The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  After a few months of this, something in Adrienne snapped. One evening, Michael came home at five o’clock from his “real” job as a postdoctoral fellow. Adrienne arranged to come home at the same time from her “unreal” job in the library as a would-be scholar trying to read. At 5:05, when Michael sat down as usual to read the paper and wait for dinner, Adrienne exploded in a burst of fury and tears. Why did his day entitle him to rest? Didn’t her day count too? It was bad enough that the world was ignoring her career plans; did he have to ignore them too? She had been happy to follow him to Duke; that was fine. But she desperately needed his support for her own fragile career plans, and sharing the second shift was a symbol of that support.

  Michael was baffled. Hadn’t they agreed long ago his work came first? Why this sudden storm? It was so unfair. Maybe Adrienne was still feeling stung by Duke’s rejection. Maybe this would pass with time, he thought. But it didn’t pass. Adrienne remained distressed and determined. If Michael couldn’t bring himself to value her career ambitions as he valued his own, if he couldn’t symbolically express this by sharing housework, she told him she would leave. Michael refused, and Adrienne left.

  What had happened to Adrienne? After all, she had married Michael in good faith on terms they had agreed on. Only a year earlier, among supportive colleagues and planning a brilliant career, she could never have imagined leaving. Part of her also loved being a homemaker and a hostess; before our first interview in her San Francisco home, she served me home-baked nut bread, carefully softened butter, and coffee freshly ground and brewed. She was beautifully dressed and had a stylish hairdo. She was not, it seemed, in flight from femininity or the domestic sphere.

  But on the evening she had left Michael five years earlier, she couldn’t bear the idea of staying home. As Daddy’s girl, the future scholar, she had done so very well. It had felt so good. As she sat alone in the library, rejected and isolated, staring blankly at her book, she wanted even more to do well again. She desperately needed Michael to back her up or she didn’t want to be with him.

  With Adrienne gone, Michael stopped to consider his choice. He felt that she knew and loved him far more deeply than any other woman could; and despite how impossible she’d been, he loved her. After two months, he woke up one morning with a decision: he could do without being waited on, could do without his career coming first. He’d rather have Adrienne back. He called to tell her he would share the second shift, and she quickly came back. Raised as a little king, Michael had never done housework before, but now in their modest apartment he did half. Adrienne felt much happier, and so now did Michael. Now on the new terms, Adrienne could brave it at the library.

  Adrienne wanted Michael to share not only because it was fair to her but because she wanted equality to be just as important to him as it was to her. In truth, Michael shared the second shift because he loved Adrienne and knew how terribly important it was to her. At least that was his main thought at first.

  Adrienne applied to the graduate program in anthropology at Duke the next year, and this time she got in. After her first year there, Michael made another sacrifice in a spirit of genuine support. Although he had finished at Duke, he stayed on for an extra year so Adrienne could collect data for her thesis. For the first time, she applied for an instructorship. One day, her mother telephoned, trying to be supportive according to her own lights. She said to Adrienne, “You have so much to do, dear, I hope you don’t get the job.” Adrienne collapsed in tears. Michael picked up the phone, indignant at his mother-in-law. “What do you mean you hope Adrienne doesn’t get the job? She wants the job!”

  After Adrienne finished her thesis research, she followed Michael again to the best job he was offered. Miracle of miracles, she was offered an excellent job in a nearby city. She spoke with quiet humor about a memo tacked on the anthropology department bulletin board listing all job applicants and the posts they had won: her name was at the top. “First I was seen as the tag-along wife with the chopped-up career. Then they saw that list and suddenly thought I was the hot stuff and Michael was following me!” Now the twists of fate could seem funny.

  In the sixth year of marriage—three years after the showdown and one year after beginning teaching—they decided to have a child. When Adrienne got pregnant, Michael spoke proudly of “our pregnancy.” Bedridden for the last two months, Adrienne taught seminars from their living-room couch. Michael did all the cooking and shopping and planning. When twin boys were born, Michael came home every day in time for the five-thirty feeding. As he recalled, “It was very important to me to be there for that feeding.” Adrienne found it hard to handle both twins; for a while, before she finished breast-feeding one, the other was awake and ready. After six weeks they switched to the bottle. Michael fed one twin, Adrienne fed the other.

  The twins grew into a rambunctious pair. One would climb on the other’s back to try to scramble up the chimney. With conspiratorial giggles, they would push on the garden gate together, open it, and dash up the street. Once they took turns drenching each other in a bucket of motor oil. If Adrienne’s showdown had forced Michael to “concede” to sharing, now Michael was having fun with it. As he reflected, “I’m amazed at myself. I hadn’t imagined the extent of nurturing feelings I have that I had really played down.” He began to feel proud: “I honestly think I’m the best father I know. I’m surprised at how patient I am, and also at how impatient.” For their part, the twins responded appealingly to his attentions, and drew him into their play. Crossing the street, each reached up for Daddy’s hand. They alternated in the mornings, calling for Daddy or Mommy. In search of more time to spend with his sons, Michael asked for some leave time from his university. Part of the time, he had to travel to give papers, but that was fine with Adrienne.

  But, increasingly, Adrienne was under more pressure at work. Now in her fourth year in the anthropology department, she found herself in fierce competition for tenure with six hardworking male assistant professors. How many articles had she published this year? How many more in the works? When was the “big” book due? Her department chairman took fiendish pride in telling junior colleagues how “tough it really was.” He admitted that Adrienne put in far more time guiding student research than her male colleagues, but reminded her “as surely she knew” that teaching didn’t matter in getting tenure.

  When the twins were three, Adrienne was out of the house forty-five hours a week and worked all evening after they were in bed. Even with this effort, she was falling behind male colleagues whose wives took care of their second shift. As Adrienne explained:

  I realized I was going to sink in my mid-career review unless I published. So that fall when I was dashing around madly teaching and doing committee work during the week, I started working weekends. I worked through five weekends in a row, and I’ll never do it again. It was a complete disaster. My kids regressed a hundred and one paces. They were upset about being separated from me, because Michael was out of town at a conference. First I tried working in the study at home, but that was too hard. Then I went into my office, and that’s where I got a surprise. One of my colleagues said, “What brings you in?” And another said, “We haven’t seen you in all four years you’ve been here.” These are the guys who’ve said to me—I must have heard it fifteen times in my four years here—“You’ve got your husband to support you.” And when I meet them in the halls they always say, “How are the twins?”

  During this period, the Shermans’ baby-sitter grew depressed, began to drink heavily, and one day disappeared completely. Michael could do his share, but no more. For the first time in years, Michael yelled at Adrienne: “I’m happy you have a career, but I don’t think you should have a career like this. There’s an upper limit.”

  She knew he was right. Adrienne asked her chairman to delay her tenure review but he refused (“If I did it for you, I’d have to do it for everyone”). She felt she’d reached a dead end and thought of quitting. She could combine an old interest in sc
ulpting with child therapy, a job outside a hierarchy. One comment by a rival faculty member, which she had suppressed to smooth her way before, rang in her head now: “Do you really feel like a mother to your children? Or is your housekeeper more their mother?” His tone said, “It must be hard on you,” but he meant, “It must be hard on them.”

  Adrienne spoke to a senior colleague about extending her tenure review deadline despite the chairman’s veto. Out of sympathy and perhaps guilt over their own struggling wives, the faculty granted her an extension. She asked for a half-time appointment, and, with Michael’s support, she fought for it. After more than a year of meetings; letters; calls; and long talks with deans, colleagues, and a network of feminists in other departments, Adrienne became the fifth faculty member on the entire campus to be granted a half-time tenure-track position.

  Michael had yelled at Adrienne for withdrawing from the children, but had dissuaded her from falling into a swoon of maternal guilt and retreating into sculpture and flower arranging. He had hung in there. If a sharing showdown had shocked Michael into a strange journey toward equality, now he was discovering who he could be as a father and husband when he wasn’t being the showcase kid. He was growing into it. Michael’s salary was higher than Adrienne’s, but this wage gap—the same issue that loomed so large for others—didn’t come up in the Shermans’ interviews until I raised it, and then neither had much to say about it. Neither job came first; both came second.

  Michael did not struggle with Adrienne; both now struggled against the pressures of their careers. Twins or no, their professional worlds spun on; colleagues wrote books, won prizes, got promotions. Both loved their work, and it took discipline to moderate their ambition. Adrienne was now also part of the tiny world of women professors busily scurrying from one committee (“It’s an all-male committee, we really need a woman, could you … ?”) to another, addressing the endless student demand for attention from “concerned” teachers, and finally settling down at night with a cup of tea to the “real” work of writing. Some of these women had children, many were waiting. All were overworked and some generated a workaholic subculture of their own, which put pressure on all of them in turn.

  If the Shermans had a “family myth,” it was perhaps that Michael’s transformation involved little sacrifice. The twins were one surprise after another. It was so much fun, he didn’t want them growing up so fast. At the same time, it was hard for a straight-A showcase kid, carrier of the Sherman line, to backpedal his scientific career while others around him were making a run for it, like Seth Stein. Holding back at work was a sacrifice. Changing his view of manhood midstream was a sacrifice. These were sacrifices other men—men like Evan Holt, Peter Tanagawa, Seth Stein—did not make, and in the eyes of women like Adrienne, this made Michael rare and precious. In the present-day relational marketplace, his market value was higher than hers. They were off the “marital market,” because they couldn’t imagine life apart; this shielded Adrienne from the unfavorable market realities. But she also felt deeply indebted to Michael for his sacrifices. If there was just a tiny bit of unresolved tension beneath their family myth, it centered on just how grateful Adrienne should feel to Michael for getting a “fair deal” in the second shift.

  Meanwhile, both gave up the spectacular career success they might have had for the respectable careers their attention to family allowed. To some colleagues, Adrienne’s half-time schedule made her seem like a dilettante. To half-disapproving, half-threatened neighboring housewives she was one of those briefcase-and-bow-tie women. By working short hours in a long-hours profession, by taking odd times of the day off to be with his kids, Michael was even more anomalous. Both felt morally isolated from their conventional relatives in upstate New York, who continued to write puzzled letters and from many of Michael’s male colleagues who ran through more wives but seemed to get more work done. Neither the old world of family nor their new world of work fit them easily. But they fit each other, and pulled together against the social tide.

  During my last meeting with the Shermans, they took turns laughing and telling me this story. The previous summer when they were visiting Michael’s parents, Michael began clearing the dishes off the dining-room table. His mother, who now approved of their arrangement, remarked to his father, “Look how Michael clears the table. Why didn’t you ever do anything like that?” Michael’s father replied solemnly, “Adrienne is turning Michael into a homosexual.” “Oh, Jacob,” Mrs. Sherman cried, “don’t be ridiculous!” Adrienne and Michael looked on, laughing and incredulous as Michael’s mother began a sharing showdown of her own.

  Art Winfield: Natural Drift

  Art Winfield, a thirty-five-year-old laboratory assistant with a high school education, had only the barest acquaintance with the women’s movement, and, unlike Adrienne Sherman, his wife had never pressed him to do more at home. But Art has a natural interest in children and a passion for being with his five-year-old adopted son, Adam. Art is not the self-consciously celebrated New Man; he is a gentle, easygoing, black man, the New Man disguised as an ordinary fellow.

  He was taking night classes twice a week in lab technology mainly at his wife’s urging; she had hoped these classes might motivate him to search out more interesting work. But as he drove to and from his lab, Art’s mind would wander from his job to the bright smile that would light his son’s face when he greeted him at the day-care center door. “My son gets only three-and-a-half hours of my time a day,” Art explained, “so the time I’m with him is very important to me.” Sometimes when he came to fetch Adam at day care, Art lingered for half an hour or so to see a secret hideout, climb a favorite tree, or organize a relay race. During several months when he was on leave from the lab, he stayed longer.

  The Winfields needed two salaries to live, no question about it, so Adam had to be in day care. But Art’s feelings about it are mixed: “Adam’s best buddy, his number-one main man is there [at the day-care center]. But sometimes he gets tired of being there. It’s real hard for a five-year-old kid to spend eight hours away from home. Sometimes I’ll take the day off and take him out of day care and spend the day with him.”

  Wherever people found Adam on a weekend—bicycling, visiting a favorite uncle, collecting rocks—they found Art. Friends and relatives called them “the twins.” Basking in the subject of his tie to his son, Art reflected: “We’re affectionate toward each other. Sometimes I wonder if I overdo it. But I think a father-son relationship happens pretty easily.”

  Some fathers reach out more easily to a son than to a daughter, but this didn’t seem true for Art. He and his wife, Julia, who is white, are trying to have a child of their own, and when I asked him how he felt about a daughter, he replied:

  I’d love to have a little girl. Yeah. I think little girls are precious. I’d like to have a father-daughter relationship, and I guess I’m sort of nontraditional when it comes to that. Regarding sports, or her basic outlook on life. I’d raise my daughter just as positively as a boy. My wife is a strong woman and I’d like to have a daughter like that too. Girls are very smart! They certainly learn a lot quicker than boys do. That’s quite obvious. Plus it would be special for Adam to have a sister.

  Art also enjoys children who are not his own, and they flock to him. Tough teenage boys drop by the Winfields’ home in a rough neighborhood of East Oakland to show off their pit bull dogs, and talk. When there’s trouble in the neighborhood, they protect the Winfields’ home. One disturbed boy showed up regularly on Art’s porch. As Art recalled:

  It was a challenge to me to get to know him, because I knew what he needed. His mother was raising five kids by herself, and he needed some attention. We worked together. He came around and got to be one heck of a kid. His grades improved. Now he’s an “A” student. He knew I was really serious about my relationship toward him, that I wasn’t trying to prove I could conquer and make him be an exceptional individual. He just turned out to be a real good kid, which he was anyway. He’s eigh
teen now and the bond is still pretty tight.

  Art’s wife, Julia, feels she lacks Art’s gift with children:

  I love my own son, but I’m not good with everyone’s kids, like Art is. I’m one of these people who doesn’t know how old a child is. I’ll ask, “How old are you?” And they’ll say, “Why do you want to know, lady?” But Art knows what level to approach a child on. After a long day’s work, it’s hard for me to compliment all the little kids at day care on their finger painting the way he does.

  Art focuses on children. About tending house he simply feels that “sharing is fair.” As he puts it:

  I went through a period where I wasn’t really involving myself in a lot of housework—like most men, I have to admit. That’s conditioning, too, because we’re led to believe we’re lords and masters of the household [laughs]—that there are certain things we’re not supposed to do. Also, I’m kind of stubborn and it’s wrong to be like that. Anyway, Julia works as hard as I do, probably a lot harder. She deserves to have me participate. So, for about ten months, since Julia’s had to work overtime at her office, I’ve been doing half.

  Art does the laundry, vacuuming, yard work, and half the cooking. Julia, a plump, good-natured woman of thirty, appreciates the help. But she also wishes that Art loved his work more. It seems to make her a bit anxious to be more engrossed in her own job as a legal secretary than Art is in his. She doesn’t care about money; between them she feels they have plenty. It was more a matter of her wanting him to be drawn to his job—because it is good for people to like their work, maybe especially if they are men.