For his part, Art feels that $25,000 is pretty good pay, and that the center of a man’s life ought to be his family. He wonders at Julia’s ambitions for him. Does it mean there is something wrong with him? Does he seem inadequate? He explained to me in confidence that he thought her anxiety might be due to her desire to please her older brother, a conventional man who had never approved of her interracial marriage, or of their house in East Oakland. Art talked the matter over privately with his mother by phone, and finally agreed, without enthusiasm, to let Julia type out a résumé for him and apply for an evening course in laboratory technology.
I asked Art why he thought his bond with his son was so warm, relaxed, and strong. He began his answer with his early childhood. His mother had raised his brother and himself by working as a cook in a child-care center. As he put it, “I could give you the whole black saga—living in a dingy apartment, sleeping in bed with my brother and my mother, rats jumping over it at night.” From time to time, his father would appear at their apartment, argue bitterly with his mother, then disappear. “I think my father helped me know what kind of man I didn’t want to be,” Art said. He continued: “He was my biological father. And from the time I was born until I was nine, he was all I had as a father. We didn’t really have the fatherly thing when I was coming up. Because my mother was a very strong force, I didn’t realize I was missing a father.”
When Art was nine, his mother married a longshoreman, a strong, gentle, kindly man with no children of his own. He worked the evening shift and was home days, waiting for Art when he came barreling in the door after school. Coming to trust and love this man was the most important event in Art’s life:
When he married my mother, he understood that it would take some time to interject himself into our family. I can recall that he took his time doing that. He got to understand us first. I was a sensitive kid, and the youngest, and it had to be explained to me that my mother was still going to be there, that he was joining the family to make it a little better. He was a gentle man, a good man.
Art spoke of his stepfather with great softness:
I don’t call him my stepfather. He’s my father. He’s everything a father ever could be. I love him as if I was the biological son. Because he’s a good man. He’s a gentle man. He’s a very honest man. We were always together. I had a father that was always there to help me whenever I needed something. He wouldn’t give me anything, but he made me realize I had to work for what I wanted. He really did teach us how to love…. Through him I learned what I want to do with my own kid. I’m trying to form the same kind of relationship. I want Adam to know that I really care about him.
Vacations at his grandmother’s farm in Arkansas were vacations “with my father.” As he spoke about this his eyes dampened, as if it was still hard for him to believe his stepfather loved him. “I hate to keep saying this,” he said, “but it’s true, he’s a very warm man.”
Perhaps Art’s double legacy—a father he did not want to be like and a stepfather he did want to be like—prompted his gift with children. In his bond with his own adopted son he may be consolidating his own great boyhood victory.
A THIRD STAGE OF FATHERHOOD
Neither Michael Sherman nor Art Winfield told “pliers” jokes like Greg Alston or waited until the end of a wail of a nine-month-old who’s tumbled. They had their own styles of hands-on parenting. Michael Sherman and Art Winfield differ in how they arrived at a comfort with it. Michael backed in, starting with housework and moving to child-rearing. Art stepped forward into it, starting with his feeling for Adam and quietly extending a principle of justice to housework. Fifty-fifty meant slightly different things to each; for Michael it was a way to “be fair to Adrienne,” for Art it was a way of “being a number-one Dad to Adam.” The results differ too: Michael is as much the primary parent to the twins as his wife; Art seems slightly more involved than his.
Certain motives forged in boyhood made them want to be the “New Man.” Both had grown up in largely female worlds; both had reacted against “bad” fathers, and neither had grown up as what they imagined to be a typical male. Even as a teenager, Art had been unusually good with small kids, which past a certain age among teenagers in East Oakland was unusual. Michael had never felt like a “typical boy.” He didn’t reject things masculine; he got along with the guys at school. But he didn’t feel the most interesting things went on in the male world or that the most interesting people were there. In truth, Michael hadn’t outgrown a traditional male identity; he’d never had one. In his high school gym class and later during basic training in the army, much of the time he felt he was acting the male role. It was as if he had grown up speaking a foreign language, fluently and without a noticeable accent, but a language not quite his own. As he put it, “I was always the guy hanging around the edge of the football field.” Different motives animate a way of seeing manhood and these private motives animated theirs. So when the door of history opened, when the culture lit the way, when the demands of two-job life called out, they wanted to walk in.
In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that “father was friendly.” In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with such titles as “Fathers Are Parents Too” and “It’s Time Father Got Back into the Family.” Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.
Men like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield lead the way into that third stage, but they’ve done so privately. They are tokens in the world of new fathers. Lacking a national social movement to support them in a public challenge to the prevailing ideal of manhood, they’ve acted on their own. Not until the other Michael Shermans and Art Winfields step forward, not until a critical mass of men becomes like them, will we end the painful stall in this revolution all around us.
CHAPTER
13
Beneath the Cover-up: Strategies and Strains
In the ten marriages I’ve described, the second shift became a forum for each person’s ideas and feelings about gender and marriage. When Evan Holt fixed dinner, Nancy Holt felt Evan was saying he loved her. When Robert Myerson cooked dinner, Ann half the time felt guilty she was failing to protect his more valuable career from family demands. When Frank Delacorte made the pesto sauce for the pasta, it meant Carmen “couldn’t.” When Peter Tanagawa roasted the chicken, it meant he was “helping Nina.” When Ray Judson barbecued the spare ribs, Anita imagined he did it because he liked to, not to help her out. When Seth and Jessica ate the meal the housekeeper cooked, Jessica figured it was her salary that paid the housekeeper, Seth’s salary that paid for the food. The personal meanings of the second shift differed greatly, but to most people they either meant “I am taken care of” or “I am taking care of someone.”
Some personal meanings leaned toward a traditional ideal of caring, and others toward a gender equal ideal. Indeed, a split between these two ideals seemed to run not only between social classes, but between partners within marriages and between two contending voices inside the conscience of a single person. The blue collar tended toward a traditional ideal, and the white collar tended toward a 50-50 one. Men tended toward the first ideal, women toward the second. And Ann Myerson flipped to the one and flopped to the other. Most marriages were either torn by, or a settled compromise between, these two ideals.
In this sense, the split between them ran through every marriage I came to know.
To be sure, I saw important differences in social class. And in the world at large there are far more couples who spend their Saturdays doing laundry, like the Delacortes or the Judsons, and fewer who spend them making out checks to the help like the Steins or the Myersons. The problems of the two-job family are tougher in the working class, but they are difficult in a different way among the affluent as well. What exacerbates the strain in blue-collar marriage is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor day care, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in the upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of careers in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between two ideals of manhood and womanhood runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.
Regardless of the ideal to which a couple aspires, the strain of working shifts often affects men nearly as much as women. It affects women who work the extra month a year in obvious ways—through fatigue, sickness, and emotional exhaustion. But one important finding of this study is that the strain clearly extends to men as well. If men share the second shift it affects them directly. If they don’t share, it affects them through their wives. Michael Sherman shared the emotional responsibility and time it took to do the work at home. He had to redefine his career ambitions, confront the high hopes of his family, and detach himself from the competition of his colleagues. Evan Holt and Seth Stein made no such adjustments, but they paid an enormous price nonetheless—Evan Holt through the resentments so woven into his sexual life and bond with his son, Joey, Seth through the disappearance of his wife and children into lives of their own.
GENDER IDEOLOGY, FEELING RULES, AND COPING WITH FEELINGS
When I began this research, I naively imagined that a person’s view of gender would cohere as a cognitive and emotional “piece.” I imagined this view would go with how he or she wanted to divide the second shift. Couples who believed in 50-50 would share more, those who believed in 70-30 would share less. But I discovered amazing fractures. Peter Tanagawa supported his wife’s career “a hundred percent,” but grew red in the face at the idea that she would mow the lawn, or that his daughters, when teenagers, would drive a car to school. Many men like Evan Holt lauded their wives’ careers. They pointed out that their wives wanted to work. It made their wives more interesting, and it gave the couple more in common. But when it came to a man’s part in the work at home, the underlying principle changed. For Robert Myerson the principle seemed to be that a man should share the work at home “if his wife asks him.” For Peter Tanagawa, a man should pitch in so long as she’s doing a bit more.1
More important were the contradictions between what a person said they believed about men and marital roles, and what they seemed to feel about them. Some people were egalitarian “on top” and traditional “underneath” like Seth Stein or traditional on top and egalitarian underneath like Frank Delacorte.
Sometimes the deep feelings that evolved in response to early cautionary tales reinforced the surface of a person’s gender views. For example, Carmen Delacorte’s dread—that she would face the same struggles her mother had as a disparaged single mother—strongly reinforced her idea that women should find male protection through submission to them. On the other hand, Nancy Holt’s fear of becoming a “doormat,” like her mother, infused emotional steam into her belief that Evan ought to share 50-50 at home. Ray Judson’s childhood loss of his mother and his current fear of losing his wife reinforced his idea that a man needs to get a woman dependent on him so that she won’t take off.
For other people, covert feelings seemed to subvert the surface of their gender ideology. For example, Ann Myerson described herself growing up as a tomboy who believed girls were “just as good as boys.” A hard-driving career woman who didn’t begin to consciously want children until she was thirty-two, Ann felt similar to her husband, Robert, in her needs and desires. Yet for some reason, her role at the office didn’t feel real while her role at home did. Rather than reinforcing her surface attitudes, this underlying feeling prompted her ambivalent “flip-flop” syndrome.
Similarly, on the surface, John Livingston had always been for sharing the provider and homemaker role. But when his daughter, Cary, was born, he felt that Barbara withdrew her attention from him, leaving him abandoned, dependent, and angry. When Barbara returned to her job, he resented her working. But, he felt guilty about resenting her work. In this way his ideology established a certain feeling rule—you shall feel good about your wife working. Yet this feeling rule clashed with his actual feeling—anger that Barbara was so unavailable. Since it was John’s habit to withdraw when he was angry, he withdrew. This withdrawal and Barbara’s upset in response to it spiraled into the conflict which, in their “overbusyness,” they avoided.
The first year of Cary’s life, John withdrew emotionally from Barbara and established himself as second to Barbara in the care of Cary, and as champion of the idea that “someone” needed to care for her more. Insofar as work permitted, he did not resist sharing the second shift; he did it, but he resisted forgiving Barbara for her emotional withdrawal from him. All the minute ways in which John sought to interrelate what he thought (his gender ideology), what he felt (upset by Barbara’s withdrawal), and what he did (to work long hours and to cut back on time for the marriage)—this complex of thought, feeling, and action together—constitute his “gender strategy.” And the interplay of his gender strategy and that of his wife determined how they actually divided the second shift.
Everyone I interviewed, in one way or another, developed a gender strategy. In some, the surface of a gender ideology strongly conflicted with underlying feelings, in others they didn’t. In some, the feeling rule was “We should want to share the second shift,” “We shouldn’t be angry about having to share, or angry at the deprivations it might entail” (for example, the Shermans). In others, the feeling rule was to feel ashamed to “have to” share it (the Delacortes). But what a man or woman wanted to do usually did not completely explain what they did. For always a dance was in motion with another.
WOMEN’S STRATEGIES: THE DIRECT APPROACH
Most women who wanted 50-50 did one of two things. They married men who planned to share at home or they actively tried to change him afterward. Before she had children, Adrienne Sherman took the risky step of telling her husband, “It’s share or it’s divorce.” She staged a sharing showdown and won. After she had Joey, Nancy Holt initiated a major crisis in the marriage but backed away from a showdown. Both women confronted their husbands, and caused great upheaval as a result. Other women initiated a series of smaller prods. When she was eight months pregnant and her husband was working nearly all the time, Carol Alston recalls sitting her husband down on the front stairs as he came home from work and saying, “I won’t have this baby if you don’t emotionally prepare for it with me.” Though she didn’t really mean she wouldn’t have the baby, she was making an important point. Still other women initiated exhaustive talks, which brought their men around.
Over half the working mothers I interviewed had tried one way or another to change roles at home. One reason the effort is so common among women is that they bear the weight of a contradiction between traditional views about men and women and modern circumstances. Unless they assume the extra work of trying to change a common habit, it is usually they who work the extra month a year. If women lived in a culture that presumed active fatherhood, they wouldn’t need to devise personal strategies to bring it about.
INDIRECT WAYS TO CHANGE ROLES
Women also tried to change marital roles indirectly. This was a primary strategy for traditional working mothers who desperately needed help at home but who couldn’t call on a husband to share the load because they didn’t believe in such a thing. Facing such a dilemma, Carmen Delacorte “played helpless” at cooking rice, paying bills, and sewing. Some women, li
ke Nina Tanagawa, used physical illness as a half-conscious signal of distress. One highly successful businesswoman, Susan Pillsbury (a woman who described herself as “sharing equally” with her husband), told this story:
When I was pregnant we were trying to think what to name the baby and we couldn’t think of a name. My husband, Jerry, wanted to have the baby but he wasn’t interested in what to name it. I didn’t want to ask him to be interested. So, you know he’s a consultant in decision analysis; that’s his specialty. I suggested that we set out “decision criteria,” like the name should be a family name, or the first name should fit the last name well, it should be a certain length…. Once I posed it as a problem in decision making, he got so into it he couldn’t stop. I always like to tell that story. Now he tells it.
Even women who abhorred “female wiles” sometimes resorted to them. Nancy Holt felt it demeaned women to withhold sex from their husbands in order to angle for something they wanted. But when Evan persistently refused to share, Nancy did withhold sex, and felt remorse about doing so.
SUPERMOMING
In contrast to strategies designed to change roles, supermoming was a way of doing both shifts without imposing on their husbands. About a third of mothers pursued this strategy. They put in long hours at the office but kept their children up very late at night to get time with them. Many believed that the extra month was theirs to work. Others wished their husbands would share but didn’t feel they had enough moral credits in the “marital bank” to persuade them to do more.
Supermoming was a way of absorbing into oneself the conflicting demands of home and work. To prepare themselves emotionally, many supermoms develop a conception of themselves as “on-the-go, organized, competent,” as women without need for rest, without personal needs. Both as a preparation for this strategy and as a consequence of it, supermoms tended to seem out of touch with their feelings. Nina Tanagawa reported feeling “numb.” And Barbara Livingston said again and again, “I don’t know what I feel.”
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 21