After divorce, fathers have distressingly little emotional contact with their children as well. According to the National Children’s Survey conducted in 1976 and 1981 and analyzed by sociologist Frank Furstenberg, 23 percent of all divorced fathers had no contact with their children during the past five years. Another 20 percent had no contact with their children in the past one year. Only 26 percent had seen their children for a total of three weeks in the last year. Two-thirds of fathers divorced for over ten years had not had any contact with their children in more than a year. In line with this finding, in her study of divorced women, sociologist Terry Arendell found that over half of the children of divorced women had not received a visit or a call from their father in the last year; 35 percent of these children had not seen their fathers in the last five years. Whatever job they took, these women would also have to be the most important person in their children’s lives.
The frightening truth is that once pushed down the class ladder, many divorced women and their children get stuck there. This is because they have difficulty finding jobs with adequate pay and because most of them have primary responsibility for the children. Also, fewer divorced women than men remarry, especially older women with children.
In the nineteenth century, before a woman could own property in her own name, get a higher education, enter a profession, or vote, she might have been trapped in a marriage to an overbearing husband and have nowhere else to go. Now we call that woman “oppressed.” Today, a woman can legally own property, vote, get an education, work at a job, and leave an oppressive marriage to walk into an apparently “free” form of inequality.
Divorce is an undoing of an economic arrangement between men and women. Reduced to its economic bare bones, traditional marriage has been what the economist Heidi Hartmann calls a “mechanism of redistribution.” Through it men supported women to rear their children and tend their homes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unions won a higher “family wage” for male workers, on the grounds that men needed the money more than women to support wives and children. At that time it seemed reasonable that men should get first crack at better-paying jobs, and even earn more than women for the same work because “women didn’t support a family.” Since this arrangement put men and women in vastly unequal financial positions, the way most women got a living wage was to marry. In the job market, the relation between men and women was as the upper to the lower class. Marriage was the equalizer.
But as marriage—this “mechanism of redistribution”—has grown more fragile, divorced men still earn a “family wage” but no longer “redistribute” it to their children or the ex-wife who cares for them. The media stresses how sexes both have the freedom to divorce, and surely this choice is an important advance. At the same time, the more men and women live outside marriage, the more they divide into separate classes. Three factors—the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages—have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.
Patriarchy has not disappeared, it’s changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, women are free with an overall unequal setup. In the old form, women were limited to the home but economically maintained there. In the new form, women earn the bacon and cook it too.
The modern oppression of women outside marriage reduces the power of women inside marriage as well. Married women become cautious, like Nina Tanagawa or Nancy Holt who look at their divorcing friends and say, “The extra month a year or a divorce? I’ll work the extra month.”
In conversation, both men and women expressed sympathy for the emotional pain of divorcing friends. But women told stories with more anxious interest, and more empathy for the plight of the woman. One evening at the dinner table, a mother of two who worked at word processing had this exchange with her husband, a store manager, and her former boss:
A good friend of mine worked as a secretary for six years, putting her husband through dental school. She worked like a dog, did all the housework, and they had a child too. She didn’t really worry about getting ahead at the job because she figured they would rely on his work and she would stop working as soon as he set up practice. Well, he went and fell in love with another woman and divorced his wife. Now she’s still working as a secretary and raising their little boy. Now he’s got two other children by the other woman.
Her husband commented: “That’s true, but she was hard to get along with, and she had a drinking problem. She complained a lot. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for her, but there’s another side to the story.”
Surprised, the wife answered. “Yeah, but she was had! Don’t you think?”
Her husband said, “Oh, I don’t know. They both have a case.”
Earlier in our century, the most important cautionary tale for women was of a woman who “fell” from chastity before marriage and came to a bad end because no man would have her. Among working mothers of small children, and especially the more traditional of them, the modern version of the “fallen woman” became the divorcée. Needless to say, not all women fear divorce. But when life is made to seem so cold “out there,” women such as Nancy Holt and Nina Tanagawa may try to get warm inside unequal marriages.
THE HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS OF BACKSTAGE SUPPORT FOR WORK
A cycle is set in motion. Because men put more of their “male” identity in work, their work time is worth more than female work time—to the man and to the family. The greater worth of male work time makes his leisure more valuable, because it is his leisure that enables him to refuel his energy, strengthen his ambition, and move ahead at work. By doing less at home, he can work longer hours, prove his loyalty to his company, and get promoted faster. His aspirations expand. His pay rises. He earns exemption from the second shift.
The female side of the cycle runs parallel. The woman’s identity is less in her job. Since her work comes second, she carries more of the second shift, thus providing backstage support for her husband’s work. Because she supports her husband’s efforts at work more than he supports hers, her personal ambitions contract and her earnings, already lower, rise more slowly. Her extra month a year contributes not only to her husband’s success but to the expanding wage gap between them, and so the cycle spins on.
The inequality in backstage support is hidden from view. One cannot tell from sheer workplace appearance who goes home to be served dinner and who goes home to cook, any more than we can tell rich from poor these days just by how people dress. Both male and female workers come to work looking the same. Yet one is “poorer” in backstage support than the other. One irons a spouse’s uniform, fixes a lunch, washes clothes, types a résumé, edits an office memo, takes phone calls, or entertains clients. The other has a uniform ironed, a lunch fixed, clothes washed, a résumé typed, an office memo edited, phone calls taken, and clients entertained.
There is a curious hierarchy of backstage “wealth.” The richest is the high-level executive with an unemployed wife who entertains his clients and runs his household; and a secretary who handles his appointments, arranges his travel, and orders anniversary flowers for his wife. The poorest in backstage support is the single mother who works full time and rears her children with no help from anyone. Between these two extremes lie the two-job couples.
In a study I did of the family life of workers in a large corporation, I discovered that the higher up the corporate ladder, the more home support a worker had. Top executives were likely to be married to housewives. Middle managers were likely to be married to a working spouse who does some or most of the housework and child care. And the clerical worker, if she is a woman, is likely to be single or a single mother and does the work at home herself.4 At each of these three levels, men and women fared differently. Among the female top executives, 95 percent were married to men who also worked and 5 percent were single or single parents. A
mong male top executives, 64 percent were married to housewives, 23 percent were married to working wives, and 5 percent were single or single parents. So compared to men, female top executives had less backstage support. As one female manager remarked: “It’s all men at my level and most of them are married to housewives. But even the ones whose wives work seem to have more time at the office than I do.” As women executives so often quipped, “What I really need is a wife.”
In the middle ranks, a quarter of the men were married to housewives, nearly half were married to working wives, and about a third were single. Among women in the middle ranks, half were part of two-job couples and carried most of the second shift. The other half were single or single parents. Among lower-level clerical workers, most were single or single mothers.
Being “rich” or “poor” in backstage support probably influences what traits people develop. Men who have risen to the top with great support come to be seen and to actually be “hard driving,” ambitious, and “committed” to their careers. Women with less support are vulnerable to the charge of being “uncommitted.” Sometimes, they do become less committed. But women such as Nina Tanagawa did not lack ambition or suffer from what the psychologist Matina Horner calls a “fear of success.” Rather, their “backstage poverty” raised the emotional price of success impossibly high.
In an earlier economic era, when men entered industrial life, their wives preserved—through the home—a link to a life they had known before. By “staying back,” such wives eased a difficult transition for the men who were moving into the industrial age. In a sense the Nancy Holts of America are like peasants new to factory life but no one is easing the transition for them.
*In the United States we speak of farmers, not “peasants.” The term “farmer” connotes free ownership of land, and a certain pride, while the term “peasant” suggests the humility of a feudal serf. I draw the analogy between modern American women and the modernizing peasantry because women’s inferior social, legal, educational, and economic position had until recently been like that of peasants.
CHAPTER
17
Stepping into Old Biographies or Making History Happen?
THE woman with the flying hair offers a picture of what it should be like to work and raise a family: busy, active, fun. But the female mannequin in the apron, wide-eyed and still, arms folded, peering outside my neighbor’s bay window, a picture of the falsely present mother is often a more real picture of life at home when two-job couples “cut back” at home and diminish their idea about what a child, a marriage, a home really needs. She is my neighbor’s joke but she also symbolizes a certain emotional reality when men don’t share the second shift.
As women have been catapulted into the economy, their pock-etbooks, their self-respect, their notion of womanhood, and their daily lives have been transformed. The “motor” of this revolution is the changing economy—the decline in the purchasing power of the male wage, the decline in “male” blue-collar jobs, and the rise in “female” jobs in the growing service sector. New ideas about manhood and womanhood have become a powerful prod, as well, by creating a new code of honor and identity for men and women that fits the evolving circumstances.
But the revolution has influenced women faster than it has men. The unevenness of this revolution has driven a wedge between such husbands and wives as Evan and Nancy Holt, Nina and Peter Tanagawa, Ray and Anita Judson. Home is far from a “haven in a heartless world,” as Christopher Lasch has noted; home has become a shock absorber of pressures far outside it.
The gender revolution is primarily caused by changes in the economy, but people feel it in marriage. In a parallel way, economic shifts have been the “motor” of changing relations between blacks and whites. As the number of unskilled jobs declines, as capital moves out of the central cities to suburbs or to cheap labor in Third World countries, blacks and whites are left to compete for the remaining jobs. It is in the back rooms of investment banks, personnel offices, and union halls that the strain between the races might be said to originate. But it is in the school yard, in the prison, on the street that racial tension is actually felt. Just as American blacks have “absorbed” a higher unemployment rate “for whites,” in the same sense, the growing number of working women have absorbed the contradictory demands of family and work “for men,” by working the extra month a year. But unlike most blacks and whites, men and women live together; the female absorption of a male problem becomes part of marriage, and strains it.
Although most working mothers I talked with did most of the work of the home, they felt more permission to complain about it than working women fifty or a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, American women lacked much permission to ask for a man’s help in “women’s work.” As Gwendolyn Hughes pointed out in 1925, in her book Mothers in Industry, earlier in the century supermoming wasn’t a “strategy,” it was a normal way of life. Today women feel entitled to ask for help at home. But most still have to ask.
At the time of my first interviews, more than half of the women I talked to were not trying to change their division of labor. They complained, they joked, they sighed fatalistically; they collected a certain moral credit for doing “so much,” but they didn’t press for change. Some of these women didn’t want their husbands to share because they didn’t believe it was right or because they were making up for having surpassed a certain “power mark.” Other women in the study wanted their husbands to share but didn’t press for it.
Some women who didn’t urge their husbands to share at home also didn’t “make room” for his hand at home; they played expert with the baby, the dinner, the social schedule. Something in their tone of voice said, “This is my domain.” They edged their husbands out, then collected credit for “doing it all.”
About a third of the women I talked to were in the course of pressing their husbands to do more. But another third of the women I talked to had at some point already pushed their husbands to share, didn’t get far, and wearied of trying. Some, like Adrienne Sherman and Nancy Holt, tried active renegotiation— holding long discussions, making lists and schedules, saying they can’t go on like this. Or they tried passive renegotiation—they played dumb or got sick.
For their part, 20 percent of the men felt they should share the responsibility and work at home and 80 percent did not. Men whose wives pressed them to do more often resisted by reducing their ideas about needs. They claimed they didn’t need the bed made, didn’t need a cooked meal, or didn’t need a vacation planned. Indeed, some men seemed to covertly compete with their wives over who could care the least about how the house looked, how the meal tasted, what the guests would think. Other men denied the fact they didn’t share by not acknowledging the extra kinds of work their wives did. Some men made alternative offerings to the home. Peter Tanagawa offered his wife great emotional support for her career instead of more help at home. Seth Stein offered his wife the money and status of his career instead of help at home. Others made furniture, or built additions on the house their wives could have done without.
Some men covertly referred their wives to “all the sacrifices” to their manhood they had already suffered—compared to other men, present and past. They made their wives feel “luckier than other women.” Unconsciously, they made a gift out of not being as patriarchal as they could be.
If there is one truth that emerges from all the others, it is that the most important injury to women who work the double day is not the fact they work too long or get too tired. That is only the obvious and tangible cost. The deeper problem such women face is that they cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. Like Nancy Holt, many women carry into their marriage the distasteful and unwieldy burden of resenting their husbands. Like some hazardous waste produced by a harmful system, this powerful resentment became hard to dispose of.
When women repress their resentment, many, like Nancy Holt, pay a certain cost in self-knowledge. The mental tricks
that kept Nancy Holt from blowing up at Evan or sinking into depression were also the mental tricks that prevented her from admitting her real feelings and understanding the ultimate causes for them. Her psychological “maintenance program”—a program that kept her comparing herself to other women and not to Evan, readjusting connections she made between love and respect, respect and actions, and reminding herself that she was “lucky” and “equal anyway”—all these habits of thought smoothed the way for a grand rationalization. They softened both sides of a strong contradiction—between her ardent desire for an equal marriage and all that prevented her from having it. They blinded her to what she really felt about her life.
Some women didn’t want their husbands to share the second shift and didn’t resent their not sharing. But they seemed to pay another price—a devaluation of themselves or their daughters as females. Ann Myerson managed the home because she wanted to protect her husband’s time so he could make his “greater contribution” at work. Hers was the “less important” work. Despite herself, she also regretted having daughters, because they too would grow up managing the house in order to protect the greater contributions of their husbands. However driven, however brilliant, Ann felt, girls could never enjoy the privilege of smooth, unambivalent, highly rewarded devotion to work. Instead of seeing a problem in the system of rewards or the arrangement between the sexes, Ann felt it was too bad she didn’t have boys who could “cash in” on it. In this, Ann articulated a contradiction I believe every woman faces: women end up doing the second shift when the second shift is secondary. The more important cost to women is not that they work the extra month a year; it is that society devalues the work of the home and sees women as inferior because they do devalued work.
Devalued as the work of rearing children is, it is probably one of the most humanly rewarding. In appreciating the toll of living in a stalled revolution, then, we should count as part of that cost the missing connections between Seth Stein, Evan Holt, and their children. Resentful of Seth’s long absences, his older son sullenly withdrew and at bedtime the younger one dashed around frantically. Drawing the one out and calming the other down became one more hassle at the end of Seth’s long day. He is missing the feelings his children would feel toward him if they didn’t resent his absence. He is missing the tangles and the arguments that ultimately remind a parent that they matter to a child. He is also missing the cuddles, the talks about what holds the clouds up and why people get sad.
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 27