Although fathers pay most of this particular emotional cost, in a different way many mothers do too. As the main managers of the second shift, women become the “heavies,” the “time and motion” persons of the family-and-work speed-up. They hurry children through their daily rounds—“Hurry up and eat….” “Hurry and get into your pajamas…. ”—and thus often become the targets of children’s aggression.
FUTURE NANCY HOLTS?
As I drive from my office at the University of California, Berkeley, across the Oakland Bay Bridge to my home in San Francisco, I often compare the couples I have been studying to the students I teach. Who will step into the biography of Nancy Holt? Who will be the new Nina Tanagawa? The Jessica Stein? The Adrienne Sherman? The Ann Myerson? And which of the men will be like Art Winfield?
Like John Livingston? Like Ray Judson? Will my students eventually rear children like Joey Holt, Alexandra Tanagawa, Victor and Walter Stein, Adam Winfield? Will it be easier for the younger generation in two-job families? Has the turmoil of the 1970s and early 1980s been a temporary phase in preparation for a new kind of marriage in the future? Or will my students also live in a revolution that is stalled?
I wonder about all this as I talk with students in my office at 464 Barrows Hall on the Berkeley campus. Nearly all of my women students badly want lifelong careers. In this they are typical of students more generally. An American Council of Education survey of 200,000 freshmen at more than 400 campuses in March 1988 asked students to name their probable career. Less than 1 percent of women answered “full-time homemaker.”1 In my office, only a handful confide that “all they want” is to be a homemaker, offering long, hesitant explanations for why they would conceivably want to stay home, as if these days this choice for a college woman called for a social version of a medical excuse.
In a 1985-86 survey of University of California, Berkeley, seniors, Anne Machung found that over 80 percent of senior women thought it was “very important” to have a career. At the same time, 80 percent definitely planned to marry or be in a committed partnership, and another 17 percent hoped to be in one. They planned to have two or three children at most, and to have them later in life than their mothers did. Most planned to interrupt their careers from one to five years to have the children but they didn’t think this would disadvantage them at work.2 The students I teach fit this description too. When I show my students a picture of the woman with the flying hair, briefcase in one hand, child in the other, they say she is unreal, but they want to be just like her.
Even for the most exceptional women, the contradictions between work and family are very real. And my students know it. Many know it from their mothers’ struggles, and sometimes from their divorces. But, faced with a contradiction and a cultural cover-up, they feel afraid. They applaud the new opportunities at work. They are scandalized by the inequities that remain. But when it comes to matters at home, a distant, vague, distracted look comes into their eyes, and suddenly they become hesitant and inconclusive. They plan to put marriage off. They plan to go slow. If they have a steady boyfriend, they don’t talk about how they will share the work at home in the future. That’s “too far ahead.” It isn’t just one or two young women who avoid it; there seems to be a collective decision not to look. For all the media attention given the working mother, young women are not asking what major changes we need to make the two-job family work well.
If Nancy Holt and many women in this book reacted against their mothers’ frustrations at the life of an unfulfilled housewife, many of my women students, eighteen to twenty-two, are reacting against their mothers’ frustration at being oppressed working mothers. To many young women, the working mother is the new ideal. But she is also the new cautionary tale.
Many young men and women grew up inside busy, strained two-job families. When I ask them about the advantages of having grown up in a two-job family, they mention the education, the family vacations, the financial needs their parents’ wages met. And they generally agree with the student who said: “It’s made me self-reliant. I can cook by myself, do my homework without prodding. I wouldn’t be so independent if my mom had been home all the time.” When I ask them about the disadvantages, they sometimes recall a bad memory, like this one: “When I was ten, I had to come home and empty the ashtrays and make the salad for dinner and start my homework in the house alone. I survived, but I hated it.” Or another: “My mother was always on the go, and my dad worked long hours. I don’t feel like I really got to know either of them until I got to college.” When asked to put the advantages and disadvantages together, both men and women felt the advantages won. They want to have two-job families, too, but not in the same way.
Bracing for the plunge into adulthood, most of these young students are turning away from Carmen Delacorte’s model of womanhood, but not reaching out with confidence to Adrienne Sherman’s. Most of my women students—at the University of California, the heartland of student revolt in the 1960s—are wistful for a 50-50 marriage, but don’t think they’ll get it. Raised as babies in families who struggled over the second shift, they are weary of marital wars. They accept the goals of the revolution but approach them pragmatically, timidly, fatalistically, in the spirit of the “stall.” They are poised to step into the biography of Nancy Holt.
Next to the experience of their own working mothers, what most affects their views on marriage is their exposure to divorce. It makes some young women more traditional. As one described: “In her first marriage, my mother really pushed to be equal with my dad. That led to horrible arguments. In her second marriage, she’s staying home. She just says, ‘Yes, dear … yes, dear’ and things are calmer. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know I don’t want a marriage like her first but I can’t see myself in a marriage like her second.” Most daughters of divorce don’t want to “get caught” unprepared. As one nineteen-year-old student explained to me: “My mother worked as a freelance graphic designer and it was she who took care of my brother and me. She didn’t earn much for her work, so after the divorce, her income plummeted and she got really depressed. Meanwhile my dad got remarried. When I called my dad to tell him how depressed she was, he just said she should get a job.” If a woman lets go of her place at work to care for a family, she can “get caught.” So some women may creep cautiously into the biography of Anita Judson, the billing clerk and mother of two who kept on working to be prepared “just in case.”
The problems middle-class women face are doubled in the working class. Blue-collar women are likely to marry blue-collar men, who are the most vulnerable to the vacillations of the near economy. Less-educated women are more likely to defer to their husbands’ jobs; one 1986 national study found that 53 percent of women with no high school education, in contrast to 25 percent of women college graduates, believe “that it is more important for a wife to support her husband’s career than to have a career herself.”3 Unlike upper-middle-class women, they will still have to work, and won’t enjoy the services of a maid.
And how about young men? Are they planning to share the work at home with working wives? In a 1986 study of Berkeley seniors, 54 percent of the women and 13 percent of the men expected to be the one who would miss an important meeting at work for a sick child. Sixty-nine percent of the women and 38 percent of men expected to share the laundry work equally. Fifty percent of women and 31 percent of the men expected to share cooking.4 A survey by Catalyst found that half of the women plan to put the husband’s job first, but two-thirds of the men said they planned to put their own job first.
In a 1985 in-depth study of Berkeley seniors, Anne Machung asked undergraduate men if they expected to marry a woman who held a job outside the home. “She can work if she wants,” most answered. When asked if they would be willing to marry a woman who wanted them to do half the housework and child care, one man answered, “Yes, I could always hire someone.” Another answered, “It would depend on how much I liked her and how she asked.” A number of men didn’t want
“lists.”
A GENDER STRATEGY FOR THE NATION
Brought to America by the tradition of the European Enlightenment, the belief in human progress easily fit the open American frontier, the expanding national and international economy, and the movements for racial and gender equality. Like most Americans over at least two centuries, most of the men and women I interviewed for this study said they believed “things were getting better.” They said they believed men “are doing more at home than before.” In small measure, this is true.
But the young do not promise to usher in a new era. Corporations have done little to accommodate the needs of working parents, and the government has done little to prod them. The nuclear family is still the overwhelming choice as a setting in which to rear children. Yet we have not invented the outside supports the nuclear family will need to do this job well. Our revolution is in danger of staying stalled.
Certainly this is what has occurred in the former Soviet Union, the other major industrial society to draw a majority of its childbearing women into paid jobs. Since industrialization, Soviet women had worked outside the home and done the lion’s share of the second shift too. “You work?” the Soviet joke went. “You’re liberated.” A stalled revolution was passed off as the whole revolution. And some argued that there, too, the extra burden on working mothers is behind the rising rate of divorce.5
Can we do better than this? The answer depends on how we make history happen. Just as individuals have gender strategies, so do governments, corporations, schools, and factories. How a nation organizes its workforce and day-care centers, how its schools train the young, reflects the work and family roles it envisions for each sex.
While we hear much rhetoric about families, we hear very little talk about government policies that would actually help them. Indeed, comparatively speaking, we are a backward society. In 1993 President Clinton signed the historic Family and Medical Leave Act that gave workers the right to twelve weeks of leave for a new baby or a family medical emergency. But that left out the roughly 50 percent of workers employed in companies with fewer than 50 workers. It didn’t apply to part-time workers, most of whom are women, and leave isn’t paid.
After giving birth, a German mother receives fourteen weeks of leave at full pay. Italian mothers receive twenty weeks at full pay. In 2002, Canadian mothers won the right to take a full year off from work after childbirth at 60 percent pay. Mothers in Norway can take a year at 80 percent pay. In Japan in 2011 new parents receive $450-500 a month and child care is free. Worldwide, 127 countries—including virtually every industrial nation—mandate some sort of paid family leave. But in the United States, the richest nation in the world, working parents are not guaranteed a penny of paid leave to stay home with a newborn baby.
A profamily policy in the United States would offer paid parental leave to parents—married, single, gay or lesbian—of natural or adoptive children, and paid “care leave” to tend the elderly. Through comparable worth, it would pull up wages in “women’s” jobs. It would go beyond half-time work (which makes it sound like a person is only doing “half” of something “whole”) by instituting lower-hour, more flexible “family phases” for all regular jobs filled by parents of young children.
The government would give tax credits to developers who build affordable housing near places of work and shopping centers, with nearby meal-preparation facilities, as Dolores Hayden describes in her book Redesigning the American Dream. It would create warm and creative day-care centers. If the best day care comes from elderly neighbors, students, grandparents, they could be paid to care for children. Traveling vans for day-care enrichment could roam the neighborhoods as the ice-cream man did in my childhood.
In these ways, the American government could reduce the number of children in “self-care,” draw men into children’s lives, and make marriages happier. These reforms could even improve the lives of children whose parents divorce, because research has shown that the more involved fathers are with their children before divorce, the more involved they are with them afterward. If the government encouraged corporations to consider the long-range interests of workers and their families, they would save on long-range costs due to higher absenteeism, turnover, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, and welfare support for single mothers.
These are the real profamily reforms. If they seem utopian today, we should remember that in the past, the eight-hour day, the abolition of child labor, and the vote for women once seemed utopian too. In his book Megatrends, John Naisbitt reported that 83 percent of corporate executives believed that more men feel the need to share the responsibilities of parenting; yet only 9 percent of corporations offer paternity leave.
The happiest two-job marriages I saw were between men and women who did not load the former role of the housewife-mother onto the woman, and did not devalue it as one would a bygone “peasant” way of life. They shared that role between them. What couples called “good communication” often meant that they were good at saying thanks for one tiny form or another of taking care of life at home. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list, taking responsibility for the “upstairs.” These were the silver and gold of the marital exchange. Up until now, the woman married to the “new man” has been one of the lucky few. But as the government and society shape a new gender strategy, as the young learn from example, many more women and men will be able to enjoy the leisurely bodily rhythms and freer laughter that arise when family life is family life and not a second shift.
POSTSCRIPT
Since the publication of The Second Shift, Greg Alston no longer plays scary jokes on his son, Daryl, to toughen him up. But the Livingstons have separated and the Judsons have divorced. Cary Livingston lives mainly with her mother, though her father wants desperately to remain involved. Ray Judson sees Erik and the baby every two weeks, and Ruby if she’s around. As the twins grew older, the Shermans plunged back into their careers from which they’ve now retired—Michael to become an ardent activist in human rights.
Afterword
The movement of millions of women into paid jobs constituted the major revolution in the twentieth-century American family. But the stories I heard told of “stalls” in that revolution. An old-fashioned view of fatherhood—that was one stall. No family-friendly policies at work—that was another stall. Too little value on the importance of the small acts of paying attention that constitute care or appreciation for others—yet another stall. I began to realize I was talking to couples trapped within the stalled gender revolution of the 1980s.
But are working parents in America today better off? A 2010 online post by Katrina Alcorn on the Huffington Post Web site, both hilarious and serious, gives one woman’s answer and points to a misguided search for answers.1 Alcorn describes how she balanced a demanding job, a daily commute, and care for her young children. Then just before the first birthday of her youngest child, she collapsed with insomnia and panic attacks. For these problems, she goes to a psychiatrist who prescribes an antidepressant. The antidepressant caused her to undergo night sweats, headaches, cotton mouth, and further sleeplessness, for which the psychiatrist then prescribes sleeping pills. Alcorn still can’t sleep and now suffers an eye twitch.
For her sleeplessness, she is now sent to a “sleep lab,” where specialists diagnose her with apnea and outfit her with the latest artificial breathing machine. This she describes as “the size of a lunch-box… with a corrugated hose that looped over my head and three slim black straps that held rubber nose plugs snug to my face …. Oxygen flowed up the vacuum cleaner hose on top of my head and through the nose plugs. When I opened my mouth, air came whooshing out like I was some kind of human leaf blower.” After two weeks, Alcorn finds herself with a fierce headache, unable to breathe through her nose, and on the verge of a cold. Finally a sensible pulmonary specialist points out that long-term use of sleeping pills can hinder breathing, antidepressants can cause in
somnia, and artificial breathing machines can dry out nasal passages and so induce colds.
In the end, Katrina Alcorn quits her pills, gives up her Darth Vader breathing machine, feels better, and wisely concludes: “It is crazy to put working parents in impossible situations where they are bound to go crazy, and then act like there’s something wrong with them for going crazy.” Many working parents look fine on the outside, smiling, well-groomed, bright-eyed, she argues, but I feel close to an inner, emotional edge doing what Tina Fey describes as “a tap-dance recital in a minefield.”2 Indeed, just as many Americans live with great financial debt—unpaid school loans, heavily mortgaged homes, a drive-now-pay-later car—so many may be overloaded with emotional debt. In these times of a stalled revolution, the cultural ideal of the breezily confident woman with the flying hair may be leading many to live beyond their emotional means. So it is to the ultimate causes—the larger “stall”—that we must look.
And how far have we come since 1989? To begin with, more American couples are doing the Tina Fey tap dance. In 1975, for example, half of mothers with kids under age eighteen were working. But by 2009, that had risen to nearly three-quarters. In 1975, a third of moms with children under age three were in the labor force; in 2009 it was nearly two-thirds—of whom 73 percent worked full time.3 And for many, the workday also stretches longer.4
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 28