Working couples who are poorer—and especially the women in those couples—have it harder. In her 1986 dissertation on lower-and working-class Chicanas, Denise Segura reported that when she asked wives whether their husbands helped at home, they responded with “half smiles, painful silences, tensing of facial muscles and at times, outright laughter.” The problems of the second shift are probably nowhere resolved any better than in the couples we’ve studied here.
Seventy percent of our couples were white, 24 percent were black, 3 percent Chicano or Latino, and 3 percent Asian. Although I found more conservative attitudes among Chicanos, I found no difference between whites and Chicano men in their help at home. Nor did I find a difference between whites and blacks. (One of Joseph Pleck’s studies, 1982, showed a smaller weekly leisure gap among black husbands and wives—11 hours—than among whites—17 hours—but I didn’t find this.)
Ways of Seeing
Initially we contacted couples by distributing a short questionnaire on work and family life to every thirteenth name drawn from the personnel list of a large corporation. Fifty-three percent returned the questionnaire. At the end of this short questionnaire we explained what we were interested in and asked if respondents would be willing to volunteer for an in-depth interview. To supplement our list, we later asked the people we interviewed for the names of neighbors and friends who were also two-job couples with children under six.
We asked men and women, “Can you tell me about your typical day?” We found that wives were much more likely to spontaneously mention something to do with the house; 3 percent of wives but 46 percent of husbands didn’t mention the house at all in their spontaneous description of a “typical day.” Three percent of the women and 31 percent of the men made no spontaneous mention of doing something for a child—like brushing hair or fixing a meal.
Working mothers also more often mentioned caring for people within the larger family circle: their own parents, their husbands’ parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, baby-sitters. One woman made sandwiches every Saturday for the neglected children of a neighboring working couple. Another helped her baby-sitter through a marital crisis. Another phoned daily to a relative bedridden with a back injury. Another made Christmas cookies for neighbors. Similarly, when gifts or phone calls came, they often came from busy working mothers. Men, especially working-class men, were often generous about giving time to move furniture, repair cars, or build additions on houses. But in most of these families, the communal circle of informal help seemed to be based more solidly on the informal work of women.
We also noticed that men spoke about chores in a different way— more in terms of chores they “liked and disliked,” would do or wouldn’t do. Women more often talked about what needed doing.
Men and women also tell somewhat different stories about how much each contributes. For example, 25 percent of husbands and 53 percent of wives answer that the wife “always” anticipates household needs. Some researchers have tried to avoid this sort of “subjective wart” on otherwise objective findings—by taking one or the other person’s word for what each partner does. To avoid this source of bias, our solution was to acknowledge and use the problem of subjective bias by averaging the husband’s and wife’s estimates of the amount of time each contributed to the set of chores about which I asked them. The tasks fell into three categories: housework, parenting, and management of domestic life. Under housework we included such things as putting out the garbage, picking up, vacuuming, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, doing laundry, routine meal preparation, cleanup, grocery shopping, sewing, car repairs, lawn, household repairs, care for houseplants, care for pets, dealing with the bank. Under child care we included both physical care of the child (tending a child while sick, feeding, bathing the child, taking the child to day care or to doctors) and educating the child (for example, daily discipline, reading). Under management of domestic life we included remembering, planning, and scheduling domestic chores and events, which included such tasks as making up the grocery list, paying bills, sending birthday and holiday cards, arranging baby-sitting, and preparing birthday parties for the child.
We found that 18 percent of men shared the second shift in the sense of doing half of the tasks in all three categories. These 18 percent of men didn’t necessarily do half of the same tasks as their wives did; they did half of the tasks in each category overall (these 18 percent did 45 to 55 percent; none did more); 21 percent did a moderate amount (between 30 and 45 percent); and 61 percent did little (between 30 percent and none).
The Relation Between Ideology and Male Help at Home
I divided the fifty husbands I studied into three groups: those who shared the housework and child care (i.e., did 45 to 55 percent), those who did a moderate amount (30 to 45 percent), and those who did little (30 percent or less). Of all the traditional men, 22 percent shared, 44 percent did a moderate amount, and 33 percent did little. (These add up to 99 percent instead of 100 percent because percentages were rounded off.) Of all the transitional men, 3 percent shared, 10 percent did a moderate amount, and 87 percent did little. Of the egalitarian men, 70 percent shared and 30 percent did a moderate amount. The numbers are small but suggestive.
The Relation Between the Wage Gap and the Leisure Gap
A debate still rages in social science research between two camps. One, represented by Gary Becker in his Economic Approach to Human Behavior, claims that wives do more housework because couples reason that “it’s good for everybody” if husbands focus on work, since they generally earn more. Women’s greater work at home is thus part of a family strategy to maximize economic utility. Implicitly, he argues that this collective strategy involves little struggle and, indeed, has nothing to do with ideology or male privilege. The second camp, best represented by Joan Huber and Glenna Spitze in Sex Stratification, argues that such arrangements are as much cultural as they are economic. And according to their own massive study, it is the size of the wife’s paycheck and not the wage gap between spouses that influences the amount of work a husband does at home.
In search of an invisible “economic hand” that might explain why some couples do and some don’t share the work at home in my own study, I set about dividing our fifty couples into three groups—high-wage gap (in which the husbands earned much more than the wives), middle-wage gap, and low-wage gap. I found no statistically significant relation between the wage gap between husband and wife and the leisure gap.
To cross-check this finding, I reanalyzed a subsample of another sixty-five couples (both of whom worked full time and cared for children under age fifteen) drawn from a larger national study done by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan in 1981. (This was the same 1977 sample that showed the disappearing leisure gap.) I divided the couples into four groups: the husband earned 75 percent or more of the total family income, between 55 and 75 percent, between 45 and 55 percent, and the wife earned more. I found that the less the wife earned (relative to her husband) the more housework she did. Women in group one contributed 72 percent of all the housework; in the second group, they contributed 66 percent; in the third, 55 percent; and in the fourth, 49 percent. Although women who earned more than their husbands did less housework, they did not have more leisure. The reason for this was that the low-earning women who did more housework worked shorter hours, so they could do the housework and have more leisure. Still puzzled, I looked again at my own fifty couples, teased apart the low-wage-gap group, and discovered that—in contrast to the couples in the University of Michigan study—the women who outearned their husbands often did so because their husbands weren’t doing so well at work. (This may not have been the case for high-earning wives in the Michigan study.) Looking more closely, I discovered the principle of “balancing”—wives “making up” for doing “too well” at work by doing more at home.
Taking off from Huber and Spitze, then, I conclude that the leisure gap between wives and husbands reflects something more than these co
uples’ pragmatic adaptation to the higher wages of American men—an interplay of gender strategy.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. For the 1975 and 2009 figures on mothers’ participation in paid employment, see Tables 5 and 7 in U.S. Department of Labor & U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (December 2010) “Women in the Labor Force: A Databook” (Report 1026; http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2010.pdf). For 2009 figures for mothers with children under age 1, see Bureau of Labor Statistics (May 2010) Table 6 “Employment Status of Mothers with Own Children Under 3 Years Old by Single Year of Age of Youngest Child and Marital Status, 2008-09 Annual Averages” (http://bls.gov/news.release/famee.t06.htm). For figures on part-time work in 1975 and 2009 see table 20 in “Women in the Labor Force” report, cited above. For data on part-time work of women with infants in 2009, see Table 6 (cited above).
2. Alexander Szalai, ed., The Use of Time: Daily Activities of Urban and Suburban Populations in Twelve Countries (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), p. 668, Table B. Another study found that men spent a longer time than women eating meals (Shelley Coverman, “Gender, Domestic Labor Time and Wage Inequality,” American Sociological Review 48 [1983]: 626). With regard to sleep, the pattern differs for men and women. The higher the social class of a man, the more sleep he’s likely to get. The higher the class of a woman, the less sleep she’s likely to get. (Upper-white-collar men average 7.6 hours sleep a night. Lower-white-collar, skilled and unskilled men all averaged 7.3 hours. Upper-white-collar women average 7.1 hours of sleep; lower-white-collar workers average 7.4; skilled workers 7.0 and unskilled workers 8.1.) Working wives seem to meet the demands of high-pressure careers by reducing sleep, whereas working husbands don’t.
For more details on the hours working men and women devote to house-work and child care, see the Appendix of this book.
3. Grace K. Baruch and Rosalind Barnett, “Correlates of Fathers’ Participation in Family Work: A Technical Report,” Working Paper no. 106 (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1983), pp. 80-81. Also see Kathryn E. Walker and Margaret E. Woods, Time Use: A Measure of Household Production of Goods and Services (Washington. D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1976).
4. Peplau, L. A., and K. P. Beals. “The Family Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men.” In A. Vangelisti, ed., Handbook of Family Communication, 2004.
Chapter 2
1. In a 1978 national survey, Joan Huber and Glenna Spitze found that 78 percent of husbands think that if husband and wife both work full time, they should share housework equally (Sex Stratification: Children, Housework and Jobs. New York: Academic Press, 1983). In fact, the husbands of working wives at most average a third of the work at home.
2. The concept of “gender strategy” is an adaptation of Ann Swidler’s notion of “strategies of action.” In “Culture in Action—Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 273-86, Swidler focuses on how the individual uses aspects of culture (symbols, rituals, stories) as “tools” for constructing a line of action. Here, I focus on aspects of culture that bear on our ideas of manhood and womanhood, and I focus on our emotional preparation for and the emotional consequences of our strategies.
3. For the term “family myth” I am indebted to Antonio J. Ferreira, “Psychosis and Family Myth,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 21 (1967): 186-225.
4. F. T. Juster, 1986.
Chapter 3
1. Lee Rainwater and W. L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 32.
2. In her book Redesigning the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 91, Dolores Hayden describes how, in 1935, General Electric and Architectural Forum jointly sponsored a competition for who could design the best house for “Mr. and Mrs. Bliss”—the model couple of the period (Mr. Bliss was an engineer, Mrs. Bliss was a housewife with a college degree in home economics. They had one boy, one girl). The winner proposed a home using 322 electrical appliances. Electricity, the contest organizers proposed, was Mrs. Bliss’s “servant.”
3. Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 67.
4. Shaevitz, Marjorie H., The Superwoman Syndrome (New York: Warner, 1984), p. xvii.
5. Ibid., p. 112. All quotes within this paragraph are from ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 205-6.
7. Ibid., pp. 100-101.
8. Hilary Cosell, Woman on a Seesaw: The Ups and Downs of Making It (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), p. 30.
9. Bob Greene, “Trying to Keep Up with Amanda,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 1984, “People” section.
Chapter 9
1. The combination of high work demands with low control over the pace of these demands creates more strain in women’s jobs. This may account for the higher observed rates of mental strain among women workers— rates often implicitly attributed to “female frailty” or “excitability.” See Cranor et al. (1981).
Similarly, in their study “Women, Work and Coronary Heart Disease,” American Journal of Public Health 70 (1980): 133-41, Suzanne G. Haynes and Manning Feinleib suggest that women service workers (especially those married to blue-collar husbands, with three or more children) actually suffer more coronary disease than top-level male executives. These female workers combine the “low-autonomy” atmosphere of clerical work with the low-autonomy situation of the family-work speed-up. For research on the effect of marriage and work on mental stress, see Walter R. Gove, “The Relationship Between Sex Roles, Mental Health, and Marital Status,” Social Forces 51 (1972): 34-44; Walter Gove and Michael Geerken, “The Effect of Children and Employment on the Mental Health of Married Men and Women,” Social Forces 56 (1977): 66-76; and Peggy Thoits, “Multiple Identities: Examining Gender and Marital Status Differences in Distress,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 259-72.
2. One study found that male workers enjoy longer coffee breaks and longer lunches than female workers. According to Frank Stafford and Greg Duncan, men average over an hour and forty minutes more rest at work than women do each week. See Frank Stafford and Greg Duncan, “Market Hours, Real Hours and Labor Productivity,” Economic Outlook USA, Autumn 1978, pp. 103-19.
3. Wiseman, Paul. “Young, Single, Childless Women Out-earn Male Counterparts,” USA Today, September 2, 2010. Figures are based on U.S. Census Bureau information analyzed by the New York research firm Reach Advisors.
4. Blades, Joan, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, The Motherhood Manifesto, New York: Nation Books, 2006, p. 7.
Chapter 10
1. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Chapter 13
1. Of the 100 men and women in the 50 “mainstream” couples I studied, 18 percent of the husbands were traditional, 62 percent transitional, and 20 percent egalitarian. Among the wives, 12 percent were traditional, 40 percent were transitional, and 48 percent were egalitarian. (Berkeley couples were omitted because they probably reflect an untypically liberal subculture.) Below, I’ve shown how husbands’ gender ideologies match those of their wives.
Thus, of all the marriages I studied, 60 percent were between husbands and wives who shared similar ideologies, and 40 percent were between husbands and wives who disagreed. The most common type of disagreement was between an egalitarian woman and a transitional man.
Chapter 14
1. See William J. Goode, “Family Disorganization,” Chapter 11 in Contemporary Social Problems, 4th ed., Robert K. Merton and Robert Nisbet (eds.) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Also see Louis Roussel, Le Divorce et les Français, Vol. II, “L’Expérience des Divorcés,” Travautet Documents, Cahier No. 72 (Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), pp. 26-29. In many ways, the fact that wives work both benefits and stabilizes marriage. In virtually all the research on women’s work, working women report themselves as happier, higher in self-esteem, and in better mental and physical health than do housewives
. See Lois Hoffman and F. I. Nye, Working Mothers (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974), p. 209. A woman’s work also adds money to a marriage through the so-called dowry effect. By making a family richer, a woman’s wages may protect the family from the strains of poverty associated with marital disruption. See Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, “The Sociology of Women’s Economic Role in the Family,” American Sociological Review 42 (1977): 387-405; D. T. Hall and F. E. Gordon, “Career Choices of Married Women,” Journal of Applied Psychology 58 (1973): 42-48.
2. Ronald C. Kessler and James McRae, Institute for Social Research Newsletter, University of Michigan, 1978. See also S. S. Feidman, S. C. Nash, and B. G. Aschenbrenner, “Antecedents of Fathering,” Child Development 54 (1983): 1628-36; M. W. Yogman, “Competence and Performance of Fathers and Infants,” in A. Macfarlane, ed., Progress in Child Health (London: Churchill Livingston, 1983).
3. Joan Huber and Glenna Spitze, Sex Stratification: Children, Housework and Jobs (New York: Academic Press, 1983).
4. According to George Levinger’s study, men voiced fewer complaints. But the top four were mental cruelty (30 percent), neglect of home or children (26 percent), sexual incompatibility (20 percent), and infidelity (20 percent). For women, the top four were mental cruelty (40 percent), neglect of home or children (39 percent), financial problems (37 percent), and physical abuse (37 percent). (“Sources of Marital Dissatisfaction Among Applicants for Divorce,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 36 [1966]: 803-7.)
Chapter 15
1. Other studies find that a man’s upbringing bears only a slight relationship to the amount of work at home he does as an adult. See Lois Hoffman, “Parental Power Relations and the Division of Household Tasks,” in F. I. Nye and L. W. Hoffman, eds., The Employed Mother in America (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 215-30; M. Bowling, “Sex Role Attitudes and the Division of Household Labor,” paper presented at the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 1975; Rebecca Stafford, Elaine Backman, and Pamela DiBona, “The Division of Labor among Cohabiting and Married Couples,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39 (1977): 43-57; C. Perucci, H. Potter, and D. Rhoads, “Determinants of Male Family Role Performance,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 3 (1978): 53-66; M. Roberts and L. Wortzel, “Husbands Who Prepare Dinner: A Test of Competing Theories of Marital Role Allocations,” unpublished paper, Boston University, 1979; S. Hesselbart, “Does Charity Begin at Home? Attitudes Toward Women, Household Tasks, and Household Decision-Making,” paper presented to the American Sociological Association, 1976; and Gayle Kimball, 50-50 Marriage (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Page 30