The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

by Arlie Hochschild, Anne Machung

  2. Surprisingly, most researchers find little or no relationship between the amount of time a man spends at paid work and the proportion of housework he does. See Robert Clark, Ivan Nye, and Viktor Gecas, “Husbands’ Work Involvement and Marital Role Performance,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 40 (1978): 9-21; Stafford, Backman, and DiBona (1977); Perucci, Potter, and Rhoads (1978). But also see John Robinson, How Americans Use Time (New York: Praeger, 1977), and Walker and Woods (1976). For a thorough review of the evidence, see Joseph H. Pleck, Working Wives, Working Husbands (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985), p. 55.

  3. I found a slight—but not statistically significant—difference. Despite a good deal of research on the possible link between the wage gap between husband and wife and the leisure gap between them, I’m aware of only one researcher, the economist Gary Becker (A Treatise on the Family [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981]), who found such a link. For more on research about this link, see the Appendix.

  4. Pleck (1985), p. 151.

  5. See Bob Kuttner, “The Declining Middle” Atlantic Monthly, July 1983; Paul Blumberg, Inequality in an Age of Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Michael Harrington and Mark Levinson, “The Perils of a Dual Economy,” Dissent 32 (1985): 417-26; and Andrew Hacker, “Women Versus Men in the Work Force,” New York Times Magazine, December 9, 1984. For the argument that the labor market is not dividing into two parts, see Neal H. Rosenthal, “The Shrinking Middle Class: Myth or Reality?” Monthly Labor Review 108 (1985): 3-10.

  6. Sheila B. Kamerman and Cheryl D. Hayes, eds., Children of Working Parents: Experience and Outcomes (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1983), p. 238.

  7. See Norma Radin, “Primary Caregiving and Role Sharing Fathers of Preschoolers,” in M. E. Lamb, ed., Nontraditional Families: Parenting and Child Development (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1982), and her “The Role of the Father in Cognitive/Academic Intellectual Development,” in M. E. Lamb, ed., The Role of the Father in Child Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1981); Norma Radin and Graeme Russell, “Increased Father Participation and Child Development Outcomes,” in Lamb, Nontraditional Families, pp. 191-218; H. B. Biller, “The Father and Personality Development: Paternal Deprivation and Sex-Role Development,” in M. E. Lamb, The Role of the Father in Child Development (New York: Wiley, 1976); A. Sagi, “Antecedents and Consequences of Various Degrees of Paternal Involvement in Child-Rearing: The Israeli Project,” in Lamb, Non-traditional Families, pp. 205-32; and Michael E. Lamb, ed., The Father’s Role: Applied Perspectives (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1986). In Robert Blanchard and Henry Biller’s study of forty-four white third-grade boys, they compared boys whose fathers were absent before they were five, absent after five, present for less than six hours a week, and present for more than two hours a day. The boys were similar in their age, I.Q., social class, and the presence of male siblings. The boys who saw their fathers the most did much better on the Stanford Achievement Tests (which measure comprehension of verbal, scientific, and mathematical concepts) than did boys whose fathers were involved less than six hours a week, and did much better than boys whose fathers were totally absent (“Father Availability and Academic Performance Among Third-Grade Boys,” Developmental Psychology 4 [1971]: 301-15).

  8. Carolyn and Philip Cowan found that a father’s involvement increased his daughter’s sense of being master of her fate and improved her scores in math (“Men’s Involvement in Parenthood: Identifying the Antecedents and Understanding the Barriers,” in P. Berman and F. A. Pedersen, eds., Fathers’ Transitions to Parenthood [Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1986]).

  9. See Mark W. Router and Henry B. Biller, “Perceived Personality Adjustment Among College Males,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 40 (3) (1973): 339-42.

  Chapter 16

  1. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Also see Julie A. Mattaie Bradby, An Economic History of Women in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1982).

  2. Louis Harris and Associates, “Families at Work,” General Mills American Family Report, 1980-81. Other research also shows that even working-class women who do not have access to rewarding jobs prefer to work. See Myra Ferree, “Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Social Change: Employment and the Family,” in Karen Sacks and Dorothy Remy, eds., My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 61-79. Women’s paid work leads to their personal satisfaction (Charles Weaver and Sandra Holmes, “A Comparative Study of the Work Satisfaction of Females with Full-Time Employment and Full-Time Housekeeping,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60 [1975]:117-28) and—if a woman has the freedom to choose to work or not—it leads to marital happiness. See Susan Orden and N. Bradburn, “Working Wives and Marriage Happiness,” American Journal of Sociology 74 (1969): 107-23.

  3. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports: Households, Families, Marital Status and Living Arrangements, series P-20, no. 382 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985). Also see Statistical Abstracts of the U.S. National Data Book, Guide to Sources (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985). Spousal support is awarded in less than 14 percent of all divorces, and in less than 7 percent of cases do women actually receive it. See Lenore Weitzman, The Divorce Revolution (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1985).

  4. These findings are based on questionnaires I passed out to every thirteenth name on the personnel roster of a large manufacturing company. Of those contacted, 53 percent replied. The results show that the typical form of a worker’s family life differs at different levels of the corporate hierarchy. The traditional family prevails at the top. Dual-work families prevail in the middle, and single-parent families and singles prevail at the bottom, as the chart below shows:

  Chapter 17

  1. “What Do Cal Freshmen Feel, Believe, Think?” Cal Report 5 (March 1988): 4. In her study of Barnard senior women, Mirra Komarovsky found only 5 percent wanted to become housewives (Women in Colleges: Shaping New Feminine Identities [New York: Basic Books, 1985]).

  2. See Anne Machung, “Talking Career, Thinking Job, Gender Differences in Career and Family Expectations of Berkeley Seniors,” Feminist Studies 15 (1), Spring 1989.

  3. Public Opinion, December-January 1986.

  4. Machung (1989).

  5. For more on the role of Soviet men in housework and child care, see Michael Paul Sacks, “Unchanging Times: A Comparison of the Everyday Life of Soviet Working Men and Women Between 1923 and 1966,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, November 1977, pp. 793-805; and Gail Lapidus, ed., Women, Work and Family in the Soviet Union (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

  Afterword

  1. Katrina Alcorn, Huffington Post Internet Post, April 8, 2010, “Peaceful Revolution: If You Give a Mouse a Prozac…”

  2. Tina Fey, “Confessions of a Juggler,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2011, p. 64.

  3. Compared with the 1980s, fewer mothers are married, have preschool kids, and work full time. If we follow the statistics, it seems more have quit, cut back hours, or divorced. Still, whether married, cohabiting, or divorced, most mothers of preschool children—six out of ten mothers of children under three—are in the labor force. And of those, only a quarter (27 percent) work part time. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, Table 6, “Employment Status of Mothers with Own Children Under 3 Years old by Single Year of Age of Youngest Child, and Marital Status, 2007-2009 Annual Averages.”

  4. The combined weekly work hours of married couples has risen by 20 percent—from fifty-six hours a week in 1969 to sixty-seven hours in 2000. Based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, the figures apply to couples ages twenty-five to fifty-four. “Working in the 21st Century” (http://www.bls.gov/opub/working/page17b.htm). According to a 2009 Time Use survey, employed men work now, as in the past, about an hour more than employed women, and even among full-time workers (men average 8.3 hours and women 7.5). “Am
erican Time Use Survey” 2009 (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/status.nr0.htm). On hours of work for employed women and men, 1980 to 2009, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor, “Women in the Labor Force, 2010,” Table 21 (http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-table21-2010.pdf).

  5. Teresa Ciabattari, Gender and Society, August 2001, 15(4): 574-91, Table 3. Another study based on the nationwide General Social Survey showed a similar rise in the acceptance of the equality of the sexes between 1974 and 2004. But it also revealed a pause in 1994 and subsequent flattening of the upward trend through 2004. This pause did not signal, the authors surmise, a return to 1950s domesticity, but rather a shift that Maria Charles and David Grusky call “egalitarian essentialism.” This view mixes the new (women should have equality of choice) with old (women are better with children and should choose to stay home when they can). Women can be equal, this view holds, and stay home with the children because they’ve freely chosen to do so. These choices are often premised, of course, on the assumption that we can’t reshape jobs, get more government support, and alter the prevailing notion of manhood.

  6. Scott Coltrane, “Research on Household Labor: Modeling and Measuring the Social Embeddedness of Routine Family Work,” Journal of Marriage and Family 2000, 62(4): 1208-33. Studies tracking the years between 1969 and 1999 reported men doing some more housework (an annual 262 hours more) and women doing quite a lot less (783 hours less). The housework gap between the sexes shrank in those decades from thirty-three hours a week to less than thirteen. See “Time Use: Diary and Direct Reports” by F. Thomas Juster, Hiromi Ono, and Frank. P. Stafford (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, unpublished report, Tables 9 and 10, pp. 39-49).

  7. See Melissa A. Milkie, Sara B. Raley, Suzanne M. Bianchi, “Taking on the Second Shift: Time Allocations and Time Pressures of U.S. Parents with Preschoolers,” December 2009, Social Forces, 88(2): 487-518.

  8. Ibid, p. 502. If the researchers added in what they call “secondary activities”—tasks one did while also doing other things—they found women working an extra 9.3 hours per week, or extra 20 days a year. Ibid., Table 2, p. 517.

  9. “Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries,” UNICEF, Innocenti Report Card 7, Florence, Italy, 2007 (http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf).

  10. Ibid, p. 2, for overall rankings. The United States, along with the United Kingdom ranked in the bottom third in five out of the six dimensions reviewed. The Netherlands won highest marks. There was no relationship between how rich a country was and the welfare of its children. The Czech Republic outranked the United States, for example.

  11. Ibid, p. 37.

  12. International Labour Office, Bureau for Gender Equality, Gender Equality and Decent Work: Good Practices at the Workplace, 2005.

  13. Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas, The Custom-Fit Workplace, 2010: San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

  Selected Reading

  Abidin, R. Parent Education and Intervention Handbook. Springfield, Mass.: Thomas, 1980.

  Arendell, Terry. Mothers and Divorce. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

  Bailyn, Lotte. “Involvement and Accommodation in Technical Careers: An Inquiry into the Relation to Work at Mid-Career.” In Organizational Careers: Some New Perspectives, edited by J. Van Maanen. London: Wiley International, 1977.

  Bain, Mary Jo, Laura Lein, L. O’Donnell, C. A. Stueve, and B. Wells. “Childcare Arrangements of Working Parents.” Monthly Labor Review, October 1979, pp. 157-62.

  Baranskaya, Natalya. “A Week Like Any Other.” Translated by Emily Lehrman. Originally appeared in Novy Mir, 11 (1969). The Massachusetts Review, Autumn 1974, pp. 657-703.

  Baruch, Grace K., and Rosalind Barnett. “Correlates of Fathers’ Participation in Family Work: A Technical Report.” Working paper no. 106. Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, Mass., 1983.

  Becker, Gary. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

  —–. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.

  Berg, Barbara. The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

  Berk, Richard A., and Sarah Fenstermaker Berk. Labor and Leisure at Home: Consent and Organization of the Household Day. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979.

  Berk, Sarah Fenstermaker, and A. Shih. “Contributions to Household Labor: Comparing Wives’ and Husbands’ Reports.” In Women and Household Labor, edited by S. F. Berk. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1980, pp. 191-228.

  Bernard, Jessie. The Future of Marriage. New York: World, 1972.

  Bernardo, H. D., L. C. Shehan, and R. G. Leslie. “A Residue of Tradition: Jobs, Careers and Spouse’s Time in Housework.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 49 (1987): 381-90.

  Best, Fred. Flexible Life Scheduling: Breaking the Education-Work-Retirement Lockstep. New York: Praeger, 1980.

  Biller, H. B. “The Father and Personality Development: Paternal Deprivation and Sex-Role Development.” In The Role of the Father in Child Development, edited by M. E. Lamb. New York: John Wiley, 1976.

  Blades, Joan, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. The Motherhood Manifesto, New York: Nation Books, 2006, p. 7.

  Blanchard, R. W., and H. B. Biller. “Father Availability and Academic Performance Among Third-Grade Boys.” Developmental Psychology 4 (1971): 301-15.

  Blumberg, Paul. Inequality in an Age of Decline. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

  Bohen, H., and A. Viveros-Long. Balancing Jobs and Family Life: Do Flexible Work Schedules Help? Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

  Bowling, M. “Sex Role Attitudes and the Division of Household Labor.” Paper presented at the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 1975.

  Bradburn, Susan R., and Norman M. Orden. “Working Wives and Marriage Happiness.” American Journal of Sociology 74 (1969): 392-407.

  Bradby, Barbara. “The Destruction of Natural Economy.” In The Articulation of Modes of Production, edited by Harold Wolpe. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, pp. 93-127.

  Brown, Helen Gurley. Having It All. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

  Campbell, A., P. Converse, and W. Rodgers. The Quality of American Life. New York: Russell Sage, 1976.

  Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

  Clark, Robert, Ivan Nye, and Viktor Gecas. “Husbands’ Work Involvement and Marital Role Performance.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 40 (1978): 9-21.

  Cooler, Cary L. Stress Research: Issues for the Eighties. Chichester, England, and New York: John Wiley, 1983.

  Cosell, Hilary. Woman on a Seesaw: The Ups and Downs of Making It. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985.

  Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

  Courtney, Alice, and Thomas Whipple. Canadian Perspectives on Sex Stereotyping in Advertising. Ottawa: Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1978.

  Coverman, Shelley. “Gender, Domestic Labor Time and Wage Inequality.” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 623-36.

  Cowan, Carolyn, and Philip A. Cowan. “Parents’ Work Patterns, Marital and Parent-Child Relationships and Early Child Development.” Paper presented at Meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Toronto, Canada, April 1985.

  —–. “Men’s Involvement in Parenthood: Identifying the Antecedents and Understanding the Barriers.” In Fathers’ Transitions to Parenthood, edited by P. Berman and F. A. Pedersen. Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1986.

  Cowan, Paul, and Rachel Cowan. Mixed Blessings: Marriage Between Jews and Christians. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

  Cranor, Linda A., Robert Karasek, Jr., and Christopher C. Carlin. “Job Characteristics and Office Work: Findings and Health Implications,” Columbia University, Department of Sociology and Industrial Engineering and Operation
s Research, Mimeo: Paper presented at the National Institute for Occupational Health Issues Affecting Clerical/Secretarial Personnel, July 22-24, 1981. Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Dale, Barbara, and Jim Dale. The Working Woman Book. Kansas City and New York: Andrews, McMeel and Parker, 1985.

  Duncan, Greg J., and James N. Morgan (eds.). Five Thousand American Families—Patterns of Economic Progress. Vol. 6, Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, 1978.

  Edder, Janet. “New Programs Offer Assistance for Latchkey Children.” The New York Times, September 5, 1985.

  Ehrenreich, Barbara, The Hearts of Men. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1983.

  Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: Fifty Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978.

  Ehrensaft, Diane. Parenting Together: Men and Women Sharing the Care of Their Children. New York: Free Press, 1987.

  Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs. Women in Law. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

  Estes, Carol, and Anne Machung. “Berkeley Work-Family Project.” The Women’s Center for Continuing Education, University of California, Berkeley, 1986.