As I watched couples in their own homes, I began to realize that couples sometimes develop “family myths”—versions of reality that obscure a core truth in order to manage a family tension.3 Evan and Nancy Holt managed an irresolvable conflict over the distribution of work at home through the myth that they now “shared it equally.” Another couple unable to admit to the conflict came to believe “we aren’t competing over who will take responsibility at home; we’re just dreadfully busy with our careers.” Yet another couple jointly believed that the husband was bound hand and foot to his career “because his work demanded it,” while in fact his careerism covered the fact that they were avoiding each other. Not all couples need or have family myths. But when they do arise, I believe they often manage key tensions which are linked, by degrees, to the long hand of the stalled revolution.
After interviewing couples for a while, I got into the practice of offering families who wanted it my interpretation of how they fit into the broader picture I was seeing and what I perceived were their strategies for coping with the second shift. Couples were often relieved to discover they were not alone, and were encouraged to open up a dialogue about the inner and outer origins of their troubles.
Many couples in this book worked long hours at their jobs and their children were very young: in this way their lot was unusually hard. But in one crucial way they had it far easier than most twq- job couples in America: most were middle class. Many also worked for a company that embraced progressive policies toward personnel, generous benefits and salaries. If these middle-class couples find it hard to juggle work and family life, many other two-job families across the nation—who earn less, work at less flexible, steady, or lucrative jobs, and rely on poorer day care—are likely to find it much harder still.
Anne Machung and I began interviewing in 1976, and accomplished most of our interviews in the early 1980s. I finished in 1988. About half of my later interviews were follow-up contacts with couples we’d talked to earlier; the other half were new.
How much had changed from 1976 to 1988? In practical terms, little: most women I interviewed in the late 1980s still do the lions share of work at home, do most of the daily chores, and take responsibility for running the home. But something was different, too. More couples wanted to share and imagined that they did. Dorothy Sims, a personnel director, summed up this new blend of idea and reality. She eagerly explained to me that she and her husband Dan “shared all the housework,” and that they were “equally involved in raising their nine-month-old son Timothy.” Her husband, a refrigerator salesman, applauded her career and “was more pleased than threatened by her high salary”; he urged her to develop such competencies as reading ocean maps and calculating interest rates (which she’d so far “resisted learning”) because these days “a woman should.” But one evening at dinner, a telling episode occurred. Dorothy had handed Timothy to her husband while she served us a chicken dinner. Gradually, the baby began to doze on his fathers lap. aWhen do you want me to put Timmy to bed?” Dan asked. A long silence followed during which it occurred to Dorothy—then, I think, to her husband—that this seemingly insignificant question hinted to me that it was she, not he, or They,” who usually decided such matters. Dorothy slipped me a glance, put her elbows on the table, and said to her husband in a slow, deliberate voice, “So, what do we think?”
When Dorothy and Dan described their “typical days,” their picture of sharing grew even less convincing. Dorothy worked the same nine-hour day at the office as her husband. But she came home to fix dinner and to tend Timmy while Dan fit in a squash game three nights a week from six to seven (a good time for his squash partner). Dan read the newspaper more often and slept longer.
Compared to the early interviews, women in the later interviews seemed to speak more often in passing of relationships or marriages that had ended for some other reason but in which it “was also true” that he “didn’t lift a finger at home.” Or the extra month alone did it. One divorcee who typed part of this manuscript echoed this theme when she explained, “I was a potter and lived with a sculptor for eight years. I cooked, shopped, and cleaned because his art ‘took him longer.’ He said it was fair because he worked harder. But we both worked at home, and I could see that if anyone worked longer hours, I did, because I earned less with my pots than he earned with his sculpture. That was hard to live with, and that’s really why we ended.”
Some women moved on to slightly more equitable arrangements in the early 1980s, doing a bit less of the second shift than the working mothers I talked to in the late 1970s. Comparing two national surveys of working couples, F. T. Juster found the male slice of the second shift rose from 20 percent in 1965 to 30 percent in І 981, and my study may be a local reflection of this slow national trend.4 But women like Dorothy Sims, who simply add to their extra month a year a new illusion that they aren’t doing it, represent a sad alternative to the woman with the flying hair—the woman who doesn’t think that’s who she is.
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