Incompetence was one way to induct traditional men into the second shift. Sickness was another. Carmen has arthritis that “acts up” and prevents her from carrying heavy things. It isn’t clear that she “uses” sickness like she uses helplessness. But curiously, other traditional women I talked with seem to get sick more often than egalitarian women. And when they are sick, it follows a certain pattern. Insisting that every task on the second shift is theirs, they work heroically until they finally fall ill with exhaustion. They don’t stop; their illness stops them. Sometimes it’s pneumonia, sometimes migraines, a bad back, arthritis. Then their husbands, primed all along to help out in an emergency, “lend a hand.” Upon recovering, the woman returns to her double load, plunges full steam ahead, and eventually becomes sick again. Getting sick can have something in common with “getting” incompetent: both are ways of receiving through an indirect strategy (of renegotiating roles) what many egalitarian women receive through a direct strategy—a mans labor in the second shift. The 11 percent of women in this study who reported themselves as traditional all reported being ill more often than their husbands, and more often than other women.
Like many traditional couples, the Delacortes were a curious mixture of old and new. They thought, talked, and felt in traditional ways, but they had to live with the stubborn realities of modern economic life. They aspired to a pattern of male rule, but had backed into a gender democracy. Frank wanted to be the kind of man whose wife didn’t have to work, but in truth he needed her wages. Carmen wanted to take exclusive care of their home but she actually needed Franks help. Frank believed that the kitchen was Carmens domain, but he worked there anyway. He enjoyed the idea of separate spheres for men and women, but he often found himself beside Carmen picking canned goods off the shelf in the supermarket or working their hand calculator to monitor the relentless contest between their modest wages and the steady rise in prices. Carmen wanted to strip her work of any meaning except financial. But the awkward fact was that she liked her work and it gave her a power she readily used, ironically, to “give” Frank his dominance and to “work” her subordination. As long as they needed Carmens wage, she would have a troubling power that subverted their ideals of manhood and womanhood.
By discrediting cultural models of female assertion, by strictly confining her tendency to dominate to the “female” sphere, by “remembering William,” by raising Frank above her—putting him on a pedestal—Carmen pursued submission as part of a traditional strategy. She squelched her assertion outside the home;
she actively magnified any feelings of dependence; these were the psychological moves that kept her soul in line with her strategy.
Their traditionalism fit neither the outer nor the inner realities of their lives. The outer reality was that Frank needed Carmen to earn money and Carmen needed Franks help with housework and child care. The inner reality was that Frank was not dominant and Carmen was not submissive. Given the personalities ideal for their ideology, Frank was “too passive,” Carmen “too assertive.” What contained both contradictions was the family myth that “Frank did little around the house.”
The Delacortes shared some things with the Holts. Both couples jointly shared a belief about how they divided the labor of the home, and in both cases, the belief was a myth. The Holts said that their upstairs-downstairs arrangement was an equal division of labor. The Delacortes said theirs was unequal. Both stories reflected what the couple wanted to believe. What they wanted to believe clashed with some important reality in their lives, and created a tension that their “cover story” both hid and managed. For the Holts, the tension was between Nancy’s egalitarian ideology and Evans traditional one. For the Delacortes, the tension was between their joint traditionalism and the reality of both their pock- etbooks and their personalities.
By itself, a gender ideology doesn’t tell us how much of the second shift the husband of a working mother will do. In general, the traditional men (who wished their wives could stay home, and were more likely to be working class) in my study actually did slightly more around the house than transitional men who supported the idea of their wives working but felt those wives should also care for the home. Most strongly egalitarian men actually did share.
What tells us more about how much the husband of a working mother does at home is the interplay between the couple’s particular gender ideologies, the economic realities of their lives, and the gender strategies through which they consciously or not reconcile these. Carmen was a tradition defender. Her strategy came into play when she faced the conflict between her traditionalism and her need for Franks help in “her” sphere at home. By playing helpless, she could still be a traditional woman but get an untraditional result—a man active in the kitchen. On the other hand, Nancy was a feminist who got a traditional result. In the Holt family, of course, it was Evan who played helpless.
Unlike Evan, Frank didn’t dissociate “fairness” from sharing the second shift—he wasn’t trying to be “fair” in Nancy’s sense. He didn’t, like some men who had committed themselves to fifty-fifty, try to get out of it (their wives felt) by pretending to share. Nor did Frank claim to be in the grips of his career or to suffer more on — the-job stress. Without much fanfare, he simply pitched in.
Nancy’s strategy was to push for a change in roles. When that failed, she cut back her hours at work. Half-consciously, she also made it hard on Evan when he didn’t share. Her sexual disinterest and her overabsorption with Joey were daily reminders to Evan of the emotional costs of his refusal.
Nancy Holt’s experience tells how a woman tries to get a failed strategy behind her and feel all right about it. Carmen Delacorte didn’t have that work to do. But both stories do tell us about how our early experiences create the emotional steam behind a certain version of womanhood and manhood. Both stories show ways of maintaining the facade of a gender identity when such things as the resistance of a spouse or the limits of a family budget jeopardize the substance of that identity.
As economic pressures force more reluctant, home-centered women into low-paid jobs in the expanding service sector, the Delacortes’ way of reconciling traditional beliefs with modern life may become more common. But what happened to Frank and Carmen may also happen to more couples. The last I heard, Frank had a falling out with his foreman and lost his job. As they drew together against this rough luck, they often said to themselves, “Thank God for Carmen’s job.”
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