How does the content of what a person thinks and feels about the second shift fit with what they do about it—i. e., with their behavioral strategy? Most egalitarian women—those with strong feelings about sharing—did one of two things. They married men who planned to share at home or they actively tried to change their husbands’ understanding of his role at home. Before she had children, Adrienne Sherman took the risky step of telling her husband, “Its share the second shift or its divorce.” She staged a “sharing showdown” and won. After she had Joey, Nancy Holt initiated a major crisis in the marriage but backed away from showdown. Both women confronted their husbands, and caused great emotional upheaval as a result. Other women initiated a series of smaller prods to their husbands to turn more attention toward the family. When she was eight months pregnant and her husband was working nearly all the time, Carol Alston recalls sitting her husband down on the front stairs as he came home from work and saying, “I wont have this baby if you don’t emotionally prepare for it with me.” Though she didn’t really mean she wouldn’t have the baby, she was making an important point. Still other women initiated exhaustive, reasonable talks rearranging who did what at home.
Over half the working mothers I interviewed had tried one way or another to change roles at home. One reason the effort is so common among women is that they bear the weight of a contradiction between traditional ideology and modern circumstances. Unless they assume the extra work of changing the division of labor, it is usually they who work the extra month a year. If women lived in a culture that presumed active fatherhood, they wouldn’t need to devise personal strategies to bring it about.