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T thirty-six, Seth Stein has been a husband for eleven years, a father for five, a practicing lawyer for eight, and a litigation attorney for the last six. He is tall, with broad, slightly stooped shoulders, and a firm handshake. We sit down for our interview at eight in the evening; normally at this hour, he tells me, he would be unwinding from a ten-hour day, beer in hand, slouched and unmoving in his TV chair, moving his thumb over the buttons of his hand-held remote TV channel control almost randomly. He would have had dinner with his wife and two small children at six-thirty or seven, perched himself on the periphery of his children s activities for three-quarters of an hour, and this, now, would have been the first stretch of time he’d had to himself all day.
His unwinding, I discovered, was usually solitary. Once the children were in bed, his wife, Jessica, who was a lawyer specializing in family law, found herself free at last, and returned to her half-read legal papers, neither joining him in relaxation nor wishing to interfere. (“Sometimes,” Seth said later, “I look over the papers in her study and think, ‘We’re both caught up in our professions.’”) The living room, with its modern Danish chairs and bright Indian tapestries standing out against white walls, is his private recovery room, a place where he “comes to” after the daily operations of his demanding career. For the first time all day, he takes off his glasses and loosens his tie.
When I ask Seth to describe a typical day, he says:
I get up at six-thirty. Into the bathroom, shower, get dressed, out of the house by seven-thirty. I might see the kids in passing—“Hi, how are you?” and give a kiss goodbye. Then my morning begins with meetings with my clients, and depending on whether we are in the middle of a big litigation case, I’ll meet with the other lawyers on the case, check with the paralegals. I’m at the office until six. Гт generally home by six-thirty at the latest to sit down and have dinner. Then I’ll go back at eight or eight-thirty for a few hours. I started coming home for dinner at six-thirty a year ago after realizing I’d missed the first two years of Victor s growing up.
Jessica, a tall, willowy woman of thirty-six, who often dressed in graceful peasant blouses and long floral skirts, had reached that stage in her career, she felt, where she was sure enough of herself as a professional woman that she could abandon the “strong” dark suits she had always worn to work earlier, and still wore in court. She grew up the daughter of a widowed waitress in Texas, and worked her way through the University of Texas law school. But there were few indications of the determination it must have taken to pursue this course of action in the expectant but shy manner with which she approached my questions.
She and Seth had begun marriage intending to honor both law degrees equally. But after many reasonable discussions, Jessica had agreed that Seths career came first because “litigation law was more demanding.” These reasonable discussions did not seem like “moves” in his or her gender strategy, but attempts to “do the best thing” for each person and for the family. Seth was happy about the outcome to these discussions but vaguely unhappy about his marriage. Jessica was unhappy about both.
If Evan Holt resisted his wife’s pressure to help at home but gave in on the “upstairs-downstairs” cover story, and if Peter Tana — gawa resisted but gave in on his role as the main provider, then Seth Stein resisted and gave up nothing except, very gradually, his wife.
Jessica is one of many women who respond to the exhausting demands of the second shift by trying to induce their husbands to share, and who cope with it when they don t. Nancy Holt tried to sustain her egalitarian identity even as her marriage made it impossible to live up to. NinaTanagawa, never a “believing feminist,” didn’t have to do this, but instead coped with the transitional’s definition of the family-career problem as “hers.” Of the two, Jessica was more like Nancy. She’d begun with an egalitarian dream and had been forced to give it up. Like Nancy, she remained married but, unlike Nancy, Jessica gradually began to detach her feelings from Seth.
Curiously, Seth had none of the traditional man’s attitudes toward “women’s work.” If he’d had the time, he could have done the laundry or sewing without a bit of shame. This was because his manhood was neither confirmed nor denied by what he did at home; what he did at home didn’t matter. Instead, his sense of self and of manhood rose and fell with the opinions of his legal community. Loaded as his career was with this meaning for his manhood and self, Seth’s career “told” him what he had to do.
Yet, this connection between manhood and career was hard for Seth to see. He actually had little to say about what it meant to “be a man” or about his notion of “manhood.” “People are people, that’s about it,” he would say about these matters. All that occurred to him consciously, it seemed, was how nervous it made him on those rare occasions when he took time off. Meanwhile, fellow lawyers were saying that Seth “had a lot of balls” to break into the fierce competition among lawyers in such a crowded urban market.
While Seth’s obsession about his career did not seem desirable to either him or Jessica, it seemed normal and acceptable and had three effects on his family. First, what occurred at the imperial center of his career determined what happened out in the “colony” of his home. Second, although neither of them quite articulated this, Seth’s dedication to his career led him to feel he deserved her nur — turance more than she deserved his. Because ^worked the longest hours, and because long hours seemed a manly way of earning nurturance, Seth felt he had “first dibs.” Third, his career led him to suppress his emotional attachment to his children, although not his ultimate concern for them. He loved them, but day to day he left it to Jessica to think about what they needed and felt. As he saw it, these were not a result of a gender strategy, but the normal attitudes of a top-notch professional. And actually a gender strategy of resisting the emotional and social work of the second shift is built into the very clockwork of male-dominated careers. It is not simply Seths personal attitudes that are at issue, but the normal hours of work in his office, the calls, the gossip that remind each worker of the overwhelming importance of work to selfesteem, and a whole urgency system based on the exclusion of life at home.
Seth and Jessica had married when they were law students. They share the memory of studying together in the library for exams and being interrupted by a fellow student and friend asking “Shall we go out for Chinese? Italian?” Six years after their marriage, Victor was born, and two years after that, Walter. As with the Tanagawas, the Steins firstborn strained the couples energy, but the second-born provoked a crisis.
Quietly but inexorably a conflict arose between Seths capitulation to the clockwork of male careers and the enormous demands of his young babies and now-anxious wife. Seth felt Jessica had to handle the second shift. The problem was to prevent her from resenting it. To lighten Jessicas resentment, Seth dwelled on his sacrifices of leisure: it wasn’t so easy to work eleven-hour days. For Jessica, the question was how she could get Seth to want to share. To make a case for sharing the second shift, Jessica focused on the sacrifices she made of her career: it wasn’t that easy to give up moving ahead in a hard-won career. Their notions of “sacrifice” more and more began to clash. Neither Jessica nor Seth felt anything like gratitude toward the other.
I asked Seth whether he’d ever considered cutting back his eleven-hour day while Victor and Walter were young. “It’s not a question of what I want,” he explained patiently, “I cant. I couldn’t share my work with a group of incompetent lawyers just to get a night off. It would blow my reputation! When you come to a desirable area like this, the legal competition is fierce.” His conversation moved spontaneously from lawyers who cut back their hours to be with their families to a highly successful lawyer friend of his who one day abandoned law to play second trumpet in a third-rate orchestra, and another friend of his, a brilliant surgeon, who became a cosmetic surgeon at a Beverly Hills “fat farm” for rich socialites. To Seth, these men were spectacular dropouts from their reputable professional establishment, a reminder to Seth of how low a man could fall.
I had begun by asking how he felt about taking time off to be with children, but the topic had slid instead to lawyers who were incompetent and disreputable. Taking time off to be with his child at a play gym seemed to fit into the same mental category in Seths mind as working at a “fat farm.” Both discredited a mans career, and thus the man himself. Both acts cut into a mans good opinion of himself, his source of important compliments. Seth said he didn’t know any good lawyers who worked reduced hours in order to spend time with their young children: none.
He explained:
I’d like to get rid of the anxiety I have about being a lawyer. Jessica suggested a long time ago that we could both go into public law. Or we could travel and do the things we enjoy. If I could get rid of my anxiety about being a lawyer it would open up a lot of other opportunities. But I have to be doing what I am doing. I have to be that guy they turn to when the case is really tough. Its a neurotic drive.
Among his legal colleagues it was almost fashionable to be a “neurotic, hard-driving, Type-А personality” and personally a bit unhappy. Fellow lawyers quietly shared tips about how to resist their wives’ pleas that they spend more time at home. Seth told me that one doctor friend had advised, “Promise her you’ll take the kids to the zoo this Sunday.” Another had said, “I’ve put my wife off by promising her a four-day vacation this spring.” I could imagine these lawyers’ wives—Jessica now among them—calling out from the wings, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, “Your children will only be young once! Young once. Young once. . . .” Inside Seths legal fraternity, the career men sometimes joked about fantasies of taking time off for themselves; but they never talked about it seriously. They talked about it like they talked about cutting out coffee or finally mastering French. Curiously missing from Seths talk about his long hours was any talk about his children.
Given that his children were so young, why did Seth abdicate to the demands of his career with so little struggle? Why did he have so few serious doubts about it? Perhaps a clue could be found in his boyhood in a highly achievement-oriented Jewish working — class family and neighborhood of New York in the 1950s. He described his sisters as “housewives who weren’t brought up to have careers.” He described his mother as a housewife and his father as a zealous Russian Jew who threw himself into one cause after another. As he explained, “There was a long period when he would have dinner and then go to a meeting every night. He was the chairman of this and that-—Russian war relief, food, clothes to the Russians. Later he was a super-duper Zionist. He was always out there every night.”
Even if Seth’s childhood had readied him to be an active father (which it had not), even if his legal colleagues had encouraged him (which they did not), in the end it may have been the very unhappiness of his marriage that kept him out of his children’s lives. In the meantime, time with them was time-not-doing-law.
In a more internal sense, Seth was frankly addicted to his work. Like a drug addict too hooked really to enjoy a drug, Seth had lost a taste for his work but could see no alternative to working. And since his addiction compensated for something missing inside, it was also highly rewarding. Seth wanted to see his addiction as a sacrifice to his family. One day when he was feeling especially unappreciated, he burst out to Jessica: “I’m not sailing a yacht. Гш not on the tennis court. Fm not rafting down the Colorado River. Fm not traveling around the world. Fm working my goddamn ass off.” But Jessica listened coolly.