As I interviewed Anita, she was standing at the kitchen table, chopping carrots, potatoes, turnips, and meat to make a stew large enough to last several meals. She interrupted herself from time to time to tend Eric or take a quick pull on her cigarette. What she seemed to want to talk about in our interview was her volatile marriage to Ray and a recently diagnosed stomach ulcer. (She had not told Ray about the ulcer for fear that he would force her to quit her job.)
Anitas childhood had been as difficult as Rays, and as important to her later notion of womanhood. Her father, a North Carolina farmer, had been crippled by polio in 1950 at the age of twenty-two, two years after he married her mother, and four years before the Salk vaccine was broadly available. After bearing him three daughters, Anitas mother became pregnant with a fourth child by a man who helped around the farm—a fact she revealed in great anguish to Anita only years later. When Anitas father discovered the truth about this fourth pregnancy, he became violently upset, and ordered Anitas mother to leave with the children. As Anita recalled: “My father wasn’t moving out of that house. He said he was going to stay there and die. He felt like he was nothing. In the end he starved himself to death.”
Alone now with her four children, Anitas mother worked at two jobs as a domestic, one mornings, and one evenings. Seven years later, she remarried, to a construction worker with six children of his own, and she continued to work as a domestic. On the evening of Anitas own first marriage, she remembers her mother’s advice: “You re a woman now. You’ve got to think about yourself, your work. Always keep your own bank account. If you have a man around, you don’t know if hes going to jump up and leave you and you 11 be stuck with four or five kids.” That was Anitas cautionary tale. Anita felt her mothers life had hardened her toward men and even toward her children:
My mother had it so tough, with no man around, and really for me it was pretty bad. Every time I approached my mother I always felt she was ready to jump on me. She was really hard, very strict, and that’s affected how I am. I can handle the usual things—being housekeeper," cook, and mother—that’s fine.
But having a man around, having to share my feelings with him—it’s hard for me to adjust to that. Like with my husband right now. [8]
Five months later she returned to her husband, but could not stay with him long because, as she put it, “I couldn’t forgive him for being so irresponsible.” She sued for divorce, and only after a legal battle for custody of Ruby was resolved in her favor did she and her ex-husband really discuss what had gone wrong. As Anita described it to me, her husband had said, “I didn’t know it was my music that broke us up.” She had replied: “No, it really wasn’t. It was just that you were ambitious and I wasn’t there to help you out. I was just young and wanted you to be there all the time.” As she explained to me: “That was the thing—he wasn’t there when I needed him. He was probably the man, the father, I never knew. He was the first man I was ever together with, you know, who filled that emptiness.”
Four years after her divorce, Anita met Ray. She was deeply touched by the way he talked to her. He seemed to understand why it might be hard for her to trust a man. She said: “Ray told me that he thought I was very tough and strong, but that I had a sensitive spot. Sometimes I tell him, ‘I can do without you,’ but deep down inside there’s a feeling that has to break out. I do need him. Ray has helped me get to that feeling.”
In their own ways, Ray and Anita were trying to heal each other. Ray saw a long racial history behind these personal hurts. He said: “Since the time of slavery, black men have always had a hard time holding on to their women. It’s said, ‘The black man spills his seed and moves on.’ I don’t want that to happen to me! No way Г But it was difficult for Ray and Anita to act on their insights in daily life. Sometimes they drew back from each other in distrust. Sometimes when they quarreled Ray drank too much and fights got physical. Anita’s mother, now in her early fifties, lived right next door. She took Anita’s side in these quarrels and offered Anita and her children a shelter against male unreliability.
Her mother’s life and her own inspired in Anita certain contradictory feelings about work. On one hand, she wanted to be economically self-sufficient: after all, your man can always leave. She had also grown up within a long tradition of wage-earning women; her mother, both grandmothers, most of her aunts, and all her female cousins worked. To be a woman was to work. That was the tradition, maybe not for white middle-class women, but certainly for her and everyone she knew. But at the same time her pragmatism sometimes obscured a wistful desire to be taken care of by a man, by Ray.
As she talked about it, her wish to be a housewife seemed half serious and half not. In part, “staying home” was a sign of trusting Ray. In part it was a vacation from the strain of working two shifts. She also associated staying home with being middle class. If she was going to stay home, she said, she wanted her home to have a certain middle-class “look.” She wanted “a snazzy kitchen, with wall-to-wall appliances.” Anita didn’t want to be under her husband’s thumb like Carmen Delacorte wanted to be; she wanted time off, a long vacation, and a crack at the good life. If that meant depending on Ray, and if depending on Ray meant subordinating herself to him, well, that might be the cost of getting what you want. The question was how much she dared want it. On tiring days she did, on not-so-tiring "days she didn’t. Meanwhile, Anita talked about staying home the way Seth Stein talked about cutting back his hours at the law office. It was a fantasy.
In the meantime, the official truth was that Anita wanted a paid job, and her desire for a paid job led her to want and need Ray to share the second shift. When I asked Ray and Anita, in a joint interview, to describe how they divided the work at home, an old argument flared up. Anita complained that Ray didn’t help her. Ray quickly countered that if Anita would quit working from time to time, she wouldn’t need help; the key to the problem, he said, was that Anita didn’t know how not to work. He was offering Anita the freedom he denied himself—the freedom not to work. In return, he said Anita should offer him freedom from housework except for weekend gardening and doing repairs.
Ray didn’t exactly claim that his higher earnings excused him from the second shift. He argued that his work had a basically different meaning than hers. As he said: “I don’t mind her quitting and starting, quitting and starting. She can do that as long as she wants. I wouldn’t care if she never went back to work. But / would never consider doing that myself, because its my job that holds us together.”
As Ray saw it, he was working the way a man works: for the money. Whether he liked his job or hated it, he had to be committed to doing it. He wanted Anita to behave more like a woman. She didn’t have to be committed to work. She could trust him to do that. However much she actually worked, he wanted her to want to work less, and to like it less. He was offering her, he felt, the chance to be casual about her work. Why was she rejecting this chance?
Anita defended her right to like working and her right to get Ray’s help at home. She said she liked work. “I’d pay two hundred dollars a month for child care, just to keep busy.” She said she’d feel bored staying at home all day. She also explained:
I like to work because of the recognition it gives me. I want to make a good impression. That’s all. My desk is important to our department. My job is a one-person job. Nobody else knows anything about Customer Service. They’ve been laying people off, so I’ve had to do more, so my desk is even more important than it was. I feel good about my work. I’m working because I want to work. I don’t think Ray is taking that into consideration at all. I go out to work, and then come home and cook. But whether I work or not, Ray expects his meals on the table!
Ray was baffled. “I can’t understand why she feels they’d miss her so much.” He countered, “I consider my job very valuable. It’s not that hers isn’t valuable, because it is; but mine provides the basic income for our house. So why does she feel they’d miss her so much that she can’t take some time off?”
“You never worked in an office before!” Anita snapped. “If you found an interesting job that you really liked, then you’d dedicate yourself to that job.” Ray retorted, “I don’t see how a group of women working in an office could be any different from the men at my job. What does your job have that mine doesn’t?” Anita’s job had a middle-class veneer. Ray conceded that. But it was still “just a clerical job.” His job was more stressful, hers less so. His was outside, hers was inside. His was dirty, hers was clean. He dressed down for work, she dressed up. She read and typed and sat at a desk, but he steered a forklift all day and lifted heavy bags of cement. His, he felt, was the harder job.
Turning to me, Anita explained:
Ray always says, “You don’t work hard. You sit behind that desk and punch out numbers and come home.” He sees the physical part of his job, sitting on the jitney, driving every day. He sees the dust all over him and he feels that’s the hardest job a person can do. But he doesn’t think about what I do. I work twenty-four hours a day! I come home and I work. And there’s the children on top of that! He doesn’t see that.
In response to this dispute, I compared their workdays. Ray described his typical day:
If I’m working days, I’ve got to be up about five-thirty. I get up and sometimes I iron some clothes to go to work and put on gospel music on the radio. I don’t eat breakfast. I’ll mess around the house and get in my truck and get to work by six — thirty or six-forty on a good day. Then we load the freight cars. We load them up and then take a break around nine o’clock. Then we work until eleven-thirty and we’re off until twelve — thirty. Me and my buddies usually go down to the park and either get half gassed or sit around and talk about each other. Then we come back to work and finish between one-thirty and two. I come home, grab me a beer out of the box, and start messing around with my guitar or lay down and sleep until Anita gets home with the children. Then I’ve got to get up. If the weather’s nice I work in my yard—I love flowers. Or maybe Г11 take a piece of meat out to the barbecue pit and do that. Usually after Гт through doing that, Anitas through cooking [the rest of the meal] and we’ll eat dinner together while were watching TV. Then I’ll go off upstairs and start playing my guitar again or try to mess with the keyboards, and by then it’s usually time for the kids to go to bed, so we’ll say our prayers together.
Anita described her typical day in less detail:
I get up about six-thirty and get the two kids up. I get my son dressed. My daughter dresses herself. They eat breakfast while I’m getting myself dressed. I leave about seven-fifteen. I drop off Eric, and then Ruby. I go to work and do my seven and a half hours and come back. I have to stop at the grocery store, come home, cook, and then feed them. I watch TV for a while, go to bed around nine-thirty or ten, and do the same thing the next day.
At work Ray also had more control over the pace of his cargo loading than Anita had over her flow of bills. Ray’s foreman did not ride his men. In fact, he allowed a spirit of play: Ray and his coworkers wore cowboy hats and joked and razzed the boss, softening his orders in these ways. But Anita’s supervisor often questioned her if she was away from her desk for more than twenty minutes at a time. In this way, their workdays reflected different supervisory styles that exist in most “male” and “female” jobs. A 1972 study by Robert Karasek, for example, showed that men and women report roughly equal workload demands in their jobs. However, women are likely to experience high demands for work performance while exercising less control than do men over the pace of that demand. A telephone operator and a waitress typically have less control over the pace of their work than a meter reader or a telephone repairman. For this reason, Karasek con — eluded that womens jobs are more stressful. In addition, women in service jobs like Anitas actually suffer more stress-related coronary disease than does the group more popularly supposed to be at risk—middle-class male executives.1
In addition, Ray had more leisure during his workday than Anita had during hers. He could, after all, spend an hour getting “half gassed” with the boys, while Anita could not. The sociologist). R Robinson has found that, in general, working men enjoy about half an hour more leisure during their workday than do working women.2
But to Ray, what mattered was the weight of his responsibility as a provider: he wouldn’t quit if he didn’t like his job. He worked “like a man,” “to provide.” One family, Ray reasoned, didn’t need two who work like that. Just one. He was that one.
Anita didn’t back down, and this dispute about the second shift dogged them like it had the Holts, the Tanagawas, the Steins. Nancy cut back her hours. The Tanagawas and Steins hired a maid. Ray brought ten-year-old stepdaughter, Ruby, in as a possible solution. Ruby, he said, could do the dishes and vacuum. She was old enough. It was good training. Besides, he said, he had helped his aunt with a lot of the housework when he was growing up.
But Ruby, already feeling low on the family totem pole, interpreted this assignment as a sign she wasn’t valued much in the family. She refused to do the dishes and vacuuming and proposed instead to weed the garden—maybe with Ray? The logic Ray had already applied to Anita when she asked him to share the housework, he now applied to Ruby: “I’m sure not going to wait hand and foot on somebody I’m working for already.” Ruby sought support in her grandmother next door, who prodded Ray further: Why couldn’t Rudy weed the flower beds instead of cleaning house? Pressure from the grandmother coupled with the fact that Anita herself was next door more and more these days made Ray feel that the kinswomen were ganging up on him.
As he became increasingly alienated from Anita and his children, Ray began to drink too much, and the drinking precipitated some bad fights. Anita and the children moved next door into her mother s house. Now Ray was forced to confront the one thing he had all along dreaded most: the possibility of Anitas leaving him. And indeed, Ray and Anita were to separate and reunite, separate and reunite, over the next few years. The last I heard, they were apart.
The official reasons Ray gave for not doing half of the second shift were that he provided most of the income, took his job more seriously, and worked “harder.” The first statement was true, the second hard to say, and the third was false. But his official reasons also seemed to coincide with a private agenda: to dampen Anitas desire to work, to increase her dependency on him, and thus to reduce the chance that she might leave him.
For her part, the drinking and the fights made Anita feel unsafe in her marriage. She fought Ray continually over the value of her work, a work she felt she needed for her security. Hers was not an exciting or glamorous career, but she clung to it tenaciously, because her mother had warned her, “You ve got to think about yourself, your work,” and at heart Anita was unsure of her union with Ray. If the marriage was to continue, she felt, her work would help Ray “respect her.” Earning money kept Ray “on his toes,” which in turn improved their marriage. If the marriage was not to continue, she would need her job even more than she needed it now.
In gender ideology, the Judsons were a mismatch. Ray was a transitional; Anita wavered between being a traditional and an egalitarian—knowing only that she didrit want the transitional womans responsibility for both spheres. This clash caused them trouble in the exchange of marital gifts. Anita offered Ray the “gift” of her wage for her family. Sensing she might be preparing to leave, Ray turned it down. For his part, Ray offered Anita this “choice”: she could work if she could also manage the second shift, or she could stay home. Disliking the double shift if she worked and sensing a danger in staying home, Anita challenged the “choice.” Their public myth—though not one they privately believed—was that the second shift was simply an issue of Anitas badgering Ray because she had “too much to do.” Certainly this was true, but it was not the whole truth. The issue of the second shift had an umbilical link to Anitas work; the more overloaded she was with the work at home, the more difficult it was for her to hold down her job.
Anitas job gave her the modest financial independence she would need if her marriage deteriorated. It was an insurance policy in case of divorce: she worked in self-defense. Early in their marriage, Anita had tried to trust Ray, tried to avoid divorce. It had been impossible to openly confess that she wanted to work “just in case.” In the end, Anita didn’t quit her job, she quit the marriage.
But the possibility of divorce had all along entered the life of their marriage. In this, Anitas dilemma may speak to an increasing number of women. As a black woman, Anita could not look back to a long tradition of marriage as a womans path to financial security, for most black men have long been barred from higherpaying jobs. For at least a century, the experience of white women in America was different because marriage to a man, almost any man, could lift them to a class higher than that in which their own job would place them. But more and more working — and middle- class white women now face the situation black women have faced for a long time: now they, too, cannot rely absolutely on marriage as a means of support for themselves or their children. Now the divorce rate confronts white women with the same uncertainties that many black women have faced all along.
Gradually over the last century, the economic footing which marriage has provided women and their children has become less secure. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and despite a shortterm dip in that rate, experts expect it to remain as high as it is now. In addition, after divorce, the income of most men rises while the income of most women drops sharply. A third of divorced women never remarry. Of the two-thirds who eventually do remarry, many divorce again. For most women, then, a shaky marriage raises the prospect of economic insecurity, and for many, outright poverty.
Because of sex segregation in the job market, women in fulltime jobs earn about seventy cents for every dollar a man earns. Thus, the old means of economic support is less secure, and a new, equal basis of self-support is not yet within reach. To support themselves and their children, most women cant look forward to the promise of work, and cant look with assurance “back” to marriage either.
More women now work not simply to “help their husbands” financially or to “use their talents,” but because they fear for their marriages. Anita lived a married life. But secretly she imagined becoming divorced. She resisted pressure from Ray to quit because she feared the prospect of losing her place at work, and feared that if and when she divorced she would fall into a financial trap. Yet the official reality with which they both wanted to live was that the marriage “was for keeps.” So she hid her pragmatic motive for working, claiming instead to work because “she loved it,” because she “needed to keep busy,” because “they needed her at the office.” As divorce has spread, more and more uncertain women are led to seem married but to ponder work and family in “unmarried ways.”
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