Between 8:05 a. m. and 6:05 p. m., both Nancy and Evan are away from home, working a “first shift” at full-time jobs. The rest of the time they deal with the varied tasks of the second shift: shopping, cooking, paying bills; taking care of the car, the garden, and yard; keeping harmony with Evans mother, who drops over quite a bit, “concerned” about Joey, with neighbors, their voluble babysitter, and each other. And Nancy’s talk reflects a series of second — shift thoughts: “We’re out of barbecue sauce. . . . Joey needs a Halloween costume. . . . The car needs a wash. …” and so on. She reflects a certain “second-shift sensibility,” a continual attune — ment to the task of striking and restriking the right emotional balance between child, spouse, home, and outside job.
When I first met the Holts, Nancy was absorbing far more of the second shift than Evan. She said she was doing 80 percent of the housework and 90 percent of the child-care. Evan said she did 60 percent of the housework, 70 percent of the childcare. Joey said, “I vacuum the rug, and fold the dinner napkins,” finally concluding, “Mom and I do it all.” A neighbor agreed with Joey.
Clearly, between Nancy and Evan, there was a “leisure gap”: Evan had more than Nancy. I asked both of them, in separate interviews, to explain to me how they had dealt with housework and child-care since their marriage began.
One evening in the fifth year of their marriage, Nancy told me, when Joey was two months old and almost four years before I met the Holts, she first seriously raised the issue with Evan. “I told him: ‘Look, Evan, if s not working. I do the housework, I take the major care of Joey, and I work a full-time job. I get pissed. This is your house too. Joey іsyour child too. Its not all my job to care for them.’ When I cooled down I put to him, ‘Look, how about this: I’ll cook Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. You cook Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. And we’ll share or go out Sundays.’ ”
According to Nancy, Evan said he didn’t like “rigid schedules.” He said he didn’t necessarily agree with her standards of housekeeping, and didn’t like that standard “imposed” on him, especially if she was “stuffing off” tasks on him, which from time to time he felt she was. But he went along with the idea in principle. Nancy said the first week of the new plan went as follows. On Monday, she cooked. For Tuesday, Evan planned a meal that required shopping for a few ingredients, but on his way home he forgot to shop for them. He came home, saw nothing he could use in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, and suggested to Nancy that they go out for Chinese food. On Wednesday, Nancy cooked. On Thursday morning, Nancy reminded Evan, “Tonight it’s your turn.” That night Evan fixed hamburgers and french fries and Nancy was quick to praise him. On Friday, Nancy cooked. On Saturday, Evan forgot again.
As this pattern continued, Nancy’s reminders became sharper. The sharper they became, the more actively Evan forgot—perhaps anticipating even sharper reprimands if he resisted more directly. This cycle of passive refusal followed by disappointment and anger gradually tightened, and before long the struggle had spread to the task of doing the laundry. Nancy said it was only fair that Evan share the laundry. He agreed in principle, but, anxious that
Evan would not share, Nancy wanted a clear, explicit agreement. “You ought to wash and fold every other load,” she had told him. Evan experienced this “plan” as a yoke around his neck. On many weekdays, at this point, a huge pile of laundry sat like a disheveled guest on the living-room couch.
In her frustration, Nancy began to make subtle emotional jabs at Evan. “I don’t know what’s for dinner,” she would say with a sigh. Or “I cant cook now, I’ve got to deal with this pile of laundry.” She tensed at the slightest criticism about household disorder; if Evan wouldn’t do the housework, he had absolutely no right to criticize how she did it. She would burst out angrily at Evan. She recalled telling him: “After work my feet are just as tired as jyour feet. I’m just as wound up as you are. I come home. I cook dinner. I wash and I clean. Here we are, planning a second child, and I can’t cope with the one we have.” t
About two years after I first began visiting the Holts, I began to see their problem in a certain light: as a conflict between their two gender ideologies. Nancy wanted to be the sort of woman who was needed and appreciated both at home and at work—like Lacey, she told me, on the television show Cagney and Lacey, She wanted Evan to appreciate her for being a caring social worker, a committed wife, and a wonderful mother. But she cared just as much that she be able to appreciate Evan for what he contributed at home, not just for how he supported the family. She would feel proud to explain to women friends that she was married to one of these rare “new men.”
A gender ideology is often rooted in early experience and fueled by motives formed early on, and such motives can often be traced to some cautionary tale in early life. So it was for Nancy. Nancy described her mother:
My mom was wonderful, a real aristocrat, but she was also terribly depressed being a housewife. My dad treated her like a doormat. She didn’t have any self-confidence. And growing up, I can remember her being really depressed. I grew up bound and determined not to be like her and not to marry a man like my father. As long as Evan doesn’t do the housework, I feel it means he’s going to be like my father—coming home, putting his feet up, and hollering at my mom to serve him. That’s my biggest fear. I’ve had bad dreams about that.
Nancy thought that women friends her age, also in traditional marriages, had come to similarly bad ends. She described a high school friend: “Martha barely made it through City College. She had no interest in learning anything. She spent nine years trailing around behind her husband [a salesman]. It’s a miserable marriage. She hand washes all his shirts. The high point of her life was when she was eighteen and the two of us were running around Miami Beach in a Mustang convertible. She’s gained seventy pounds and she hates her life.” To Nancy, Martha was a younger version of her mother, depressed, lacking in self-esteem, a cautionary tale whose moral was “If you want to be happy, develop a career and get your husband to share at home.” Asking Evan to help again and again felt like “hard work” but it was essential to establishing her role as a career woman.
For his own reasons, Evan imagined things very differently. He loved Nancy and if Nancy loved being a social worker, he was happy and proud to support her in it. He knew that because she took her caseload so seriously, it was draining work. But at the same time, he did not see why, just because she chose this demanding career, he had to change his own life. Why should her personal decision to work outside the home require him to do more inside it? Nancy earned about two-thirds as much as Evan, and her salary was a big help, but as Nancy confided, “If push came to shove, we could do without it.” Nancy was a social worker because she loved it. Doing daily chores at home was thankless work, and certainly not something Evan needed her to appreciate about him. Equality in the second shift meant a loss in his standard of living, and despite all the high-flown talk, he felt he hadn’t really bargained for it. He was happy to help Nancy at home if she needed help; that was fine. That was only decent. But it was too sticky a matter “committing” himself to sharing.
Two other beliefs probably fueled his resistance as well. The first was his suspicion that if he shared the second shift with Nancy, she would “dominate him.” Nancy would ask him to do this, ask him to do that. It felt to Evan as if Nancy had won so many small victories that he had to draw the line somewhere. Nancy had a declarative personality; and as Nancy said, “Evans mother sat me down and told me once that I was too forceful, that Evan needed to take more authority.” Both Nancy and Evan agreed that Evans sense of career and self was in fact shakier than Nancy’s. He had been unemployed. She never had. He had had some bouts of drinking in the past. Drinking was foreign to her. Evan thought that sharing housework would upset a certain balance of power that felt culturally “right.” He held the purse strings and made the major decisions about large purchases (like their house) because he “knew more about finances” and because he’d chipped in more inheritance than she when they married. His job difficulties had lowered his self-respect, and now as a couple they had achieved some ineffable “balance”—tilted in his favor, she thought—which, if corrected to equalize the burden of chores, would result in his giving in “too much.” A certain driving anxiety behind Nancy’s strategy of actively renegotiating roles had made Evan see agreement as “giving in.” When he wasn’t feeling good about work, he dreaded the idea of being under his wife’s thumb at home.
Underneath these feelings, Evan perhaps also feared that Nancy was avoiding taking care of him. His own mother, a mild — mannered alcoholic, had by imperceptible steps phased herself out of a mother’s role, leaving him very much on his own. Perhaps a personal motive to prevent that happening in his marriage—a guess on my part, and unarticulated on his—underlay his strategy of passive resistance. And he wasn’t altogether wrong to fear this. Meanwhile, he felt he was “offering” Nancy the chance to stay home, or cut back her hours, and that she was refusing his “gift,” while Nancy felt that, given her feelings about work, this offer was hardly a gift.
In the sixth year of her marriage, when Nancy again intensified her pressure on Evan to commit himself to equal sharing, Evan recalled saying, “Nancy, why don’t you cut back to half time, that way you can fit everything in.” At first Nancy was baffled: “We’ve been married all this time, and you still don’t get it. Work is important to me. I worked hard to get my MSW. Why should I give it up?” Nancy also explained to Evan and later to me, “I think my degree and my job has been my way of reassuring myself that I won’t end up like my mother.” Yet she’d received little emotional support in getting her degree from either her parents or in-laws. (Her mother had avoided asking about her thesis, and her in-laws, though invited, did not attend her graduation, later claiming they’d never been invited.)
In addition, Nancy was more excited about seeing her elderly clients in tenderloin hotels than Evan was about selling couches to furniture salesmen with greased-back hair. Why shouldn’t Evan make as many compromises with his career ambitions and his leisure as she’d made with hers? She couldn’t see it Evan’s way, and Evan couldn’t see it hers.
In years of alternating struggle and compromise, Nancy had seen only fleeting mirages of cooperation, visions that appeared when she got sick or withdrew, and disappeared when she got better or came forward.
After seven years of loving marriage, Nancy and Evan had finally come to a terrible impasse. Their emotional standard of living had drastically declined: they began to snap at each other, to criticize, to carp. Each felt taken advantage of: Evan, because his offering of a good arrangement was deemed unacceptable, and Nancy, because Evan wouldn’t do what she deeply felt was “fair.”
This struggle made its way into their sexual life—first through Nancy directly, and then through Joey. Nancy had always disdained any form of feminine wiliness or manipulation. Her family saw her as “a flaming feminist” and that was how she saw herself.
As such, she felt above the underhanded ways traditional women used to get around men. She mused, “When I was a teenager, I vowed I would never use sex to get my way with a man. It is not self-respecting; if s demeaning. But when Evan refused to carry his load at home, I did, I used sex. I said, ‘Look, Evan, I would not be this exhausted and asexual every night if I didn’t have so much to face every morning.’” She felt reduced to an old “strategy,” and her modern ideas made her ashamed of it. At the same time, she’d run out of other, modern ways.
The idea of a separation arose, and they became frightened. Nancy looked at the deteriorating marriages and fresh divorces of couples with young children around them. One unhappy husband they knew had become so uninvolved in family life (they didn’t know whether his unhappiness made him uninvolved, or whether his lack of involvement had caused his wife to be unhappy) that his wife left him. In another case, Nancy felt the wife had “nagged” her husband so much that he abandoned her for another woman. In both cases, the couple was less happy after the divorce than before, and both wives took the children and struggled desperately to survive financially. Nancy took stock. She asked herself, “Why wreck a marriage over a dirty frying pan?” Is it really worth it?