Carol would have preferred for Greg to go light on the “pliers jokes,” the C£you-hit-me” jokes, the fatherhood of toughening. She would have preferred that Greg give Daryl something more than popcorn for dinner. In short, Carol wanted Greg to act more like a primary parent. But she didn’t press him to change his ways. She was enormously grateful that he woke up with Daryl Saturday mornings, and worked the second shift as hard as he did.
Carol and Greg present a certain paradox. Both believed in sharing both housework and childcare. This is the first side of the paradox. On the other hand, in the psychological fabric of child care and home management, Carol was far more central. Each side of this paradox poses a question. First, why did they believe in sharing? After all, the Delacortes, the Tanagawas, and indeed 40 percent of the women and three-quarters of the men in this study did not believe in really sharing the responsibility and work of the second shift.
In Carol’s background was hidden an important experience that may have fueled her strong desire to be an independent career woman, and to adopt the ideology that, in the late 1980s in her upper-middle-class professional circle, went with it. Carol remembers her mother—a navy wife left alone for six months at a time to care for two small children—as an example of womanhood to avoid. As Carol realized: WI remember her dressed all day in her nightgown, sighing. My sister says our mother was suicidal. I don’t remember that. But she did try to leave us. My sister and I were into the normal mischief, wouldn’t go to bed. My mother said, ‘Well, I’m leaving.’ And she walked out the door. I can remember telling my sister, ‘Don’t worry. I know how to make soup.
Through her early twenties she had few thoughts of marriage or children, and Greg won her heart only by gallantly declining a big job offer in another city in order to be with her. (Many happily married women described some “career-sacrifice” gesture their husband made that convinced them that this was the right man for them.) “I was strong-minded,” she said, “and I wanted a man who would never let me down.” Part of “never letting her down” was probably connected to Greg’s continued involvement at home.
For his part, Greg wanted Carol to work and he wanted to share the second shift. Carol speculated that it was because Greg’s mother had worked full time from when Greg was five years old. “I thank Meg [Greg’s mother] for setting him an example of how independent a woman should’be.” After Greg was five, his father retired from the army, got a teaching credential, taught math and wood shop in middle school, and was home when Greg returned from school. His mother worked overtime as a secretary in order to make ends meet. His father shared the second shift and Greg may have identified with his father.
The other side of the paradox is that, despite their “modern” belief in sharing the work at home, Carol and Greg implemented this belief in a “traditional” way. When they could permit themselves to do so, some traditional men such as Peter Tanagawa actually patented their children in a more “motherly” way than Greg did. Again, why? Greg commented:
My dad never touched me much. He was probably afraid.
Plus, my dad is quiet, like I am. He doesn’t express himself. I
have reflected upon the fact that I don’t embrace my dad.
About six months ago, when he was here, I accidentally
embraced him. Fm glad I did. He commented on it. He said that I hadn’t hugged him for years. He used to wrestle with me a lot but that stopped after I started to beat him at fourteen. After that we didn’t really touch. I don’t know whether it was him or me, but it stopped.
Perhaps Greg’s awkward way of holding his daughter, and his aggressive joking with his son manifested his fear of getting close. Perhaps Greg’s jokes were a verbal stand-in for the old boxing matches. But time had brought some change.
Greg would plant many small kisses on Daryl’s cheek each night, and from time to time hug Daryl in the course of tussling with him. Greg was, he felt, more physically affectionate with Daryl than his father had been with him.
Greg was not as much a primary parent as were Michael Sherman or Art Winfield (described in Chapter 12). Nor was Carol as ardently committed to getting her husband to be a more primary parent as Adrienne Sherman was. Part of the reason seemed to be that Carol had discovered she enjoyed parenting. After all, she had completely put off thoughts of children until her thirties, and a few months after her son was born, she’d put him in the care of a babysitter for ten hours a day. (Even now she urged Greg’s mother to live near them in Little Creek to “raise the kids.”) Unlike some women, Carol had not been attached to the idea of being the main parent until her second child was born. Now parenting was more important to her, and now it loomed larger in Carol’s identity than it did in Greg’s perhaps because she found it a way to reparent herself.
The greater importance of parenthood for Carol may illustrate the theory Nancy Chodorow presents in her book The Reproduction of Mothering} Chodorow argues that women develop a greater desire to be a mother than men do to be fathers. This is because as children most boys and girls are both brought up by mothers. Socially speaking, this need not be; after a child is born, fathers can care for children as well as mothers, she argues. But as long as it is women who mother, boys and girls will develop different “gender personalities,” which alter their later motives and capacities. Both girls and boys first fuse with the mother. But when girls grow up, they seek to recapitulate this early fusion with the mother by becoming mothers themselves. When boys grow up, they try to recapitulate that early fusion by finding a woman “like mother.” The reason girls and boys recapitulate this early fusion in different ways is that girls are females, like their mothers, and can more readily identify with her than boys can. According to Chodorow, because mothers are the object of the child’s earliest attachment, boys and girls differ in another aspect of “gender personality.” Girls are more empathic, more able to know how others feel than boys, though they are less able than boys to maintain a clear boundary between themselves and others.
Chodorows theory deals with the familial origins of mens and womens motives for becoming parents. By her mid-thirties, motherhood was a more central identity to Carol than fatherhood was to Greg, and perhaps this is one reason why.
But in Chodorows theory,’ all women come out pretty much alike. Her theory doesn’t explain why some women like Adrienne Sherman felt no urge to be the primary parent, while Carmen Delacorte had always felt a strong urge, and Carol Alston only came to feel it in her middle thirties. Carol didn’t want her husband involved at home as ardently as Nancy Holt did, but she clearly didn’t want to “protect” her husband from the burden of parenthood like Ann Myerson, nor did she want him in the picture mainly to exert authority, as did Carmen Delacorte. Clearly women’s motives differ enormously, according to some additional principles.
In Chodorows theory, all men are pretty much alike too. So we don’t know why Evan Holt and Seth Stein are so disinterested in fatherhood while Art Winfield and Michael Sherman have immersed themselves so passionately in it. Clearly, other factors—the quality of a person’s early bonds with their mother and father, and broader cultural messages about manhood and womanhood— enter in. The concept of gender strategy adds to Chodorows theory an interpretation of the remarkable differences we find between some men and other men, and between some women and other women.
To understand why Carol and Greg Alstons approach to parenthood is different from that of other couples, we need to take account of other kinds of motives—Carols desire to be different from her own mother, unfused with her, joined instead with Greg. It is probably true that, for better or worse, Carols mother was a more important figure to her than her father. She criticized her mother. She didn’t like her. But she talked about her mother far more, and with greater feeling, than she talked about her father. So, in that respect Carol fits Chodorows theory. But because this fusion was problematic for Carol, she had invested a great deal of energy in her early adulthood avoiding motherhood. Now that she was trying it out, it was not so easy for Carol to become a mother-not-like-her-mother; it was frightening. Every bit of Greg’s support helped; and perhaps that was why she wanted Greg by her side at home. She found legitimacy for this wish in egalitarian ideology.
By happily sharing the job of earning money, by not caring much about material things, she freed Greg from worry about being the provider. By expressing gratitude for all he did around the home, she encouraged him to do more. Consciously or not, Carol pursued a strategy of bringing Greg to her side to support her in the task of being a mother-not-like-her-mom.
To understand Carol and Greg, we need something else missing from Chodorows theory: culture. Carol’s mother didn’t offer a good example of mothering, but even as a small child Carol had some idea about what “regular” mothers do; there was a culture of motherhood outside her home, and she grew up in that culture. For some periods of Greg’s boyhood, Greg’s father was a primary parent to him—and thus an exception to Chodorows theory— but a primary parent who could hug his son only in a boxer’s clench. This way of being a dad surely has much to do with the notion of manhood with which Greg’s father grew up. Both Carol and Greg grew up knowing about male and female cultures and attached a strategy of action to selected aspects of their cultures.
Carol also pursued her wish to bring Greg into the home more timidly than she might have, had greater societal conditions been better for women. Although the cultural shifts and work opportunities of the 1980s had led Carol and Greg to a life ideologically and financially removed from patriarchy, that older, entrenched system influenced them, as it had influenced many others, anyway. Because conditions were worse for women in general than for men in general, Carol felt more grateful to Greg than he did to her. The love ran both ways, but the gratitude ran more from Carol to Greg than from Greg to Carol. Although Carol had for years earned more money than Greg and had taken responsibility for all the most pressing aspects of the second shift, Greg did not spontaneously talk about being grateful to Carol for this.
Carol had catalogued a series of “miserable boyfriends” she’d met in college whose laundry she’d washed and whose weekend dinners she’d cooked. Compared to these other possible men, Greg was wonderful. Greg hadn’t washed any girlfriend’s laundry; for him the pickings weren’t so slim. Again, Carol explained: “My God, these single mothers whose husbands don’t see the kids or pay child support. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t. Being a single mother is the worst thing that can happen to you, next to cancer.” Greg would never leave; Carol was grateful for that. But Greg didn’t feel haunted by a dread of abandonment, by the sense “that could happen to me.” He couldn’t picture himself as a single father. The general supply of male commitment to share responsibility for children was far lower than the female demand for it. Through this fact in the wider society, patriarchy tipped the scales inside the Alston marriage; it increased Carol’s sense of debt to Greg. It evoked her extra thanks.
And her extra thanks inhibited her from making further demands on Greg, who was already doing comparatively so much. Carol had a “wish list” on which sharing primary parenting was probably fourth or fifth after the desire that Greg be healthy, faithful, mentally sound, and able to help provide. Greg had a wish list too, with many of the same wishes. But given the generally worse lot for women, Carols extra sense of gratitude and of debt inhibited her going as far in her wish list as Greg went in his. In this different rate of climb up each “wish list,” Carol and Greg were like nearly every couple I met. Greg Alston really was unusual, and given the scarcity of such men, Carol was “right” to be grateful. She had fewer options. Equal as they felt they were, the burden of the second shift fell mainly on Carols shoulders. And it was the larger, societal support of inequity between the sexes, a system outside of their stable, happy marriage, that indirectly maintained the “his” and “hers” of sharing.