|
T |
he ten marriages Ive described cover the range of patterns I found in the fifty-plus marriages we studied—patterns in what two-job couples feel, think, and do about the work at home. The second shift becomes a forum for each persons ideas about gender and marriage and the emotional meanings behind them. When Evan Holt fixed dinner, Nancy Holt felt Evan was saying he loved her. When Robert Myerson cooked dinner, Ann half the time felt she was failing to protect his career from family demands. When Frank Delacorte made the pesto sauce for the pasta, it meant Carmen ‘couldn’t.”’ When Peter Tanagawa roasted the chicken, it meant he was “helping Nina.” When Ray Judson barbecued the spare ribs, Anita imagined he did it because he liked to, not to help her out. When Seth and Jessica ate the meal the housekeeper cooked, Jessica figured it was her salary that paid the housekeeper, Seth’s salary that paid for the food. The personal meanings of the second shift differed greatly, but to most people the tasks of the second shift either meant “I am taken care of” or “I am taking care of someone.”
Some personal meanings leaned toward a traditional ideal of caring, and others toward an egalitarian ideal. Indeed, a split between these two ideals seemed to run not only between social classes, but between partners within marriages and between two contending voices inside the conscience of one individual. The working class tended toward the traditional ideal, and the middle class tended toward the egalitarian one. Men tended toward the traditional ideal, women toward the egalitarian one. And within Ann Myersons “flip-flop,” her desires to protect her husband s more valuable career was pressed on her by a more traditional ideal, while her moments of feeling this was “unfair” came from an egalitarian ideal. Most marriages were either torn by, or a settled compromise between, these two ideals. In this sense, the split between them runs implicitly through every marriage I came to know.
To be sure, I saw important differences in social class. And in the world at large there are far more couples who spend their Saturdays doing laundry, like the Delacortes or the Judsons, and fewer who spend them making out checks to the help like the Steins or the Myersons. The problems of the two-job family are tougher in the working class, but they are difficult in a different way in the upper-middle class as well. What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor day care, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partners job. What exacerbates it in the upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.
Regardless of the ideal to which a couple aspires, the strain of working shifts often affects men nearly as much as it affects women. It affects the women who work the extra month a year in obvious ways—through their fatigue, sickness, and emotional exhaustion. But one important finding of this study is that the strain clearly extends to men as well. If men share the second shift it affects them directly. If they don’t share, it affects them through their wives. Michael Sherman shared the emotional responsibility and time it took to do the work at home. He had to redefine himself, to reduce his career ambitions, confront the high hopes of his family, and detach himself from the competition of his colleagues. Evan Holt and Seth Stein made no such adjustments, but they paid an enormous price nonetheless—Evan Holt through the resentments so woven into his sexual life and bond with his son Joey, Seth through the disappearance of his wife and children into lives of their own.