When I began this research, I naively imagined that a persons gender ideology would cohere as a cognitive and emotional “piece.” I imagined a mans gender ideology would “determine” how he wanted to divide the second shift. Couples with more egalitarian ideas about men and women would share more, those with traditional ideas, less. But I discovered that the set of ideas a person has about gender are often fractured and incoherent. Peter Tanagawa supported his wife’s career “a hundred percent,” but grew red in the face at the idea that she would mow the lawn, or that his daughters, when teenagers, would drive a car to school. Many men like Evan Holt ideologically supported the idea of their wives working. They pointed out that their wives wanted to work. It made their wives more interesting, and it gave the couple more in common. But when it came to a mans part in the work at home, the underlying principle changed. For Robert Myerson the principle seemed to be that a man should share the work at home “if his wife asks him.” Peter Tanagawa seemed to say a man should share the work at home if hes as good at it or as interested in it as his wife.1
More important than the surface fractures in gender ideology, though, were the contradictions between what a person said they believed about men and marital roles, and what they seemed to feel about these. Some people were egalitarian “on top” and traditional “underneath” like Seth Stein or traditional on top and egalitarian underneath like Frank Delacorte.
Sometimes the deep feelings that evolved in response to early cautionary tales reinforced the surface of a persons gender ideology. For example. Carmen Delacorte’s dread—that she would face the struggles her mother had as a single mother—strongly reinforced her idea that women should find male protection through submission to them. On the other hand, the deep feelings that evolved in response to the early experiences of Nancy Holt reinforced a totally opposite gender ideology. Nancy’s fear of becoming a submissive housewife, a “doormat,” like her mother, infused emotional steam into her belief that Evan ought to share fifty-fifty in the work at home. Ray Judson’s early experience of losing his mother and his current fear of losing his wife reinforced his idea that a man needs to keep his woman at home, needs to make her depend on him and to dominate her. It fed and strengthened his gender ideology.
For other people, covert feelings seemed to subvert the surface of their gender ideology. For example, Ann Myerson described herself growing up as a tomboy who believed girls were “just as good as boys.” A hard-driving career woman who didn’t begin to consciously want children until she was thirty-two, Ann felt similar to her husband Robert in her needs and desires. Yet for some reason, her role at the office didn’t feel real while her role at home did. Rather than reinforcing her surface gender ideology, this underlying feeling undermined it. It made her ambivalent. It prompted her “flip-flop” syndrome.
Similarly, John Livingston’s early experience led him to feelings that contradicted his “surface” ideology. On the surface, John was all for sharing the provider and homemaker role and always had been. But when his daughter, Cary, was born, he felt that Barbara withdrew her attention from him, leaving him feeling abandoned, dependent, and angry. When Barbara returned to her job, he felt even more angry and hurt, and so resented her working. But, because he “believed in women working,” these feelings seemed inappropriate. He felt guilty to have them. In this way his ideology established a certain feeling rule—you shall feel good about your wife working. Yet this feeling rule clashed with his actual feeling—anger that Barbara was so unavailable. Since it was Johns habit to withdraw when he was angry, he withdrew. This withdrawal and Barbaras upset in response to it spiraled into the conflict which, in their “overbusyness,” they then tried to avoid.
At the heart of the matter was the fact that Johns surface ideology, and the feeling rules that derived from it, conflicted with his feelings underneath. Normally, the feelings “underneath,” as I have called them, are less articulated, and less conscious than the surface ideology. John was highly unusual in his ability to see and talk about them.
In each instance, whats involved is a persons gender ideology (a set of beliefs about men and women and marital roles) and the emotional meanings it evokes, which in turn reinforce or undermine that ideology. Also involved is the persons secondary reaction to whats going on, a reaction that derives from his feeling rules (for example, John’s guilt at feeling angry). And there is the style of coping with emotional conflict (John withdrew). The ideology and attendant emotions—whether conscious or not—do not combine to yield what John did about the second shift. They combine to determine how he felt about what he did. The first year of Cary’s life, John withdrew emotionally from Barbara into his work and established himself as second to Barbara in the care of Cary, and as champion of the idea that “someone” needed to care for her more. Insofar as work permitted, he did not resist sharing the second shift; he did it, but he resisted forgiving Barbara for her emotional withdrawal from him. All the minute ways in which John sought to interrelate what he thought (his gender ideology), what he felt (upset by Barbara’s withdrawal), and what he did (to work long hours and to cut back on time for the marriage)—this complex of thought, feeling, and action together— constitute his “gender strategy.” And the interplay of his gender strategy and that of his wife determined how they actually divided the second shift.
All told, what John thought (his gender ideology) was only one small part of the explanation of why he divided the work at home as he did. His gender ideology gave coherence and reason to his biographically derived feelings and his social opportunities, even as it also cloaked these.
The feelings that underlie Johns egalitarian ideology grew from the emotional deprivations of growing up with a withdrawn father and a workaholic mother, and what this background led him to hope to receive from his wife now. For men like Peter Tanagawa, the feelings that underlie ideology resulted more from his awareness of the role of men in his social world. But whatever their derivation, these feelings strengthened or subverted the surface ideology of such men and affected their will to share the work at home.
Everyone I interviewed, in one way or another, developed a gender strategy. In some, the surface of a gender ideology strongly conflicted with other underlying feelings, in others they didn’t conflict at all. In some, the feeling rule was aWe should want to share the second shift,” “We shouldn’t be angry about having to share, or angry at the deprivations it might entail” (for example, the Shermans). In others, the" feeling rule was to feel ashamed to “have to” share it (for example, the Delacortes).
But what a man or woman wanted to do usually did not completely explain what they did. Nancy Holt and Frank Delacorte are a case in point. Nancy did nearly all the second shift even though she did not want to believe she should do the work herself. Frank Delacorte nearly shared it even though he thought he shouldn’t. This is because, among other things, Nancy had to cope with Evan’s gender strategy, and Frank had to cope with Carmen’s.