In one key way the Holts were typical of the vast majority of two- job couples: their family life had become the shock absorber for a stalled revolution whose origin lay far outside it—in economic and cultural trends that bear very differently on men and women. Nancy was reading books, newspaper articles, and watching TV programs on the changing role of women. Evan wasn’t. Nancy felt benefited by these changes; Evan didn’t. In her ideals and in reality, Nancy was more different from her mother than Evan was from his father, for the culture and economy were in general pressing change faster upon women like her than upon men like Evan. Nancy had gone to college; her mother hadn’t. Nancy had a professional job; her mother never had. Nancy had the idea that she should be equal with her husband; her mother hadn’t been much exposed to that idea in her day. Nancy felt she should share the job of earning money, and that Evan should share the work at home; her mother hadn’t imagined that was possible. Evan went to college, his father (and the other boys in his family, though not the girls) had gone too. Work was important to Evan’s identity as a man as it had been for his father before him. Indeed, Evan felt the same way about family roles as his father had felt in his day. The new job opportunities and the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s had transformed Nancy but left Evan pretty much the same. And the friction created by this difference between them moved to the issue of second shift as metal to a magnet. By the end, Evan did less housework and child-care than most men married to working women—but not much less. Evan and Nancy were also typical of nearly 40 percent of the marriages I studied in their clash of gender ideologies and their corresponding difference in notion about what constituted a “sacrifice” and what did not. By far the most common form of mismatch was like that between Nancy, an egalitarian, and Evan, a transitional.
But for most couples, the tensions between strategies did not move so quickly and powerfully to issues of housework and childcare. Nancy pushed harder than most women to get her husband to share the work at home, and she also lost more overwhelmingly than the few other women who fought that hard. Evan pursued his strategy of passive resistance with more quiet tenacity than most men, and he allowed himself to become far more marginal to his sons life than most other fathers. The myth of the Holts’ “equal” arrangement seemed slightly more odd than other family myths that encapsulated equally powerful conflicts.
Beyond their upstairs-downstairs myth, the Holts tell us a great deal about the subtle ways a couple can encapsulate the tension caused by a struggle over the second shift without resolving the problem or divorcing. Like Nancy Holt, many women struggle to avoid, suppress, obscure, or mystify a frightening conflict over the second shift. They do not struggle like this because they started off wanting to, or because such struggle is inevitable or because women inevitably lose, but because they are forced to choose between equality and marriage. And they choose marriage. When asked about “ideal” relations between men and women in general, about what they want for their daughters, about what “ideally” they’d like in their own marriage, most working mothers “wished” their men would share the work at home.
But many “wish” it instead of “want” it. Other goals—like keeping peace at home—come first. Nancy Holt did some extraordinary behind-the-scenes emotion work to prevent her ideals from clashing with her marriage. In the end, she had confined and miniaturized her ideas of equality successfully enough to do two things she badly wanted to do: feel like a feminist, and live at peace with a man who was not. Her program had “worked.” Evan won on the reality of the situation, because Nancy did the second shift. Nancy won on the cover story; they would talk about it as if they shared.
Nancy wore the upstairs-downstairs myth as an ideological cloak to protect her from the contradictions in her marriage and from the cultural and economic forces that press upon it. Nancy and Evan Holt were caught on opposite sides of the gender revolution occurring all around them. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s masses of women entered the public world of work—but went only so far up the occupational ladder. They tried for “equal” marriages, but got only so far in achieving it. They married men who liked them to work at the office but who wouldn’t share the extra month a year at home. When confusion about the identity of the working woman created a cultural vacuum in the 1970s and 1980s, the image of the supermom quietly glided in. She made the “stall” seem normal and happy. But beneath the happy image of the woman with the flying hair are modern marriages like the Holts’, reflecting intricate webs of tension, and the huge, hidden emotional cost to women, men, and children of having to “manage” inequality. Yet on the surface, all we might see would be Nancy Holt bounding confidently out the door at 8:30 a. m., briefcase in one hand, Joey in the other. All we might hear would be Nancy’s and Evan’s talk about their marriage as happy, normal, even “equal”—because equality was so important to Nancy.
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