There was a moment, I believe, when Nancy seemed to decide to give up on this one. She decided to try not to resent Evan. Whether or not other women face a moment just like this, at the very least they face the need to deal with all the feelings that naturally arise from a clash between a treasured ideal and an incompatible reality. In the age of a stalled revolution, it is a problem a great many women face.
Emotionally, Nancy’s compromise from time to time slipped; she would forget and grow resentful again. Her new resolve needed maintenance. Only half aware that she was doing so, Nancy went to extraordinary lengths to maintain it. She could tell me now, a year or so after her “decision,” in a matter-of-fact and noncritical way: “Evan likes to come home to a hot meal. He doesn’t like to clear the table. He doesn’t like to do the dishes. He likes to go watch TV. He likes to play with his son when he feels like it and not feel like he should be with him more.” She seemed resigned.
Everything was “fine.” But it had taken an extraordinary amount of complex “emotion work”—the work of trying to feel the “right” feeling, the feeling she wanted to feel—to make and keep everything “fine.” Across the nation at this particular time in history, this emotion work is often all that stands between the stalled revolution on the one hand, and broken marriages on the other.
It would have been easier for Nancy Holt to do what some other women did: indignantly cling to her goal of sharing the second shift. Or she could have cynically renounced all forms of feminism as misguided, could have cleared away any ideological supports to her indignation, so as to smooth her troubled bond with Evan. Or, like her mother, she could have sunk into quiet depression, disguised perhaps by overbusyness, drinking, overeating. She did none of these things. Instead, she did something more complicated. She became benignly accommodating.
How did Nancy manage to accommodate graciously? How did she really live with it? In the most general terms, she had to bring herself to believe the myth that the upstairs-downstairs division of housework was fair, and that it had resolved her struggle with Evan. She had to decide to accept an arrangement which in her heart of hearts she had felt was unfair. At the same time, she did not relinquish her deep beliefs about fairness.
Instead, she did something more complicated. Intuitively, Nancy seemed to avoid all the mental associations that reminded her of this sore point: the connections between Evans care of the dog and her care of their child and house, between her share of family work and equality in their marriage, and between equality and love. In short, Nancy refused to consciously recognize the entire chain of associations that made her feel that something was wrong. The maintenance program she designed to avoid thinking about these things and to avoid the connections between them was, in one way, a matter of denial. But in another way, it was a matter of intuitive genius.
First, it involved dissociating the inequity in the second shift from the inequity in their marriage, and in marriages in general. Nancy continued to care about sharing the work at home, about having an “equal marriage” and about other people having them too. For reasons that went back to her depressed “doormat” mother, and to her consequent determination to forge an independent identity as an educated, middle-class woman for whom career opportunities had opened up in the early 1980s, Nancy cared about these things. Egalitarianism as an ideology made sense of her biography, her circumstances, and the way she had forged the two. How could she not care? But to ensure that her concern for equality did not make her resentful in her marriage to a man remarkably resistant to change, she “rezoned” this anger — inducing territory. She made that territory much smaller: only if Evan did not take care of the dog would she be indignant. Now she wouldn’t need to be upset about the double day in general She could still be a feminist, still believe in fifty-fifty with housework, and still believe that working toward equality was an expression of respect and respect the basis of love. But this chain of associations was now anchored more safely to a more minor matter: how lovingly Evan groomed, fed, and walked the dog.
For Evan, also, the dog came to symbolize the entire second shift: it became a fetish. Other men, I found, had second-shift fetishes too. When I asked one man what he did to share the work of the home, he answered, “I make all the pies we eat.” He didn’t have to share much responsibility for the home; “pies” did it for him. Another man grilled fish. Another baked bread. In their pies, their fish, and their bread, such men converted a single act into a substitute for a multitude of chores in the second shift, a token. Evan took care of the dog.
Another way in which Nancy encapsulated her anger was to think about her work in a different way. Feeling unable to cope at home, she had with some difficulty finally arranged a half-time schedule with her boss at work. This eased her load, but it did not resolve the more elusive moral problem: within their marriage, her work and her time “mattered less” than Evan’s. What Evan did with his time corresponded to what he wanted her to depend on him for, to appreciate him for; what she did with her time did not. To deal with this, she devised the idea of dividing all of her own work in the new schedule into “shifts.” As she explained: “I’ve been resentful, yes. I was feeling mistreated, and I became a bitch to live with. Now that IVe gone part-time, I figure that when Гт at the office from eight to one, and when I come home and take care of Joey and make dinner at five—-all that time from eight to six is my shift. So I don’t mind making dinner every night since it’s on my shift. Before, I had to make dinner on time I considered to be after my shift and I resented always having to do it.”
Another plank in Nancys maintenance program was to suppress any comparison between her hours of leisure and Evans. In this effort she had Evans cooperation, for they both clung hard to the notion that they enjoyed an equal marriage. What they did was to deny any connection between this equal marriage and equal access to leisure. They agreed it couldn’t be meaningfully claimed that Evan had more leisure than Nancy or that his fatigue mattered more, or that he enjoyed more discretion over his time, or that he lived his life more as he preferred. Such comparisons could suggest that they were both treating Evan as if he were worth more than Nancy, and for Nancy, from that point on, it would be a quick fall down a slippery slope to the idea that Evan did not love and honor her as much as she honored and loved him.
For Nancy, the leisure gap between Evan and herself had never seemed to her a simple, practical matter of her greater fatigue. Had it been just that, she would have felt tired but not indignant. Had it been only that, working part time for a while would have been a wonderful solution, as many other women have said, ‘the best of both worlds.” What troubled Nancy was the matter of her worth. As she told me one day: “It’s not that I mind taking care of Joey. I love doing that. I don’t even mind cooking or doing laundry. It’s that I feel sometimes that Evan thinks his work, his time, is worth more than mine. He’ll wait for me to get the phone. It’s like his time is more sacred.”
As Nancy explained: “Evan and I look for different signs of love. Evan feels loved when we make love. Sexual expression is very important to him. I feel loved when he makes dinner for me or cleans up. He knows I like that, and he does it sometimes.” For
Nancy, feeling loved was connected to feeling her husband was being considerate of her needs, and honoring her ideal of sharing and equity. To Evan, “fairness” and respect seemed impersonal moral concepts, abstractions rudely imposed on love. He thought he expressed his respect for Nancy by listening carefully to her opinions on the elderly, on welfare, on all sorts of topics, and by consulting her on major purchases. But who did the dishes had to do with a persons role in the family, not with fairness and certainly not with love. In my interviews, a surprising number of women spoke of their fathers helping their mothers “out of love” or consideration. As one woman said, “My dad helped around a lot. He really loved my mom.” But in describing their fathers, not one man I interviewed made this link between help at hom‘e and love.