The trends I have described constitute the stall in the revolution and stack the cards in favor of husbands not sharing the second shift with their working wives. Once all these forces are set in mo­tion, one final pattern keeps men doing less: womens lack of “backstage support” for their paid jobs. It sets up […]

Women’s move into the economy, as a new urban peasantry, is the basic social revolution of our time. On the whole, it has increased the power of women. But at the same time, other realities lower women’s power. If women’s work outside the home increases their need for male help inside it, two facts—that women […]

But many women of every social class and in every kind of job are faced with a common problem: how shall I preserve the domestic culture of my mother and grandmother in the age of the nine-to — five or eight-to-six job? In some ways, the experience of Chicana women condenses the experience of all […]

If working wives are the modern-day urbanizing peasant, then there are important differences between some “peasants” and oth­ers. In addition to the split between housewives and working women, this social revolution also widens a second split among women—between the women who do jobs that pay enough to pay a baby-sitter and the women who baby-sit […]

Not only are many of the products and services of the home avail­able and cheap elsewhere, the status of the full-time housewife has been eroded. As the role of housewife has lost its allure, the wives who “just” stay home have developed the defensiveness of the downwardly mobile. Facing the prospect of becoming a house­wife […]

In a time of stalled revolution—when women have gone to work, but the workplace, the culture, and most of all, the men, have not adjusted themselves to this new reality—children can be the vic­tims. Most working mothers are already doing all they can, doing that extra month a year. It is men who can do […]

Involved fathers are aware that their children depend on them. Every afternoon Art Winfield knew Adam was waiting for him at daycare. Michael Sherman knew that around 6 a. m. one of his twins would call out “Daddy.” John Livingston knew that Cary relied on him to get around her mothers discipline. Such men were […]

Men who are greatly involved with their children react against two cultural ideas: one idea removes the actual care of children from the definition of manhood and one curtails the notion of how much care a child needs. As to the first idea, involved fathers’ biggest struggle was against the doubts they felt about not […]

Involved fathers had a much fuller, more elaborate notion of what a father was than uninvolved fathers did. Involved fathers talked about fathering much as mothers talked about mothering. Unin­volved fathers held to a far more restricted mission—to discipline the child or to teach him about sports. For example, when asked what he thought was […]

Money mattered in the marriages I studied, but it was not the powerful “invisible hand” behind men who shared.3 For one thing, this is clear from the family portraits. Michael Sherman earned much more than Adrienne but his job didn’t matter more, and he shared the work at home. For years Ann Myerson earned more […]