Yet another set of strategies involved cutting back on effort or on basic ideas about “what needs to be done” for the welfare of the house, the child, the marriage, or oneself. Cutting back on housework was clear, intentional, and almost across the board for those without maids. Traditional working mothers often began the interview […]

After trying hard to change Evan, Nancy Holt reluctantly cut back her hours at work. As she’d all along planned to do after her second child, Carol Alston willingly cut back her hours at work. After a hopeless succession of quarrelsome baby-sitters, Ann My — erson quit her job. To some women, cutting back felt […]

In contrast to strategies designed to change roles, supermoming was a common working mother’s strategy for coping with the work at home without imposing on their husbands. About a third of mothers pursued this strategy, often in combination with other strategies. Supermoms put in long hours at the office but kept their children up very […]

Women also tried to change marital roles indirecdy. This was a pri­mary strategy for traditional working mothers who desperately needed help at home but who couldn’t ask for a change in respon­sibilities directly or actively because they wanted the role—and whatever power came with it—themselves. Facing such a dilemma, Carmen Delacorte “played helpless” at cooking […]

How does the content of what a person thinks and feels about the second shift fit with what they do about it—i. e., with their be­havioral strategy? Most egalitarian women—those with strong feelings about sharing—did one of two things. They married men who planned to share at home or they actively tried to change their […]

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 […]

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 […]

Both Michael Sherman and Art Winfield share the work at home. They didn’t tell jokes like Greg Alstons “pliers” jokes, or wait to the end of a wail of a nine-month-old who’s tumbled. They have their own styles of parenting, and it is primary parenting. Michael Sherman and Art Winfield differ in how they arrived […]

Art Winfield, a thirty-five-year-old laboratory assistant with a high school education, had only the barest acquaintance with the women’s movement and, unlike Adrienne Sherman, his wife had never pressed him to do more at home. But Art has a natural in­terest in children and a passion for being with his five-year-old adopted son, Adam. Art […]

As the only son of an immigrant who began work at the age of twelve and rose to the top of the scrap-metal business in New Jer­sey, Michael Sherman became the repository of his father’s ambi­tions. The reading of Michael’s school report cards was a family event, while the cards his two older sisters brought […]