E ighty percent of the men in my study of two-job couples had one thing in common. Like Evan Holt, Peter Tanagawa, Seth Stein, and Ray Judson, they didn’t share housework and child care. This introduced extra work for their wives and often tension in their marriages. The two men I describe in this chapter […]

There are certain ways during an interview that a husband and wife show they care about each other. They will laugh or uncon­sciously sigh and gesture together. (This evening Barbara and John had spontaneously laughed together at Johns microwaving Daisy’s meat bones.) When I interview one, he or she will spontaneously talk at length about […]

C onsuela, the baby-sitter, finally opens the door a crack, looks me over, and lets me in. She leads me up to the second floor of the Livingstons’ friendly, weather-worn Victorian home to a family room with overstaffed chairs, family photos, and an excitable parrot in a large cage, all of which seem to face […]

Carol would have preferred for Greg to go light on the “pliers jokes,” the C£you-hit-me” jokes, the fatherhood of toughening. She would have preferred that Greg give Daryl something more than popcorn for dinner. In short, Carol wanted Greg to act more like a primary parent. But she didn’t press him to change his ways. […]

The main strategy that either Carol or Greg pursued was Carols quitting her full-time job, and this had important emotional con­sequences for her. As Carol explained: “After Daryl was born, I stayed home for six months, and I discovered how much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in money. Being out of work, I felt […]

Compared to Carol, Greg did less with the children and more with the house. He was the handyman. He looked at the mantelpiece with a carpenter’s eye; he thought about repairs on the septic tank in the back yard of the house in Little Creek. Carol was the par­ent who noticed a developing hole in […]

A T 7:45 one Sunday morning I slowly drive my car up a newly paved street lined with young trees and clusters of two-story homes that form a curving line up a hill overlooking the San Fran­cisco Bay. It has the feel of a new housing development; along each street the shrubs are sculpted with […]

As I interviewed Anita, she was standing at the kitchen table, chopping carrots, potatoes, turnips, and meat to make a stew large enough to last several meals. She interrupted herself from time to time to tend Eric or take a quick pull on her cigarette. What she seemed to want to talk about in our […]

earned $30,000 working the early morning shift as a fork­lift driver, loading and unloading bags of cement in Crockett, California—a two-hour barge trip across the bay from San Fran­cisco. At home in his study, he relaxed in a large chair, his guitar hanging on the wall behind him. As with other men and women I […]

“I used to think of us as a couple of really bright, attractive, well — liked people,” Seth said softly, at the end of my interview with him, “but the last three years have been tense. When Гт doing an eleven-hour day, Гт sure Гт no fun. When Jessica is bummed out, shes awful to […]