At our first meeting at the moms’ group, Ann told the other women: “Robert easily does half the work at home, with one exception—I plan. I like the control. But he keeps doing errands as long as I hand him errands to do. He’s very unusual.”
Yet when I met Robert he described their arrangement differently and, I think, more accurately: “We’ve achieved a balance— three to two in Ann’s favor, just because I work away so much of the time. But when I’m home, I do more than half the cooking.” Even this description slightly misrepresented the extent to which Ann carried the second shift. Robert was a handsome man of medium height who walked briskly, and talked with gusto. When I met him (I was on the floor by the playhouse making “chicken paprika” again with Elizabeth), he thrust his hands in the pockets of his green trousers, rolled back on his heels with a proprietary air, and said, “How about some chocolate sauce on that chicken?” After the morning errands, and a moment of rest, he explained to me:
If you subtract my travel, I have slightly more leisure than Ann has, partly because I sleep less and partly because she does more at home. I travel 30 to 40 percent of the time. I’m on the road two or three days a week. When Гт home, I get up at four to work on my model trains for an hour. Then I exercise for an hour. I eat breakfast at six. At six-thirty, Nora wakes up, then Elizabeth. By seven-thirty our Swiss baby-sitter has arrived and were out the door. In the evening I try to come home with Ann at six-thirty, although sometimes I come home later. Nora goes to bed an hour later and Elizabeth at eight — thirty. Sometimes I wash the dishes, or do bills and go to bed between ten-thirty and eleven. Other times, I’m so tired I go to bed earlier.
Robert spent longer hours at work than Ann, and by mutual agreement his work mattered more to both of them. Ann worked but took more responsibility and did more at home. In this period of their lives, Ann and Robert were organizing their roles in a “transitional” way. Each contributed to the overall well-being of the family, but in different ways. Robert found more time for building model trains and exercise than Ann did, and read more. “Sometimes,” Ann said, “Robert gets into a good book, takes it into the bathroom, and emerges forty-five minutes later, unable to put it down.” Ann had a list of books she wanted, but had no time, to read. But she did not in the least begrudge Robert his good book—at least not on her good days.
Ann thought that one reason she took primary responsibility in the home was because it was she who naturally noticed such things as whether Elizabeth had on socks. (Ann said, bemused, “Robert wouldn’t notice.”) It was she who cared more about the house:
Even before children, I had a sense that our house should be orderly, meals should be prepared, our life should be less frantic. We hadn’t bought any furniture. Robert would be happy to sit on pillows in the living room or to have wonderful furniture I would buy, either way. He just won’t bother with it.
It was the same with meals: he’d be happy to eat tuna every night. I’m the one who wants real meals.
Though Ann and Robert had lived in this two-story ivy — covered house for two years, it looked like they’d moved in last week. Almost no pictures hung on the walls. The living room was bare of lamps, chairs, plants. They’d bought no furniture—the couch and two chairs were borrowed. “It bothers me but it doesn’t bother Robert,” Ann explained. Yet Ann was so preoccupied with the children and her job, she’d ordered such things as curtains but hadn’t seemed able to keep after the person from whom she ordered them. The house seemed to tell a story of Robert’s friendly detachment and Ann’s continual overload. But in talking about
her house, Ann was reminded of her mother-in-law, who had lived in the same house for fifty years. Having moved a great deal as a child, Ann wanted a “homey” house that she could live in a long time. She even referred to this nearly empty house as their “retirement home.” She guarded her sense of “a real home,” her idea of “real” meals, almost the way an ethnic group in danger of assimilating to the dominant white culture protects a language, a cuisine, and a set of customs in danger of disappearing. A mobile, urban life and demanding career system was fast beating that old — fashioned female culture into retreat. In the meantime, Ann and Robert very much intended to move into their house—to claim it, to hang a hat, to make a home—when Ann got time.
Their arrangement was a common one, and in American culture an honorable one, but it didn’t involve sharing the second shift. I began to wonder why Ann so genuinely felt she and her husband did share this shift. The picture of their domestic life didn’t seem unusual to me. The only thing unusual was that Ann thought Robert shared.
Ann’s belief that Robert shared was a minor myth, not on the order of Nancy and Evan Holt’s myth of the equitable “upstairs- downstairs” arrangement, but a myth all the same. I was to discover that the belief that their husbands shared 50 percent of the work at home was fairly common among successful upper — middle-class professional women in the late 1980s, women who carried most of the burden of the second shift. Ann believed her husband shared because she wanted to be part of the “vanguard,” of couples liberated from traditional roles. Curiously, at the same time, she felt it was “natural” that, as a woman, she exercise her need for control by managing the house, and that she suffer a greater conflict between work and family than her husband did.
Despite the fact that Robert had the time Ann herself lacked for hobbies—his model trains and his reading—Ann genuinely felt that Robert shared the second shift for another reason too: her deep gratitude for the many other ways Robert was more “advanced” than other men “out there.”
For one thing, when Robert was home and not tired, he participated wholeheartedly. One Saturday, I went along with the Myerson family as they shopped for a baby jogger, a bureau, and jogging shoes for Robert. I watched as they danced in their bare living room to “Rock Me Amadeus,” made espresso in the kitchen, played in the park, and had dinner with close friends who had young children. Throughout this round of activity, Robert chatted exuberantly to each child. As he drove their Jeep from errand to errand, he reached back a hand to pat the baby each time the car stopped at a red light. Throughout the day he hugged them, petted them, and engaged them in a warm, energetic way. When Ann said Robert did 50 percent, one thing she probably meant is that when he was there, he contributed at least half of the family spirit.
Of the two parents, Robert was also the more indulgent, perhaps because he was away so much. When he was waiting in line to pay for his shoes, Elizabeth dashed excitedly around a rack of skirts. At first he was amused, then for a long while slightly anxious as others in the checkout line began to notice a little girl ducking in and out of the hanging clothes. Only when customers began to stare openly did he run after her. When they returned, he confessed, exasperated, “She wouldn’t do that with her mother.”
Parenthetically, Robert also exhibited a slightly different style of parenting. When they were buying a bureau, Robert joked to Nora, “I’m going to shut you in this drawer and leave you there.” When Elizabeth started to climb a ladder to get to a tent set atop a bunk bed (they shopped in stores with childrens play areas, so that they could combine errands with fun), Robert unzipped the tent and joked, “We’ll lock you in!” Ann was the one who reminded Elizabeth to take her shoes off, smiled at her in the tent, price-checked the bureaus, and decided which to buy. Later, when they visited their friends, Robert went exploring in the back yard with Elizabeth, while it was Ann who noticed that a neighbor’s child—who had wandered into their friend’s home to join the children’s play—had chicken pox.
Another reason Ann probably felt Robert “shared” the second shift was that he held a range of unusually progressive attitudes with regard to her, and women in general. He was more progressive than such men as Evan Holt or Peter Tanagawa about womens entrance into the formerly mostly male arena of paid work, and actively took pride in not being a “typical male.” When his wife earned more than he, he prided himself on that fact—and was pleased he did. As he said with a twinkle:
When my wife started to earn more than I did, I thought Id struck gold. One time, when wed first moved here, I had to wait for our bedroom furniture to arrive. When I told my office manager I had to stay home to wait for it, he said, “Why cant your wife wait?” I told him, “Look at it this way. In terms of foregone income per hour, / should wait for the furniture.” My boss just didn’t understand my attitude.
Robert was very proud of his wife’s career. “Now that I’ve quit my job,” Ann confided in our third interview, “I’m worried Robert wont like it. He doesn’t want me to be a typical wife. I’m convinced that when we get to Boston, he’s going to introduce me by saying, ‘This is my wife. She’s not working now but she used to be vice president of a large electronics company, and before that. . .’” Just as Robert didn’t want Ann to be a “typical wife,” so he didn’t want Elizabeth to be a typical girl. When Elizabeth occasionally wandered down to the basement, where he was working on his model train, Robert gave her an engine to play with. When Elizabeth started playing with dolls and talking about Snow White, he bought her an Erector set. On the Saturday I joined them in doing errands, they all browsed through a bookstore. Elizabeth brought him Madeline and the Gypsies. Robert thumbed through impatiently, then held out a book on trains, saying—in a perfunctory way, as if the battle were lost—“Why don’t you look at books on trains like Dada likes?”
Robert was unusual in his desire to share the traditional world of men with women, to offer women the male “advantages.” But he was less enthusiastic about wanting to preserve the traditional world of women—caring about the house, meals, noticing Elizabeths socks—and sharing it. He preferred to pay a maid and a baby-sitter to do as much as possible, to reduce to an ever smaller wedge the need for domestic work of all sorts. He would then divide that small wedge in some way with Ann. The most important reason Ann felt Robert shared was that she felt he was honestly willing to share the remaining wedge of domestic work—if she wanted him to.
Robert adored Ann and he wanted to please her, and being willing to share, should she need him to, is one way he pleased her. Robert wasn’t an Evan Holt. He wasn’t a Peter Tanagawa; it was really okay with him to share. Thus, whether she chose to share or not, Ann enjoyed a certain “adoration shield” that protected her from many disadvantages women suffer from, like having their men “refuse” to help at home, or “resist” their careers. As a result of this, what they did share was power.
But Ann did not want Robert to share the second shift. She wanted to think of him as doing half the work at home. She wanted to know he would share if she needed him to. But, even if he didn’t have to travel so much, Ann didn’t actually want Robert to do half.