A week later, Nina asked her boss if she could take a cut in pay
and work only three days a week, and he said she could. She broke
the good news to Alexandra at dinnertime, hoping for a delighted response. For three days, Alexandra said nothing about it. Then, one evening, she asked nonchalantly if she might invite a girl friend over the following Friday. As Peter drove Nina to work the next day, he said to her in a warm, excited tone, “Doesn’t that make it worth it, honey?”
During this time, Peter made no modifications in his own work schedule. By telling Nina that she could do “whatever she needed to do” but refusing to become more involved with Alexandra himself, Peter had effectively robbed Nina of the choice he had so lovingly offered her, to work full time or not, as she saw fit. Ironically, he worked even harder at extending the market for technical books, work that bored him, while Nina curtailed the work she loved. Neither one saw anything strange about this.
Until this point in her career, Nina had been the showcase woman in top management at a company that prided itself on personnel policies that enabled mothers to work—flex time, parttime work, job sharing. Now Nina had a chance to show the world that workers can be good mothers and part-time workers can have real careers. Her immediate boss assured her, “Don’t worry, we support you.”
But trouble began almost immediately. Nina had handled four departments; she gave up three. Word had it that management was saying, “What Nina does can’t be that important if she just works three days a week.” Her immediate boss became more “realistic.” “I fought for you with the higher-ups, I’ve been holding them off,” he told her. “Now there’s only one thing I want from you—to work full time.” They had trained and groomed her; now they wanted their money’s worth.
Fellow employees gossiped about how “serious” Nina was. The longer your hours, they reasoned, the more serious and committed you were. Men whose lives ran on traditional tracks had a far better crack at passing this seriousness test than a woman like Nina, who already felt lucky to live with a man who had “taken a lot.” Despite its formal progressive policies, the company latently rewarded traditional marriages and punished other kinds. Nina summed up her predicament now this way:
Working three days a week is barely holding them off. I thought to myself that maybe with the four-day weekend, I could at least meet my carpool obligations. And I’d have more time with Alexandra. If I go back to full time pretty soon, Г11 be okay. But if I keep this up much longer, I wont be. I may already be out. My boss says, “You re walking alone right now. You’re not committed here.” Which isn’t true. I am committed to the company—on a part-time basis.
More and more, Nina was punished for being an uncommitted worker. First she was moved from her large office, facing the San Francisco bay, to a tiny, windowless office. Then she was told to report to a peer instead of a higher-ranking officer “until she came back full time.” Her participation in a company bonus program, all along assured her, was terminated. One older man— whose own marriage to a career woman had come to a stormy end and who had quietly resented Nina’s success for years—finally confessed to her, “When you went part time, I realized you weren’t really serious.”
Some of her colleagues in upper management were happily remarried to women who, in second marriages themselves, were more cautiously dedicating themselves to the family. Others were married to wives who worked on timeless graduate degrees, or did volunteer work that offered them a private fantasy of some future public life but never interfered with their husbands’ long hours at work. Some of these wives simply stayed home and seemed to have an easier life. A few men in upper management had career wives, but even they didn’t seem to face a dilemma like this one with Alexandra.
Nina was becoming keenly aware of how her male coworkers were, like Peter, protected from the crisis she faced. Were they sacrificing anything to make sure their children got all they needed? She noticed that male coworkers were happy to pin a “mother identity” on her; passing her in the halls, they often said, “Hi, Nina, how are the kids?” She used to give a happy reply. Now she sensed certain asymmetry in such greetings; seldom did she or anyone in the company greet men in this way.
One day when I went to visit Nina at work, I found her gazing at family photos on her desk. She told me that for the first time she felt like a stranger in her own company. She was taking a hard look at her job: “In my job I lay people off. I have to. We’ve been going through layoffs. I counsel people and help them solve problems. It hasn’t hit me until this year that they’re good people. They’re not poor performers. They’re people I can really relate to, people who’ve worked hard. It wasn’t their fault. Their division went under.”
As I looked at Nina now, I could see how her delicate, almost Cinderella-like look of innocence, combined with her sharp intelligence and high emotional control, could have convinced her boss that she was just the person to give employees bad news kindly. Her helpful manner and mindfulness of corporate purpose had probably saved the company millions in lawsuits. How could a laid-off worker sue after dealing with someone so kind and helpful in suggesting relocation with other companies? I could imagine Nina as the velvet glove on the hard hand of the corporate profit motive. Now, in her spirit of detachment, she saw this too.
She held the company off while she looked for part-time jobs at other companies. Before long, another computer company offered her a vice presidency, full time. Hearing of this offer, Nina’s company itself suddenly offered her a vice presidency, with a higher salary and unbelievably high bonuses, again full time. She agonized about Alexandra. She talked and talked with Peter. And then she accepted the job with her company. She told her boss she would not be able to work late on weekdays or on weekends, but she would work five days a week. As with her last success, she had
a sinking feeling. But she told herself that this was a decision “for now”; she could quit if Alexandras problem got worse.
And it did. Not long after she accepted the new job, she opened Alexandras lunchbox and found another note from her teacher: “Dear Mrs. Tanagawa, I wanted you to know that Alexandra has made more friends at school. But I have to say that other things still concern me. Recently I assigned the children a story to write and Alexandra wrote a strange story about killing her sister and hating her mother.” Nina talked to Alexandras teacher, and within two weeks, engaged a family therapist. When I last saw them, Peter was still being supportive of Nina in “her” crisis.
Ninas circle of relatives and friends offered no solution. Her “progressive” workplace offered no relief. She had started out a transitional, had pushed softly toward Nancy Holt’s position, and like Nancy, met resistance. The Holts family myth was that they shared the second shift “as much as we can, given the difference in interest.” Peter didn’t, like Evan Holt, believe he shared more than he actually did. But the Tanagawas’ myth, like that of the Holts, disguised the fact that Peter had a gender strategy, based on the ideology and feeling rules of the transitional. Although he’d been forced to accept his wife’s higher salary and the extension of her identity outside the home, Peter’s feeling rules were still fairly traditional, as were his feelings. Given his view of how a man should earn appreciation, he had thought he “should feel” anguished if his wife earned more than he. And he did feel anguish. On the other hand, Nina’s growing involvement with her career led her to begin to outgrow the rules with which she’d begun her marriage, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to re-align their marital roles.
Peter’s move was to resist Nina’s passive attempts to renegotiate their roles, and to push her into playing the supermom. He partly did this to preserve the marriage by shoring up the traditional male role on which he felt it emotionally depended. His “solution” was thus the problem. Currently, in about 20 percent of the nation’s two-job couples (though slightly fewer in my study), women earn more than their husbands. Though the tune may differ a little each time, the beat is usually the same. As is probably true for many such women, Ninas conflict is hardly resolved. For Nina and Peters marriage is the stalled revolution in microcosm, and like that revolution, their story is unfinished.
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