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s he begins his interview with me, Frank Delacorte is speaking from his personal chair, a lounger with armrests and a footrest that extends when he leans back. In this modest living room, it is the only chair with armrests. Some men I interviewed sat in chairs turned closely toward the television set, suggesting a desire for solitary retreat and recovery Franks chair faced outward toward the room, suggesting membership, its size and prominence suggesting authority. It is the centerpiece of the room, the provider s chair. I am seated on the sofa, tape recorder beside me, interviewing a man who, as it was to turn out, holds more traditional views on men and women than Evan Holt, but who does more work at home with far less struggle.
Frank is a slender man of twenty-nine with long, ropey muscles in his arms, neatly groomed dark hair, and thoughtful brown eyes. In a modest but deliberate way, he describes himself and his marriage: “I look at myself as pretty much of a traditionalist. Its the way I am inside. I feel the man should be the head of the house. He should have the final say. I don t think he should have the only say; my father was the head but a lot of times my mother got her way. But I feel like this is my role in life, and I don’t see any reason to want to change it.” He pauses and gives a modest but not apologetic shrug of the shoulders. He has chosen his words slowly—as if saying something so fundamental it is normally beyond words.
Frank earns $12,000 a year gluing together the pressboard sides of boxes in a factory. Pressboard isn’t the real wood he loves to work with. He dislikes the powerful smell of chemicals in the glue and worries whether they might be hazardous. By trade, he says, he is a cabinetmaker, but when his father-in-laws small cabinetmaking^ business where he had worked failed, Frank was forced into factory work. Though he was scanning the want ads these days for a better paying job, and had even interviewed for one on a lunch hour, nothing had come through. But his marriage was happy, he thanked God. He has been married for six years to Carmen, now in the bedroom watching a love story on television.
The third of six children in a Nicaraguan working-class family, Frank had moved often, as a child, with his mother and siblings to be near his father, a merchant seaman who worked out of various port cities. He remembers his mother and father—he describes them jointly as “they”—as “stern” and “somewhat cold.” He doesn’t want to complain, but he feels there had not been enough affection to go around. He considers carefully whether he has the right to complain—because his parents had had a hard life, too— but he tentatively concludes that he wished it had not felt as cold growing up in their home. He wanted to establish a warmer family, and with his marriage to Carmen, he already had.
Frank Delacorte held to the views of most other working-class men I interviewed. Middle-class men often expected their wives to “help” support the family while they themselves expected to “help” at home; and they often supported their wives’ work, often thought it was “good for her,” and a woman’s “right if she wanted it.” Middle-class men often saw themselves as “equal” partners playing slightly “different roles.” Although their higher salaries gave them greater potential power, it was a point of male honor not to press this economic advantage, not to talk about it, just to have it. Some would occasionally crack jokes about keeping the wife “barefoot and pregnant,” or commanding her to “fetch my pipe and slippers,” their jokes consolidating the fact that women’s oppression was a matter of history.
In contrast, for Frank and many working-class men, there was a different language, of “letting my wife work.” For him, it was a point of male honor to show loving consideration toward one whom God had given a subordinate role in marriage. Because the Delacortes needed Carmens income to live on, Frank actually held less economic power than most middle-class men. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, both Delacortes wanted Frank to be “the man of the house,” and to have the “final say” over whether Carmen worked. These days, Franks traditional ideal was too “expensive” for his pocketbook.
Frank did not link his desire to be “the man of the house” with the need to compensate for racial discrimination, a link I sensed in a few other interviews with minority men. Had Frank been Irish or German, rather than Latino, he might have had a better crack at a union job. Most of his coworkers in the nonunion, low — paid jobs at the box factory were Latino. But Frank did not require his relationship with Carmen to make up for racial injustice.
Frank had anticipated a conflict between his pocketbook and his traditionalism even before he married Carmen. With some effort to be candid, he explained:
I wasn’t that ready to get married. Actually, at that time I was feeling inadequate, since I didn’t have the kind of job I wanted to have yet. I guess I’m not the most ambitious person in the world [light, nervous laugh]. Yeah, Carmen was much more anxious to get married than I was. I was really very hesitant for awhile. I felt I might disappoint her, probably financially. Carmen was working at the time. She told me, “If you add our salaries together, really there’s plenty to live on. Between the two of us, we shouldn’t have any trouble.” And that was true!
I finally gave in. She really asked me to marry her, rather than me asking her [light laugh].
Frank would marry Carmen when she wanted to marry and she would accept her need to work with good grace, even though she wanted to stay home and be a “milk and cookies mom.” The compromise did not take place after the marriage, as it did with the Holts, but before their marriage, as a premise of it. The compromise was not, as it was for the Holts, between a husband’s gender ideology and his wife’s. The Delacortes agreed on that. Their compromise was between a traditional ideal they shared, on one hand, and a pocketbook too thin to permit them to realize it on the other.
So from the beginning, it was understood that if the fickle fluctuations of the market in wood cabinets made Frank lose his job or take a cut in pay, Carmen would not blame these things on Frank; they would face them together. More important, Franks inability to earn all the money—to be “male” in that way—would also not be his moral burden alone. Carmen would not, like some traditional wives, assume the right to resent having to work. Carmen had a sister-in-law and a cousin, both working mothers, who did resent “having” to work and they made life miserable for their husbands because of it. Not Carmen; to her, the deal was: “We’ll need my salary but I won’t rub it in.” Like most middle-class feminists, Nancy Holt had wanted to work, and felt she should want to work. It had never occurred to her to reserve a right to resent having to work; she insisted on a different right: that she be honored in leisure out of deference for her legitimate career, that her career be cotisidered her work. But Carmen felt strongly that the only “real” work was at home. Having divergent views about womanhood, Nancy and Carmen also held to different notions of what were the right and wrong feelings to have about work or child rearing. And they held different ideas about the proper psychological gifts between a husband and wife.
The two women had opposing “feeling rules.” Carmen thought she should dislike her work and feel it as unimportant. Nancy Thought she should enjoy her work and find it important. Carmen felt she should feel grateful for whatever extra help Frank gave around the house; Nancy considered 50 percent of the second shift as Evan’s rightful job and found it hard to feel grateful for any less.
Carmen, twenty-nine, a pretty, black-haired, heavy-set day-care worker, spoke to me with a spirited voice and dancing hands. She wanted me to know that she did not work because she wanted to. That was a point of pride. As she explained: “The only reason Гт working is that every time I go to the grocery store the bill is twenty dollars more. Гт not working to develop myself. Гт not working to discover my identity. No way!” She wasn’t that kind of woman, the new kind, the kind who’s off seeking her real self in some office on the thirtieth floor of some high-rise. Ironically, although Carmen didn’t want to like her work, she rather did. She chuckled with obvious enjoyment as she described each child she cared for. A few professional women illustrated the opposite dilemma. One struggling feminist writer despondently confessed, “I want to love my work, but at the moment I hate it.” Ironically, it was a blessing that Carmen had to work; she got to enjoy her work even when she wasn’t “supposed to.”
Carmen referred to her job as a day-care worker as a “business I run out of my home,” not to be confused with “being a babysitter.” Like every day-care worker and baby-sitter I interviewed, Carmen was painfully aware of the low esteem in which the women in America who tend children are held. (I had come to interview her first as the baby-sitter of a two-job couple in the study, but discovering that she and Frank were also a two-job couple, I asked if I could interview them on that account as well.) When I came to her door for our first interview, and explained the project, her first comment was “They don’t think you’re anything if you’re a baby-sitter.” For women in more “male” and middle-class occupations, this issue of self esteem didn’t arise.
Frank tried to save his pride by explaining to people that Carmen was “really at home.” This was not exactly a myth, but it was a slightly misleading way of describing the situation. Sometimes the company he kept made him want to use this phrase. One notch above him in social class, Frank’s foreman, Bill, could afford to keep his wife home and to tout the correctness of doing so with a certain cutting conviction. Frank drove to work with Bill every day, and next to rising prices, the topic of women came up most often. Frank coughed and explained with some unease: “We were talking about needing extra money, and I told him about the business that Carmen has, and I said, ‘You know, you’ve got a house. Your wife could have a business like Carmens. It’s not too bad.’ His attitude was ‘No! No! No! I don’t want anybody to say she’s taking care of children.’ He feels he lives the way most people should live—the husband working, the wife at home.” Frank believed that Bill opposed the idea of his wife working not because it was too low for her, but because it was too low for him. It would rob him of the one luxury that distinguished a foreman from a worker—the domestic services of a full-time wife. I asked Frank how he felt about his foreman’s remark and he said, “I felt put down. Yeah, I definitely felt he put me down.”
While she cared for their own year-old child, Delia, Carmen earned about $5,000 a year providing day care for four two-year- old children of neighboring mothers who worked. She was one of the many women who have become part of an emergent female “underclass” of day-care workers, baby-sitters, maids, au pairs, and companions for the elderly—who accomplish for little pay and status the work performed in a bygone era by the woman of the house. Ironically, it was this declining role of housewife that Carmen, lacking other options, aspired to fill. She, too, was proud to work “at home.” Frank never denied that she earned money working at home. But saying “Carmen was home” helped him preserve a notion of himself as provider, as head of the household that was, these days, harder and harder to keep up.
Carmen was an ardent traditionalist. (One woman in my study was so eager to be the traditional wife that she “tried” to get pregnant “by accident” so she could drop out of college and marry, had the word “obey” put back into her marriage ceremony, worked “because my husband told me to,” dressed mainly in pink, and named her cat “Pretty Kitty.” But even this woman’s traditionalism was less ardent than Carmens.) Carmen very much looked up to Nancy Reagan and very much down on Gloria Steinem. Even within her Catholic, Latino working-class culture of women trapped in low-paid, dead-end jobs, she was far more deeply convinced of her desire to stay home and submit to her husband. Women in her position often wished they worked shorter hours, at better jobs and pay, but most such women nonetheless did want to work. Only 10 percent of women in this study could be counted as “traditional” in the sense of not wanting to ever work, although I suspect the numbers nationwide are larger. What so appealed to Carmen about being a “traditional woman” was being subordinate to Frank. As Carmen told me excitedly: “I dorit want to be equal with Frank. I don’t want to be equal in work. I want to be feminine. I want to have frilly things. I don’t want to compete with men! Heck! I don’t want to do what my husband’s doing. Let him do it. Maybe that’s it—I want to be taken care of.”
Carmen further explained: “I want Frank to know more than I do. I don’t want my children to be brought up thinking, ‘Oh, Mom knows it all, and Dad’s just a painting on the wall.’ I take pride in Frank knowing more. Maybe that’s wrong, but I take pride in it.”
A bright but uninspired student in high school, Carmen had gone no further, but had followed a narrow path of clerical jobs from which day care seemed a welcome relief. She considered her lack of higher education as a virtue, for she thought it made her inferior to Frank—who “knew more” even though he also had ended his education with a high school diploma. Carmen applied the same principle in bed: the more Frank knew, the more dominant he was, the better. She said: “I don’t want to be his equal in bed. I want him to dominate me! I don’t want to dominate him. I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, this is the way you make love to me.’ ”
Carmen thought that dominating women were committing a serious sin—right up there with homicide and child abuse. One dangerous avenue to female dominance, she felt, was a successful career. Pursing her lips in disgust, she told me of an “overly” ambitious sister-in-law who got a Ph. D. in veterinary science—“a Ph. D. in bullshit,” she hissed—and as a consequence bossed people around and never married.
Carmen disliked ambitious women partly because she felt they were pushing her kind of women out of style. It was bad enough that rising prices were forcing women out of their homes; what was worse, the daytime soap operas on television she followed avidly while the children took afternoon naps were featuring selfish career women who stole the allure from domestic-minded women. Today, Carmens kind of women were being portrayed as overweight, depressed, abandoned—as losers. Women who believed in being a housewife were the latest endangered species. Career-minded women were taking over everywhere. She saw the womens movement as an upper-class fad. As Carmen put it, “Betty Ford is for womens liberation, right? But has she mopped the floor yet? Beautiful nails, face lift, hair done, and I’m there nails broken, hair a mess, and Pm thinking, sure, lady, tell me all about it. . . . Instead of parading around, Gloria Steinem should sit down and watch a soap opera. They tell you the way it really is. She should take off her rose-colored glasses and really look.”
On the basis of these views it might at first seem that, by temperament, Carmen was a dependent person. But the truth was Carmen believed in female dependence. It was part of her gender ideology. She actively, strategically pursued it. This was probably because she feared that without some cultural constraint—like the ideal of a woman as wilting violet—she could end up dominating Frank. Carmen reminded me of a student of mine who spoke up a great deal in class, pursued me relentlessly after lectures and in office hours, pressed me to change the “B plus” on her term paper to an “A”—but, when asked about the kind of relationship she hoped to have with her boyfriend, said in a little girl voice, WI want to fit in the palm of my boyfriend s hand, like Thumbelina.”
Why did Carmen hold this view of the sexes and not some other? Part of the reason was economic. I think it worked like this: in young adulthood, she matched her qualifications with the real world—no college, no typing experience, and few interesting, well-paid jobs out there for women without these. As she explained in exasperation: “Im not prepared to go out and sit on my butt and be a secretary. I know how to type, but not fifty words a minute. What am I going to do? Scrub floors? I should have prepared for such a career [typing] but I didn’t, okay? My mother gave me a good education but I didn’t take advantage of it. Its my fault, okay? But Гт not on welfare and Гт not on food stamps. Гт trying to help my husband.” Carmen couldn’t support herself alone without dropping into poverty; better to support herself through marriage. If her husband needed her to work, fine. That’s how it was for families these days.
Curiously, several other high school-educated women in this study who were equally trapped in low-paid clerical or sales jobs did want a job they could identify with, and wanted a husband who didn’t dominate them and who shared the work at home. Lack of job opportunities didn’t totally predict women’s views on gender.
A more internal motive seemed to be involved as well. Like Nancy Holt, Carmen wanted to avoid the fate of her mother. If Nancy Holt became a feminist partly in response to her mother’s self-belittling response to her life as a housewife, Carmen Dela — corte may have become a traditionalist in response to her mother’s hard life as an “independent woman.” Her mother was a model of a self-made career woman, but to Carmen she was a dangerous model. Carmen’s mother was a spunky, gifted woman who married at eighteen, got pregnant at twenty, and divorced at twenty — two. The marriage, as Carmen learned from her mother, had been a disaster. Her father never sent child support and called Carmen for the first time in thirty years the day he died of cancer, to ask forgiveness. Carmen described her mother’s situation with empathy: “In that society, when a woman becomes divorced or a widow, there is nothing else to do except ‘dress the saints’ [put clothes on the statues of saints in the church on holidays] for the rest of your life. You don’t get remarried. You don’t date. When my mother got divorced, she was a young woman, so her father started to run her life.”
Alone with her baby, Carmen’s mother ventured to the United States working her way up from assistant file clerk to file clerk to junior auditor and senior auditor in an expanding insurance company. The two lived in a tiny apartment with two other divorced Latino women and their children, until Carmen’s mother got remarried (when Carmen was sixteen) to a cabinetmaker who drank too much.
Reflecting on how she would have fared in her mother’s situation, Carmen visibly recoiled. “I would never want my mothers life! Never, never! I don’t think I could be like my mom because my mom didn’t have anybody to fall back on.”
Gloria Steinem would have drawn entirely different lessons from the struggles of a single mother (and in fact did). The trials of Carmen’s mother would have seemed textbook examples of why society should finally prevent wife battery, discourage the double standard, and ensure that divorced men continue to support their children financially and emotionally. But sizing up her personal situation carefully and lacking confidence, Carmen drew a cautionary lesson from her mother’s life: Don’t go out on your own. If her mother had only submitted more to her husband, hidden her intelligence, checked her initiative, maybe Carmen’s father would have stayed. The equation seemed to be this: it’s a cold world for women outside of marriage. So a woman has to marry. If she is to succeed in marriage, she can’t be the dominant type. To avoid dominance, she should try to feel subordinate, and if she can, she should project an image that is delicate, fragile, and unburdened by much knowledge. If Carmen could manage to feel or to seem this way, she seems to have reasoned, Frank would always stay. For her, women were by nature as likely to be bright and powerful as men; but it was their duty as women to press their natural personality and I. Q. into the ‘wilting violet” mold. For her, female subordination was not sexism. It was a shield against the sexism a single woman like her mother can face.
Once established, certain things followed from Carmens gender ideology. One had to do with her relationship with Frank, the other with the second shift. Given her perception of her resources and opportunities, a traditional version of womanhood took on great appeal for her. According to her gender ideology Carmen should be demure, soft-spoken, sweet, passive, and quiet. But, in fact, Carmen had the “wrong” personality for her gender ideology; most of the time she was loud, colorful, engaging, active, willful, and bright. In her occasional heated discussions with Frank, neighbors in the apartment below could hear Carmens loud voice rising with rhetorical flourish, falling, and coursing through long explanations of something. Then they heard Franks voice: low, mild, appeasing, steady. In the supermarket, Frank politely followed the unspoken traffic rules of shopping-cart traffic, but Carmen bumped carts that blocked her way. She sometimes took the offensive in family quarrels. She had, for example, pushed Frank to “stand up for himself” when his father chided him for giving up a “promising” job he once had as a bank clerk. But the morning of the day after such occasions, she scolded herself for doing it.
In her youth, she had, as she said, “driven a boyfriend away.” She told me: “I had a boyfriend everybody loved, and we thought we were going to marry. But I was awfully dominating. He left me and I always thought he would come back, but he didn’t. Mother always says, ‘Don’t forget William. ’ ”
Married life after the first three years was harmonious between Carmen and Frank, but they had had one telling showdown. One day, Frank was complaining that Carmen had shown poor judgment in making a payment on a new chair (which could wait) before paying the rent (which could not). According to Carmen, “Frank said to me, ‘Since Fm making the most money, I can make most of the decisions.’ I said, ‘What?! Wait a minute! What?!!’ I
said, ‘Forget it! Just because you’re making more money doesn’t mean anything. I’m still working.51 told him, ‘Do you really believe that?5 And he said with a smile, ‘Well, not really. I just thought I5d give it a try.5 55
All in all, for Frank, the veneer of Carmens submission would do. Fie liked Carmen, plucky as she was. Her spunk was no big deal; he wasn’t threatened in the least. Getting her personality in line with her ideology was her dilemma, not his.