e-Book The Second Shift download

As a college-age male, one might think that I would have little reason to read a study about the struggles of working women. That is wrong.
This insightful, modest study of family life (witnessed by the capable Arlie Hochschild as a fly-on-the-wall) gives perspective on a dillemma everyone should think about before marriage: how to reconcile economic and personal needs with having children. This problem affects women and men, mothers and fathers.
Unfortunately, it is rarely talked about. People are forced to muddle through using their parents as examples, or to try to construct new strategies from scratch. Hochschild provides a useful structure for discussing the problem and avoiding the emotional and marital cost of relying on "myths." Any serious couple should be able to talk about these subjects to avoid misunderstanding and conflict.
One problem with this book is the writing - the points do not always flow together, and sometimes the sentences are simply awkward. This study is also weighted toward middle class families, though it explores others as well. Despite being over a decade old, this book is still relevant.
Well worth reading, whether you are deciding on a career, getting married, or already trying to balance both.

It was OK. It didn't give me the satisfaction I was hoping for.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley; she also wrote books such as The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work,Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us,So How's the Family?: And Other Essays,The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 309-page 1989 hardcover edition.]

She wrote in the Preface of this 1989 book, “As things stand now… The Housewife pays a cost by remaining outside the streams of social life. The career woman pays a cost by entering a clockwork of careers that permits little time of emotional energy to raise a family… because [her career] was originally designed to suit a traditional man whose wife raised his children. In this arrangement between career and family, the family was the welfare agency for the university and women were its social workers… maybe [career women] need careers basically redesigned to suit workers who also care for families… the career system inhibits women…by making up rules to suit the male half of the population… One reason that half the lawyers, doctors, business people are not women is because men do not share the raising of their children and the caring of their homes… Women who enter these traditional structures and do the work of the home, too, can’t compete on male terms. They find that their late twenties and mid-thirties, the prime childbearing years, are also a peak period of career demands. Seeing that the game is devised for family-free people, some women lose heart.” (Pg. x-xi)

She asks, “What leads some working mothers to do all the work at home themselves---to pursue what I call a supermom strategy---and what leads others to press their husbands to share the responsibility and work of the home? Why do some men genuinely want to share housework and childcare, others fatalistically acquiesce, and still others actively resist? How does each husband’s ideas about manhood lead him to think he ‘should feel’ about what he’s doing at home and at work? … Do his real feelings conflict with what he thinks he should feel? The same questions apply to wives. What influence does each person’s consequent ‘strategy’ for handling his or her feelings and actions with regard to the second shift affect his or her children, job, and marriage? Through this line of questioning, I was led to the complex web of ties between a family’s needs, the sometime quest for equality, and happiness in modern marriage, the real topic of this book.” (Pg. 13-14)

She outlines the “second shift” concept: “Adding together the time it takes to do a paid job and to do housework and childcare, I averaged estimates … and discovered that women worked roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men. Over a year, they worked an extra month of twenty-four hour days a year… Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework and children. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a ‘leisure gap’ between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a ‘second shift’ at home.” (Pg. 3-4)

She acknowledges, “One reason women take a deeper interest than men in the problems of juggling work with family life is that even when husbands happily shared the hours of work, their wives felt more RESPONSIBLE for home and children… They were more likely to think about their children while at work and to check in by phone with the baby-sitter. Partly because of this, more women felt torn between one sense of urgency and another, between the need to soothe a child’s fear of being left at daycare, and the need to show the boss she’s ‘serious’ at work. More women than men questioned how good they were as parents… More often than men, women alternated between living in their ambition and standing apart from it. As masses of women have moved into the economy, families have been hit by a ‘speed-up’ in work and family life.” (Pg. 7-8)

She points out, “the entrance of men into industrial work did not destabilize the family whereas in the absence of other changes, the rise in female employment has gone with the rise in divorce… The exodus of women into the economy has not been accompanied by a cultural understanding of marriage and work that would make this transition smooth. The workforce has changed. Women have changed. But most workplaces have remained inflexible in the face of the family demands of their workers and at home, most men have yet to really adapt to the changes in women. This strain between the change in women and the absence of change in much else leads me to speak of a ‘stalled revolution.’” (Pg. 12)

She explains, “I felt the need to explore what I call loosely ‘gender strategies.’ … A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play. To pursue a gender strategy, a man draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood, beliefs that are forged in early childhood and thus anchored to deep emotions. He makes a connection between how he thinks about his manhood… and what he does. It works in the same way for a woman. A woman’s gender ideology determines what sphere she WANTS to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage she wants to have… I found three types of ideology of marital roles: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian.” (Pg. 15)

Of her study of fifty couples, she summarizes, “Eighty percent of the men in my study of two-job couples had one thing in common… they didn’t share housework and childcare. This introduced extra work for their wives and often tension in their marriages.” (Pg. 173) “The ten marriages I’ve 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 person’s ideas about gender and marriage and the emotional meanings behind them.” (Pg. 188) “One out of five men in this study were as actively involved in the home as their wives---some… working the same hours as their wives but sharing in a more ‘male’ way, doing things such as carpentry; others… shared the cooking and being a primary parent. In my study the men who shared the second shift had a happier family life… The men in this study who shared the work at home were no more likely than other men to have ‘model’ fathers who helped at home. Their parents were no more likely to have trained them to do chores when they were young.” (Pg. 216)

She suggests, “Men like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield lead the way into the third stage of fatherhood… Lacking a national social movement to support them in a public challenge to the prevailing notion of manhood, they’ve acted on their own. Not until the other Michael Shermans and Art Winfields step forward, not until a critical mass of men becomes like them, will we end the painful stall in this revolution all around us.” (Pg. 187)

She asserts, “In the era of stalled revolution, one way to reverse this devaluation is for men to share in that devalued work, and thereby help to revalue it. Many working mothers are already doing all they can at home. Now it’s time for men to make the move. In an age of divorce, marriage itself can be at stake.” (Pg. 215) She adds, “Now is the time for a whole generation of men to make a second historic shift---into work at home.” (Pg. 238)

She summarizes, “two forces are at work: new economic opportunities and needs, which draw women to paid work and which put pressure on men to share the second shift. These forces lend appeal to an egalitarian gender ideology and to strategies of renegotiating the division of labor at home. But other forces… lend appeal to a traditional gender ideology and to the female strategy of the supermom and to the male strategy of resistance to sharing.” (Pg. 253)

She concludes, “The happiest two-job marriages I saw were between men and women who did not load the former role of the housewife-mother onto the woman, and did not devalue it… They shared that role between them… Up until now, the woman married to the ‘new man’ has been one of the lucky few. But as the government and society shape a new gender strategy, as the young learn from example, many more women and men will be able to enjoy the leisurely bodily rhythms and freer laughter that arise when family life is family life and not a second shift.” (Pg. 270)

Although nearly thirty years old, the issues addressed in this book are still very “timely.” It (along with her later “Time Bind” book) are “must reading” for anyone interested in the economics and sociology of working couples and their families today.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley; she also wrote books such as The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work,Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us,So How's the Family?: And Other Essays,The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, etc. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 309-page 1989 hardcover edition.]

She wrote in the Preface of this 1989 book, “As things stand now… The Housewife pays a cost by remaining outside the streams of social life. The career woman pays a cost by entering a clockwork of careers that permits little time of emotional energy to raise a family… because [her career] was originally designed to suit a traditional man whose wife raised his children. In this arrangement between career and family, the family was the welfare agency for the university and women were its social workers… maybe [career women] need careers basically redesigned to suit workers who also care for families… the career system inhibits women…by making up rules to suit the male half of the population… One reason that half the lawyers, doctors, business people are not women is because men do not share the raising of their children and the caring of their homes… Women who enter these traditional structures and do the work of the home, too, can’t compete on male terms. They find that their late twenties and mid-thirties, the prime childbearing years, are also a peak period of career demands. Seeing that the game is devised for family-free people, some women lose heart.” (Pg. x-xi)

She asks, “What leads some working mothers to do all the work at home themselves---to pursue what I call a supermom strategy---and what leads others to press their husbands to share the responsibility and work of the home? Why do some men genuinely want to share housework and childcare, others fatalistically acquiesce, and still others actively resist? How does each husband’s ideas about manhood lead him to think he ‘should feel’ about what he’s doing at home and at work? … Do his real feelings conflict with what he thinks he should feel? The same questions apply to wives. What influence does each person’s consequent ‘strategy’ for handling his or her feelings and actions with regard to the second shift affect his or her children, job, and marriage? Through this line of questioning, I was led to the complex web of ties between a family’s needs, the sometime quest for equality, and happiness in modern marriage, the real topic of this book.” (Pg. 13-14)

She outlines the “second shift” concept: “Adding together the time it takes to do a paid job and to do housework and childcare, I averaged estimates … and discovered that women worked roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men. Over a year, they worked an extra month of twenty-four hour days a year… Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework and children. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a ‘leisure gap’ between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a ‘second shift’ at home.” (Pg. 3-4)

She acknowledges, “One reason women take a deeper interest than men in the problems of juggling work with family life is that even when husbands happily shared the hours of work, their wives felt more RESPONSIBLE for home and children… They were more likely to think about their children while at work and to check in by phone with the baby-sitter. Partly because of this, more women felt torn between one sense of urgency and another, between the need to soothe a child’s fear of being left at daycare, and the need to show the boss she’s ‘serious’ at work. More women than men questioned how good they were as parents… More often than men, women alternated between living in their ambition and standing apart from it. As masses of women have moved into the economy, families have been hit by a ‘speed-up’ in work and family life.” (Pg. 7-8)

She points out, “the entrance of men into industrial work did not destabilize the family whereas in the absence of other changes, the rise in female employment has gone with the rise in divorce… The exodus of women into the economy has not been accompanied by a cultural understanding of marriage and work that would make this transition smooth. The workforce has changed. Women have changed. But most workplaces have remained inflexible in the face of the family demands of their workers and at home, most men have yet to really adapt to the changes in women. This strain between the change in women and the absence of change in much else leads me to speak of a ‘stalled revolution.’” (Pg. 12)

She explains, “I felt the need to explore what I call loosely ‘gender strategies.’ … A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the cultural notions of gender at play. To pursue a gender strategy, a man draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood, beliefs that are forged in early childhood and thus anchored to deep emotions. He makes a connection between how he thinks about his manhood… and what he does. It works in the same way for a woman. A woman’s gender ideology determines what sphere she WANTS to identify with (home or work) and how much power in the marriage she wants to have… I found three types of ideology of marital roles: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian.” (Pg. 15)

Of her study of fifty couples, she summarizes, “Eighty percent of the men in my study of two-job couples had one thing in common… they didn’t share housework and childcare. This introduced extra work for their wives and often tension in their marriages.” (Pg. 173) “The ten marriages I’ve 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 person’s ideas about gender and marriage and the emotional meanings behind them.” (Pg. 188) “One out of five men in this study were as actively involved in the home as their wives---some… working the same hours as their wives but sharing in a more ‘male’ way, doing things such as carpentry; others… shared the cooking and being a primary parent. In my study the men who shared the second shift had a happier family life… The men in this study who shared the work at home were no more likely than other men to have ‘model’ fathers who helped at home. Their parents were no more likely to have trained them to do chores when they were young.” (Pg. 216)

She suggests, “Men like Michael Sherman and Art Winfield lead the way into the third stage of fatherhood… Lacking a national social movement to support them in a public challenge to the prevailing notion of manhood, they’ve acted on their own. Not until the other Michael Shermans and Art Winfields step forward, not until a critical mass of men becomes like them, will we end the painful stall in this revolution all around us.” (Pg. 187)

She asserts, “In the era of stalled revolution, one way to reverse this devaluation is for men to share in that devalued work, and thereby help to revalue it. Many working mothers are already doing all they can at home. Now it’s time for men to make the move. In an age of divorce, marriage itself can be at stake.” (Pg. 215) She adds, “Now is the time for a whole generation of men to make a second historic shift---into work at home.” (Pg. 238)

She summarizes, “two forces are at work: new economic opportunities and needs, which draw women to paid work and which put pressure on men to share the second shift. These forces lend appeal to an egalitarian gender ideology and to strategies of renegotiating the division of labor at home. But other forces… lend appeal to a traditional gender ideology and to the female strategy of the supermom and to the male strategy of resistance to sharing.” (Pg. 253)

She concludes, “The happiest two-job marriages I saw were between men and women who did not load the former role of the housewife-mother onto the woman, and did not devalue it… They shared that role between them… Up until now, the woman married to the ‘new man’ has been one of the lucky few. But as the government and society shape a new gender strategy, as the young learn from example, many more women and men will be able to enjoy the leisurely bodily rhythms and freer laughter that arise when family life is family life and not a second shift.” (Pg. 270)

Although nearly thirty years old, the issues addressed in this book are still very “timely.” It (along with her later “Time Bind” book) are “must reading” for anyone interested in the economics and sociology of working couples and their families today.