The Family Speed-up
SHE is not the same woman in each magazine advertisement, but she is the same idea. She has that working-mother look as she strides forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling child in the other. Literally and figuratively, she is moving ahead. Her hair, if long, tosses behind her; if it is short, it sweeps back at the sides, suggesting mobility and progress. There is nothing shy or passive about her. She is confident, active, “liberated.” She wears a dark tailored suit, but with a silk bow or colorful frill that says, “I’m really feminine underneath.” She has made it in a man’s world without sacrificing her femininity. And she has done this on her own. By some personal miracle, this image suggests, she has managed to combine what 150 years of industrialization have split wide apart—child and job, frill and suit, female culture and male.
When I showed a photograph of a supermom like this to the working mothers I talked to in the course of researching this book, many responded with an outright laugh. One day-care worker and mother of two, ages three and five, threw back her head: “Ha! They’ve got to be kidding about her. Look at me, hair a mess, nails jagged, twenty pounds overweight. Mornings, I’m getting my kids dressed, the dog fed, the lunches made, the shopping list done. That lady’s got a maid.” Even working mothers who did have maids couldn’t imagine combining work and family in such a carefree way: “Do you know what a baby does to your life, the two o’clock feedings, the four o’clock feedings?” Another mother of two said: “They don’t show it, but she’s whistling”—she imitated a whistling woman, eyes to the sky—“so she can’t hear the din.” They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the flying hair, but she didn’t remind them of anyone they knew.
The women I interviewed—lawyers, corporate executives, word processors, garment pattern cutters, day-care workers—and most of their husbands, too—felt differently about some issues: how right it is for a mother of young children to work a full-time job, or how much a husband should be responsible for the home. But they all agreed that it was hard to work two full-time jobs and raise young children.
How well do couples do it? The more women work outside the home, the more central this question. The number of women in paid work has risen steadily since before the turn of the century, but since 1950 the rise has been staggering. In 1950, 30 percent of American women were in the labor force; by 2011, that had risen to 59 percent. Over two-thirds of mothers, married or single, now work; in fact more mothers than non-mothers work for pay. Women now make up half of the labor force and two-job marriages now make up two-thirds of all marriages with children.
But the biggest rise by far has been among mothers of small children. In 1975, only 39 percent of women with children six and under were in the civilian labor force—doing or looking for paid work. By 2009, that had risen to 64 percent. In 1975, 34 percent of moms of children three and under were in the labor force; in 2009 that had risen to 61 percent. And it was the same story for moms of children one and younger: 31 percent in 1975 and 50 percent in 2009. Since more mothers of small children are now in the labor force, we might expect more to be working part time. But that’s not what we find; in 1975, 72 percent of women worked full time and a bit more than that in 2009. Of all employed moms with babies under age one, 69 percent in 2009 worked full time.1
If more mothers of young children are stepping into full-time jobs outside the home, and if most couples can’t afford household help, how much more are fathers doing at home? As I began exploring this question I found many studies on the hours working men and women devote to housework and child care. One national random sample of 1,243 working parents in forty-four American cities, conducted in 1965–66 by Alexander Szalai and his coworkers, for example, found that working women averaged three hours a day on housework while men averaged seventeen minutes; women spent fifty minutes a day of time exclusively with their children; men spent twelve minutes. On the other side of the coin, working fathers watched television an hour longer than their working wives, and slept a half hour longer each night. A comparison of this American sample with eleven other industrial countries in Eastern and Western Europe revealed the same difference between working women and men in those countries as well.2 In a 1983 study of white middle-class families in greater Boston, Grace Baruch and R. C. Barnett found that working men married to working women spent only three-quarters of an hour longer each week with their kindergarten-aged children than did men married to housewives.3
Szalai’s landmark study documented the now familiar but still alarming story of the working woman’s “double day,” but it left me wondering how men and women actually felt about all this. He and his coworkers studied how people used time, but not, say, how a father felt about his twelve minutes with his child, or how his wife felt about it. Szalai’s study revealed the visible surface of what I discovered to be a set of deeply emotional issues: What should a man and woman contribute to the family? How appreciated does each feel? How does each respond to subtle changes in the balance of marital power? How does each develop an unconscious “gender strategy” for coping with the work at home, with marriage, and, indeed, with life itself? These were the underlying issues.
But I began with the measurable issue of time. Adding together the time it takes to do a paid job, housework, and child care, I averaged estimates from the major studies on time use done in the 1960s and 1970s, 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. Over a dozen years, it was an extra year of twenty-four-hour days. Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time caring for both house 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.
Studies show that working mothers have higher self-esteem and get less depressed than housewives, but compared to their husbands, they’re more tired and get sick more often. In Peggy Thoits’s 1985 analysis of two large-scale surveys, each of about a thousand men and women, people were asked how often in the preceding week they’d experienced each of twenty-three symptoms of anxiety (such as dizziness or hallucinations). Thoits found working mothers more likely than any other group to be “anxious.”
In light of these studies, the image of the woman with the flying hair seems like an upbeat cover for a grim reality, like those pictures of Soviet tractor drivers smiling radiantly into the distance as they think about the ten-year plan. The Szalai study was conducted in 1965–66. I wanted to know whether the leisure gap he found back then still existed or whether it has disappeared. Since most married couples work two jobs, since more will in the future, since most wives in these couples work the extra month a year, I wanted to understand what this “extra month” means for each person, and what it does to love and marriage in an age of high divorce.
With my research associates Anne Machung and Elaine Kaplan, I interviewed fifty couples very intensively, and I observed in a dozen homes. We first began interviewing artisans, students, and professionals in Berkeley, California, in the late 1970s. This was at the height of the women’s movement, and many of these couples were earnestly and self-consciously struggling to modernize the ground rules of their marriages. Enjoying flexible job schedules and intense cultural support to do so, many succeeded. Since their circumstances were unusual they became our “comparison group” as we sought other couples more typical of mainstream America. In 1980 we located more typical couples by sending a questionnaire on work and family life to every thirteenth name—from top to bottom—of the personnel roster of a large, urban manufacturing company. At the end of the questionnaire, we asked members of working couples raising children under age six and working full-time jobs if they would be willing to talk to us in greater depth. Interviewed from 1980 through 1988, these couples, their neighbors and friends, their children’s teachers, day-care workers, and baby-sitters form the heart of this book.
When we called them, a number of baby-sitters replied as one woman did: “You’re interviewing us? Good. We’re human too.” Or another, “I’m glad you consider what we do work. A lot of people don’t.” As it turned out, many day-care workers were themselves juggling two jobs and small children, and so we talked to them about that, too.
We also talked with other men and women who were not part of two-job couples, divorced parents who were war-weary veterans of two-job marriages, and traditional couples, to see how much of the strain we were seeing was unique to two-job couples.
I focused on heterosexual, married couples with children under age six, their child-care workers, and others in their world from the top to the bottom of the social class ladder. But the second shift is front and center for many other kinds of couples as well—the unmarried, gay, and lesbian couples, nonparents, and parents of older children. In particular, gay and lesbian partners are more likely than heterosexual ones, research suggests, to share the second shift—gay partners by specializing in tasks, lesbians by doing similar tasks.4
I also watched daily life in a dozen homes during a weekday evening, during the weekend, and during the months that followed, when I was invited on outings, to dinner, or just to talk. I found myself waiting on the front doorstep as weary parents and hungry children tumbled out of the family car. I shopped with them, visited friends, watched television, ate with them, walked through parks, and came along when they dropped their children at day-care, often staying on at the baby-sitter’s house after parents waved good-bye. In their homes, I sat on the living-room floor and drew pictures and played house with children. I watched as parents gave them baths, read bedtime stories, and said good night. Most couples tried to bring me into the family scene, inviting me to eat with them and talk. I responded if they spoke to me, from time to time asked questions, but I rarely initiated conversation. I tried to become as unobtrusive as a family dog. Often I would base myself in the living room, quietly taking notes. Sometimes I would follow a wife upstairs or down, accompany a child on her way out to “help Dad” fix the car, or watch television with the other watchers. Sometimes I would break out of my peculiar role to join in the jokes they often made about acting like the “model” two-job couple. Or perhaps the joking was a subtle part of my role, to put them at ease so they could act more naturally. For a period of two to five years, I phoned or visited these couples to keep in touch even as I moved on to study the daily lives of other working couples—black, Chicano, white—from every social class and walk of life.
I asked who did how much of a wide variety of household tasks. I asked who cooks. Vacuums? Makes the beds? Sews? Cares for plants? Sends Christmas or Hanukkah cards? I also asked: Who washes the car? Repairs household appliances? Does the taxes? Tends the yard? I asked who did most household planning, who noticed such things as when a child’s fingernails need clipping, cared more how the house looked or about the change in a child’s mood.
The women I interviewed seemed to be far more deeply torn between the demands of work and family than were their husbands. They talked with more animation and at greater length than their husbands about the abiding conflict between them. Busy as they were, women more often brightened at the idea of yet another interviewing session. They felt the second shift was their issue and most of their husbands agreed. When I telephoned one husband to arrange an interview with him, explaining that I wanted to ask him about how he managed work and family life, he replied genially, “Oh, this will really interest my wife.”
It was a woman who first proposed to me the metaphor, borrowed from industrial life, of the “second shift.” She strongly resisted the idea that homemaking was a “shift.” Her family was her life and she didn’t want it reduced to a job. But as she put it, “You’re on duty at work. You come home, and you’re on duty. Then you go back to work and you’re on duty.” After eight hours of adjusting insurance claims, she came home to put on the rice for dinner, care for her children, and do laundry. Despite her resistance, her home life felt like a second shift. That was the real story and that was the real problem.
Men who shared the load at home seemed just as pressed for time as their wives, and as torn between the demands of career and small children, as the stories of Michael Sherman and Art Winfield will show. But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a loving shoulder to lean on, an understanding ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers. At first it seemed to me that the problem of the second shift was hers. But I came to realize that those husbands who helped very little at home were often indirectly just as deeply affected as their wives through the resentment their wives feel toward them, and through their need to steel themselves against that resentment. Evan Holt, a warehouse furniture salesman described in Chapter 4, did very little housework and played with his four-year-old son, Joey, at his convenience. Juggling the demands of work with family at first seemed a problem for his wife. But Evan himself suffered enormously from the side effects of “her” problem. His wife did the second shift, but she keenly resented it, and half-consciously expressed her frustration and rage by losing interest in sex and becoming overly absorbed with Joey. One way or another, most men I talked with do suffer the severe repercussions of what I think is a transitional phase in American family life.
One reason women took 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 the home. More women kept track of doctors’ appointments, arranged play dates, and kept up with relatives. More mothers than fathers worried about the tail on a child’s Halloween costume or a birthday present for a school friend. While at work they were more likely 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 day care, and the need to show the boss she’s “serious” at work. More women than men questioned how good they were as parents, or if they did not, they questioned why they weren’t questioning it. 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. There is no more time in the day than there was when wives stayed home, but there is twice as much to do. It is mainly women who absorb this “speed-up.” Twenty percent of the men in my study shared housework equally. Seventy percent of men did a substantial amount (less than half but more than a third), and 10 percent did less than a third. Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning—jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But, as one mother pointed out, dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o’clock, whereas the car oil needs changing every six months, any day around that time, anytime that day. Women do more child care than men, and men repair more household appliances. A child needs to be tended daily while household repair can often wait “until I have time.” Men had more control over when they make their contributions than women do. They may be very busy with family chores but, like the executive who tells his secretary to “hold my calls,” the man has more control over his time. The job of the working mother, like that of the secretary, is usually to “take the calls.”
Another reason women may feel more strained than men is that women more often do two things at once—for example, write checks and return phone calls, vacuum and keep an eye on a three-year-old, fold laundry and think out the shopping list. Men more often cook dinner or take a child to the park. Indeed, women more often juggle three spheres—job, children, and housework—while most men juggle two—job and children. For women, two activities compete with their time with children, not just one.
Beyond doing more at home, women also devote proportionately more of their time at home to housework and proportionately less of it to child care. Of all the time men spend working at home, more of it goes to child care. That is, working wives spend relatively more time “mothering the house”; husbands spend more time “mothering” the children. Since most parents prefer to be with their children to cleaning house, men do more of what they’d rather do. More men than women take their children on “fun” outings to the park, the zoo, the movies. Women spend more time on maintenance, such as feeding and bathing children, enjoyable activities to be sure, but often less leisurely or special than going to the zoo. Men also do fewer of the “undesirable” household chores: fewer wash toilets and scrub the bathroom.
As a result, women tend to talk more intently about being overtired, sick, and “emotionally drained.” Many women I could not tear away from the topic of sleep. They talked about how much they could “get by on” … six and a half, seven, seven and a half, less, more. They talked about who they knew who needed more or less. Some apologized for how much sleep they needed—“I’m afraid I need eight hours of sleep”—as if eight was too much. They talked about the effect of a change in baby-sitter, the birth of a second child, or a business trip on their child’s pattern of sleep. They talked about how to avoid fully waking up when a child called them at night, and how to get back to sleep. These women talked about sleep the way a hungry person talks about food.
All in all, if in this period of American history, the two-job family is suffering from a speed-up of work and family life, working mothers are its primary victims. It is ironic, then, that often it falls to women to be the “time and motion expert” of family life. Watching inside homes, I noticed it was often the mother who rushed children, saying, “Hurry up! It’s time to go,” “Finish your cereal now,” “You can do that later,” “Let’s go!” When a bath was crammed into a slot between 7:45 and 8:00 it was often the mother who called out, “Let’s see who can take their bath the quickest!” Often a younger child will rush out, scurrying to be first in bed, while the older and wiser one stalls, resistant, sometimes resentful: “Mother is always rushing us.” Sadly enough, women are more often the lightning rods for family aggressions aroused by the speed-up of work and family life. They are the “villains” in a process of which they are also the primary victims. More than the longer hours, the sleeplessness, and feeling torn, this is the saddest cost to women of the extra month a year.