The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home by Anne Machung Arlie Hochschild Read Free Book Online

“typical days,” their picture of sharing grew even less convincing. Dorothy worked the same nine-hour day at the office as her husband. But she came home to fix dinner and to tend Timmy while Dan fit in a squash game three nights a week from six to seven (a good time for his squash partner). Dan read the newspaper more often and slept longer.
    Compared to the early interviews, women in the later interviews seemed to speak more often in passing of relationships or marriages that had ended for some other reason but in which it “was also true” that he “didn’t lift a finger at home.” Or the extra month alone did it. One divorcee who typed part of this manuscript echoed this theme when she explained, “I was a potter and lived with a sculptor for eight years. I cooked, shopped, and cleaned because his art took him longer. He said it was fair because he worked harder. But we both worked at home, and I could see that if anyone worked longer hours, I did, because Iearned less with my pots than he earned with his sculpture. That was
hard
to live with, and that’s really why we ended.”
    Some women moved on to slightly more equitable arrangements in the early 1980s, doing a bit less of the second shift than the working mothers I talked to in the late 1970s. Comparing two national surveys of working couples, F. T. Juster found the male slice of the second shift rose from 20 percent in 1965 to 30 percent in 1981, and my study may be a local reflection of this slow national trend. 4 But women like Dorothy Sims, who simply add to their extra month a year a new illusion that they aren’t doing it, represent a sad alternative to the woman with the flying hair—the woman who doesn’t think that’s who she is.
    * This is more true of white and middle-class women than it is of black or poor women, whose mothers often worked outside the home. But the trend I am talking about—an increase from 20 percent of American women in paid jobs in 1900 to 55 percent in 1986—has affected a large number of women.

CHAPTER
3
    The Cultural Cover-up

    I N the apartment across from the little study where I work there is a large bay window that never fails to catch my eye. Peering out from inside, wide-eyed and still, is a life-sized female mannequin in an apron. Her arms are folded and have been for years. She’s there guarding the place, waiting. She reminds me and other passersby that no one is home. Maybe she’s a spoof on the nostalgia for the 1950s “mom,” waiting with milk and cookies for the kids to come home in the era before the two-job family.
    Perhaps the mannequin mom is the occupant’s joke about the darker reality obscured by the image of the woman with the flying hair—briefcase in one hand and child in the other. “There’s really no one home,” it seems to say, “only a false mother.” She invites us to look again at the more common image of the working mother, at what that image hides. The front cover of the
New York Times Magazine
for September 9, 1984, features a working mother walking home with her daughter. The woman is young. She is good-looking. She is smiling. The daughter is smiling as she lugs her mother’s briefcase. The role model is taking, the child is a mini-supermom already. If images could talk, this image would say, “
Women
can combine career and children.” It would say nothing about the “extra month a year,” nothing about men, nothing about flexible work hours. That would be covered up.
    There is no trace of stress, no suggestion that the mother needshelp from others. She isn’t harassed. She’s busy, and it’s glamorous to be busy. Indeed, the image of the on-the-go working mother is very like the glamorous image of the busy top executive. The scarcity of the working mother’s time seems like the scarcity of the top executive’s time. Yet their situations are totally different. The busy top executive is in a hurry at work because his or her time is worth so much. He is in a