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

hurry at home because he works long hours at the office. In contrast, the working mother is in a hurry because her time at work is worth so little, and because she has no help at home. The analogy suggested between the two obscures the wage gap between them at work and helps the gap between them at home.
    The
Times
article gives the impression that the working mother is doing so well because she is
personally
competent, not because she has a sound
social
arrangement. Indeed the image of her
private
characteristics obscures all that is missing in
public
support for the working parent. In this respect, the image of the working mother today shares something with that of the black single mother of the 1960s. In celebrating such an image of personal strength, our culture creates an ironic heroism. It extends to middle-class white women a version of womanhood a bit like that offered to poor women of color.
    In speaking of the black single mother, commentators and scholars have sometimes used the term “matriarch,” a derogatory term in American culture, and a term brought to popular attention by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial government report
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
In a section of the report entitled “Tangle of Pathology,” Moynihan cited figures showing that black girls scored higher on school tests than black boys. He also showed that 25 percent of black wives in two-job families earned more than their husbands, while only 18 percent of white wives did. Moynihan quotes social scientist Duncan MacIntyre: “… the underemployment among Negro men and compensating higher labor force propensity among Negro women …both operate to enlarge the mother’s role, undercutting the status of the male and making many Negro families essentially matriarchal.” 1 The implication was that black women should aspire to the standards of white women: perform more poorly on educational tests and earn less than their mates. Reading this, black social scientists such as Elaine Kaplan pointed out that black women were “damned if they worked to support their families and damned if they didn’t.” Black women were cautioned against being so “matriarchal.” But as working mothers in low-paid jobs without much male support, they also legitimately felt themselves the victims of male underemployment. While at the bottom of the social totem pole, they were described as if they were at the top. These women pointed out that they “took charge” of their families not because they wanted to dominate, but because if they didn’t pay the rent, buy the food, cook it, and look after the children, no one else would. Black women would have been delighted to share the work and the decision making with a man. But in Moynihan’s report, the black woman’s dominance came to seem like the problem itself rather than the result of the problem.
    Similarly, the common portrayal of the supermom suggests that she is energetic and competent because these are her
personal
characteristics, not because she has been forced to adapt to an overly demanding schedule. What is hidden in both cases is the extra burden on women. The difference between Moynihan’s portrayal of the black working mother as matriarch and the modern portrayal of the white supermom is an unconscious racism. The supermom has come to seem heroic and good, whereas the matriarch seems unheroic and bad.
    This same extra burden on women was also disguised in the Soviet Union, a large industrial nation that had long employed over 80 percent of its women, and who, according to the Alexander Szalai study (described in Chapter 1 ), work the extra month a year. In a now legendary short story entitled “A Week Like Any Other” by Natalya Baranskaya, Olga, twenty-six, is a technician in a plastics testing laboratory in Moscow and a wife and motherof two. Olga’s supervisor praises her for being a
real
Soviet Woman—a supermom. But when Olga is asked to fill out a