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

questionnaire listing her hobbies, she answers, “Personally my hobby is running, running here, running there….” Like the black matriarch, and the multiracial supermom, the image of the real Soviet woman confines a
social
problem to the realm of
personal
character.
    Missing from the image of the supermom is the day-care worker, the baby-sitter, the maid—a woman usually in a blue collar position to whom some white collar couples pass much, although not all, of the work of the second shift. In the image, the supermom is almost always white and at least middle class. In reality, of course, day-care workers, baby-sitters, au pairs, nannies, maids, and housekeepers are often part of two-job couples as well. This growing army of women is taking over the parts of a mother’s role that employed women relinquish. Most maids and baby-sitters also stay in their occupations for life. But who can afford a house cleaner? In 2010, the median household income was about $50,000. There were 1,470,000 maids and house cleaners and 312,000,000 Americans. So for the average American, outsourcing is not a primary solution.
    In the world of advertising images, the maid is often replaced by a machine. In television ads, for example, we see an elegant woman lightly touching her new refrigerator or microwave oven. Her husband may not be helping her at home, but her
machine
is. She and
it
are a team. 2 In the real world, however, machines don’t always save time. As the sociologist Joan Vanek pointed out in her study of homemakers in the 1920s and 1960s, even with more labor-saving appliances, the later homemakers spent as much time on housework as the earlier ones. The 1960s homemakers spent less time cleaning and washing the house; machines helped with that. But they spent more time shopping, getting appliances repaired, washing clothes (as standards of cleanliness rose), and doing bookkeeping. Eighty-five percent of the working couples I interviewed did not employ regular household help; it was up tothem and their “mechanical helpmates.” Since these took time they didn’t have, many dropped their standards of housekeeping.
    The image of the woman with the flying hair is missing someone else too: her husband. In the absence of a maid, and with household appliances that still take time, a husband’s hand becomes important. Yet in the popular culture the image of the working father is largely missing, and with it the very issue of
sharing.
With the disappearance of this issue, ideas of struggle and marital tension over the lack of sharing are also smuggled out of view. One advertising image shows us a woman just home from work fixing a quick meal with Uncle Ben’s rice; the person shown eating it with great relish is a man. In a 1978 study of television advertising, Olive Courtney and Thomas Whipple found that men are shown
demonstrating
products that help with domestic chores, but usually not
using
them. Women are often shown serving men and boys, but men and boys are seldom shown serving women and girls.
    In the world of print as well, the male of the two-job couple is often invisible. There are dozens of advice books for working mothers, telling them how to “get organized,” “make lists,” “prioritize,” but I found no such books for working fathers. In her book
Having It All,
Helen Gurley Brown, inventor of the “Cosmo Girl” and the author of
Sex and the Single Girl,
tells readers in a chatty, girl-to-girl voice how to rise from clerical work to stardom, and how to combine this career success with being feminine and married. She offers women flamboyant advice on how to combine being sexy with career success, but goes light and thin on how to be a good mother. Women can have fame and fortune, office affairs, silicone injections, and dazzling designer clothes, in Brown’s world. But the one thing they can’t have, apparently, is a man who shares the work at home. Referring to her own husband, Brown writes: “Whether a man