The Second Shift Reader Guide

The Second Shift A Reader’s Guide for the Sociology of Gender The Second Shift is a great book about a mundane, but fascinating topic: the tensions experienced within American families between the demands of work and the demands of childcare and housework. The book is very well-written and its author, sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is renowned for her research on gender, work and family. For the purposes of our class, though, the book is somewhat long (almost 300 pages). Although you must read the entire book for this course, not every single chapter is equally important or relevant to our studies. Therefore, I’ve written this reader’s guide to help you focus your energies on particular themes in the book. Note that this is a very general guide to the book, not a replacement of it! Note: In Chapters 4-12, Hochschild details the beliefs and behaviors of different dual-earner families. For each couple, keep track of their social location in terms of race/ethnicity, educational attainment and social class. How do the particular class constraints on these families shape how they allocate their second shift? Does the family outsource childcare? …housework? Do they eat take-out food or frozen dinners; do they hire a nanny; do they use day care or a cleaning service? Use the worksheet at the end of this handout to help you keep track of the marital ideologies, conflict and gender strategies of each couple. Chapter 1. A Speed-up in the Family. Among employed people with families, women work a “double day” or “second shift” or an extra month a year, comprised by the additional time women spend on housework and childcare compared to men. Hochschild describes her research housework and child care among dual-earner married couples: systematic and snowball sampling to identify couples; structured interviews and participant observation. (See Appendix, especially pp. 287-292, for more details.) As real wages fell for male bread-winners, large numbers of women moved into the paid labor force to compensate for budget shortfalls. Families (women, especially) absorbed the accompanying “speed-up” in work and family life. Chapter 2. Marriage in the Stalled Revolution. Women’s roles have changed substantially to include both family and work, while men’s roles, work demands, and demands of childrearing have changed very little. Women, who bear the brunt of this “stalled revolution,” tend to see their “double day” as an individual hurdle, instead of the shared social problem which it is. Women and men adapt different gender strategies to make sense of conflicting role demands and their deep and shallow gender and marital ideologies. (The “supermom strategy” is a gender strategy in which the working mom does it all.) Three ideal types of marital/gender ideologies are relevant to the study. Traditional is the belief that the husband’s role should be as sole breadwinner and the wife’s role should be as sole homemaker/childrearer. The traditional person believes that, even if the woman works for pay, she “wants to identify with her activities at home (as a wife, a mother, a neighborhood mom)…and have less power” than her husband and that, even if his wife also works for pay and even if he does do housework and childcare, the man has his base at work and wants his wife’s base in the home (p. 15). The person holding a purely egalitarian ideology expects that men and women identify in the same spheres (of work, of family, or some combination of the two) and share power within marriage equally. Between the traditional and egalitarian ideologies is the transitional ideology in which the husband identifies as the primary breadwinner who supports his wife’s desire to work (to help earn money) as long as she also identifies primarily with the home. Transitional women want to balance work and family for themselves while they want their husbands to identify with work, while transitional men want to identify with work and expect their working wives to balance the demands of work and family. (Other important terms: ideologies “on top” or “underneath,” economy of gratitude, and family myths.) Chapter 3. The Cultural Cover-up. Conflicts between the demands of work and family are treated as personal issues of individual women instead of treated as social problems shared by women and by women and men. Chapter 4. Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt. The Holts, Nancy and Evan, are first couple Hochschild profiles. Nancy holds an egalitarian ideology while Evan holds a transitional ideology. Like many dual-earner families, the Holts have a leisure gap in which the husband/ father Evan has more leisure time than wife/mother Nancy. The couple maintain two myths about childcare and housework. Evan frames his son’s and wife’s mutual attachment, to his own exclusion, as “Joey’s problem,” not the lack of his own involvement as a father in his son’s life. After much tension and struggle, Nancy maintains that she has an egalitarian relationship with Evan regarding housework: she does the “upstairs” while he does the “downstairs.” Chapter 5. The Family Myth of the Traditional: Frank and Carmen Delacorte. Frank and Carmen, a working-class couple, both traditional ideologies. Unlike the Holts, the Delacortes share the same ideology with regard to how they’d like to behave with respect to work and family. Like so many families, Franks pay check isn’t large enough to make ends meet, so Carmen must work for pay. One gender strategy Carmen and Frank use to ease the sting of her economic power in the family is her submissiveness and feigned incompetence. Chapter 6. A Notion of Manhood and Giving Thanks: Peter and Nina Tanagawa. The Tanagawas both started out as holding transitional ideologies. Peter sees his role in the family as supporting Nina’s parenting, not parenting himself. He takes this stance despite his more intuitive emotional connection with his daughters and even when his eldest child is in crisis (pp. 93-94, 98). The couple’s main conflict is that Peter is less interested in his work than he intended, while Nina is more interested in her work than she intended (pp. 82-83, 94-99). Nina’s career success (and her salary) surpassed her husband’s. While she saw this as an opportunity for him to switch careers to something more rewarding, he couldn’t accept her generosity because her success impugned his masculinity (p. 86-90). Chapter 7. Having It All and Giving It Up: Ann and Robert Myerson. The Myersons each straddle the line between egalitarian and transitional ideologies. Both successful professionals, at one point Ann earned more than Robert. Unlike Peter Tanagawa who resented his wife’s earning, Robert felt like he “struck gold” (p. 108). Although the couple shared power within their marital relationship and they shared the family myth that they shared equally their home and family responsibilities, in reality Ann actually did more of the second shift. Ann eventually quits her job as struggles with her gender and marital ideologies. Be sure to read her poignant advice to young women contemplating entering a two-job marriage (pp. 114-115). Chapter 8. A Scarcity of Gratitude: Seth and Jessica Stein. Both lawyers, Jessica held an egalitarian ideology while Seth held a transitional ideology thinly disguised as egalitarian. Jessica wanted her husband to want to share the second shift and to want to be a more emotionally involved parent, while Seth wanted his wife to not resent taking on and managing the second shift. Seth’s gender strategy, his unquestioning belief in the centrality of his career and its demands, allows him to dwell on his leisure time sacrifices; Jessica instead dwells on her career sacrifices (pp. 119, 123124). The Stein family relies especially heavily on paid help for their housework and childcare needs (pp. 126-129). Chapter 9. An Unsteady Marriage and a Job She Loves: Anita and Ray Judson. A working-class couple, the Judsons both hold transitional ideologies. Their personal histories filled economic and racial struggles are part of their conflict. Ray’s masculinity is tied up with his role as breadwinner Worksheet on Marital Ideologies, Couple Conflict & Gender Strategies in The Second Shift. Couple Nancy & Evan Holt Wife’s Ideology† egalitarian Husband’s Ideology† Conflict transitional Carmen & Frank Delacorte Nina & Peter Tanagawa Ann & Robert Myerson Jessica & Seth Stein Anita & Ray Judson Carol & Greg Alston Barbara & John Livingston Adrienne & Michael Sherman Julia & Art Winfield † Marital ideologies are: Traditional, Egalitarian, or Transitional. Gender Strategy Comments