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

could use in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, and suggested to Nancy that they go out for Chinese food. On Wednesday, Nancy cooked. On Thursday morning, Nancy reminded Evan, “Tonight it’s your turn.” That night Evan fixed hamburgers and french fries and Nancy was quick to praise him. On Friday, Nancy cooked. On Saturday, Evan forgot again.
    As this pattern continued, Nancy’s reminders became sharper. The sharper they became, the more actively Evan forgot—perhaps anticipating even sharper reprimands if he resisted more directly. This cycle of passive refusal followed by disappointment and anger gradually tightened, and before long the struggle had spread to the task of doing the laundry. Nancy said it was only fair that Evan share the laundry. He agreed in principle, but, anxious that Evan would not share, Nancy wanted a clear, explicit agreement. “You ought to wash and fold every other load,” she had told him. Evan experienced this plan as a yoke around his neck. Onmany weekdays, at this point, a huge pile of laundry sat like a disheveled guest on the living-room couch.
    In her frustration, Nancy began to make subtle jabs at Evan. “I don’t know
what’s
for dinner,” she would say with a sigh. Or “I can’t cook now, I’ve got to deal with this pile of laundry.” She tensed at the slightest criticism about household disorder; if Evan wouldn’t do the housework, he had absolutely
no
right to criticize how she did it. She would burst out angrily: “After work
my
feet are just as tired as
your
feet. I’m just as wound up as you are. I come home. I cook dinner. I wash and I clean. Here we are, planning a second child, and I can’t cope with the one we have.”
    About two years after I first began visiting the Holts, I started to see their problem in a certain light: as a conflict between their two views of gender, each with its load of personal symbols. Nancy wanted to be the sort of woman who was needed and appreciated both at home and at work. She wanted Evan to appreciate her for being a caring social worker, a committed wife, and a wonderful mother. But she cared just as much that she be able to appreciate
Evan
for what
he
contributed at home, not just for how he supported the family. She would feel proud to explain to women friends that she was married to such a man.
    A gender ideology is often rooted in early experience and fueled by motives traced to some cautionary tale in early life. So it was for Nancy:
    My mom was wonderful, a real aristocrat, but she was also terribly depressed being a housewife. My dad treated her like a doormat. She didn’t have any self-confidence. And growing up, I can remember her being really depressed. I grew up bound and determined not to be like her and not to marry a man like my father. As long as Evan doesn’t do the housework, I feel it means he’s going to be like my father—coming home, putting his feet up, and hollering at my mom to serve him. That’s my biggest fear. I’ve had
bad
dreams about that.
    Nancy thought that women friends her age in traditional marriages had come to similarly bad ends. She described a high school friend: “Martha barely made it through City College. She had no interest in learning anything. She spent nine years trailing behind her husband [a salesman]. It’s a miserable marriage. She hand washes all his shirts. The high point of her life was when she was eighteen and the two of us were running around Miami Beach in a Mustang convertible. She’s gained seventy pounds and hates her life.” To Nancy, Martha was a younger version of her mother, depressed, lacking in self-esteem, a cautionary tale whose moral was “If you want to be happy, develop a career and get your husband to share at home.” Asking Evan to help again and again felt like hard work but it was an effort to escape Martha’s fate and her mother’s.
    For his own reasons, Evan imagined things very differently. He loved Nancy and if Nancy loved being a