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

social worker, he was happy and proud to support her in it. He knew that because she took her caseload so seriously, it was draining work. But at the same time, he did not see why, just because she chose this demanding career,
he
had to change
his own
life. Why should her personal decision to work outside the home require him to do more inside it? Nancy earned about two-thirds as much as Evan, and her salary was a big help, but as Nancy confided, “If push came to shove, we could do without it.” Nancy was a social worker because she loved it. Doing daily chores at home was thankless work, and certainly not something Evan needed her to appreciate about him. Equality in the second shift meant a loss in his standard of living, and despite all the high-flown talk, he felt he hadn’t
really
bargained for it. He was happy to help Nancy at home if she needed help; that was fine. That was only decent. But it was too sticky a matter committing himself to some formal even-steven type plan.
    Two other beliefs probably fueled his resistance as well. The first was his suspicion that if he shared the second shift with Nancy, she would dominate him. Nancy would ask him to dothis, ask him to do that. It felt to Evan as if Nancy had won so many small victories that he had to draw the line somewhere. Nancy had a declarative personality; and as she confided, “Evan’s mother sat me down and told me once that I was too forceful, that Evan needed to take more authority.” Both Nancy and Evan agreed that Evan’s sense of career and self was in fact shakier than hers. He had been unemployed. She never had. He had had some bouts of drinking in the past. Drinking was foreign to her. Evan thought that sharing housework would upset a certain balance of power that felt culturally right. He held the purse strings and made the major decisions about large purchases (like their house) because he “knew more about finances” and because he’d chipped in more inheritance than she when they married. His job difficulties had lowered his self-respect, and now as a couple they had achieved some ineffable balance—tilted in his favor, she thought—which, if corrected to equalize the burden of chores, would result in his giving in “too much.” A certain driving anxiety behind Nancy’s strategy of actively renegotiating roles had made Evan see agreement as “giving in.” When he wasn’t feeling good about work, he dreaded the idea of being under his wife’s thumb at home.
    Underneath these feelings, Evan perhaps also feared that Nancy was avoiding taking care of
him.
His own mother, a mild-mannered alcoholic, had by imperceptible steps phased herself out of a mother’s role, leaving him very much on his own. Perhaps a personal motive to prevent that happening in his marriage—a guess on my part, and unarticulated on his—underlay his strategy of passive resistance. And he wasn’t altogether wrong to fear this. Meanwhile, he felt he was offering Nancy the chance to stay home or cut back her hours, and that she was refusing his gift, while Nancy felt that, given her feelings, this offer was hardly a gift.
    In the sixth year of their marriage, when Nancy again intensified her pressure on Evan to commit himself to equal sharing, Evan recalled saying, “Nancy, why don’t you cut back to half time, that way you can fit everything in.” At first Nancy was baffled:
    “We’ve been married all this time, and you
still
don’t get it. Work is important to me. I worked
hard
to get my MSW. Why
should
I give it up?” Nancy also explained to Evan and later to me, “I think my degree and my job has been my way of reassuring myself that I won’t end up like my mother.” Yet she’d received little emotional support in getting her degree from either her parents or her in-laws. (Her mother had avoided asking about her thesis, and her in-laws, though invited, did not attend her graduation, later claiming they’d never been invited.)
    In addition, Nancy