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

was more excited about seeing her elderly clients in tenderloin hotels than Evan was about selling couches to furniture salesmen with greased-back hair. Why shouldn’t Evan make as many compromises with his career and his leisure as she’d made with hers? She couldn’t see it Evan’s way, and Evan couldn’t see it hers.
    In years of alternating struggle and compromise, Nancy had seen only fleeting mirages of cooperation, visions that appeared when she got sick or withdrew, and disappeared when she got better or came forward.
    After seven years of loving marriage, Nancy and Evan had finally come to a terrible impasse. They began to snap at each other, to criticize, to carp. Each felt taken advantage of: Evan, because his offer of a good arrangement was deemed unacceptable, and Nancy, because Evan wouldn’t do what she deeply felt was fair.
    This struggle made its way into their sexual life—first through Nancy directly, and then through Joey. Nancy had always disdained any form of feminine wiliness or manipulation. She felt above the underhanded ways traditional women used to get around men. Her family saw her as a flaming feminist and that was how she saw herself. “When I was a teenager,” she mused, “I vowed I would
never
use sex to get my way with a man. It is not self-respecting; it’s demeaning. But when Evan refused to carry his load at home, I did, I used sex. I said, ‘Look, Evan, I would not be this exhausted and asexual every night if I didn’t have so much to face every morning.’” She felt reduced to an old strategy, and her modern ideasmade her ashamed of it. At the same time, she’d run out of other modern ways.
    The idea of a separation arose, and they became frightened. Nancy looked at the deteriorating marriages and fresh divorces of couples with young children around them. One unhappy husband they knew had become so uninvolved in family life (they didn’t know whether his unhappiness made him uninvolved, or whether his lack of involvement made his wife unhappy) that his wife left him. In another case, Nancy felt the wife had nagged her husband so much that he abandoned her for another woman. In both cases, the couple was less happy after the divorce than before. Both wives took the children, fought with their exes about them, and struggled desperately for money and time. Nancy took stock. She asked herself, “Why wreck a marriage over a dirty frying pan?” Is it really worth it?
U PSTAIRS -D OWNSTAIRS : A F AMILY M YTH AS “S OLUTION ”
    Not long after this crisis in the Holts’ marriage, there was a dramatic lessening of tension over the second shift. It was as if the issue was closed. Evan had won. Nancy would do it. Evan expressed vague guilt but beyond that he had nothing to say. Nancy had wearied of continually raising the topic, wearied of the lack of resolution. Now in the exhaustion of defeat, she wanted the struggle to be over too. Evan was “so good” in
other
ways, why debilitate their marriage by continual quarreling? Besides, she told me, “Women always adjust more, don’t they?”
    One day, when I asked Nancy to tell me who did which tasks from a long list of household chores, she interrupted me with a broad wave of her hand and said, “I do the upstairs, Evan does the downstairs.” What does that mean? I asked. Matter-of-factly, she explained that the upstairs included the living room, the diningroom, the kitchen, two bedrooms, and two baths. The downstairs meant the garage, a place for storage and hobbies—Evan’s hobbies. She explained this as a “sharing” arrangement, without humor or irony—just as Evan did later. Both said they had agreed it was the best solution to their dispute. Evan would take care of the car, the garage, and Max, the family dog. As Nancy explained, “The dog is all Evan’s problem. I don’t have to deal with the dog.” Nancy took care of the rest.
    For purposes of accommodating the second shift, then, the Holts’ garage was