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A woman's 'second shift'
By Lee Kucera
According to NBC Nightly News, a recent survey of working mothers in industrialized nations around the world indicated that women with paid jobs and children under the age of 18 are feeling a lot of stress. It must have been a slow news day. That's like hiring a team of astronomers to document the fact that the sun rises in the east.
In sociologist Arlie Hochschild's landmark 1989 book, The Second Shift, the author summarized more than a decade of research showing that in 80 percent of two-parent American families, women are responsible for the majority of household and child-rearing tasks regardless of their demographic circumstances. It makes no difference whether they are in their 20s or their 40s, rich or poor, well-educated or not, married or not, Caucasian, Asian, Latina or African-American. The common thread among women in all of these groups is that they do most of the shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, pediatricians' appointments, birthday parties, and 101 other tasks involved in rearing children and running a household. Even women who work for eight hours (or more) a day at paying jobs outside the home still assume the brunt of the domestic work that is required to keep a family going. In essence, they come home to a "second shift"--hence the book's title --from which their male partners are largely exempt. Are we surprised that they feel stress?
When women entered the workplace in large numbers in the '70s and '80s, nobody had thought much about what we were supposed to do with our children, or how households were supposed to run by themselves. Those questions still haven't been answered. Even if a working mother is lucky enough to find adequate child care, she still lives in constant fear that her child will wake up with a fever on the morning she has a meeting or a deadline that simply can't be missed, that the school will call with some emergency, that the au pair (if the family is wealthy) will get sick or quit, that she has to invent a lie or take a vacation day to attend an important event at school. She still falls into bed exhausted from trying to cram the full-time job of household work into the four or five hours that remain after her paying job ends.
Professional women are no longer being advised in magazines, as they were in the '70s, not to keep pictures of their children on their desks at work if they want to be taken seriously at their jobs. But any real adjustments in the social and professional support systems that would make their dual responsibility any easier are too few and too slow. The division of labor within households hasn't changed significantly since Father Knows Best, and we still haven't bridged the cast-in-stone dichotomy between professional life and home life that exists for most working parents. Parenting is not a circumstance that people can erase as soon as they put on a suit and drive to work; nor should they. We need to acknowledge its central place and integrate the two halves of our lives so that neither parent is limited by what author Ann Elliot Crompton called "this cheat, this half-life: either work, or children."
For openers, we need to make child care in this country more than the underpaid, luck-of-the-draw provision it is now for most families. We live in the midst of one of the greatest concentrations of corporate wealth in the country. Multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies can afford obscene salaries for their chief executives, generous stock options for employees, luxurious perks such as on-site workout centers and lavish holiday parties. They should be able to subsidize on-site child care.
And they should do it automatically, affirming that the most important obligation of their employees' lives--parenting--is a fundamental value, rather than ignoring or dismissing that obligation as a professional liability. I believe they could afford it--and would also be open to some other solutions, such as job-sharing and long-term maternity leaves and more flexible professional tracks for parents in general--if the nitty-gritty of child-rearing were not still a "woman's problem."
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
