The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home Read Free Page A

over ten years ago, as we were hiking up a mountain and I had talked for half the climb about women’s “double day,” Adam suggested on our way down, “Why not write about it?” For that idea, for the good-humored encouragement, and for the love I have felt all along our way, my deepest gratitude.
    Thanks to my son David, who sets aside his schoolwork and political and ecological concerns to pitch in with the second shift and regale me with hilarious imitations of figures on the American political scene. Thanks also to Gabriel, who took time away from his dog-walking business and poetry writing to bring me cups of Dr. Chang’s herb tea. To inspire me, he even drafted some fictional case studies of Ted and Mary, Robin and Peter, Dick and Rosemary, Sally and Bill, and Asia and Frank, which are more gripping and action-packed than any the reader will find here. One day, he also left a note on my desk under the tea mug, with a small white bow attached, which said, “Congratulations for finishing, Mom.” No mother could ask for more.

Introduction
    In a society marked by individualism, we often think of problems at home as matters of clashing personality (“He’s so selfish,” “She’s so anxious”). But when millions of couples are having similar conversations over who does what at home, it can help to understand just what’s going on outside marriage that’s affecting what goes on inside it. Without that understanding, we can simply continue to adjust to strains of a stalled revolution, take them as “normal,” and wonder why it’s so hard these days to make a marriage work.
    After
The Second Shift
was published, I talked informally to many readers and in the 1990s conducted interviews with more working couples at a Fortune 500 company for
The Time Bind
, the following book. Based on these talks I began to conclude that for many couples the basic dilemma remains.
    Among the variety of responses I encountered, one reader, Shawn Dickinson Finley, wrote a poem about one finding in this book, for the
Dallas Morning News:
    Weekends come. I’d like to relax.
    But he’s tired of work and needs to crash.
    So take care of everything, would you dear?
    While he watches TV and drinks lots of beer.
    At last I’m through—I’m finally done.
    So good night. I have to run
    And hit the pillow and dream a dream
,
    Of the 18 percent who help to clean.
    In New York, an imaginative bride and groom made up marriage vows designed to avoid Finley’s dilemma. “I vow to cook dinners for Dhora,” the groom said, before a stunned and delighted gathering of family and friends. And with a twinkle, the bride replied, “And I promise to eat what Oran cooks.”
    Other couples had become more seriously locked in an anguished struggle, not for time to relax but for time to work. One young Latino father of a two-year-old child explained, “My wife and I both work at low-paying jobs we love and believe in. [He worked for a human rights organization and she worked for an environmental group.] And we can’t afford a maid. We love Julio but he’s two and he’s a handful. I do a lot with him, which I love. [Here his voice was soft, and slow.] But it’s tough because my wife and I have no time for a marriage. It makes me think the unthinkable [Here his voice quavered.]: should we have
had
Julio?”
    Some women found in these pages aid in an ongoing struggle. One working mother left xeroxed pages from the chapter on Nancy and Evan Holt on the refrigerator door. When her husband failed to notice, she placed the pages on his pillow in their bed. As she recounted, “He finally read about how Nancy Holt did all the housework and child care and expressed her resentment for doing so by excluding her husband from the love nest she made for herself and their child. The parallels began to hit him the way they had me.”
    I was sad to learn about what some people imagined as solutions to their struggles. One woman declared, with straightened