Fatima ShaikhJune 17, 2009Sociology 111

Randles

Reading ResponseIn Arlie Hochschild’s book called the second shift, she talks about women that come back from

work and do housework and/or childcare in what she terms the second shift. When she averages estimates

from the major studies on time use done in the 1960s and 1970s, she finds that women work about 15

hours longer each week than men. Over a year this makes women working an extra month of twenty-four

hour days.

Hochschild begins research on this issue because she wants to understand what the wife’s extra

month a year meant for the husband and wife each, and what it does for love and marriage in a time where

there is such a high divorce rate. She also finds it significant to do this research because most married

couples work two jobs, and that more will in the future.

Hochschild interviewed fifty couples very intensively and observed in a dozen homes. They had a

comparison group of artisans, students and professionals in Berkeley, California. To get more typical

mainstream families, Hochschild and her research associates sent out questionnaires on every thirteenth

name from top to bottom from a personnel roster of a large urban manufacturing company. At the end of

the questionnaire they asked members of working couples raising children under age six and working full-

time jobs if they would talk more with them. They also talked to men and women who were not in two job

couples, divorced parents who were in two job marriages and traditional couples, so they could see what

strain was unique to two job couples. She also studied black and Chicano couples, and people from every

“social class and walk of life”. She would ask questions such as who cooks, vacuums, makes the beds,

sews, care for plants. She also asked who washes the car, repairs household appliances, does the taxes,

maintained the yard. She also asked who does most household planning.

The women that were interviewed were more affected by the demands of work and family than

their husbands because that the women felt more responsible for the home and children. The women and

most of their husbands felt that the second shift was a woman’s issue. However, the husbands who didn’t

do very much around the house were indirectly affected just as much as their wives by the need to do the

work, through the bitterness their wives felt at them, and through their need to “steel” themselves against

their wives bitterness. Because women felt more responsible, women felt more sense of conflict between

the urgency of caring for children and to show the boss that she’s being diligent. Even in couples where

they shared the work more equally women did two-thirds of the daily jobs at home-like cooking and

cleaning up-jobs that fixed them in a regular routine.

Hochschild defines a stalled revolution as the strain between the change in women and the

absence of a change in much else. She says that a society that doesn’t suffer from a stalled revolution

would be adapted to the fact that most women work outside the home, such as by the workplace allowing

parents to work part-time, share jobs, take parental leaves to give birth, take care of a sick child or even a

child that isn’t sick. She says that a stalled revolution lacks social arrangements that ease life for working

parents and lacks men who share the second shift.

A woman’s gender ideology establishes whether she wants to identify with home or work and how

much power she wants to have in a marriage. Hochschild found three types of ideologies of marital roles:

traditional, transitional, and egalitarian. The purely traditional woman wants to be a stay at home mom, and

wants her husband to base his identity on work. She wants less power in the relationship than him. The

traditional man wants the same thing. The purely egalitarian woman wants to identify with the same

spheres as her husband and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage. Some want the couple to

be jointly oriented to the home, some to their careers, or both of them to hold some balance between the

two together. Between the traditional and egalitarian is the transitional which is the between the two. Unlike

the traditional, the transitional woman wants to identify with both her role at work and her role in the home.

Dissimilarly than the egalitarian, she believes that her husband should base his identity more on work than

she does. Most of the men and women Hochschild talked with were transitional. It is important to note that

Hochschild did find contradictions between what they believed about their marital roles (such as that they

shared work equally) and how they seemed to feel about those roles. For example a man might seem

egalitarian but is actually traditional.

Hochschild defines a gender strategy as the way a man or woman applies himself to situations that

face him in real life. Strategy means his plan of action and also to his emotional preparations for pursuing it.

For example, he might plan to cut his hours at work to spend more time with his kids. A gender strategy is

the basic dynamic for marriage, and marriage is the “magnet for strains of the stalled revolution” (18).

Hochschild says that “the interplay between a man’s gender ideology and a woman’s implies a deeper

interplay between his gratitude towards her, and hers towards him” (19). An example she gives is that if a

man doesn’t think a man should earn less than his wife, but he bears it out anyway, bearing it is like a “gift”

to his wife. She gives the profound statement that when couples struggle it’s hardly ever about who does

what, it is more often about the giving and receiving of gratitude.

Hochschild defines the family myth as a version “of reality that obscure a core truth in order to manage

a family tension” (19). She gives an example that some women think that they are sharing the work equally,

but they really aren’t. This is a chilling note that she ends the chapter with.

Patricia Hill Collins would say to Arlie Hochschild that feminist theorizing about motherhood shows that

stressing the father as a patriarch in a decontextualized nuclear family warps the experiences of women in

different family structures with different political economies. Collins would say that for women of color the

subjective experience of mothering or motherhood is enmeshed in the concern of racial ethnic

communities. Hochschild would say she interviewed people of color. To contrast even more, Collins would

say that for women of color women’s reproductive labor is seen as work benefiting the whole family, not just

men. Hochschild would quote Kate Shanley in Collins own work in saying that mainstream feminists are

trying to redefine family and community in a way that Indian women had known for a long time. Collins

would also say that mothers have to pass on to their children a positive racial identity in a world where their

racial identity is disparaged-and that white mothers don’t have to do this. Collins would say that the burden

on colored mothers is more than that of white middle class mothers. As a result of the conversation,

Hochschild would agree.

The second shift has to do with how gender roles are changing from women entering the workforce.

Over time, women are changing from being traditional to more egalitarian as they move into the workforce.

Working women are finding it hard to juggle both home and work, and some now expect their husbands to

pitch in. How can these women be helped? As Hochschild says a society that does not suffer from the

stalled revolution would have workplaces that allowed parents to work part-time, to share jobs, to take

parental leaves to give birth, take care of a sick kid or care for a well child. For the benefit of all involved,

making the stalled revolution simply a revolution will do wonders.