Fittingly enough, The Second Shift is the second book I’ve read by the famed sociologist Professor Arlie Russel Hochschild. It’s a book about the second working shift – the one that starts when people, especially parents, come home from work and find themselves confronted with a mound of chores.
I really liked this book. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read this year and I’ve regaled everyone who will listen with facts from it for the past few weeks. Now I’m taking that regaling online. I’m not going to do a full summary of it because I think a lot of its ideas have entered the cultural consciousness; it’s well known that women continue to do the majority of work at home and have less time for leisure than men and this popular comic about mental load summarizes that section of the book better than I ever could.
But even still, there’s lots of interesting anecdotes and figures to share.
(A quick note: This book focused on heterosexual couples because gay couples are much better at sharing the second shift. I’m going to use gendered language for partners that assumes heterosexual relationships throughout this post because this book talked about a problem of heterosexual relationships; specifically, it talked about a problem with how men act in heterosexual relationships.)
"Transitional" men are worse than traditional men
Professor Hochschild identifies three types of men. There are the traditional men, who believe in traditional gender roles and separate spheres for the sexes. These are the men who’d prefer to earn the money while their wives keep the house. Then there are the egalitarian men – the men who believe that men and women are equal and try (with varying amounts of success) to transfer this political principle to their personal relationships.
Then there are the transitional men. These men aren’t against women having careers, per se (like traditional men might be). Transitional man accept that women can be part of the workforce and often welcome the extra paycheque. Unfortunately, transitional men haven’t bought all the way into equality. They also believe that women should be in charge and do most of the work at home.
Transitional men were the worst sharers of chores. Seventy percent of egalitarian men shared the chores entirely. The rest did between 30% and 45% of them, an amount Professor Hochschild labelled “moderate” (none did less than 30% of the chores, labelled as “little”). Of traditional men, 22% shared entirely and 33% did little (with the balance doing a moderate amount). The transitionals? 3% shared, 10% did a moderate amount and a full 87% did little.
This seems to be because transitional men expect women to deal with a lack of time by cutting back at work. The transitional men profiled in the book tended to be emotionally supportive of the women in their lives who were caught between work and home, but most refused to support their partners by actually helping out more.
People talk about women wanting to “have it all”, with a career and motherhood. But if anyone should be accused of wanting to “have it all”, it’s these men. They wanted the extra spending money their wife brought in with her job, but weren’t prepared to support her in the chores at home. To these men, their wife being able to work was contingent on her first completing her “more important” duties in the home.
Working more can be a way to escape chores
Some couples try and have the same amount of leisure time, rather than do the same amount of chores. This allows them to balance things out if one partner works more. It also can set up bad incentives. Some of the men in this book used their long hours (and high salaries) as an excuse not to do chores at home.
When Prof. Hochschild looked at these men more closely, she discovered that they enjoyed their jobs much more than they enjoyed doing chores. It wasn’t that the jobs didn’t leave them drained – they certainly weren’t faking their need to flop down in front of the TV at the end of a day – but despite that, these men wouldn’t have chosen helping out with chores over being drained. They found work fulfilling, while chores were just a boring obligation.
The negative impacts of overtime work seem to pop up in a few studies. There’s no good reason (beyond signalling your dedication to your job) to work more than forty hours a week long-term. You simply can’t get anything more done. It’s better for your relationship (and your health!) to take some of the extra overtime you might do and spend it at home helping with chores.
Not everyone has the freedom to bring this up at work and not everyone enjoys their work. You might be stuck in a job you don’t like, a job that demands a lot of overtime to prove that you’re serious and this overtime might take a toll on you (like studies suggest it does). If you leaving that job isn’t feasible, you don’t like your job, and your partner works fewer hours or enjoys their job more, then it probably is fair for your partner to take on more of the housework. In all other cases, you probably shouldn’t use working longer hours as an excuse to do less of the housework, at least not if equality is important in your partnership.
This also applies to personal projects, even if they might increase your employability, bring in a bit of extra cash, or bring value to your community. If you’re an aspiring author and spend an hour writing each night, this shouldn’t entitle you to any lesser share of the chores. If you’re studying a subject you enjoy, you shouldn’t use night class as an excuse to shirk housework. And volunteering, while laudable, is an activity that you do. It shouldn’t entitle you to a pass on chores.
Family Myths
The most distressing tale (to me) in the whole book was the story of Nancy and Evan Holt. Nancy was an ardent feminist and egalitarian, while Evan was a transitional. Evan was happy that Nancy liked her job, but thought that the home should be primarily her responsibility. Nancy wanted Evan to share the second shift.
They clashed over this mismatch for years. Here’s what happened when Nancy tried to get Evan to share the cooking:
Nancy said the first week of the new plan went as follows. On Monday, she cooked. For Tuesday, Evan planned a meal that required shopping for a few ingredients, but on his way home he forgot to shop for them. He came home, saw nothing he could use in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, and suggested to Nancy that they go out for Chinese food. On Wednesday, Nancy cooked. On Thursday morning, Nancy reminded Evan, “Tonight it’s your turn.” That night Evan fixed hamburgers and french fries and Nancy was quick to praise him. On Friday, Nancy cooked. On Saturday, Evan forgot again.
As this pattern continued, Nancy’s reminders became sharper. The sharper they became, the more actively Evan forgot—perhaps anticipating even sharper reprimands if he resisted more directly. This cycle of passive refusal followed by disappointment and anger gradually tightened, and before long the struggle had spread to the task of doing the laundry.
Evan kept up his passive resistance for years and eventually Nancy cut back her hours at work in order to have more time for the second shift. But this was never framed as a capitulation. Instead, it coincided with the family myth that they were sharing the chores.
How? Well, they’d ‘split the house in half’. Nancy took the upstairs (cooking, cleaning, the majority of childcare) and Evan took the downstairs (fixing the car, dealing with the yard, and maintaining the house). For all that this apparently represented an even split, it wasn’t. Not only did Evan spend less time doing chores than Nancy, the chores he did gave him more freedom. It’s much easier to put off mowing the yard or some bit of home maintenance than it is to put off picking up your kid from daycare or cooking a meal.
The myth of the work being split in half allowed Nancy to feel like she hadn’t capitulated on her feminist principles, even though she had. From a certain point of view, the family myth was a useful fiction – it probably saved Nancy and Evan’s marriage. But it opened my eyes to the very real danger of allowing a convenient myth to become an unquestioned truth. It reminded me to be careful of any convenient myths and to favour data (e.g. directly comparing how much time my partner and I spend doing chores) over stories when deciding if things are fair.
Passive avoidance and making do with less
Another tactic favoured by men like Evan Holt who have little interest in helping with the second shift requires a combination of passive avoidance and making do with less. We saw the first half of this above. It was the strategy Evan used to get out of cooking. By forgetting the ingredients, he got out of the chore.
Passive avoidance allows for lazy partners to avoid chores they don’t want to do without having to have a conversation about why they’re avoiding them or if it is fair for them to. It was much easier for Evan to be berated for forgetting (a common human frailty) than for not wanting to split chores fairly, which Nancy might have taken (correctly?) to imply something about how much Evan cared about her.
On its own, this was a moderately effective way of getting out of work. To be truly effective, it had to be paired with making do with less. In the book, men who wanted their wives to do more of the cleaning claimed that their wife wanted things too clean; if it was just them, they’d clean much less often. Men who wanted to get out of cooking claimed that takeout was good enough for them. Men who were too lazy to help their wives shop for furniture claimed that they were perfectly happy in a bare house. Men who wished to get out of childcare said they were coddling the child too much and that their children should learn to be more independent.
By passively avoiding chores and then loudly claiming that the whole chore was unnecessary, men made their wives feel like asking for their help was an unreasonable imposition.
In The Second Shift, this was a highly gendered interaction. There were no women claiming that their husbands’ standards of cleanliness were too exacting. And while there’s no reason that this has to always be gendered, I suspect that as long as women are raised with more knowledge of chores (and expectations that they will be the ones to do them), this trend will continue.
The thing I find particularly unfortunate about this tactic is that it sets up a race to the bottom. Having the chores go to whomever cares the most sets up a terrible system of competitive insouciance.
While I acknowledge that it certainly is possible for partners to have very real differences in their desired level of cleanliness or in their desired calibre of meal preparation, I think it makes sense to have a strong habit of discounting those, so as to ensure a good incentive structure. As long as each partner has even one thing they care about more than the other, it should be possible for them to cultivate empathy and avoid the insidious temptation to put off chores by making do with less.
Not all chores are created equal
Even when men were splitting the chores evenly, this didn’t always translate to less work for their partners. The illustrative example here was Greg and Carol Alston. Both spent about the same amount of time working on tasks around the house, but this was driven in part by Greg taking on a variety of home improvement tasks.
Had Greg not done those, the family’s daily situation would have been the exact same. That’s not to say that this work at home wasn’t benefiting the family. It was increasing the resale value of their house and making their long-held dream of a move to the mountains and part-time work that much closer to fruition.
The Second Shift opened my eyes to the reality that some chores must get done in a household and it’s these chores on which I now want to judge sharing the second shift. It’s only these disruptive daily chores that can’t be set aside for something more important.
If Greg was exhausted, or sick, he could easily work less on the kitchen cabinets and make it up when he felt better. Carol had no such luck with her chores. Their daughter had to get fed and bathed regardless of how Carol felt.
Greg somewhat redeemed this imbalance by being entirely willing to help out with the daily chores when Carol needed him. If she was sick, he undoubtedly would have stepped in to help. This still left the burden of managing those daily chores and making sure they got done to Carol, but it offered her some buffer.
What chores are daily necessities will probably vary from couple to couple. If you and your partner are habitually neat but bad at cooking, you might decide that it is important that the house is tidied up daily, but you won’t mind if meals come from takeout.
In discussions with your partner about the second shift, it seems especially worthwhile to determine which chores you and your partner consider absolutely mandatory and ensure that in addition to balancing chores in general, you are approximately balanced here. Otherwise, the chores you do might not be lightening the load on your partner at all.
Gratitude
Despite that fact that Greg’s carpentry projects didn’t really reduce the burden on her, Carol was happy that he was doing them. For one, Greg treated her as someone with important opinions. He may have planned the projects, but he actively sought out and valued her input. In addition, by doing this, Greg was helping make one of Carol’s lifelong dreams a reality. Carol was grateful for the work that Greg was doing around the house.
Reading The Second Shift, it struck me how gratitude was the most important factor in how couples felt about how they split the chores. When one partner expected gratitude, but didn’t receive it, they felt a lot of resentment towards the other. Conversely, relationships were strengthened when one of the partners felt grateful for the things the other did by default.
This showed up in surprising places. When Nina Tanagawa started making more money than her husband Peter, he expected her to grateful that he was willing to accept it. On the other hand, when Ann Myerson started earning more than her husband Robert, he was ecstatic. He’s quoted as saying “[w]hen my wife started to earn more than I did, I thought I’d struck gold.” When furniture arrived, he was the one who waited for it, because it just made sense to him that the person making less money should take the time off work. His wife was reciprocally grateful that he wanted her to have a career and didn’t care if she made more than him. The existence of men like Peter made Ann grateful for Robert.
The worst situation was when one partner expected gratitude for something the other took for granted. When Jessica Stein cut back on work after the birth of her children, her husband Seth treated it like the natural order of the world. To Jessica, it stung. It wasn’t how she’d seen her life going. She’d thought that their careers would be treated as equally important. She expected gratitude (and perhaps equal sacrifices from Seth) in response to her sacrifice.
Seth’s “sacrifice” was working long hours for a large salary. But this wasn’t the sacrifice Jessica wanted of him. She wanted him to be present and helpful. Because of this mismatch, Jessica ended up withdrawing from her marriage and children. She spent the weekends in Seattle (she lived in the San Francisco bay area), with her old college friends. Professor Hochschild described the couple as “divorced in spirit”.
It's all in the culture
So much of what drove gratitude was cultural. Nina felt grateful that her husband “tolerated” her higher salary because when she looked around at the other women she knew, she saw many of them married to men who wouldn’t have “tolerated” their wife making more than them.
Many of the men in Professor Hochschild’s study almost shared the second shift. They did something like 40% of the tasks around the home and with the kids. Interestingly, the wives of these men often felt like they shared (even though the men were likely to say that their wives did more). This became a sort of family myth of its own, that these men entirely shared, instead of almost entirely shared. Professor Hochschild suggests that this myth arose because when compared to other husbands, these men did so much more.
Who won conflicts about the second shift was often determined by the broader patterns of culture as well. If a husband did much more housework than the average (or was more willing to “tolerate” his wife working), then his wife was much less likely to be successful in causing him to contribute more. When compared against the reference class of “society”, many men did quite well, even though they were objectively lazy when compared to their wife.
This is a pattern I’ve observed in many relationship negotiations (both in my own life and in stories told by friends). It’s really hard to get the partner who is more willing to leave the relationship to do something they don’t want to do. In relationships that aren’t abusive or manipulative, people only do the things they freely choose. They obviously won’t freely choose to do anything that they like less than breaking up. But the very fact that breaking up will hurt them less than their partner makes it very hard for their partner to feel like they can push for changes.
In one of the two profiled couples who actually shared the second shift equally (Adrienne and Michael Sherman), their equality was brought about because Adrienne actually left Michael after his refusal to share the second shift and his insistence that his career come first. After two months, Michael called Adrienne and told her that he’d share. He loved her and didn’t feel like he could love anyone else as deeply as he loved her. She came back and they shared the housework and raising the kids. Michael surprised himself by how much he enjoyed it. He became the best father he knew and he took pride in this. But none of this would have been possible if Adrienne hadn’t been willing to leave.
While the division of the second shift is ostensibly an agreement among individuals, I don’t think the overarching problem is best addressed individually. As long as women feel like they’re getting a good deal when men almost do their fair share, many men won’t do any more. Policies – like extended, non-transferable parental leave after the birth of a child – that encourage men to spend time at home sharing the second shift are a necessary component of ending this gendered divide.