The Second Shift Chapter 1 Women changed rapidly but the jobs they went out to and the men they came home to have not changed or not so much Marriage has become a shock absorber of tensions borne by this stalled revolution The number of women in paid work has risen steadily since before the turn of the century but since 1950 the rise has been staggering In 1950 30 percent of American women were in the labor force by 2002 that had doubled to 60 percent Over two thirds of mothers married or single now work in fact more mother than non mothers are in the workforce Women now make up 47 percent of the labor force and two job marriages now make up 63 percent of all marriages with children Women believed the second shift was their issue and most of their husband agreed One reason women took a deeper interest than men in the problems of juggling work with their family life is that even when husbands happily shared the hours or work their wives felt more responsible for home and children As masses of women have moved into the economy families have been hit by a speed up in work and family life is that even when husbands happily shared the hours of work their wives felt more responsible for home and children As masses of women have moved into the economy families have been hit by a speed up in work and family life There is no more time in the day than there was when wives stayed home but there is twice as much to get done It is mainly women who absorb this speed up Twenty percent of the men in my study shared housework equally Seventy percent of men did a substantial amount more than a third less than half and 10 percent did less than a third Men have more control over when they make their contributions Another reason women may feel more strained than men is that women more often do two things at once write checks and return phone calls vacuum and watch kids Women more often juggle three spheres of job children housework while men juggle two job and children Women also devote proportionally more of their time at home to housework and proportionately less of it to child care Of all the time men spend working at home more of it goes to child care Since most parents prefer to tend to their children than clean the house men do more of what they d prefer to do Men also do fewer of the undesirable household chores fewer wash toilets and scrub bathroom floors As a result women tend to talk more intently about being overtired sick and emotionally drained All in all if in this period of American history the two job family is suffering from a speed up of work and family life working mothers are its primary victims Women are more often the lightening rods for family aggressions aroused by the speed up of work and family life They are the villains in a process of which they are also the primary victims Chapter 2 Quarrels that erupt result mainly from a fiction between faster changing women and slower changing men rates of change which themselves result from the different rates at which the industrial economy has drawn men and women into itself It is women who are being drawn into wage work and women who are undergoing changes in their way of life and identity Women are departing more from their mothers and grandmothers way of life men are doing so less Both the earlier entrance of men into the industrial economy and the later entrance of women have influenced the relations between men and women especially their relations within marriage The entrance of men into industrialized work did not destabilize the family whereas in the absence of other changes the rise in female employment has accompanied the rise in divorce This strain between the change in women and the absence of change in much else leads me to speak of a stalled revolution A stalled revolution lacks social arrangements that ease life for working parents and lacks men who share the second shift Supermom does all work at home themselves and retains job Shallow ideologies which were contradicted by deeper feelings Deep ideologies which were reinforces by such feelings A gender strategy is a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand given the cultural notions of gender at play To pursue a gender strategy a man or woman draws on beliefs about manhood and womanhood beliefs that are forged in early childhood and thus anchored to deep emotions They make a connection between how he she thinks about their manhood womanhood what he she feels about it and what he she does A woman s gender ideology determines what sphere she wants to identify with home or work and how much power in the marriage she wants to have less more or the same amount Three types of ideology of marital roles traditional transitional and egalitarian Traditional Even though she works the pure traditional woman wants to identify with her activities at home as a wife mother a neighborhood mom wants her husband to base his identity on work and wants less power than him The Traditional man wants the same Egalitarian The pure egalitarian wants to identify with the same spheres as her husband does and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage Some want the couple to be jointly oriented to the home others to their careers or both of them to jointly hold some balance between the two Transitional Any one of a variety of types of blending of the two A transitional woman wants to identify with her role at work as well as at home Unlike the egalitarian she believes her husband should base his identify more on work than she does A typical transitional wants to identify both with the caring for the home and with helping her husband earn money but wants her husband to focus on earning a living A typical transitional man is all for his wife working but expects her to take the main responsibilities at home too Found contradictions between what people said they believed about their marital roles and how they seemed to feel about those roles Develop gender ideology by unconsciously synthesizing certain cultural ideas with feelings about their past They also developed their ideology by taking opportunity into account Some in adolescence they matched their personal assets against the opportunities available to men or women of their type they saw which gender ideology best fit their circumstances and they identified with a certain version of manhood or womanhood Superdad working long hours and keeping his child up late at night to spend time with Or cut back work