Focus 580; The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home

Obviously sees that as part of her job yet as the way he agreed to he's you know he's looking at it as well I'm going to work I'm bringing home a wage I'm holding up my end of the deal. Yes that's right. And so the problem what I at least what I'm seeing there and maybe it's typical isn't so much that isn't so much the second job that they were trained in the same direction when they got married. Exactly. I think you're right. The second job became an expression of that difference that became the battleground where that difference became clear and current Kaba Athan and Nancy were pursuing what I call the second shift different gender strategy gender strategy in an often unconscious way in which we try to enact the. Ideals we hope of being a proper man or a proper woman a proper father a proper mother proper wife or proper husband

and we early on had these ideals they become part of our ego ideal you might say the part of this that tells us how we ought to be and that they had very different ones. But I would say that something else was going on between Nancy and Evan are also on Evan's side that his resistance to steering had some emotional sources as well. First of all afraid that Nancy would dominate him. And I can understand why he was afraid of that because he would begin to. It nagged him. Adam did it. Ave that and he he didn't like that and he didn't want to be her orderly and what with Bill the find of her terrain you know sought out with one I think a source of resistance in

addition to their original difference of opinion and there was a second one too and that was I think deeper. Evan had had an alcoholic mother who in his childhood had gradually drawn herself away from him and so his experience growing up with a person that's an important person in his life withdrawing from him and I think that the way he talked about the Nancy and effect until after he was a friend of the same thing happening with Nancy in other words that people had more at home she would do less and. What kind of pull out on him and I think he was afraid of that. And my conclusion therefore is that couples who are running into real problems over this issue ought to really sit down and talk very respectfully and carefully

about the emotional sources of their resistance to listening to each other and that there are emotional anchors attached to their gender strategies which we don't need a way of talking about in order to resolve this problem. I got a question about strategy. How does it seem to be. Success for hours is usually handled with having two careers in the family at least in my career I have to move quite often and it has to be a continuous line and I just wondered how you could put two careers of that nature even if the other career was of the type where you wind up staying someplace for all basically forever. How

do you put the two. The need to have two main careers together and hang up and listen to your response. Well thank you. It's a very good question. I don't think that you can live out the family suffering and that leads me to think that if this trend toward increasing numbers of others in the workforce is to continue that what we really need to do with modified careers and give some choice to working parents as to what kind of hours they're going to work. I'd like to see some like time some part time work some parental leave so that a working parent could for that period with it. Her children are small go to say three quarters of time work and then when they're older go back to full time work. The European countries and even countries specifically for you have

made enormous strides in that direction by modifying the structure of work to our parents to be the kind of parent I want to be but I think that structures as they are now about its career are now structured putting together. It's extremely difficult. I think it starts right away. Well we're about midway through here I would like to reintroduce our guest. For those of you who may just have tuned in and also tell you about the programs we have scheduled for next week we're talking with our lee hope Shields author of the book the second shift working parents and the revolution at home and will continue in just a second and we have another caller we will talk with We'd like to know that in our number two of our program today we will talk about creation science and I guessed we do English vice president of the Institute for Creation Research is located in California. In Santee which is a suburb of San Diego

on the program Monday we will not have live programs will have repeats tape repeats of two shows from this past fall. Both interviews with novelists who traveled to Champagne Urbana to give readings from their work and we had an opportunity to talk with them here on focus. And our number one you'll hear an interview with Alan Ghana's His book is oldest living Confederate widow tells all. A book that sold very well and it was well received. And our number two will talk with us about his book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Also a book that did very well for him. We'll be back here live on Tuesday and next week Tuesday at 10 o'clock we'll be speaking with historian Walter Lefebvre from Cornell University talking about the recent U.S. military invasion of Panama and the future of the relationship between the two countries. Next week on Wednesday it is our first is the first Wednesday of the month and for a long time when doing on that day a program about cooking we talk about cooking various things and share recipes. And our guest next week will be Mike Cox from the great American Seafood Company sitting in for

our chef in residence Joe Moore. Well talk about seafood recipes. Next week on Thursday the topic is looking for the greenhouse effect. We'll talk with Michael Slesinger a professor of atmospheric sciences here at the U of I who is working on research on the greenhouse effect and then one week from today our topic is earthquake preparedness in the Midwest and we'll have two guests when Ping Chen he is a seismologist and associate professor of geology here at the U.S. and Doug will join us also he's a professor of civil engineering and we'll talk about the possibility of a serious earthquake here in the Midwest. You know after the San Francisco earthquake there was a lot of attention here focused on the new med rid fault and the possibility we could have a serious earthquake here. And the fact that if we did it could cause serious damage because here in the Midwest we really don't think about earthquakes and we we are we are not ready. I will talk about some of those issues on focus one week from today coming up on our afternoon magazine today. Matt Ehrlich will be talking to both Stephanie Moore

observer with witness for peace and they'll be talking about Nicaragua and again you'll have the opportunity to call in if you have questions or comments this morning on focus We're talking with our lee hope shield. She is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. She has written a couple of books. Her most recent one is the second shift working parents and the revolution at home. It's published by Viking. In addition she's written for Harper's Mother Jones Psychology Today in The New York Times Book Review. She makes her home in San Francisco the book essentially looks at the research that she has done over the past eight years interviewing a number of families where both the husband and wife work. And these are families where with with children as well. And it makes the argument that there are many women essentially who are working two jobs they're going out of the home going to the factory to the office and they're working one shift. And then when they come home they're doing most of the work involved in running the household laundry and cooking and dishes and taking care of kids. And

that constitutes the second shift. That's where the title of the book comes from. If you have questions comments three three three wy allow eight hundred two to two W while we have another caller here and we'll go right back to the phones to talk with someone here on line 1. Hello. Yes. I'm calling with regard to a comment that was made by your guest a little earlier about perhaps women are changing faster than now and at the present time and that that really got me to thinking. And there's sort of an implied sense that this change in women is positive and you start to get into this a few moments ago when you were saying that real change needs to take place in the workplace. To allow humane solution. Division of out of the home labor and in the home labor it

seems to me that perhaps the there is the rapid change that women are making it is not very positive in the sense that they're not recognizing that a professional role the job has been vacated in the care of the home and all of the family activities and that the solution to this is perhaps neither for the woman to assume all of the care of the home or for this to be divided equally at the level that was previously maintained between the man and the wife and in the home but rather to just diminish the amount. I got the good done and I see a lot of women trying to keep their home the way their mother kept their home when they're in truly very different circumstances. Right. And the thing is most people

are allowing the demands of the workplace. Most families the demands the workplace to simply roll over them that they meet the demands of the workplace and don't resist. And then when they come home many men say well I've done enough I'm not done enough for the day that this is the only humane way to behave. And many of the women try to do superhuman feats and maintain the home in the way that they would like to see it. And it and it may not be it may not be may not be healthy. You know I found a great variety of responses to the standard at the how it should be kept from women came home after an eight hour day and started washing the wall. I mean literally they were immaculate house keepers and to maintain a 1950s

standard of housekeeping. When we were in Nineteen Eighty-Four economic situation was. It seemed oppressive to both the wife herself and to her husband whom she was trying to get to help her in this. But actually I found a majority of the couples doing less than they had previously in their earlier in their marriage and studies indicate that even working mothers of the nineteen eighties are doing less housework than they did in the 1960s. So men aren't caring more and women are doing less and the talk was kind of like that too. They say well does the trial grilling to be green you know I'm a clam and he definitely for me anyway. So I don't make salad for dinner anymore. Or does a kid really need clean clothes

every day. He likes to wear his overalls and always favorite overalls can't he wear them all week sometimes out with extended cab. And there was a poll like that about the house. I actually found this kind of talk in much more common than women. Sometimes they would also take care well it's OK to send a child to daycare with a cold because the other kids a particular kind of ride style they're cold. Why shouldn't he give him a cold and my response was to think well when we're talking about the house. OK you know but when we're talking about the child not OK it seemed to me that there was a kind of a minima variation of what the term I don't mean and kind of the cultural

appreciation of art a tile made that gave me pause. For example one father of two and a half year old. Girls said well you know really they have their independence and she loves her friends they are earth sociable on she'd rather be there than here and I really want to be self-sufficient. And I thought that with language appropriate you know growth but not appropriate to the moon. And it seemed to me that in contrast to the 19th century needs that were being perhaps exaggerated but certainly the withdrawal of women from the labor force that were thing to date is that the opposite is a very intimate study of what a child needs a little bit of participation in a way before.

So that's the M.O. of what the housemaid's can be part of a kind of marginalization of family life that I think we as a culture ought to look at. That's not a problem. I wonder if it seems to me though that something that I keep coming back to as I think about this as a bedrock issue of a lot of these other things is it has a lot to do with how men and women think of themselves as men and women and what they what they think constitutes the job description. So to speak of men and women and that there still seem to be a lot of a lot of people perhaps more men than women who are still dividing up the world in terms of men's work and women's work and that household tasks are are mostly female. And then perhaps it's because you know they grew up still though a lot of men who grew up in houses in households where that's the way things were divided dad went to the office and Mom stayed home and and that's the way it was. And Brad actually 50 and Leave It to Beaver.

I had quite a lot around the house. It was often things going on which a car could travel after. And there are half that but what's happening now. Women are working full time out. If that answer is that women are going to they have a right. I mean we're the people that have a deadline. You know by six at night and during the town of Reich that thing of like a parasite that could be put off for a weekend. So women are feeling under the pressure of what I call the Burke family beat up and they more often do two things one they would be folding laundry and talking to a top or talking on the phone answering phone calls and writing up the bill and would more often do one thing at a time. Pick the child to

them through you know or make a meal. And women more often up to mental responsibility for caring for the home than would more often than what would you like me to do 3-D. So all of that added up to being more of an issue for her when it actually got less sleep and felt more bluntly drained and felt like they were bored doing their part they felt virtuous actually and the sad part the poignant part of the poignant story you know and I'm not telling a male bashing story really to me this is point B. It's the movement that arrived and honestly wanted to make their marriages work but they were doing that were kind of old fashioned cultural Google didn't fit the circumstance that they were. And it seemed to be living in a

revolution women had to change but the good for the workplace has not changed. And one of the panes are living with cultural ideals that encourage them to consider the notion of manhood as a good way turning what they're doing. We are turning over to women the top earning women are turning it over partly to their care workers. Partly it is getting done. I think children are suffering and we need to know if we're going to keep going in the direction that growing up women working outside. And to redesign a society that makes them work. If that's of to become the new string. Let's make it a bank. I believe that the tiled over the wall or but keep it

from the heart and modify it to work. Read the fine cultures and what the women I think are working with are going on there. Right. That pressure to perform at home of a truck and into a cult target. Check how he does. I think by everybody for what he's doing at home. I think that's a sign of revolution that are suffering from stuff that's much when we we're moving here into our last 10 minutes. I just like to remind folks who are listening at home again our guest is sociologist Arlie hope shield. We're talking with her about her book The second shift working parents on the revolution at home. I have two callers holding will try to get to both of them in before we have to finish. We'll go next to our toll free line. Hello.

If you're wrong. Yes. Well groomed from the moon. I kind of covered some of the issues that I was concerned about is when are we going to get back into the one family where ma or PA can stay home. Primitive everyone is the going to be to wage earners and take care of the kids being ripped away to ensure that this will eliminate the need for daycare. It will solve the problem many problems of this country as far as trying to furnish this daycare. And another thing with daycare that really bugs me is the fact that if you get the wrong element in the state care centers to mold the minds of these youngsters away from the ideals of family and country of religion or whatever one state they can just devastate the bill if they put the whole system down what it did Hitler do it took took the minds of the kids and they took care of mine.

If you didn't think the way they wanted to make your living you would often dock our outfit. And these kids do. Well you know I think we have to ask ourselves Are we going to go back to traditional home as the model for most American families or are we going to continue with the two job family as a model of the family. And my prediction is that we're going to continue with the two job family as the new strong mainstream family. There has been a trend since 1890 that really I think it's a result of industrialization toward women moving into the labor force and that really hasn't reversed itself except for three years after World War Two for the whole of the whole

century so I think we're going to seem more women and not fewer women working outside the home and then the question becomes are we going to do it just the way it's being done now with its hide worth rate and its enormous strain or are we going to make some major changes that make it livable arrangement. And that's what I'm writing thank you. If about. Let's go in I want to get this last caller in here along line number two. Hello hi. Actually you've answered many of my questions I was concerned about the children and what happens to the children in the sorts of situations. AF and I kind of object to what the last caller said there are many women out there who are working who just don't have a choice. That's right they have to work and I think that our society is letting its own responsibilities go by not taking better care of kids. If you can't I mean the kids are the future. You have to have good daycare because many women don't have any choice they have to be in daycare at the time.

That's right. You know President Bush really meant that about a pro-family policy that he would do something about not just care but about getting corporations to offer part time jobs like time like place get. Like Brock parental. There's not much that could be done to make family life possible. And doing absolutely nothing. We are just about the point where we're going to have to finish we just have maybe a minute or two and I want to ask you just as a last question. You talk in the book about being in a car being in a transitional stage we're moving perhaps from one kind of family to another. And you we have talked about how the outside world the world outside of the family perhaps can and should change to make things easier for for families. What do you think is

happening is going to happen inside the family even if we're in a transitional stage in the way men and women relate to each other as husband and wife and parents and and so forth. What are we moving towards Do you think. Well I'm an optimist. I think we're moving forward in a humane fashion. Of job family. I think it's going to be a struggle and I think it's going to be a hard thing. But I would like to see a move toward the Swedish model and I think we are. If you look at studies that compare with what the husbands working wives did at home in 1960 and what they're doing in the 1980s you find the error with pointing up an average 20 percent of the housework 960 to 30 percent today. So I think we're moving in that direction but there we could certainly do it much more slowly and we could really save

a lot of marriages and a lot of tile put if we had some planning about this and I would like to see a workforce change I'd like to see it workers get together and go to their employers asking for our work schedule change like a proper working couples get together with each other to iron out what problems they're having getting their concept going. Maybe there could be some kind of. Service we could get going more on site they care. Really I think we ought to have an artful plan at this point to rescue the family from one of very difficult external for comfort and not blame the people who are suffering from a stalled revolution but until the revolution what and where do you think the leadership for those kind of changes is going to come from.

I think it would come from both youth before young people get into two job situations. They should see that they can't live the kind of life they want to live without structure. I would like to see a whole new level of women's movement. Maybe call it something or don't women that word. A loving family loving something like that. It would have a new face presumably but I'd like to think that among young and I'd like to see a couple from now of who are facing these problems get together in the leadership. It usually comes from both were hurting his case I think it's others who are trying to do two things. But there are so I have there have been. Well I think you very much for talking with us today we appreciate you giving us your time. Well thank you very much. Our guests are Lee Hope sheild is the author of the book

the second shift to working parents and the revolution at home. She's a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her book was just published this past summer by Viking Penguin. If you're interested you might go out and take a look at it.