1. Introduction
In her book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, Arlie Hochschild sheds light on the various strategies used by men and women in two-career marriages to manage the pressure of work and the needs of their family all at the same time. Hochschild, who is a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, documents how household work is divided by husbands and wives who both have full-time careers after they are done with their official jobs. Her book basically revolves around the story of eleven couples out of the fifty she had her research associates interviewed between 1980 and 1988. A majority of the couples are from the middle and upper-middle class. Arlie Hochschild’s 300-page book, The Second Shift, is an excellent book in which she takes look at the contributions that husbands make to the household in comparison to those that the wife makes.
2. Brief Description of the Book
Hochschild’s The Second Shift should not be mistaken with indifferent sociology; rather it is a well-balanced ethnographic report. From the very first page, Hochschild begins promoting an ideological argument. She genuinely seems to believe that marriages should be androgynous. It becomes apparent that she is promoting the complete equality of men and women, especially at home. Moreover, she does not seem to be seeking moral equality, rather he plea for equality is tilted towards women. It is apparent that she is being sympathetic to women and is seeking to defend their interests.
Throughout the book, Hochschild does everything she can to turn the odds in favor of her ‘heroines.’ Thus, her book contains a description of the reputed history of how marriages have evolved from being traditional, then transitional, and ultimately egalitarian. Just like Karl Marx, she assumes that this e evolution is inevitable. Therefore, she describes that all traditional marriages represent a temporary resting spot, and subsequently evolve into egalitarian marriages.
According to Hochschild, egalitarian marriages are marriages in which there are virtually no gender differences. Like many feminists, Hochschild apparently assumes that historic masculine advantages have consequently lead to unnatural dissimilarities between the ways men and women operate. These will only fade away once women take their righteous place at work and home.
3. Critical Review
In her book The Second Shift, Hochschild uses the term “'stalled revolution,” which according to her is the reason that women, such as the ones reported in her book, have had to get out of the home and become employed just like their husbands. However, she notes that their domestic life has barely changed because of this. According to Hochschild’s research, despite their working careers, women usually continue to be the primary and housekeeping is ultimately their responsibility. In a majority of marriages, a woman’s job is never regarded as career like a man’s job is. Thus, a woman’s employment is usually devalued, which consequently rationalizes her responsibility at home. Hochschild has calculated that the average amount of time that a working woman puts in housework after coming back home from her job equals to an additional month of work every year.
The great thing about Hochschild’s The Second Shift is that is not a feminist complaint or lamentation on behalf of all women. What sets her book apart is that her insights are quite subtle and she reports them with a special texture. Her writing is charming and witty, while her elegantly smooth narrative dexterously moves to and fro between generalization and case study. Based on her observations, married men and women have their own implicit “gender ideologies,” i.e. they expect themselves and their spouses to meet appropriate marital roles. According to her, these gender ideologies are rooted in their own acquired values, childhoods, and habits. However, modern marriages are so economically demanding and stressful that these gender ideologies are never met. Most of the time, it is the wife who decides to save her marriage by sacrificing her professed values.
We are living in a market society where paid work is usually more valuable that domestic endeavor and the least sensible compromise that both spouses can typically make is that they both become careerist, instead of sharing more household responsibilities. For the professional classes, the office offers them opportunity to achieve career status, invigoration, money, and respect, while at home; all they get is servile chores and whining children. Perhaps this is why men shy away from giving up their office life for their domestic life. According to Hochschild, men and women both lose something because of the imbalanced stalled revolution. Her conclusion is that the stalled revolution creates a gap, in which husbands and wives both feel that their spouses are not appreciating the sacrifices they make. Since appreciation is necessary in a loving mutual relationship, this leads to deep hurts and misunderstandings over household responsibilities, thus corroding the marriage bond.
The domestic lives of the families that Hochschild reports in her book are certainly unhappy in their own way, it can be assumed there is something really wrong with the current domestic situation. Hochschild unintentionally ends up supporting traditionalist views that life would be healthier if women reclaimed their traditional role of looking after the household fulltime and men when stuck to their role of earning the bread and butter, even if it means a loss of some income. Similarly, she also unintentionally justifies the radical belief that the domestic changes that have already taken place can only be complemented through drastic social change. While the portrait Hochschild paints in her book are often bleak, but she presents shrewd insights into family dynamics. Arlie Hochschild claims that real men do not really care about the stuff she has discussed in her book, and it would be disappointing if The Second Shift is regarded merely as a woman’s book.
4. Closing Comments and Reflections
As mentioned, gender strategies and family myths that are developed by couples so they can justify or live with the lack of fairness in household workloads are relentlessly yet sympathetically uncovered in the book. Some strategies allow couples to pay lip service to ideals that are rather separated from their usual practice. For instance, a woman may aspire to become a house wife and submit to her husband, but she may have to end up doing day care in her home because of economic realities. In this case, since she will need her husband’s help in housework, she may use the strategy of playing helpless, i.e. telling her husband that he can cook better rice than her, or she cannot drive. This way, the husband will willingly help her while believing that his wife is submitting to her.
Hochschild has discussed many other similar strategies that are used by couples that tend to have a greater emotional cost, not only to the husband and wife but the children as well. Her conclusion is that American husbands and wives essentially need to reassess their household responsibilities because if they do not do so, their marriage will become deeply egalitarian. She also adds that it is necessary to shape public policy in shape a way that these changes are not undermined but are supported. Hochschild's vocabulary of consideration and sharing may make some male readers cower. Men may find her vocabulary resembling that found in women’s magazines and they may find it nagging. However, after reading The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home what will really make men cower is the realization that what she speaks is true, and as for men who are equally good domestic citizens, they will bask in the glory of how Hochschild appreciates their manhood.
Works Cited
Hochschild, A. The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. New York, NY: Penguin, 2012. Print.
