Word: hochschild
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have his food ready, I should quit." Instead Brown quit her marriage. Among the upper middle class, male rhetoric may sound enlightened, but the bottom line is much the same. In The Second Shift, a study of 50 mostly middle-class, two-career couples published this year, Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, found that wives typically come home from work to another shift: doing 75% of the household tasks. "Men are trying to have it both ways," she charges. "They're trying to have their wives' salaries and still have the traditional roles at home...
...Hochschild describes what she calls a stalled revolution, with both men and women following "gender strategies" that prevent progress. Traditional men, those who believe that women should tend children and kitchen even when the family money squeeze forces them to take jobs, actually do more chores in the home than the "transitional" husbands. But transitional couples, caught between new ideology and old sex roles, may cooperate in believing a family myth that the husband does half the babyminding and the chores. In fact, only 20% of Hochschild's couples, who ranged from working class to upper middle class, split household...
...help from colleagues or corporations. "Women's work" is not respected in the marketplace or out of it, and skilled women executives who insist on shorter hours or home leave to do it are thought to have gone soft in the head. This is the Mommy Track problem, though Hochschild does not use the phrase. A Daddy Track is barely in sight, though some men might enjoy not having to seem conventionally ambitious and being able, like modern women, to drop into and out of their careers...
...Hochschild thinks "pro-family" legislation is needed, not to promote school prayers and cut off birth-control funds, as in the cant of the Reagan years, but to equalize women's wages and provide family leave for both sexes. Tax breaks would go to firms that allow job sharing and flextime, and to developers who build affordable housing with communal meal-preparation facilities. (A problem she does not mention is that many employers do encourage part-time work, often as a way to avoid paying for medical insurance and other benefits.) Using the phrase of another sociologist, the author calls...
...such modest goals sound like crazed radicalism? Because, a male observer is forced to admit, men and male-dominated institutions are exceedingly timid about revolution. Perhaps, however, Hochschild's prickly, irritating, distressingly reasonable book can help us to see the next step. The call used to be for soft-center males, studs who could cry. That was silly. Men don't cry. They brood, and mutter, and sulk, sometimes for hours on end, while on TV the Red Sox are slowly dying. That's fine, the author is saying, but not while there are children to be bathed, dinner...