TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/080789/08078900.064

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 105 lines

LIVING, Page 62

The Myth of Male Housework

For women, toil looms from sun to sun

By John Skow


    Quick flip-through, by male in jokey mood: Woman sociologist
gets big grant, does ten years of research, writes book proving
that men don't do housework. Complains.

    More thoughtful assessment: Yeah, she's right, it's awful, I
don't want to hear about it.

    Even more thoughtful assessment, by female tired of kidding
around: The end of civilization as husbands know it, and high time.

    Maybe. At any rate, it seems likely that sociologist Arlie
Hochschild's The Second Shift (Viking; $18.95) will turn up in
empty fridges, on piles of undone laundry and taped to "I'm long
gone, George" notes left on breakfast tables. It is dire stuff,
whose thesis is that in normal, modern two-career marriages, most
men -- even those who talk equality -- do not really do much child
rearing, cooking, cleaning, food shopping, or enough other chores
to count.

    The result, says Hochschild, is that most wives among the 50
two-job couples she interviewed drive home from the office while
plotting domestic schedules and playdates for the children, and
then work a second shift. Recent national studies she surveyed
concluded that women spend 15 fewer hours at leisure each week than
their husbands. In a year they work an extra month of 24-hour days.
Hochschild's couples were fraying at the edges, and so were their
careers and their marriages. She notes that the women did not much
resemble, in their mind's-eye views of themselves, the beautiful
young businesswoman of the magazine ads, dressed in a power suit
but with a frilled blouse, briefcase in one hand and happy young
child clinging to the other, striding eagerly into the future with
hair flying.

    Of course, most men have mind's-eye astigmatism too. A
late-'80s father has a hard time visualizing himself tooling along
the Corniche above Monte Carlo in a bottle-green Aston Martin, with
a bottle-yellow enchantress in the passenger seat. Reality is
deadly stuff. What men do is put in long hours in front of the
tube, thanklessly exposing their eyeballs to radiation because not
to know at work the next day precisely how the Red Sox lost yet
another game is to risk career prolapsus. Working women may still
spend three hours a day doing housework and their husbands only 17
minutes, as a 1965-66 study cited in The Second Shift claims. But
watching baseball is hard, dull work -- nobody likes it -- and it
takes a lot of time. Look, can we talk about this between innings?

    O.K., not funny. What Hochschild describes, in fact, is so
gloomy, at least for two-career couples who are trying to raise
children, that the information should be withheld from the young,
or the race may not reproduce. It may not anyway, since the
two-career marriage means the certain end of weekday sex, and
toil-sharing men are known to be subject to Saturday-night
headaches.

    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 tasks and child
rearing equally.

    They get little 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 for a "Marshall Plan for the Family,"
in which government would encourage day care by students, elderly
neighbors and grandparents. Neighbors could form support networks
so couples wouldn't feel so alone. "Traveling vans for day-care
enrichment," she muses, "could roam the neighborhoods as the
ice-cream man did in my childhood."

    Why do 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
to be zapped, vacuuming to be postponed. Her bleak message, alas,
is that taking out the garbage is not enough.