‘Real’ Men Will Avoid This Book : Why, Even Today, Most Women Work a ‘Second Shift’

Real men used to refuse quiche. Today, when it is served up by wives in business suits who have rushed home from the office, briefcase in one hand, children and a store-prepared meal in the other, quiche is OK. Just don’t ask them to cook it.

Thirty years of women’s liberation may have brought equality in the workplace, even treatment by the world outside and the unquestionable right of a woman to buy a man lunch, but they have failed miserably to dent traditional male prejudices in the home.

Men’s aversion to housework remains as strong as ever, even when wives are giving them dusters.

I have had my suspicions about this lurking injustice during moments of slaving over a hot stove. But I now know it is true: An American sociologist says so.

The harsh picture of how husbands behave in two-income families where the wives are balancing career, children and the cooking comes from UC Berkeley Prof. Arlie Hochschild on the strength of 10 years peering into the lives of American households.

In the households Hochschild describes there are sinks full of unwashed dishes, piles of bone-dry unironed laundry and dog-eared permission slips for school outings long since past. Resentment smolders amid these symbols of a stalled revolution where women have won the right to work outside the home but have not yet persuaded their husbands to work inside it. Her all too real-life women characters struggle to organize their homes while their other halves watch TV. Worse, one of them even gets up early not to dress the children but to play with his model trains.

Perfectly nice men who would not dream of opening doors for women or calling their female colleagues a patronizing “love” turn into old-fashioned monsters once inside the front door. The gender barriers go up; they can almost be seen calling for their carpet slippers. Some even believe they are sharing the housework. Didn’t I mend the light bulb for you last week?

Hochschild may have spent evenings in Los Angeles watching women who pull off million-dollar deals in the day struggle to unstick the rice unaided at night, but her message is universal. In a world of dishes to be washed, children to be dressed and dustbins to be taken out, men are not pulling their weight.

This is the kind of stuff on which modern domestic disputes thrive. As one American reviewer said, disgruntled women need no longer write a note that says: “I am leaving. Your dinner is in the oven.” They will simply let drop a copy of the Hochschild thesis.

The title of “The Second Shift” (Viking) is a swipe at the extra schedule that women face in doing the housework and looking after the kids once they come home. On the basis that writers succeed when they reinforce their readers’ existing prejudices, this is damning evidence of female double time, which women will warm to and men will dismiss or turn on the telly to avoid reading. Dangle a stopwatch over the daily round of dual-income families, and it turns out that women work an extra month a year of 24-hour days than the men.

Because this is serious sociology as only Americans can produce--Hochschild seems to have spent the last decade on sitting room floors playing with children for an ant’s eye view of how their parents divide up the household chores--the sort of excuses that men make for putting off their share have lofty labels such as “gender ideology,” and her couples face crises like “the nurturance crunch.” The ray of hope for men in this book is that there are a whole new set of excuses to trot out for not mucking in at home.

How about claiming it is a statement against their mothers, or fear of becoming a doormat husband when next faced with cooking supper?

Men’s attitudes to their working spouses are traditional, transitional or egalitarian, but few make it as far as forsaking their newspaper in favor of washing the kitchen floor. The worst kind are transitionals who pay lip service to equal roles and still have their noses buried in the sports pages.

Beaming in the background is the advertisers’ image of the working mother “who has it all,” who sweeps across her landscape hair flying in the wind from such upward mobility. She holds a briefcase in one hand, a child (clean) in the other. She is confident, active and liberated and, on the evidence of this book, she does not exist. The problem is that while it is no longer compulsory or even fashionable to try to be Superwoman, mere existence has to continue, and that is difficult enough. Look underneath the surface (undusted) of the average dual-income household and the have-it-alls are suffering overload.

Nothing short of complete social upheaval, or at least the end of televised football, seems destined to achieve Hochschild’s vision of the future and free women from their own apron strings. In the meantime, the rest of us had better reach for a Chinese take-out meal.