Blue-Collar Husbands Likelier to Don White Aprons at Home
When his wife goes to a job, Newhall carpenter Steven Morley picks up his two daughters from the baby sitter, vacuums the family’s two-bedroom apartment, cooks dinner (though the girls do get tired of specialty spaghetti), bathes the youngsters and gets them into pajamas. All April Morley has to do, when she gets home from her 12-hour-a-day job as a part-time animal trainer, is read her daughters a bedtime story.
By contrast, accountant Joe Smith, who asked that his real name be withheld, makes his own breakfast and picks up his clothes but does little else in his well-scrubbed Orange County home for his bookkeeper wife, Mary, or their two preteen sons.
“If you leave your Orange County home at 8 a.m.,” says Smith, “and return from Los Angeles after 7 p.m., you don’t leap into the laundry room.”
Surprising Finding
The Morleys and the Smiths illustrate a surprising finding of Arlie Hochschild’s “The Second Shift” (Viking: $18.95). In the study of working couples’ division of labor in housework and parenting, the UC Berkeley sociologist reports that 22% of the blue-collar men share housework equally while white-collar workers become full housework partners only 3% of the time. “In the traditional marriages,” explains Hochschild, “the husband feels guilty that he can’t be the sole provider. Since he can’t, he often feels he owes her something, which he pays back during the Second Shift when the couple return from their jobs and begin housework and child care.
“In the transitional type of marriage where the husband (emotionally) supports his wife working, the man is earning a lot of money so he doesn’t feel he owes her anything. He says if my wife wants to work, fine. But she should also do the Second Shift at home.”
No Hot Meal Required
White-collar men resist women’s pleas for household help by feigning incompetence at the required tasks, like cooking, or by drastically lowering their need levels. One man said he happily ate Cheerios for dinner because he really didn’t need a hot meal at night.
Hardly a mad housewife, Mary Smith doesn’t complain that her husband does little after being gone 11 hours a day, but the bookkeeper, who works because she would go crazy staying home all day, wistfully says she would like help with cooking because it’s “so boring.” And she wouldn’t mind a little help moving the furniture every once in a while. “And then there’s the yard . . . the car. There’s always something.”