They face burgeoning demands at work and at home. They don’t feel that men will either help or care. That’s why many women say they harbor . . . : Heavy-Duty Anger
Debbie Mae Kershaw wants a trash compactor “really bad.” That’s because her husband, Walter, doesn’t take out the garbage when she asks him to. Sometimes she gets so mad that she puts the trash in the middle of the driveway of their trilevel Mission Viejo home, so he can’t get in the garage after work. “Then he has to get out of the car and deal with it,” she says.
Garbage isn’t the only thing engineer Walter Kershaw, 39, neglects around the house, says Debbie Mae: “I do all the housework. I dust, do the dishes, vacuum the floors, pick up clothes, clean the bathroom, wash the windows, scoop the dog poop, feed the birds and the cats. I even mow the lawn.” What’s so maddening, says the 35-year-old advertising manager for CalComp Inc., is that “we both have jobs, we both contribute equally to the communal bills, yet I contribute probably 90% of the physical labor to keep the household running.”
Don’t get Debbie Mae wrong. She loves her guy Walter “until death do us part.” They lived together for 11 years before they married last October, and she knew exactly what she was in for when they wed: “I wouldn’t give up our relationship just because he’s messy and doesn’t do things the way I like them done. By the way, he does bathe the dog.”
That’s probably more than lots of other men do for the women in their lives. If there is a gene for housework, men apparently don’t have it. And if women are liberated, they don’t seem to know from what.
Ongoing polls by the Roper Organization indicate that women’s anger at men has risen steadily over the last 20 years. Instead of mellowing, relationships between the sexes get grittier as more women work outside the home--and find they still have to work inside the home as well. Husbands and lovers talk a good game about sharing chores, the studies show, but their actions don’t match their words. And so women--even self-proclaimed happy ones like Debbie Mae--believe they have a lot to be mad about. For them, “having it all” means having to do it all.
Bickley Townsend, a vice president of the Roper Organization, a New York-based opinion research firm, says a recent nationwide survey of 3,000 women turned up some surprising information. The more women work side by side with men, both in and out of the home, the less women seem to like them.
One great source of anger is the workplace, Townsend says. Women still believe a “glass ceiling” and a sexist “old boy network” hold them back from making even greater career and financial strides. Lack of money was tops on women’s lists of dissatisfactions in this poll, with “more money” listed as the factor that, above all, would make their lives better. But right below that, running a very close second, Townsend says, is the issue of “how much my mate helps around the house.”
Men who don’t pitch in at home were declared by the pollsters as a “major irritant” and, next to money, the “single biggest source of resentment” in women’s lives.
Other Roper studies show that the chore men do most is grocery shopping. Next down the line are cooking and washing dishes. But the more unpleasant the job, the less men do it, Townsend says. In a sort of “real men don’t eat quiche” syndrome, studies show that toilet scrubbing, floor washing, laundry and oven cleaning are things men would rather leave for the females.
It’s no wonder, Townsend adds, a 1990 survey for Virginia Slims reveals that the old cliche “battle of the sexes” sounds new again. In 1970, for example, only about 30% of women believed “most men are basically selfish and self-centered.” This year, more than 40% believe that statement is true.
Twenty years ago, almost 70% of women believed “most men are basically kind, gentle and thoughtful.” In 1990, only 50% of women thought that statement was true.
The “goodwill toward men” barometer continues to fall, Townsend believes, because “the women’s revolution has stalled” and because women are angrier than men about almost everything.
Townsend says “women are twice as likely to resent the way child-care duties are shared; they are twice as likely to resent how they look. They have to spend more time on their appearance than men.” And since they’re more time-pressured than men to begin with, because of household and child-care duties in addition to their jobs--they begin to resent themselves for not being born perfect, so they don’t have to worry about how they look.
“Women report fewer leisure hours of time than men in every age and income group,” she says. That’s partly because they have to spend some of what should be their leisure time shopping for clothes, makeup, hairstyles.
That adds up to women being angrier than men about almost every aspect of their lives.
Veronica Vasquez (not her real name) can relate to that. Vasquez, 35, runs a day-care center at her Canoga Park home, caring for up to six infants and toddlers from 7:30 in the morning until about 5 p.m. five days a week. Then she heads for nearby Pierce College, where she carries 15 units, working at night toward a B.A. degree. With all that, Vasquez says, her husband John, 42, doesn’t share any household chores. “He feels I’m not really working because I work at home. If the laundry isn’t done, he says I’m not doing what he calls ‘my wifely duties.’
“It comes down to the littlest things,” Vasquez says, “like putting a new roll of paper in the bathroom when the old one runs out. He will not do it. If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Yesterday I asked him for the umpteenth time to get a special hose he told me about, so I could bathe the dog. He’ll get around to it, he said, and of course he never did. It’s been four months now that I’ve been asking him.”
Vasquez reels off her list of resentments long stored. “He has his job and that’s all he feels required to do,” she explains. “Yesterday his allergies were acting up and as he left for work he asked me to make a doctor’s appointment for him. I said, ‘You work at an office with a desk and telephone. Why don’t you make the appointment for yourself?’ But normally, I schedule everything for him. I think men are selfish and out to gain what they can for themselves.” Vasquez did not want her real name used in this article, because her husband “would have a fit if he saw it.”
Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, followed for seven years the lives of 50 Bay Area couples who both worked and had children under the age of 6. Her book, published last year (“The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home,” Viking Press) addresses the sources of women’s anger.
“Women work two shifts, at the office and at home, which my studies show adds up to an average of 13 more hours of work for women than for the men with whom they live. This is often seen as a woman’s problem,” Hochschild continues, “referred to as ‘Woman’s fatigue, woman’s overload, the conflict between work and family.’ But I argue that it is very much a man’s problem because he lives with his wife’s resentment and that resentment becomes a third party to their marriage.”
Hochschild says the women’s revolution has stalled, because women’s lives have changed very fast but men’s attitudes have not kept pace at the office or at home.
The sad thing about the stalled revolution, Hochschild says, is that “women can no longer afford an unambivalent love for their husbands. They don’t really want to be angry. They want to love unambivalently, but their resentment prohibits that.”
The author’s research, like the Roper surveys, shows that men typically change the oil in the car, fix broken lamps, occasionally cook or do other household chores. “But in general, women do far more daily chores, especially what I call deadline chores that have a time element attached to them: bathing a child, cooking a meal, arranging doctors’ appointments.”
In general, her studies show, “men have more control of their time than women do, both on and off the job.”
Even more perplexing, Hochschild found, is that most couples she studied really loved each other. “But I think men and women define love very differently. Men would often tell me, ‘I love my wife; I brought her flowers yesterday.’ Or, ‘We made love in a wonderful way last night.’ The wife would come to me and say, ‘My husband really loves me--he made dinner for us last night.’ To the man, making dinner was merely a task he performed. It had nothing to do with expressing his love.”
Hochschild says, “Good marriages have a very rich economy of gratitude, meaning that husband and wife each feel a lot of gratitude toward each other. In marriages doing poorly, each mate feels ripped off by the other one.”
What really struck her as poignant, the author says, is that “in many marriages, each partner was capable of giving a great deal. But what one wanted to give was not what the other wanted to receive. For example, a man comes home, worn out after a 10-hour day at the office and says, ‘Honey, I gave it my all at work today.’ He is telling her he worked especially hard to help build security for his little family. But the wife often delivers an ungrateful, scorching reply: ‘Where have you been? I told you I needed you at home tonight.’ ”
The same problems cut across all educational, ethnic and economic lines, the experts say.
Even the most psychologically enlightened, post-modern pairs don’t seem to escape. Scratch the surface of a couple who have deliberately structured their lives to share equally in child care and household chores, and you’re likely to find pockets of female rage.
Ellen Friedman and her husband Louis Blumberg are San Franciscans so attuned to the pitfalls of two-paycheck parenting that they read Hochschild’s book as soon as it was published, after hearing about it from friends.
Friedman, 34, runs a small philanthropic institution. Blumberg, 42, is assistant regional director of the local Wilderness Society branch. They lived together for five years, married six years ago, and have a year-old son, Jacob, who shares a nanny with another neighborhood child whose parents also work.
“Everything is going nicely, “ Friedman says. “We both travel for our work, but one of us is always in town when the other one isn’t. We both do marketing and we share cleaning chores around the house. It’s a pretty informal arrangement, depending on who needs to spend time with our son. If I’ve spent more time with him on a given day, then I do the dishes while my husband reads him a bedtime story. If I need to be with Jacob, my husband does dishes while I put Jacob to bed.
“My husband really shares the housework and parenting load. He’s very concerned with his surroundings and he used to do 90% of the chores when he worked out of the home,” she says.
So far so good. But chat a little longer and the anger bubbles up. Yes, her husband does his share, but she bears most of the psychological load. “I’m the one who worries about the child, who has primary responsibility for planning meals, for general marketing, for keeping an overview of what our household and our child and even our dog needs. When Jacob gets sick, I’m definitely the primary call. I feel like I have the primary care-giver role for the baby, and I feel there is inequity in this.
“I feel I have to give up the kind of focus on my career that I don’t see my husband having to give up because we’ve had a child,” Friedman says. “Somehow, my husband’s need to stay late at the office always wins out over mine. That means I come home and relieve the care-giver. We struggle around that issue a lot. Louis feels he can call me any time and say he’s coming home late, but in the nine months I’ve been back at work since Jacob was born, I’ve called him only once to say I need to stay late. I feel it’s my responsibility to always get the baby. I wish it were otherwise. I also pay more attention to what the sitter says, to what kind of day the baby has had. On this, the eve of our sixth anniversary, I can honestly say my husband and I have a great relationship. But we have a lot of heated conversations about priorities.”
Cheryl Sindel, 29, a social worker in Santa Monica, has no children but some of her anger seems the same. Her husband David is “great at doing kitchen-type things. He cooks, cleans, shops, helps with recycling. But I honestly feel the overall household management is my responsibility, and it’s pretty sex-role stereotyped. He does the things I mentioned. I clean the toilets, wash the floors, all those unpleasant things. We’re talking about all this right now. I feel I have to lay a guilt trip on him to get him to do the unpleasant things--or else do them myself. I don’t like that nagging housewife role at all. We have the option of getting someone do the chores we don’t want to do, and just the thought of it is liberating.”
Meanwhile, back in Anaheim, Debbie Mae Kershaw’s husband Walter is amazed when a reporter calls to verify his wife’s report that he hates housework and does nothing to help her.
“Does anyone like housework?” Kershaw asks with a laugh, “and if they did, would they admit it?” Yes, but isn’t there anything he feels obligated to do to help his wife around the house? “I change the sheets, wash the dishes and do the laundry, but not on a regular basis. I am aware that in my wife’s mind, the level of what I do is nothing. In reality, that’s far from the truth. But what I do does not meet her definition of what needs to be done, so it has progressed in her mind to being nothing.”
Kershaw sounds perplexed about the whole issue, an irony noted in studies by N.Y. researcher Ellen Galinsky, who heads the year-old Work and Family Institute. “Men are getting angry too,” Galinsky says. “They say any time they do something, it gets criticized. That’s a constant theme in the workshops we hold. For example, a wife goes out shopping and leaves the child with the husband. Then she comes home and criticizes the way he handled the child. Sometimes she has a serious complaint, but certainly not all the time. And the husband begins to wonder why he should try to please her any more. The way he cuts carrots is wrong, the way he washes dishes or changes diapers is wrong. He can’t seem to do anything right.
“The wife is saying, ‘Help me. But do it my way,’ ” Galinsky says.
“Women also want husbands to be mind readers,” she says. “They are praying to be rescued from all the pressures and doubts they have about leaving their home and kids--but by the time husbands realize what their wives want, the wives are already mad.”
Louis Blumberg, husband of Ellen Friedman, agrees. At his office in San Francisco, Blumberg wondered why his wife neglected to tell the reporter that she has a meeting every other Wednesday night “and I am always home on time to relieve the nanny, so she can attend her meeting.” Blumberg says he is “a very involved father” and is just as interested in the baby’s day-to-day life as his wife is. “But Ellen worries more. I think the anxiety is more intense for her, and I think that’s part of being a mom.”
It’s a complex problem, Galinsky says, having to do with women’s ambivalence about working and their fears about parenting, which make them feel twice as threatened when their husband cares for the baby in a way they’re not familiar with.
“I think it’s becoming clear that women cannot have it all and do it all. That’s why the anger is surfacing now. The pioneering stage is over, and the issues are becoming much more clear and easy to speak about.”
Galinsky and others say the sands are shifting and the ‘90s may tell a different story about women’s feelings about their lives.
Already there’s a chink in the solid mass of Roper Organization statistics which, from 1975 to 1985, showed more women each year opting for a marriage of shared responsibilities. From 1985 until now, the figure has been dropping.
The Roper Organization’s Townsend says this dovetails with a slight increase since 1985 in the number of women who say they think a “traditional” marriage would be the most satisfying.
Townsend says this could mean that some women are starting to reconsider whether work is satisfying enough, given the barriers they encounter. “Maybe they are trying to decide whether they want the trade-off of work in place of raising their children and caring for their families,” she says. Although this may sound heretical, Townsend says that in a recent survey, “We asked how satisfied women are with 15 different aspects of their lives. The top satisfactions were children, friends, and husbands or the men in their lives. Job opportunities and income ranked last of all 15 choices.”