TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080789/08078900.064

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.8 KB | 115 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.