‘Second Shift’ Examines Women’s Plight

Working the second shift has a new meaning. No longer is the second shift personified by a worker--usually male--going off to a job in bright daylight, dinner pail in hand. A worker who will come home after the late news, usually to “wind down” with TV or a newspaper before turning in at 2 or 3 a.m.

Oh, there are still plenty of those second-shifters, but the notion is being updated, personified this decade by a worker--most likely female--coming home to a job in the twilight, children and groceries in hand. This worker often stays busy until after the late news, too, but requires little winding down and has almost no time for TV or reading; she simply falls into bed beside her already-sleeping husband when she’s had enough or has done all that is expected of her.

These new second-shifters are today’s working wives and mothers, women who work outside their homes as well as in, women who continue to shoulder most of the housework, child care, cooking and shopping for their families.

The plight of these women, and their husbands, is detailed in “The Second Shift, Working Parents and the Evolution at Home,” a new book by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (Viking, New York, $18.95).

“Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a ‘second shift’ at home,” Hochschild writes. That second shift, she found, amounts to an extra month of 24-hour days each year or about 15 hours a week that such women--and not their husbands--put in at home.

Besides wearing out the second-shifters--”these women talked about sleep the way a hungry person talks about food”--balancing home, family and job strains their marriages, robs their children and weighs heavily on their own psyches, says the author, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley.

Granted, not all women are working the second shift alone. But in Hochschild’s study of 50 mainstream couples interviewed from 1980 to 1988, 20% of the men shared housework equally, 70% did less than half but more than one-third of the work, and the remaining 10% did less than one-third of the chores, which included housework, cooking, gardening, household repairs and such duties as planning children’s birthday parties, sending holiday cards and paying bills.

“Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. . . . Women do more child care than men, and men repair more household appliances. A child needs to be tended daily while the repair of household appliances can often wait until ‘I have time,’ ” Hochschild writes.

Hochschild’s findings bear out those of earlier studies.

John P. Robinson, a University of Maryland researcher, found in a 1985 study of 5,000 men and women that American women with children under 5 do an average of 22.5 hours of housework a week and those with children over 5 do 19.9 hours weekly. For every two hours women spent on housework, men spent only one, Robinson’s survey indicated. If there’s good news, it’s that in 1975 the ratio was 3 to 1.

How men and women spent those hours also coincided with Hochschild’s conclusions. Women were doing 77% of the cooking, down from 87% in a similar 1965 University of Michigan survey, while men did 74% of the yard work and 82% of the home repairs.

And a 1986 survey, conducted for Johnson Wax, found that women, both employed and unemployed, did 84% of the housecleaning--just one of the second-shift duties listed by Hochschild.

All of these numbers support what Hochschild calls a “stalled revolution,” caused by rapid changes in women--in their roles in the family and society, in their earning power and in their goals--coupled with slower changes in men and society.

The revolution continues to idle because of a “cultural veneer that disguises how painful and confusing” it is, Hochschild said in a phone interview. The veneer shows the double-shift woman as happy, organized, together and, most of all, not resentful, she said.

“The main thing I was trying to do was to peel off the veneer,” she said. “Revolutions are messy; revolutions are confusing; revolutions are painful.”

This one is no different.