The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home

The information retrieved for this reading was done by interviewing women with different job backgrounds, from lawyers and corporate executives to day care workers and seamstresses. These women, and surprisingly their husbands both felt differently in regards to some issues. For example: how right is it for a mom with young kids to work fulltime, or how many responsibilities a husband should have at home. However, both agreed that it is hard for them to work fulltime jobs and raise their young kids.

Today in the labor force, 2/3 of women are now working. With that statistic Szalais asks how much more time are Dads contributing at home? The study shows that men only spend 17 minutes a day to help with housework, versus women who spend an average of 3 hours. Sadly, when it comes to spending time with their kids, women spend 50 minutes a day, versus men who spend only 12 minutes (P. 569-70). I think this statistic is very sad. I question how much this affects kids growing up.
Szalais’ study portrayed a deeper set of emotional issues behind gender strategy coping with home, work, marriage, and life. The wage gap between men and women leads to a gap between work, home, and leisure time as well. We are all aware that “second shift” is a real thing that occurs with women in our society- Working fulltime and coming home to keep up with cleaning, laundry, cooking, and tending to the kids schedule. I feel that because of our history and society’s idea that juggling everything is apart of being a woman in a family, the second shift will continue to exist. Women in the study said that they feel as if they are always on duty- on duty at work and then arriving at home and on duty there too. The article leads me to the idea that women in our society are just plane overwhelmed. Also, many of the women believed that the speed up with more responsibility and the speedup lead to strain because they often have to do two things at once. Because of this, problems arise between husbands and wives in the marital and individual realm. The author believes that this an effect from their childhoods and how they were raised, and goes on to state that when couples struggle, it is not really because of who does what, but more so over who is giving and receiving gratitude (p. 578).During the authors interviews of husbands and wives in their home, began to see that these couples develop family myths. What are these family myths? Hochschild describes it as “versions of reality that obscure core truth in order to manage a family tension” (P. 579). Hochschild found by the end of the interviews that more people spoke about ending relationships for other reasons than the husband not contributing to household work and commitment to time with kids. I think that was a surprise because the entire reading seemed to be more about the gender differences in roles and the stresses of women and their role in society between labor and family. To me it seemed that the author threw in that statement at the end as if to say “oh by the way.” which makes no sense to me because of everything else she focused on. I do question some of her findings because she never described the setting whether it was rural or in the suburbs, or what the age of these women were. I wish she would have gotten some statistic on the reasons why wives divorce.