The Second Shift

The Second Shift
Arlie Hochschild opens chapter one of her book by providing statistics about American women in the workforce over time. In 1950, she notes, 30 percent of American women were in thelabor force, a number that had risen to 55 percent in 1986. The same trend can be observed for married women with children between the ages of six and seventeen, increasing from 28 to 68 percent inthe same period. A striking fact she mentions is that in 1950 the Bureau of Labor kept no statistics on how many women with children under the age of one worked outside the home because it was so rare,and by the time the book was published that statistic was fifty percent. Hochschild not only wanted to know the percentage of women involved in the workforce, but the number of hours these womenworked (both in and out of the home) and compared that to their husbands. "Adding together the time it takes to do a paid job and to do housework and childcare… I discovered that women worked roughlyfifteen hours longer each week than men. Over a year, they worked an extra month of twenty-four hour days".
Once the reader is presented with the aforementioned background statistics, Hochschildexplains her research methodologies and observations. In total, she and her colleagues interviewed fifty couples very intensively, and observed in a dozen homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, extending overseveral years. She aimed not only at determining who does the housework and cares for children, but also at who sacrifices career and how values have changed as it becomes increasingly common forwomen to work outside the home. Hochschild reports that women bear the burden of what she calls a ''stalled revolution,'' one that got wives out of the home and into the labor force but caused essentiallyno change for the domestic/second shift. Her research confirms that wives remain the primary parent and are ultimately responsible for keeping house. In many marriages, the woman's paid work is...