The idea of the “second shift” is one that mostly mothers experience in
a two working parent family. After a long hard day at work they come
home only to endure another shift of unpaid work, taking care of the
family. This shift usually takes up the rest of the day as women are
forced to balance cooking, cleaning, child care and many other tasks.
With limited time they feel overwhelmed and unappreciated as they
receive minimal help from their husbands. This causes stress on the
relationship, especially since at the root of this is an issue between
the ideologies of husband and wife. This is evident in the marriage of
Evan and Nancy Holt. She is forced to give up her idea of an equal
marriage in order to sustain it. Her husband didn’t think it was his
job to equally help out, convincer her that she was better suited for
the job. They ended up coming up with a system they thought was equal
in which he took care of the dog. It became his fetish since it was his
one responsibility. They had tried to implement other ways of sharing
the work but it never worked out. Nancy tried to hide her feelings of
“being taken advantage of” by staring to compare her work to other
mothers instead of her husband. This gave the illusion that things were
fair.
Homosexual families tend to follow similar patterns as heterosexual
ones, even though they try to portray their relationship as ideal both
to themselves and the outside world. Lesbigay families tend to describe
their relationship at egalitarian. Much of domesticity is invisible.
This sometimes causes resentment and anger between partners. Paid work
greatly determines the organization of domesticity. Wealthier lesbigay
often buy domesticity, which allows them to enhance their
egalitarianism within the relationship. The “Downsized family” also
sees egalitarianism. They tend to hire whatever domestic necessities
they need but it is very limited since they are rarely home. Sometimes
the terms fair and equal are misinterpreted. Some couples claim to have
equal responsibilities when one is specialized in paid-work and the
other domestically. What they really mean usually is that this is a
fair relationship. Practical economic concerns and occupational
characteristics play the largest role in determining who gravitates
towards domesticity involvement. Although not many, some people choose
to become more involved in family and domestic affairs. One reason for
this could be the “glass ceiling” effect lesbians and gays run into. On
a whole, those individuals who gravitate towards greater domestic
involvement than their partners often share common socioeconomic
characteristics. The usually share their lives with partners who earn
more, have greater career opportunities, work more hours, and work
outside the home. Many of the families interviewed for this study sort
and arrange domesticity differently, but equality is never really
reached even when they believe so.
The apparently routine work that supports a household is complex and
more meaningful than is typically acknowledged. There are complex
family relations involved that are difficult to put into texts and
articulate. This unpaid work is described as “something different than
work.” Love is a common element involved in household activities such
as preparing food. Meal time and feeding has been affected by changing
society. People eat less meals all togheer at home. Some of the causes
of this include increase in restaurant business and people working
farther away form home. Even so, many families make a special effort to
enjoy meals together, seeing it as quality family time. A lot of
planning goes into these meals, trying to determine what will satisfy
everyone. During actually dinner talk was a very important aspect for
many families. Behavior also must be monitored and controlled.
Professional households are more likely to work successfully at
arranging family means while single mothers were somewhat less likely
than married women to arrange regular meals together for their family.
Meal planning and other family management work is invisible. Practices
seem natural and therefore much credit is not given to it. There is
logic to the work women do, learned through experience and principles.
According to a National Survey of Families and Households, women’s
housework is affected only by their own earning, not by their husbands’
and not by their earnings compared to their husbands’. The findings
also suggest dependence of women’s absolute rather than relative
earnings. It suggests that married women have a substantial degree of
economic autonomy in the areas of domestic life for which they are
normatively responsible. Some women have a dependence on men because
they exchange their domestic labor in return for access to monetary
resources. Women whose earnings are greater than their husbands’ will
spend more time on housework than other women in order to affirm their
gender identities. The main theory is that women’s housework is
affected by their earnings compared to their husbands’ and their time
spent on domestic labor. My analysis also addresses another crucial gap
in the existing research, namely, its failure to account for the
relationship between women’s absolute and relative earnings. Research
has shown that married women with low earnings are more likely than
other women to have high relative earnings, that is, earnings compared
to their husbands.
Men spent more time working for pay and women spent more time on
domestic labor because they were better at doing it. Since men’s
earnings are higher on average than women’s, the economic dependence
hypothesis is a possible explanation for the gender gap in housework.
Partners with incomes that are unusually high or low for their
gender are predicted to compensate by exaggerating their
gender-normative housework performance. married women whose earnings
exceed their husbands’ will spend more time on domestic labor than
other women, and men whose earnings are unusually low compared to their
spouses’ are predicted to spent less time on housework than other men.
Analysis implies that married women may as well be single. Even though
the sharing of life experiences and resources characterize marriage, it
seems that women’s earnings matter more than their husbands’ to certain
outcomes within it. A study implies that women act as autonomous
economic agents in the domestic sphere to the extent made possible by
their own earnings. It is unknown exactly if the autonomous
relationship between married women’s earnings and their housework is a
sign of their freedom to make economic decisions that benefit them, or
of their inability to draw on their husbands’ earnings to reduce their
household labor.
I feel as if the issues faced by Nancy and Evan Holt are very common
among today’s families. Mothers are overworked and outwork their
husbands countless with little appreciation. I myself take for granted
my mother and all that she does for me and all six of us kids. This
includes preparing meals for all of us that we all will enjoy, which is
a nearly impossible task. Each one of us always wants to eat at
different times and different foods. We forget home is not a restaurant
as our mother tries to cater to our needs and wants. I remember trying
to cook over the summer for my family and realizing how difficult it
really is. The logistics of it were a lot harder than the physical
aspect of cooking. I swore to never do it again after having to plan,
prepare, serve, and clean up after just one evening’s meal. I don’t
know how my mother does it most nights for all of us. Even though we
try to eat together as much as possible, it is a rare occasion.
Somebody is always busy and unless it is a holiday or birthday it
rarely happens. My mother doesn’t like it when we eat with the TV on
because she wants us to be able to enjoy each other’s company.
I can see how gay couples would want to even more portray their
relationship as egalitarian. With already so much stigma on such
couples, it is natural for them to want to portray themselves as an
ideal couple. In my own experience, my gay brother and his partner have
separate, and maybe fair roles. My brother tends to be the more
domestic one since he likes to cook, and works less hours therefore
allowing him the time to do more domestic tasks.