The Myth of Male Housework

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.