''The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home'' is a book by

Arlie Russell Hochschild Arlie Russell Hochschild (; born January 15, 1940) is an American professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, an ...

with Anne Machung, first published in 1989. It was reissued in 2012 with updated data. In the text, Hochschild investigates and portrays the

double burden A double burden (also called double day, second shift, and double duty) is the workload of people who work to earn money, but who are also responsible for significant amounts of unpaid domestic labor. This phenomenon is also known as the Seco ...

experienced by late-20th-century employed mothers.

Summary

Coined after Arlie Hochschild's 1989 book, the term "second shift" describes the labor performed at home in addition to the paid work performed in the formal sector. In ''The Second Shift'', Hochschild and her research associates "interviewed fifty couples very intensively" and observed in a dozen homes throughout the 1970s and 1980s in an effort to explore the "leisure gap" between men and women.Hochschild, Arlie and Anne Machung. ''The Second Shift''. New York: Avon Books, 1990. Through the depictions of couples' day-to-day practices, Hochschild derived three constructs in regard to marital roles that she observed during her research: transitional, traditional, and egalitarian. The traditional woman "wants to identify with her activities at home (as a wife, a mother, a neighborhood mom)". The egalitarian female partner "wants to identify with the same spheres her husband does, and to have an equal amount of power in the marriage". The transitional woman falls in between, blending the traditional and egalitarian ideologies. Most of the chapters are dedicated to the routines of a different couple, delving into the apparent and unnoticed motivations behind their behaviors. Similar to earlier research that is cited in the book, ''The Second Shift'' found that women still take care of most of the household and child care responsibilities despite their entrance into the labor force. The "second shift" affected the couples, as they reported feelings of guilt and inadequacy, marital tension, and a lack of sexual interest and sleep. On the other hand, Hochschild shared the stories of a few men who equally shared the burden of domestic work and childcare with their wives, showing that while this scenario is uncommon, it is a reality for some couples. Hochschild's research also presented a clear division between the ideology preferences of the genders and social classes: the working class and men preferred the traditional idea; the middle class and women preferred the egalitarian one.

Reception

Reviewing the book for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' in 1989,

Robert Kuttner Robert L. Kuttner (; born April 17, 1943) is an American journalist and writer whose works present a liberal/progressive point of view. Kuttner is the co-founder and current co-editor of ''The American Prospect'', which was created in 1990 as a ...

wrote that the topic is "a standard feminist plaint", but commended the book for "the texture of the reporting and the subtlety of the insights".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Second Shift 1989 non-fiction books Sociology books Viking Press books Feminist books Books about families Books about labour