Arlie Hochschild - The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE SECOND SHIFT

Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has co-edited one book and authored seven others, three of these New York Times Review Notable Books of the Year. She was won Guggenheim, Fulbright, Mellon, and Alfred P. Sloan awards, and her books have been translated into fourteen languages.

Newsweek describes The Second Shift as having the detail and texture of a good novel; Publishers Weekly noted that the concept of the second shift has entered the language; and in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Kuttner described her subtlety of insights and graceful, seamless narrative, and called The Second Shift the best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time. The Financial Times said of the Time Bind, there are wit, humour, and joy as well as portents of doom. In Christine Stansells Washington Post review of The Commercialization of Intimate Life, she describes Hochschilds curious, roving mind, her big ideas No one, she writes, has written about (family dilemmas) with Hochschilds intelligence, originality, and on-the-ground knowledge.

Hochschild has written for the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ms., the American Prospect, and Mother Jones, directed the U.C. Berkeley-based Alfred P. Sloan Center on Working Families, and lectures widely in Europe and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild. They have two sons and share the second shift on the weekly overnight visits of their two small granddaughters.

Anne Machung currently works as director of accountability for the University of California. She received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published articles on higher education and family in Change and Feminist Studies.

Other Books by Arlie Hochschild

The Outsourced Self

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich)

The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling

Coleen the Question Girl (a childrens story)

The Unexpected Community

THE
SECOND
SHIFT

Working Families and the Revolution at Home

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD

WITH ANNE MACHUNG

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1989

Edition with a new introduction published in Penguin Books 2003

This edition with a new preface published 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Arlie Hochschild, 1989, 2003, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 1940

The second shift : working families and the revolution at home / Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung.

p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: The second shift : working parents and the revolution at home. 1989.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 9781101575512

1. Dual-career familiesUnited States. 2. Dual-career familiesUnited StatesCase studies. 3. Sex roleUnited States. 4. Working mothersUnited States.

I. Machung, Anne. II. Title.

HQ536.H63 2012

306.872dc23 2011043651

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Designed by Alice Sorensen

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For Adam

Preface

When I was thirty-one, a moment occurred that crystallized the concern that drives this book. At the time, I was an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the mother of a three-month-old child. I wanted to nurse the babyand to continue to teach. Several arrangements were possible, but my solution was a pre-industrial oneto reintegrate the family into the workplace, which involved taking the baby, David, with me for office hours on the fourth floor of Barrows Hall. From two to eight months, he was nearly the perfect guest. I made him a little box with blankets where he napped (which he did most of the time) and I brought along an infant seat from which he kept a close eye on key chains, colored notebooks, earrings, and glasses. Sometimes waiting students took him out into the hall and passed him around. He became a conversation piece with shy students, and some returned to see him rather than me. I put up a fictitious name on the appointment list every four hours and fed him alone.

The babys presence was like a Rorschach test for people entering my office. Older men, undergraduate women, and a few younger men seemed to like him and the idea of his being there. In the next office there was a seventy-four-year-old distinguished emeritus professor; it was our joke that he would stop by when he heard my son crying and say, shaking his head, Beating the baby again, eh? Textbook salesmen with briefcases and striped suits were generally shocked at the unprofessional gurgles (and sometimes unprofessional odors) from the box. Many graduate student women were put off, partly because babies were out of fashion in the early 1970s, and partly because they were afraid that I was deprofessionalizing myself, women in general, and, symbolically, them. I was afraid of that too. Before having David, I saw students all the time, took every committee assignment, worked evenings and nights writing articles, and had in this way accumulated a certain amount of departmental tolerance. I was calling on that tolerance now, with the infant box, the gurgles, the disturbance to the dignity and sense of purpose of my department. My colleagues never seemed to talk about children. They talked to each other about research and about the departments rankingstill number 1 or slipping to number 2? I was just coming up for tenure and it wasnt so easy to get. And I wanted at the same time to be as calm a mother for my son as my mother had been for me. In some literal way I had brought together family and work, but in a more basic way, doing so only made the contradictions between the demands of baby and career all the more clear.