Second Shift/Third Shift

Stalled Revolution

Putting this into an historical context, when the American industrial revolution occurred in late 18th to mid-19th century, the male exodus from the home and family farm to centralized workplaces separated fathers from their children, and fathers' parenting responsibilities subsequently decreased. Women buffered the ill effects of this social change by increasing their own parenting responsibilities, and the newly female-identified household developed into what historians call the “cult of domesticity.” By contrast, during the 20th century, when middle-class white women made their own exodus from the home to centralized workplaces (poor women and women of color already worked for pay), men's labor and identities did not make a parallel shift to accommodate this new change in the home. That is, men did not significantly increase their second-shift workload to keep pace with women's increasing first-shift workload. Likewise, the workplace, once structured around a family wage [Page 1105]and the tacit assumption of a homemaker wife, did not markedly shift or become more flexible when women increasingly entered into the workforce, even though the decline of the family wage mandated their entry. Thus, the 20th-century increase in women's labor force participation radically altered the lives of women, but there was no parallel transformation or recalibration in the lives of men or in society at large. This comprises what Hochschild calls a “stalled revolution.”

Supermom and the Cultural Cover-Up

Due to this lack of male or workplace adjustments, women buffered the social ill effects of their own increased labor force participation in the 20th century just as they had for men during the industrial revolution. They did so in large part by embodying a cultural icon: what Hochschild labels the “super-mom.” The supermom image is one of a highly competent, driven, and energetic woman who can effectively balance professional work with motherhood by sheer force of will. This image, propagated in part by advertisements and the media, places the burden of public issues—such as limited workplace flexibility and limited male contributions to the second shift—squarely on the shoulders of individual women. Hochschild called this a form of “cultural cover-up,” privatizing social problems and solutions, and overtaxing individuals for the repercussions of a poorly devised social system.

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