Arlie Russell Hochschild: Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a...

Most women without children spend much more time than men on housework; with children, they devote more time to both housework andchild care. Just as there is a wage gap between men and women in the workplace, there is a "leisure gap" between them at home. Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

women work children

Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a 'second shift' at home.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

factories office home

Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.... Men thus have more control over when they make their contributions than women do.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

women couple jobs

Each marriage bears the footprints of economic and cultural trends which originate far outside marriage.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

trends marriage bears

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

women home kids

Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society at large.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

husband acceptance mother

Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

age love jobs

In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

children art moving

If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

choices together people

For many of us, work is the one place where we feel appreciated. The things that we long to experience at home - pride in our accomplishments, laughter and fun, relationships that aren't complex - we sometimes experience most often in the office. Bosses applaud us when we do a good job. Co-workers become a kind of family we feel we fit into.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

laughter fun jobs

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

Arlie Russell Hochschild

soup-kitchens volunteer self

And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

party dream ideas

Many working families are both prisoners and architects of the time bind in which they find themselves.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

architect prisoner time

As long as the "woman's work" that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman's work, as long as it's tacked onto a "regular" work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

women coffee mom

The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

equal-treatment divorce home

There's the reason that I think that red states don't trust the government. They see it as an instrument of their own marginalization, because they feel especially Democratic administrations have favored blacks, women, immigrants, refugees. And all of these groups, they see as getting ahead of them, as almost like line-cutters, pushing them back in line.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

democratic reason thinking

Let's stop insulting each other and really get to know people. I mean, have a few beers and go on a fishing trip, and you will find a friend who won't see the world the way you do, but where you can have a really good conversation about it.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

beer mean people

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called 'advanced insecurity.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

peaceful insecurity faults

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

omission important lying

To televisionize any serious problem, the program directors face the task of making the message 'go down smooth' until the audience is delivered to the commercial.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

tasks faces directors

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?