Summary Of Arlie Hochschild's Second Shift

You and I both have a mother and father. However, privileged individuals have both parents living under the same roof in “love”. If you are one of these privileged individuals we can make judgement on who does the most laundry, who handles the finances, who cooks, who cleans, and the list is endless. Some of us might say “mom” and others “dad” but regardless of who does what, in a “traditional” household (Olson November 17th, 2016), there’s always one parent who does the majority of the house and child-rearing work. It becomes a “second shift” for that parent when they come home from work. The “second shift” is referred to the domestic roles and expectations that occupy one or both parents before they go to and after they return from work. This is precisely what Arlie Hochschild looked at when she and her associate, Anne Machung, interviewed and did home observations on 50 working couples who were raising children under the age of six. These two researchers were looking at the balance, if there was any, between careers, household work, and childrearing tasks. “There is a ‘his’ and ‘hers’ to the economic development of the United States” (pg. 11) and both Hochschild and Machung were determined to find this. In this book, Hochschild studied sets of working parents. As an example of what Hochschild’s research consisted of and what she found, the first set of …show more content…
There are nine other couples that Hochschild look at in chapters five to twelve that exemplifies this concept further. Also, in these other chapters, we are introduced to various other husbands, baby-sitters, friends, neighbors and women who are lawyers, word processers, garment pattern cutters, and executives. The names of all of the families that Hochschild interviewed were the Holts, Delacortes, Tanagawas, Myersons, Steins, Judsons, Alstons, Livingstons, Shermans, and