Men's Definition of Masculinity in the Context of the Second Shift

Arlie Russell Hochschild, the author of The Second Shift, saids that men and women come into marriage with implicit “gender ideologies”, which are formed from expectations about traditionally appropriate marital roles for themselves and their mates. During her research on family relations, Hochschild conducted a case study on a family – consists of Evan, the husband and a furniture salesman, Nancy, the wife and a social worker, and their son, Joey. After multiple bargains on equal sharing of domestic life, the couple agrees that Nancy is responsible for “upstairs” and Evan for “downstairs”. The deal sounds fair until one discovers that “upstairs” includes shopping, cooking, cleaning, paying the bills, doing the laundry, and caring for the children, while “downstairs” only consists of dealing with the car, the garage, Evan’s hobby workshop, and the family dog. Yet, as Hochschild notes, “the two have convinced themselves that this arrangement is fair.” In another research that uses data from 18 countries called Understanding Men’s Housework in the Cultural Context of Paid Work, men who earn approximately the same income as their spouses have been found to perform more housework than men who are primary breadwinners; however, when men are dependent on their wives, they do not perform proportionately more housework than men who are not. Surprisingly, in some cases, men who are especially dependent on their wives do even less housework than when they are the primary breadwinners. Although men who are dual-earners do more housework than they would if they were sole breadwinners, they do not raise it enough to engender parity or to undo the traditional gender division of labor. Thus, although men have increasing agreed to division of domestic work, they still perceive it as a role of a woman, not a man.
              
The role of a man as a breadwinner in the family has traditionally been the central aspect of hegemonic masculinity in diverse cultural contexts. This link between masculinity and gender role is especially emphasized in capitalist societies despite the rise in women’s paid employment and flexible labor markets. Men’s identity in terms of masculinity continues to be the underlying reason for men with employed wives to feel an obligation to become the main providers. In cases where women’s income is about the same as her husband’s, the wife, as well as her husband, tends to interpret his employment as the main source of supply for essential family needs, while hers is, no more or less, a “supplement”. Likewise, when the wife provides the main source of income, her spouse makes up for his shortcoming by considering his work as more important than hers. Despite the variation in circumstance, women typically do the majority of the housework due to the sturdy link between gender roles and masculinity; because housework is symbolically “women’s work” and masculinity is defined in opposition to masculinity, men in counter-normative situations reinforce their masculinity by not engaging in feminine activities, i.e. house chores and childcare.