Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

by Anne Helen Petersen

Alarm, but also stability: For many families, a supplemental income was a godsend. But that stability was offset by the shame of the husband no longer being able to uniquely provide for his family, and all other manner of fragile masculinity manifestations. And how do you make men feel better about their masculinity? You assure them that nothing, really, will change: A woman might be working in the office eight hours a day, but she’ll still be feminine and put together, and dinner will still be served at the same time, and the kids won’t even notice a thing. In other words, she’ll still be a full-time housewife—even if she’s also a full-time worker outside the home. Hence the “second shift,” a term popularized by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 1989 book of the same name, to describe the fact that these mothers were in fact pulling double shifts every day: one in the “formal” workplace, then another back at home.