The Second Shift Quotes

“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 Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

“The workplace would allow parents to work part time, to share jobs, to take personal leaves to give birth, tend to a sick child, or care for a well one. As Delores Hayden has envisioned in Redesigning the American Dream, it would include affordable housing closer to places of work and perhaps community-based meal and laundry services.”
― Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

“In the history of American fatherhood, there have been roughly three stages, each a response to economic change. In the first, agrarian stage, a father trained and disciplined his son for employment, and often offered him work on the farm, while his wife brought up the girls. (For blacks, this stage began after slavery ended.) As economic life and vocational training moved out of the family in the early nineteenth century, fathers left more of the child-rearing to their wives. According to the historian John Nash, in both these stages, fathers were often distant and stern. Not until the early twentieth century, when increasing numbers of women developed identities, beyond brief jobs before marriage, in the schoolhouse, factory, and office, did the culture discover the idea that "father was friendly". In the early 1950s, popular magazines began to offer articles with titles such as "Fathers Are Parents Too" and "It's Time Father Got Back into the Family". Today, we are in the third stage of economic development but the second stage of fatherhood.”
― Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift