Word: shifts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SECOND Shift has been rightly called a "seminal," "smashing" and "brilliant" work on the state of modern marriage. The tragic stories of working parents coping with careers and children are enough to give pause to any prospective newlywed. Second Shift powerfully raises the question of housework as an issue of happiness, and not just of fairness...
...Second Shift also falters when Hochschild's personal prejudices color her descriptions of the couples she observes. She tends to ascribe nefarious subconscious motives to minor actions that aren't necessary to prove her overall point. For example, when a husband in the study made a joke about housework, she accuses him of denying the problems in his home. (In fact, he did deny them, but not because of the joke.) At worst, Hochschild chastises a father as a bad parent for refusing to do a "camel walk" with his baby...
Hochschild views the family through the narrow lens of the second shift, failing to address factors other than housework that may be just as likely to cause marital discord. These other factors--such as domestic violence--seem to be more important for the poor families in the study than the rich ones...
Poor couples also seem more hesitant to acknowledge conflict over the second shift, although Hochschild demonstrates its importance in their marriages. It might seem that conflicts over housework and child-rearing would be more intense for those families which must do without baby-sitters and maids. But Second Shift does not deal with this discrepancy...
Issues of class remain peripheral to Hochschild's basic point that the second shift causes unhappiness, regardless of whether the couples perceive the second shift as a problem. And Hochschild makes this point convincingly through the well-documented and precisely explained observations of individual families...