Opinion Forum

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The very meaning of work in the home has been changed. In earlier times, a woman’s claim to honour was based primarily on her central position in her home. This notion can be traced in ancient Vedic Hindu dharma-shastras that one of the great blessings to women was “to be the emperor of your home” (in Sanskrit language- griham saamraajni bhawa).

But, as Therese L. Baker observes, after the spreading of paid work, the “unpaid” work of the home lost its value and the housewife became “just a housewife”. With the development of capitalization and market, many traditional “value systems” have been redefined but not surely every new thing being better.

There hasn’t been any research in this regard yet in Nepal . In the context of US, Arlie Hochschild has been studied of how far husbands and wives share housework and childcare when both partners work. The “second shift” is the job you have at home caring for your family after you have completed your “first shift” at the workplace. In her study, the activities of the second shift were sorted into three categories: housework, childcare, and managing domestic life. Then the proportional share of the work undertaken by men in each of three categories was determined. In addition, on the basis of interview material, Hochschild learned what roles the men expected to play in their families. From this, she defined three ideological types: traditional men , transitional men , and egalitarian men .

Comparing the men’s ideological beliefs to their sharing of childcare, housework, and the management of domestic life, she found a strong relationship between the ideology of egalitarian men and the sharing of the second shift . The situation was much less clear, however, for transitional men who were beginning to believe in equal roles for men and women in the home but in many cases were not yet contributing much to the work of keeping the home. In fact, larger proportions of traditional men than transitional men (22 percent compared to 3 percent) actually shared equally in the three types of work.

Hochschild’s study is memorable not only for the wonderfully insightful descriptions but also for her ability to draw interpretations from the cases that address the home lives. In searching beneath the ideologies and activities of families in dealing with the second shift, she finds strategies and strains. For example, she concludes that men’s participation with their families developed in response not only to their ideological goals but also to their psychological needs and the degree to which they identified with their own fathers and or wished to play a fatherly role they had never experienced as boys. She also notes social class differences: Those in the working classes more often hold traditional ideals of caring, while those in the middle classes more often hold the egalitarian ideal of “sharing” child care. In the working classes, however, lack of money makes getting assistance impossible, while among the more affluent, the problems arise more because of the instability of paid help and the greater pressures of the partners’ careers.

As she interprets, women try to change their roles or cope with them by adopting various strategies: being a “super mom” or reducing efforts at work, at housework, at child care, toward one’s partner, toward oneself. Or the woman might seek help outside the family. Men’s strategies include trying to cooperate or to resist. She also examines the impact of the demand of the second shift on marital stability, finding that many marriages cannot withstand the complex pressures of jobs and home life. For some workingwomen, however, recognition of the weaker position of women in the economy may increase their fear of divorce and hence dissuade them from asking their husbands for more help with the second shift.

Finally, she contrasts men who participate in the second shift with men who don’t, looking for the factors that differentiate these two groups. The common factor, which the “helping” men shared, was that they themselves had lacked a positive father figure. These men wanted to be the fathers they had never had.

Her generalization about what she saw happening to urban working women as they struggled to handle the pressures of their jobs and coordinate them with the ever-increasing demands of child care, house work, and home management led her to conceptualise these women as “urbanized peasants”. As she states, “The term peasant suggests the humility of a feudal serf. I draw the analogy between modern American women and the modernizing peasantry because women’s inferior social, legal, educational, and economic position had until recently been like that of peasants.”

The issue of second shift is not unfamiliar to Nepali society too since Nepali women are also doing “paid work” in these days. There can be seen attitude of seeing housewife as “just a housewife” and thus changing the very meaning of work in the home. The condition of a job-holding woman becomes even worse when her husband doesn’t cooperate in the housework and in caring children. But, any generalization without having research in Nepal herself might be misleading. It is a topic which should not be ignored by social scientists studying Nepali society.

Nrimala Mani Adhikary