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How Did The Double Shift Somehow Become The Triple Burden?
Women’s work just keeps expanding.
When I was studying sociology back in the 1980’s my teacher put a lot of emphasis on what sociologists were then referring to as the double shift. This was a phenomenon whereby women who worked full-time still did the majority of the housework and childcare, effectively resulting in around eight hours of paid work, followed by eight hours of unpaid work.
Women had fought hard at this point to normalise working full-time as a woman, even after you had children. They had focused on seemingly important things like the right to earn the same as men, and make discrimination at work based on gender, if not uncommon, at least illegal. They’d campaigned for a fair maternity leave and the right to return to a job after time off to do the exhausting and important (though also unpaid) work of bringing new life into the world.
They had, perhaps, been so busy focusing on what they wanted that they’d failed to address what they didn’t want. I don’t know any women who actually wanted to work all day to earn money then work all evening and weekend at the unpaid work of running a home and raising children. But we completely forgot to campaign for legislation to ensure men would pull their weight with all that.
What were we thinking? That men were suddenly going to step up and do half the housework and childcare, because that was what would be fair, and sensible, and morally correct? That if we were working the same hours of paid work as our male partner, he would change the same amount of diapers? That if we were earning the same amount, he would do the same amount of cooking and cleaning and folding laundry?
If that was our assumption, we were wrong.
Still, back in the 80’s, my 18-year-old self wasn’t too worried. It will right itself over time, surely, I thought. This working mom thing is still fairly new. Men aren’t used to it yet. They’ll realise how unfair the double shift is, surely, and step up to do half the unpaid work, because that just makes sense. Another decade or two and things will change.
Over three decades later, my 50-year-old self sat down to help my own 18-year-old daughter with her sociology homework. We were in…
