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159 Chapter 8 Unequal Families: Class Shapes Women’s Responses to Unpredictability Both employers and employees in our study said that families drive unpredictability and the struggle over schedules. Talking about hours and schedules, a human resources administrator reported that when she talked to nurses about their schedules, “the key issue is family.” “Family is your responsibility, and it’s your first responsibility,” was how a nursing assistant with two children phrased it. A fire chief who supervised EMTs told us, “Family comes first.” Even a middle-aged doctor with a couple of kids insisted: “Family, then work, then anything else. That’s all. You have to prioritize.” Very similar formulations, it seems. Very different realities. In their analysis of paid work hours, Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson show that the key change over the last few decades has not been the number of hours that individuals work but rather the number of hours that spouses jointly devote to paid work.1 Because so many wives and mothers entered the labor force in the last few decades, and because the economic well-being of both adults and children has come increasingly to depend on the paid work of women, the United States has witnessed a dramatic increase in the working time of families. This change has produced new conflicts and new opportunities for both women and men, but it has also produced more routine unpredictability. In a family with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife, there is a built-in way of adapting to schedule unpredictability. In a family with children and two full-time wage-earners, or a family with a single parent (both are family types that have increased dramatically in recent years), how to respond to unexpected events is much less obvious. Much of the literature on the modern family emphasizes the centrality of companionate marriage, the desire of partners to be “soul mates,” and 160 Unequal Time the importance of intimacy between them. Given this view, it is in some ways stunning how little impact, both across occupations and across different types of families, spouses (or partners) have on each other’s schedules . For example, we might have expected to hear spouses in dual-earner families talking of their need to be home to see one another, or wives saying that they needed to be home to fix dinner for their husbands; these concerns, however, rarely came up in our interviews. Instead, it was another aspect of family that shaped job hours and was absolutely central in the lives of these modern families: children. It was above all for women that children figured so centrally, but this was the case for many men as well. Not only were children the central factor shaping job schedules for all our occupations (except for male physicians), but the unpredictability of job hours was a defining concern for those who were parents, specifically because of their children. It is not just nuclear families that create and respond to unpredictable events, but also extended families, and especially with the rise of single parents, extended family ties and dependencies have also increased in recent years. These kin create new demands and unpredictability at the same time as they are sometimes crucial in any effort to respond to unpredictable events. Families have made an appearance in preceding chapters, but this chapter and the next will focus on them. Together, chapters 8 and 9 show that families’ responses to the growing unpredictability of hours and schedules are shaped by class interacting with gender. Advantaged male and female employees use their class privilege to uphold conventional gender expectations. In contrast, class disadvantage pushes men and women to weaken gender expectations. More specifically, the two classadvantaged groups—nurses and doctors, one almost exclusively women and the other mostly men—have a series of choices about work hours. They use those choices in gendered ways: male physicians tend to prioritize careers, and female nurses tend to balance families and careers. The two class-disadvantaged groups—female nursing assistants and male EMTs—face greater constraints and have more difficulty meeting gendered expectations. To some extent, both of these disadvantaged groups “undo gender,” even as both sometimes resist or at least have reservations about doing so. A focus on occupations rather than scattered individuals makes it possible to see that cultural schemas are not simply individual choices, but rather are built into occupational cultures and organizational arrangements . In turn, this perspective allows us to highlight the...

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