The Tolls of Uncertainty by Sarah Damaske

Author:Sarah Damaske [Damaske, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Gender and Labor Force Attachment and Family Responsibilities

In the last two chapters, we saw how broad social and cultural norms about what is acceptable for men and women to do can shape how men and women behave after they lose their jobs. Societal expectations about who should care and who should work influences what we do and what we expect others to think of us. What others will think shaped people’s decision making about health care, the household division of labor, and childcare.46 It then shaped their decisions about searching for work. Although sociologist Jennifer Sherman finds gender flexibility—the ability to share work and home tasks and to break away from traditional gender norms—can help families when they face economic challenges and during times of familial change, I find that not everyone has the same access to flexibility.47 As we have already seen, women, particularly working-class women, faced greater demands to do more at home after their job loss. Working-class women’s increased childcare responsibilities (which middle-class women shared to a lesser extent, as they had a greater ability to outsource childcare, particularly at first) played a critical role. Men, on the other hand, had a greater ability to avoid household labor and, as we will see, middle-class men were best positioned to demand some time for themselves, while working-class men faced strong breadwinning demands because of the likelihood that they had a stay-at-home partner.

While most of the middle-class men had anticipated a lifetime of full-time labor, unemployment presented an opportunity to rethink their relationship with work. Many of the men in the Take Time group pointed to their long years in the labor force and said they deserved this time off. A lack of guilt surrounding their job loss emerged, as the middle-class men expressed their entitlement to take time off. Neil said he was “enjoying my time,” and Dean explained, “It’s like I want a break. I just want a break. So, I’m going to let go of the appointment. I will figure out my next steps after I get to take a bit of a break. So that’s where this ended up.” Jason went so far as to say that his job loss was a “blessing in disguise” because it had given him the ability “to focus on [figuring out what I want to do] full-time.”

Some middle-class men felt torn about their decision because they were not fulfilling what they (and their wives) saw as their responsibilities to their families. In the previous chapters, we saw guilt connected to actions in which women sacrificed health care or healthy behaviors or increased their household labor; here, a few men talked about feeling guilty, but not enough to change their search strategies. Jacob (Take Time) explained, “I feel terrible about it and I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do. If she wants to work, that should be her prerogative to do that as sort of an extra thing. I don’t feel she should have to carry the burden of having to supply for her family like that.

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