When Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Second Shift was published in 1989, it made a startling argument: if one combined the paid and unpaid labour of employed women in the sixties and seventies, they worked a full month extra over the course of a year. That's hardly the case today: women are doing far less housework than they used to, and men are doing more; fathers also do more child care, and mothers put more hours into the workforce, in greater numbers.
The reason Hochschild's book became famous, however, probably had little to do with a mathematical equation. What made The Second Shift so powerful was its analysis of the myths and delusions about what couples needed to do to keep their marriages together. Hochschild could see that repeated attempts - often touchy, and sometimes failed - to recalibrate the workload had terribly messy emotional consequences. "When couples struggle," she wrote, "it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude."
And this vexed economy of gratitude - along with its more poisonous corollary, resentment - still persists in relationships to this day, albeit in subtler and different forms. In absolute numbers, our contemporary division of labour may be more equal than it was in decades past, but that doesn't mean many mothers experience it as fair.
For starters, in the US, mothers of children under six still work five more hours per week than fathers of children under six, if one takes into consideration both paid and unpaid work. That's not a small difference, especially when you consider how much of that time is devoted to nocturnal caregiving: a 2011 study found that mothers in two-income families were three times more likely than men to report interrupted sleep if they had a child at home under the age of one.
Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k to Sleep. About halfway through the discussion, he freely conceded that it was his partner who put his child to bed most nights. That said so much, this casual admission. He may have written a best-selling book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house it was mainly Mum’s problem.
But let's say that a husband and wife do work the same number of hours each week. (This is what the data basically suggest, once kids are six and older.) That is not, in and of itself, an indicator of fairness. Fairness, after all, is not just about absolute equality; it's about the perception of equality. Not all work is created equal. An hour spent on one kind of task is not necessarily the equivalent of an hour spent on another.
Take childcare, for instance. It creates far more stress in women than housework. Specifically: if a married mother believes that childcare is unfairly divided in the house, this injustice is more likely to affect her marital happiness than a perceived imbalance in, say, vacuuming. And today, mothers are doing twice as much of it as fathers.
Data also make clear that the kind of time mothers spend with their children is both less interesting and more enervating: they do the “routine” activities (toothbrushing, feeding) while fathers do the “interactive” ones, like games of catch. Ask any parent which one is more fun. Mothers do more deadline-centred tasks as well (dinner on the table by 6, homework checked by 8, bath by 8.30), which means that home is not a haven, but a place with more deadlines.
These deadline pressures and split-screen demands may explain why researchers have found that leisure activities at home do little to bring down the level of cortisol, or stress hormone, in mothers. Even when they're trying to relax, a ticker tape of concerns still whips through their heads.
So what, you might ask, have researchers found that does have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: seeing their husbands do work around the house.
This is an adapted extract from All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, published by Virago in paperback, £8.99.