, 66% of the shopping, 75% of the cleaning, and 85% of the laundry (Benokratis, 1996). Percentages like this have resulted in women’s work at home being labeled as “the second shift.” In contrast, wives whose husbands do an equal amount of chores at home report higher levels of satisfaction with their marriage, less depression, and less resentment. In fact, the women whose marriages lack equity in these areas have said that improvements in helping around the home is one of the most important things that would make their lives better. Anecdotally, while attending night classes at CSU, Hayward the most common complaint I heard on break and during study sessions was about the lazy husband at home not helping, and women dreading having to go home after class and clean up the house.The third area where families are affect by work is the area of childcare. Research shows that having both parents work is not automatically damaging to kids (Benokraitis, 1996). Instead, what is most important seems to be the quality of the care given to the children by the parents and caregivers.The news media has concentrated on the difficulties working mothers face when they try to "have it all"; tales of strained “Superwomen” can serve to reinforce a notion that I resent, that unlike for fatherhood, motherhood and work outside the home are naturally in conflict. Media have been less likely to dig beneath the surface symptoms of women's workplace problems--for example, working mothers' stress levels--to the root causes of such problems. But these root causes shouldn't be hard for journalists to find. It is no secret that working parents are increasingly strapped for time; according to EPI, married workers with children labored an average of 354 more hours per year in 1998 than they did in 1979. This time crunch is particularly hard on women, since childcare arrangements tend to be handled more often by mothers even when mar...
