Women, Work, and Inequality in the U.S.: Revising the Second Shift

Abstract

The second shift, coined in 1989 by Arlie Hochschild, highlights the complexity of women‟s roles as mothers, wives, and working women. According to Hochschild, working women perform a first shift in the paid labor force and a second shift of unpaid labor in their households. This research critiques Hochschild‟s second shift concept from a critical sociological perspective. The authors argue that because Hochschild‟s conceptualization of second shift fails to engage a comparative historical analysis, her work dismisses, devalues and omits marginalized groups of working women, who have throughout history engaged unpaid, underpaid, involuntary, devalued, and/or overlapping never ending shifts of labor long before middle-class White women joined the paid labor force. Keywords: