The Second Shift Summary

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The Second Shift is a feminist book written by Hochschild; this is a narrative that can make people revisit their perception of the world and thus how they perceive and engage it. The Second Shift addresses the dichotomy that women face while trying to incorporate career life into family life. Although Hochschild explains that what she discusses in the book is a factual event in her life, the themes and plot of the book cover a wider perspective of the women at large. It discusses the lives that women lead and how they face some difficulties while trying to balance the roles of a mother and work ethics (Hochschild, & Machung, 2003). The book states that, despite women having struggled for a very time in balancing family and career life, only …show more content…

The book tries to explain that it is possible for people to reduce the pressure of the full-time jobs so that they can they can find time to equally perform the duties related to family care (Hochschild, & Machung, 2003). Therefore, it does away with the link that is exhibited between social benefits and wage labor, therefore, forces up the minimal salaries, top wages, and reduces the premiums. It does not penalize maternal caregivers and rewards maternal caregivers economically naming every care as work plus giving special incentives to those men who take part in the caring process. It reduces on the aspect of the affluent having to go for the foreign practitioners as regards giving of care to the oppressed. Moreover, the emotionally economically rich are the. Economic Valorization could only encourage community and tender feelings, cooperative behaviors and altruistic and long lasting relationships to those who seek them (Hochschild, & Machung, 2003). When Hochschild was writing this book, she was targeting to end the exploitation of women by men in households. However, today it stands as the critique that firmly addresses the ideology of the dominant discourse of the current world; a neoclassic economic which makes the discriminations done on women to look natural and gives explanations as to why there are economic differences between the lives of man and women. It encourages that the care work in households should be equally shared between families regardless of the economic