Men Want Change Too

By Michael Elliot

We were young; we were smart; we were looking forward to the world of work. And when we graduated from Oxford University in the early 1970s, my wife and I (we've been together 33 years) thought we'd have it all. We'd both have successful, satisfying careers. We'd have enough free time to travel the world and do fun stuff (you should have seen the shirts and dresses she used to make). We'd share in our kids' upbringing and divide the chores. We were convinced that the world of stay-at-home moms and job-trapped dads had ended, oh, sometime around 1969.

We were wrong, of course. In her 30s, my wife gave up a high-powered career as a government official to have children. Consciously trying to balance work and family, she took part-time jobs that in some cases were enjoyable but that never gave her the recognition or professional advancement that you get if you're in full-time employment. Meanwhile--first for fun, later because the extra income helped--I allowed work to take over my life, spending nights and weekends working on books or TV films. I've spent nothing close to the time I wanted to with my two daughters. Granted, there should be some rule against well-paid journalists complaining about their lot in life, so let the record show that I love my work and that my children are charming, healthy teenagers. But the three-way balance among work, family and the nonjob, nonkid stuff that provides much of the spice of life--what ever happened to my tennis game or the trip to Machu Picchu?--is nothing like what my wife and I imagined it would be. It's not just women who are disappointed that modern life has not accommodated their various needs. So are millions of baby-boomer men who wanted their marriage to be a genuine partnership of equals.

Why did we get it so wrong? We weren't all smoking something--O.K., some of us were--and we weren't unutterably naive. But we left college at a very specific moment in time. We were the beneficiaries of eight decades of astonishing technological change, and we subconsciously thought it would continue. But a long wave of improvement in everyday life came to an end in the 1970s. Look around your home; you will not see a significant labor-saving device invented since the 1960s. Nothing has happened since then to make feeding the kids, washing their clothes or cleaning the home easier. Think about the time you spend schlepping around; note that New Yorkers travel in the same way and at much the same speed as they did in the 1930s.

The most significant technological development of the past 30 years has been a collapse in the price of a unit of information. That, it turns out, has been disastrous for the work-life balance. Information is now ubiquitous. Home life is no easier than it was, but work has invaded the domestic space--which is what my daughters mean when they scream at me to stop answering e-mail in the evening. The incessant demands of an always-on, 24/7 world of free information have made some middle-aged women who would like to go back to work consider whether the benefits are worth the hassle. But so long as they stay out of the labor market, their husbands are trapped in it--otherwise family incomes would fall. Hence that familiar social phenomenon: a married couple in their 50s in which the wife is resentful because she does too little paid work and the husband is resentful because he does too much.

Thirty years ago, we dreamed of something different. Pity it didn't work out.