When women entered the workforce en masse in the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it the “second shift”. Women’s lives were transformed, she found, but the men they shared their homes with were stubbornly unchanging in their habits. So, as men were clocking off and chilling out, their wives and girlfriends were clocking back in for an evening of domestic duty: the cooking and the cleaning, the laundry and the to-do lists, the shopping and the shuttling between childminder and swimming classes. The situation remains the same today. In effect, women in employment are pulling double shifts, and their unpaid labour is subsidising the men who live with them – or rather, live off them.
Molly, the American suburban mother at the centre of Helen Phillips’s novel, hasn’t read Hochschild, but then she doesn’t have time. She’s got a small daughter called Viv and a baby called Ben; a job as a palaeobotanist at a site called the Pit, which turns up plant fossils mystifyingly not quite like anything else in the record; a ceaseless rota of expressing milk so she can keep up the breastfeeds; and a husband whose work takes him away from home for weeks at a time. She is tired – so tired, and so anxious for her children’s safety that she can hardly trust her own senses.
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