A book published in 1989 by sociologist Arlie Hochschild dealt with modern women’s double life, or more precisely double shift, with one shift in the workplace and one shift at home.

All women who work outside the home can warm to this concept instantly. While stay-at-home mums gather at the school gates discussing how busy they are (and many of them indeed are), mums working in offices, factories and elsewhere, who still have to get home and start all the chores the stay-at-home mum can spread out over the day, can only scream silently, particularly those with no help from family or who can’t afford paid childcare.

There is simply no comparison in the quality of life between those who work a double shift and those who do one shift, and research in America points to a widening happiness gap between men and women. Essentially, it shows us that while bits of the gender revolution have worked fantastically, other bits, not least important the bits concerning woman’s actual happiness are in sharp decline.

Happiness is a big area of research today. The thing is it is utterly subjective so results have to be treated with some caution.

We Maltese for example have come out of such surveys rather well (perhaps because so few women do a double shift here), though this may also be about our not wanting to admit we may be unhappy. American women, the subject of this new research, have flooded into the workforce the way Maltese women haven’t, at least not yet. However, the US does not even yet have universal preschool and, contrary to many European countries, has no guaranteed paid leave for parents. So it is doubly understandable that with government policy trailing behind work realities, it is women who are buckling under the strain.

A report in the New York Times last week brought the dilemma of working women to the fore. The research done by Alan Kreuger, a Princeton economist, who used something called a “time use survey”, found that men are getting happier and women unhappier. Mostly this is due to the fact that men, modern men, are spending more time doing stuff they like doing, while women are spending more time doing things they enjoy less. Those doing the survey questioned respondents about various activities and how these activities made them feel. American men and women said they liked similar things like hanging out with their mates and disliked, say, paying bills. However, men have managed, since the 1960s, to spend less time on activities they find unpleasant, while women are spending more time doing things they don’t like.

This is probably true of non-working or single shift women too. Men for example are happy spending time with their non immediate families, while women less so, probably because in many cases this means more duties including cooking meals for the whole family on Sundays, looking after parents and so much more that all women have to take on. Now, while it was perhaps natural for non-working housewives to take all this on, as they got older women who are working full time are simply burning out younger. After all, a stay-at-home mum starts off manically busy but things then ease while the children are at school, although there is still lots of ferrying around, supervision of homework and the like. But full-time working mums are often just plain overtired by the time they hit their forties, while mums who had their children young and who have now grown up, are able to take on extra familial duties without starting from an overtired base.

The male essayist in the New York Times summed it up thus and I think many of us full-time housewives or full-time working mums plus housewives can visualise this very clearly indeed.

“Inside of families men still haven’t figured out how to shoulder their fair share of the household burden. Instead, we’re spending more time on the phone and in front of the television.”

Of course part of the problem is what we women want.

We want to achieve the same things our mum did, a nicely kept house, nourishing meals and the like, as well as working and feeling that fantastic satisfaction and moments of sheer happiness I know I get, and many working women who are in interesting jobs get for any job done well. It seems having it all is out of reach unless the next generation of men, Scandinavian style, take on their fair share of women’s double shift. Because even among the housewives I know, many simply go on and on, even after hubby or partner comes home with a list of chores while he eats in front of the telly and generally relaxes after a hard day’s work.

Women should clearly spend more time doing things they like, be this tennis or art, reading or dance. We don’t have to spend our whole lives in utter servitude to our families and our men, though many of us do. The saddest cases of course are many of those utterly servile women, victims of domestic violence, who carry this absurd guilt all women do to a ridiculous degree. And while a recent report from an AD spokesman apparently suggested women had to report this themselves, changes in the law in Malta do now mean that a third party can do so. We are very a long way away from perfection but a lot of legal changes have been made to allow all those fantastic men and women to better help those victims of domestic violence gain their dignity again.

On a much lighter note though, maybe nature decides everything and nurture has very little part in our lives. More research among lap dancers (now I wonder what man thought of this as a good area for research) found that women lap dancers make much more money from tips when they danced at that time of the month when they were most likely to conceive. Nature will in other words makes women sexier and more alluring to men precisely on those days when conception is most likely. They may look happy but those who go home to a family and kids and have to do a second shift may not be that happy after all, whatever the tip.

So we can forget feminism and facials, those hours in the gym, those blessed treatments, those hours spent cruising the shops for the most alluring clothes. It is ultimately nature that will decide when you look most attractive and when you are most likely to attract the opposite sex. Pretty depressing or perhaps pretty amusing depending on your take on life, and whether of course you are a man or a woman.

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