"The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects"
About this Quote
The first half is the hopeful script: wages and workplace authority expand a woman’s sense of what she deserves at home. Not gratitude for “help,” but equal treatment. Then Hochschild flips the lens to the constraints that quietly discipline that hope. Lower wage and lower status do more than limit purchasing power; they calibrate what feels negotiable. If you’re paid less, you’re easier to cast as the “secondary” earner, and domestic inequality can be justified as practical rather than ideological.
The sharpest line is “the threat of divorce.” Divorce is framed not as liberation but as leverage held against the person with less economic security. That subtext is brutal: equality at home is not just a matter of attitudes or enlightened partners, but of bargaining power under conditions of risk. Hochschild’s intent is to expose the paradox of partial emancipation - when women enter the market on unequal terms, it raises expectations while simultaneously teaching people to keep them modest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: The Second Shift (Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1989)
Evidence: The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects. (Likely Chapter 16, "The Working Wife As Urbanizing Peasant"; exact page not fully verifiable from available snippet). The quote is widely attributed online to Arlie Russell Hochschild, and the strongest primary-source evidence points to her 1989 book The Second Shift. In the accessible text snippets from that book, I could verify closely related surrounding language and the table of contents shows Chapter 16 titled "The Working Wife As Urbanizing Peasant," which is the most likely location of this wording. However, the exact sentence was not visible in the limited preview/snippet I could access, so the page number remains unconfirmed. I did not find evidence that it first appeared as a speech or interview before the book. Based on the available evidence, the earliest verifiable primary source is The Second Shift (1989). Other candidates (1) The Meaning of Sociology (Joel M. Charon, 2005) compilation100.0% ... The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatm... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (2026, March 9). The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-influx-of-women-into-paid-work-and-her-149573/
Chicago Style
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. "The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects." FixQuotes. March 9, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-influx-of-women-into-paid-work-and-her-149573/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects." FixQuotes, 9 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-influx-of-women-into-paid-work-and-her-149573/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.
