If you follow intellectual trends in popular and academic Western feminism(s) about the labor that women perform in the home, then the phrase the second shift is almost pro forma. It was popularized and entered general parlance after the 1989 book by the same name published by Arlie Hochschild1 whose rigorous interview study with fifty married couples led her to coin this phrase. The second shift stands for the unaccounted and unpaid labor that women perform in the home after a day’s work in the formal workforce. The study came out in the period between first- and second-wave feminism in the United States. In brief, first-wave feminism was about securing the right of women to vote; it was succeeded by the economically oriented second wave, followed by the culturally oriented third wave. Hochschild’s study sits comfortably within second-wave...
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Winter 2021
Research Article|
January 11 2021
Diversity Work as Second Shift
Devika Chawla
Devika Chawla
Devika Chawla is a professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. She teaches and writes on matters of migration, affect, material culture, and family life. She has published multiple essays and books, including Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition (Fordham University Press, 2014). She is the editor-in-chief of the University of California Press journal, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research.
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Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (1): 103–105.
Citation
Devika Chawla; Diversity Work as Second Shift. Journal of Autoethnography 11 January 2021; 2 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.103
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