68 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
“White Collar,” a study of the alien-
ation and boredom of the office worker,
bought a Shopsmith, a woodworking
machine, for his workshop. Theodor
Adorno, meanwhile, boasted that he
had no hobbies, and bemoaned the
“hobby ideology” as just another way
that capitalism destroyed any possibil-
ity of free time.
The leisure that Keynes predicted
never came. Average weekly hours for
wage workers fell from 1930 to 1970,
but, in recent decades, a lot of work-
ers have been scrambling for more.
Why? Put another way: Who killed
Maria Fernandes?
T
he problem with the argument that
it’s stupid to look for meaning in
work—a form of false consciousness to
find purpose in your job—and rare to
love what you do is that it’s wrong. All
sorts of people doing all kinds of work
like the companionship they find in the
workplace, the chance to get out of the
house, the feeling of doing something,
the sense of accomplishment. In 1974,
Studs Terkel published “Working,” a
compilation of more than a hundred
and thirty interviews with Americans
talking about what they do all day, and
what they think about it. It was a study,
he explained, of Americans’ search “for
daily meaning as well as daily bread, for
recognition as well as cash, for aston-
ishment rather than torpor; in short,
for a sort of life rather than a Monday
through Friday sort of dying.”
Terkel loved his job as a radio broad-
caster. He thought of himself as an ar-
tisan. “It is, for better or worse, in my
hands,” he wrote. “I’d like to believe I’m
the old-time cobbler, making the whole
shoe.” He interviewed everyone from
telephone operators to spot welders. He
found plenty of people who hated their
jobs. “It don’t stop,” an assembly-line
welder at a Ford plant told him. “It just
goes and goes and goes. I bet there’s
men who have lived and died out there,
never seen the end of that line. And
they never will—because it’s endless.
It’s like a serpent. It’s just all body, no
tail.” But most of the people Terkel
talked to also took a whole lot of pride
in their work. “Masonry is older than
carpentry, which goes clear back to Bible
times,” a stonemason told him. “Stone
is the oldest and best building material
that ever was.” A hotel switchboard op-
erator said, “You cannot have a busi-
ness and have a bad switchboard oper-
ator. We are the hub of that hotel.” A
twenty-six-year-old stewardess told Ter-
kel, “The first two months I started
flying I had already been to London,Paris, and Rome. And me from Bro-
ken Bow, Nebraska.”
Plenty of people still feel that way
about their jobs. But Terkel’s interviews,
conducted in the early seventies, cap-
tured the end of an era. Key labor-move-
ment achievements—eight hours a day,
often with health care and a pension—
unravelled. The idea of the family wage
began to collapse, as Kirsten Swinth
points out in “Feminism’s Forgotten
Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for
Work and Family” (Harvard). Income
inequality had just begun to rise. In
places like the United States and the
United Kingdom, manufacturing was
dying, and so were unions. When Rich-
ard Donkin started writing for the Fi-
nancial Times, in 1987, six reporters were
assigned to a section of the paper that
chronicled the goings on in the labor
movement: strikes, stoppages, union ne-
gotiations, pay deals, labor legislation.
By 2001, when Donkin published his
history of work, “Blood, Sweat and Tears,”
the labor pages had gone, “because labor,
as we knew it,” he writes, “no longer ex-
ists.” Donkin, who was born in 1957, had
witnessed the dwindling power of unions,
and mourned the end of the separation
of work from home. “Once we may have
left our work behind,” he writes. “Today
we take it with us.... Our working life
is woven, warp across weft, into the tex-
ture of our domestic existence.”
That’s not the full story. The indus-
trial-era division between home and
work was always an artifice, one the
women’s movement tried to expose. In
1968, in “The Politics of Housework,”
the radical feminist Pat Mainardi is-
sued an eviscerating indictment of men
whose home life was taken care of by
women. “One hour a day is a low esti-
mate of the amount of time one has to
spend ‘keeping’ oneself,” she wrote. “By
foisting this off on others, man gains
seven hours a week—one working day
more to play with his mind and not his
human needs.” More women joined the
paid labor force. Men balked at joining
the unpaid labor force, at home. “It is
as if the 60 to 80 hour work week she
puts in... were imaginary,” a Boston
feminist observed. To protest, women
proposed a labor action. “Oppressed
Women: Don’t Cook Dinner Tonight!”
read one sign at the Women’s Strike for
Equality in 1970. “Housewives Are Un-