Weekend Can Wait Working Women No Longer Find Reason To Celebrate Friday

It used to be we looked forward to Friday nights. Time to kick back, tilt a margarita or two, party hearty with friends until early Saturday. Thank goodness it was Friday! They even named a restaurant for that blissful combination of relief and anticipation.

Then we grew up and dove into jobs we soon called careers. Some of us got married, had kids. Gradually, rosy Friday evening faded into the night of the living dead for many working women, according to a national survey.

In a poll for United HealthCare Corp., a Minneapolis-based health-care management firm, working women identified Friday as the night they feel most tired and stressed out. Men chose the traditional Monday.

While both sexes are often bushed by Friday, they approach Saturday differently, says Edward Bergmark, United HealthCare president.

“Men look at the weekend and say, ‘Gee, that’s time for me,’ whereas women say, ‘Oh, my goodness, now I’ve got to get my job done at home.’ It makes the weekend more of a pressure cooker in some ways than the weekdays.”

Robin Hardman, marketing director for the Families and Work Institute in New York, says she starts thinking on Fridays about home chores she has put off all week. “I know I couldn’t get through half the list if I tried. My husband is more relaxed, doesn’t carry around the mental list I do. On the weekend he’ll do some cleaning, then sit down and play the stereo. I don’t stop; I’m always thinking of the next thing I have to do.”

Ann Stuart, a contracting officer for the Navy, also identifies with the survey. On Fridays at work, “I’m really churning to get all of the stuff done I didn’t get done during the week,” she says. After work this particular Friday, she is standing in the flower corner of her neighborhood Safeway store in Arlington, Va., staring at tulips, roses and multi-flower arrangements. Women feel responsible for “making the weekends fun,” she says.

Stuart already has stopped at Blockbuster Video to rent “Apollo 13” and “The Age of Innocence.” In her shopping cart is a bottle of champagne. In her head? “I’m thinking that I have to wash the floor at home so it’s clean when the carpet installer gets there tomorrow.”

Homemakers also can feel frazzled by Friday, says Elizabeth O’Neill, another Safeway shopper. O’Neill is on leave from a home health-care job tending her 3-month-old son. Her day has been filled with diaper changes, feedings, cleaning and preparing dinner.

Fridays have not always held their sacred status, according to Witold Rybczynski, author of “Waiting for the Weekend” (1991, Viking/ Penguin). Prior to World War II most Americans worked a six-day week and didn’t let their hair down until Saturday night.

Many baby boomers’ parents, however, worked a five-day week, and the boomers looked forward to Friday dances or, as they got older, happy hours.

“Part of my little head remembers getting dressed in something girlie, going out for a glass of wine,” sighs Debbie Nigro, a single mother and producer of the radio talk show, “Working Mom on the Run.” “It’s a pathetic fantasy that never comes true, at least not in the way it used to.”

“For the masses of women, the home job is as complicated and challenging as what went on all week long,” Nigro continues. “It’s quality time with your kids and cleaning time and spouse time and all throughout this you’re saying, ‘When am I going to do something for myself?’ and suddenly you’re back to Monday. There’s a law in America that women can’t sit down on the weekend.”

Many men, of course, battle piles of dirty laundry and transport kids to soccer and ballet. Generally, however, they see themselves as “helping out,” says Gary Kiger, a sociologist at Utah State University who has studied couples’ attitudes toward work and leisure. Their wives “are organizing and managing the work and feel ultimately responsible for it.”

Chris Kernan, a D.C. preschool teacher, arrives home Friday afternoon from work, drops daughter Kaitlin at swimming practice, then heads to the church gym where she and husband Jim run a Friday night basketball program. Saturday mornings she opens the gym at 8, then returns home for a weekend of laundry, chores and activities with Kaitlin and 6-year-old Brendan. Jim, she says (unprompted), “helps out. If he can’t do something, he gives me plenty of notice.”

A 1993 survey of working men and women by the Families and Work Institute showed women spend almost an hour a day more on chores than men during days off from work, and two hours a day more caring for children.

In a more recent study of 300 full-time dual-earner couples with children, Rosalind Barnett, a psychology professor at the Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College, discovered women did 27 hours of unpaid household labor a week while men did 21. Most was on the weekend, she says.

And as Barnett writes in her book “She Works, He Works” (June 1996, HarperCollins), men and women reported that jobs dictated by time - meals and cleaning the house for guests, for example - were more stressful than jobs with greater flexibility, such as home repairs or working on the car.

Barnett’s suggestion to couples? “Share the high- and low-control tasks.” Translation: Pick up a dipstick, women, and put an apron on your husband.