Week 13 - Families

Gendered housework and parenting

• only 20% of households have breadwinner/housewife structure with a stay-at-home mom

  • historically, breadwinner/homemaker outnumbered by both single parent and dual-earner families

  • now it does not.

• second shift: work that greets us when we come home from paid work

  • ex: laundry, cooking, cleaning, childcare, yard work

  • Who does most of this work?

• Childcare and housework still carry gendered meanings

• mothers considered primary housework/childcare

Second shift and the division of labor

• messages about who should be in charge of the second shift

• housework as feminized labor

• sharing vs. specialization

  • men = 2/3 of paid labor and 1/3 of unpaid work

  • sharing: dividing up the labor at home evenly

  • specialization: dividing up the labor at home based on how much work they do in the workforce

  • family life is currently more balanced but not equal

Ideologies and institutional barriers to sharing

• couples want to share, but don’t

  • social norms, expectation, socialization

  • work has expectations that aren’t compatible with family

• neo-traditionalism

  • when being egalitarian get’s too difficult, it’s often reverted back to traditional division of labor

  • men often ask their partner to de-value their work once they have kids

• intensive mothering

  • as a result of the devaluing of mothering, there was a switch to seeing mothering as pivotal and now it’s the expectation that women are only mothers and give all their attention to mothering

  • fathering has never been devalued, so there isn’t the same intensive notion around fathers

    • the assumption that their will be a mother at home

    • sees father that are parenting as the exception

Division of labor in families

• “supermom”

  • backhanded complement for mothers that “do it all”, if they don’t, then they are bad mothers

• neo-traditionalist dads

  • “stepping in, babysitting, helping out”

  • disservice to dads - assuming they can’t 

• modern breadwinner/homemaker

  • women in high or low income levels may be pushed out of the workforce

    • this is based on childcare costs

  • sharing solution

    • least likely to end in divorce

    • outsourcing: domestic outsourcing is paying a non-family member to do family-related tasks

      • care-chain

      • eating out

      • household help (nannies, housekeepers)

    • de-emphasize work (dual nurturer couples)