Domestic Division of Labour

Definitions-

Instrumental role: means of pursuing an aim

Expressive role: effectively conveying thoughts and feelings

Dual burden: the feminist idea that women have a dual burden of both paid work and unpaid work such as housework and childcare.

Emotion work: managing the emotions and feelings of family members e.g. sibling squabbles or jealousy

Triple shift: the idea that women do both housework/childcare, paid work and emotion work.

Parson 1955

  • Functionalist

  • Called husband/wife roles in a relationship conjugal roles

    • Husband’s role is instrumental

      • Achieving success at work in order to financially provide for the family

    • Wife’s role is expressive

      • Primarily socialising the children, meeting the families emotional needs, being a homemaker instead of a wage earner

Bott 1957

  • Functionalist

  • Furthered Parson’s description of what she called ‘segregated’ conjugal roles with the idea that this genre of couples tended to have separate leisure activities.

  • Created another genre called ‘joint’ conjugal roles in which couples divided housework and childcare equally and spent their leisure time together.

Young and Willmott 1962

  • Functionalist

  • Studied traditional working-class extended families in Bethnal Green and their findings supported Bott’s addition to Parson’s theory

    • Added that men often spent their leisure time with work colleagues in pubs or men’s clubs while women had limited leisure time which they spent with the female kin that helped them with housework and childcare.

Cultural explanation

  • (Patriarchal) norms about gender roles due to values, socialisation and role models dictate men and women’s domestic duties

  • Once these change, equality will be achieved

  • Man Yee Kan, BSA

Material explanation

  • Women earn less than men and spend more time at home so therefore do more childcare and housework

  • If men and women were to earn equally, in theory they should do equal amounts of domestic work

  • Ramos, Man Yee Kan

March of Progress view

  • Y&W said that family life was gradually improving for everyone as the trend moved towards joint conjugal roles which created a symmetrical family.

  • They observed that:

    • The roles of husbands and wives were becoming increasingly more similar as women began to take on paid work and men began to do childcare and housework

    • Couples beginning to spend their leisure time together.

  • This was because:

    • Women’s position changed as married women began to work (dual income)

    • Couples had more geographical mobility (moved away from their hometowns) and therefore had less extended family to rely on for childcare

    • New labour-saving technology allowed men to do more housework as it was easier and less time consuming.

  • There was now a higher standard of living due to the second wage, which meant labour-saving devices could be afforded and then men did more housework.

Feminist view

Oakley 1974

  • Feminist

  • Claimed Y&W exaggerated their claims of a ‘march of progress’ as their survey was too qualitative (helping once a week could just be making breakfast or cleaning the whole house) and therefore was not convincing evidence of symmetry.

  • She found that:

    • 15% of husbands had high participation in housework

    • 25% of husbands had high participation in childcare, and of this only the ‘fun’ bits.

  • Couples defined the fathers role as ‘taking an interest’.

Boulton 1983

  • Feminist

  • Claimed Y&W exaggerated their claims of a ‘march of progress’ as they looked at tasks instead of responsibilities.

  • Said that fathers helped with specific tasks while the mother was responsible for the child’s security and wellbeing.

  • Found that <20% of husbands played a major role in childcare.

Supported by:

Ferri and Smith 1996

  • Found fathers did the childcare in less than 4% of families

Dex and Ward 2007

  • 78% of fathers played with their children

  • <1% of them took the responsibility of caring for a sick child

Braun, Vincent and Ball

  • 3/70 families had a father as their main carer

  • Most fathers viewed caring for the children as placating their spouse instead of actually caring about the children

Ward & Hetherington 1993

  • Feminist

  • Saw that sex-typing of domestic tasks was still strong with wives 30x more likely to have been the last person to do the washing and husbands 4x more likely to have been the last person to wash the car

  • Men only did routine ‘female’ tasks when their partners were unable to do them

  • However, with younger men there was less of an assumption that women should do the housework and they were more likely to think they were doing less of the housework than their fair share

Men usually undertake repairs while women do laundry, cleaning and meal preparation. Since 1994, there has not been a significant change in who carries out the tasks as percentages of men/women doing tasks do not vary by more than 10% between 1994 and 2012. Although times might be changing a lot the tasks shares only stray from the normal in blended or same-sex families.

The feminist view of the dual burden is supported by the data from the BSA 2013 as men do almost half the hours of housework/caring that women do even though they are working. Women were then not only doing housework and childcare as much as before but also taking on paid work. However, this data fails to show the qualitative differences in tasks such as intrinsic satisfaction, difficulty, discomfort and skill required.

Quality time

Southerton (2011)

  • Said that mothers face greater difficulty in organising quality time due to:

    • 24/7 society

    • Flexible working patterns leading to lack of routines

    • Fragmented blocks of time meaning no clear time to dedicate as quality time.

  • Men have blocks of leisure time whereas women’s leisure time is punctuated by childcare and is often spent multitasking.