conjugal roles and the domestic division of labour
- Created by: loupardoe
- Created on: 17-01-18 08:43
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conjugal roles- the domestic division of labour between husband and wife; housework, paid work, child care, emotion work, decision making
segregated conjugal roles- split; different; traditional
joint conjugal roles- shared; interchangable
instrumental role- taking charge of family life
expressive role- caring for family emotional life
willmott and young 1973- the symmetrical family
- used a questionnaire with more than 100 questions asking almost 2000 people in london about their domestic roles
- the symmetrical family- nuclear, home centred and privatised, roles of husband wife are similar
- stratified diffusion- new ideas of family life were started by the higher social classes and graduall filtered down to the lower classes
- as the working class has come to enjoy shorter working hours, more comfortable homes and a higher standard of living, family life has become increasingly privatised and nuclear
- less need for the traditional mutual aid network of the extended family
- more opportunity to devote time and money to home and children
ann oakley in 'the sociology of housework' 1974
- wives saw housework and childcare as their responsibility and recieved little help from their husbands
- said the figure of 72% of married men claiming to help their partners at least once a week exaggerated the degree of symmetry
- to be included in their figures, husbands only had to perform one household chore a week, hardly convincing evidence of male domestication
- Oakley had a small sample
- compared being a housework to working in a factory
- it was mostly men who worked in factories and she wanted men to be sympathetic to her views
arlie hochschild
- surveyed 145 dual income married couples as well as 45 other people involved in their lives
- sample was mainly middle class and white
- carried out in depth interviews with 10 of the couples
- when men were asked 'tell me about your typical day' 46% made no reference to their home or domestic matters
- about 70% shared 'reasonably closely'
- as many as 33% did 'little or nothing to help'
- wrote 'The Second Shift' in 1989
- was called this to suggest that women did one shift of paid work and another of unpaid housework
- weakness- small sample, unrepresentative, vague
duncombe and marsden 1993
- the triple shift
- added the issue of emotion work to the debate
- emotion work- the love, sympathy, understanding, praise, reassurance and attention which are involved in maintaining relationships
- claimed that emotion work is gendered
- it is women who are responsible for it
- most women complained of men's emotional distance
- they felt they were the ones who provided reassurance, tenderness and sympathy
- men showed little awareness of understanding of their shortcomings
- the triple shift- paid work, housework and childcare, and emotion work
- other research produced similar findings, despite the major increase in working women
- Devine's small scale study of car workers in luton- tried to find out whether men's involvement in domestic labour increased when their wives re-entered paid employment
- although their involvement increased, their position was secondary (1992)
- Gershuny (1994) also found that women do the majority of housework and…
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