Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, eBook
Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0804763577
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804763578
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0804763577
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804763578
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2010
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804763578 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2010 |
| Series: | Studies in Social Inequality |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
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DIVIDING THE DOMESTIC
Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National PerspectiveSTANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6357-8
Chapter One
Why Study Housework? Judith Treas
To understand how married people divide the household work, a wealth of research has examined the characteristics of the husband, the wife, and their household. A keyword search for housework in Sociological Abstracts yields a remarkable 1736 scholarly publications. These studies, however, have focused on single-country cases and usually on the United States. The research has had little of the cross-national comparison that enlivens and informs so much of contemporary sociology. Because "traditional" gender relations and the balance of work-family activities are being challenged to varying degrees from country to country, the time has come to examine how national context affects the very organization of intimate family life. In this volume, leading international scholars take a path-breaking turn away from single-country studies, extending a rich area of inquiry to show how people's domestic lives are shaped by the country in which they live. The ambitious research by our contributors bridges the micro and macro levels of analysis to demonstrate how social institutions and national cultures penetrate the most intimate aspects of our private lives.
Why study who does the housework? At one time, housework was of little scholarly interest outside the field of home economics, a pragmatic branch of academia dedicated to bringing the scientific efficiency of modern industry to the household (Ehrenreich and English 1978). The study of housework gained broader legitimacy when labor economists observed that men divided their time between market work and leisure, but women also spent time in "home production" (Mincer and Polachek 1974). Whether they produced tidy homes or polite children or buttered biscuits, their household labor contributed to the well-being of their families. Under the banner of the "New Home Economics," neoclassical economists applauded husband-wife differences in household responsibilities for bringing the efficiencies of economic specialization to the family (Becker 1981). Sociologists also found much to admire in a system that saw men largely in the labor force and women mostly in the home. The most honored American sociologist of the mid 20th century, Talcott Parsons, argued that the wife's expressive role within the household complemented the husband's instrumental one in the market; taken together, they were the cornerstone of a functional equilibrium in the family (Parsons and Bales 1955).
Feminists, however, have long denounced these differences in gender roles as the linchpin of a patriarchal system of inequality that disadvantages women not only at home, but also at work, in politics, and in the broader culture of the society (Budig 2004). For their part, some contemporary social demographers point to women's "double shift" of housework and paid employment as explaining why so many women think two children are too many (Cooke 2004; McDonald 2000; Torr and Short 2004). Even when employed full-time, wives spend many more hours doing housework than husbands, and they perform the more tedious tasks (Blair and Lichter 1991; Dex 2004). Compared with husbands, wives are more likely to "scale back" their career to prioritize family demands (Becker and Moen 1999; Bielby and Bielby 1989). Although both women and men say that they would like to spend more time with family, it is largely the women who want to work fewer hours (Treas and Hilgeman 2007). Wages are depressed by time spent in child rearing (Budig and England 2001) and in housework (Hersch and Stratton 2002)-or, at least by time spent on "female" chores (Noonan 2001). Family-accommodating careers lead to lower earnings even at midlife (Velsor and O'Rand 1984). The imbalanced division of housework has consequences for health and well-being, too. Perceiving the division of household labor as unfair raises the risk of depression (Glass and Fujimoto 1994). Dissatisfaction with a partner's contributions to housework decreases marital quality, and it increases marital conflict and thoughts of divorce, particularly for women (Pina and Bengtson 1993; Suitor 1991; Ward 1993).
Couples choose how they will divide the chores, starting from the point when they choose to live with one another (Gupta 1999). Most theorizing about domestic decision making has centered on the way in which the characteristics of husband, wife, and their household shape this decision making (Coltrane 2000). One guiding assumption has been that partners arrive at rational decisions about who will mind the children, cook the dinner, and pick up the dry cleaning. One keen consideration has been whose time is regarded as too valuable for this sort of unpaid work. This determination has usually favored the man, whose job prospects-for a variety of reasons-have exceeded the woman's. With his valuable time devoted to earning a living, his hours left over for diaper changing and dusting were limited, and this work fell largely to his wife. This general argument is often called the "time availability" explanation for the division of household labor (Shelton and John 1996).
A bigger home may increase the amount of housework required (van der Lippe, Tijdens, and de Ruijter 2004), but it is the arrival of children that tends to scuttle any egalitarian intentions and press couples into even greater gender specialization (Baxter, Hewitt, and Haynes 2008). These considerations point to what has been widely referred to as "demand" (for housework) explanations of who does what around the home-albeit a gendered demand conditioned on cultural ideals about the relation of mothers and their children. Of course, fertility everywhere has fallen, presumably lowering one source of demand for housework-although the time children themselves require does not seem to have declined (Bianchi 2000; Sayer 2005). In addition, as the value of women's time in the labor force has increased, they, too, are working for pay and have less time to mind the house. The upshot of changes in demand for housework and time availability has been a number of accommodations. In various countries, these include not only the wife doing a lot less housework and the husband doing a bit more (Bianchi et al. 2000; Gershuny 2000), but also couples outsourcing more chores to hired helpers and commercial establishments (Bittman, Matheson, and Meagher 1999; de Ruijter, Treas, and Cohen 2005; Treas and de Ruijter 2008; van der Lippe, Tijdens, and de Ruijter 2004).
Although rational decision making in the face of shifting opportunities and constraints is a big part of the story, there is another significant consideration-namely, personal preferences. Individuals' attitudes and values lead them to prefer some sorts of domestic arrangements over others. researchers have stressed a distinction between those whose values support "traditional" versus "nontraditional" gender roles, although, as some of our contributors suggest, this broad-brush description of preferences is an oversimplification. Studies show that gender role attitudes tend to line up at least loosely with the actual allocation of housework (Coltrane 2000), but "traditional" attitudes are clearly losing ground (Bolzendahl and Myers 2004; Scott, Alwin, and Braun 1996). There is even some evidence that gender ideology matters less to housework decisions than it once did (Crompton, Brockmann, and Lyonette 2005). Furthermore, partners do not necessarily share the same preferences (Greenstein 1996), which means some element of bargaining and negotiation enters into decision making about the household division of labor (Bernasco and Giesen 2000; Breen and Cooke 2005; Youm and Laumann 2003). In any case, many sociologists regard preferences as social products that depend to some degree on institutional structures and cultural traditions.
Gender poses one complication to the tidy logic of rational choices and predictable outcomes. The outcome of bargaining has long been argued to depend on the comparative clout of the partners, as epitomized by the "relative resources" explanation for the division of labor in the household (Coltrane 2000). These resource discrepancies may manifest in relative earnings, the economic dependency of the homemaker on the breadwinner, how credible divorce threats seem, one's subjective sense of entitlement, and a host of other considerations (Baxter and Kane 1995; Breen and Cooke 2005; Brines 1993; Major 1993). When it comes to household negotiations, women do tend to be at a bargaining disadvantage with respect to most of these factors. In fact, disadvantage compounds from level to level so that gender inequality in the broader society undermines whatever bargaining power over housework is derived by the woman from employment-based resources (Fuwa 2004). Of course, some women make more money than their husbands, and their numbers are growing (Raley, Mattingly, and Bianchi 2006). Despite their resource advantage, these women appear to pay a price, because the husbands out-earned by their wives defy rational predictions. Rather than doing more housework so the wife can spend more time in breadwinning, these husbands have sometimes been seen to do less (Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1993).
Although the significance of relative earnings has been questioned (Gupta 2005, 2007), the paradox of husbands doing less housework when wives do more paid work brings us to an important idea. Clean laundry, accomplished children, and savory meals are not the only things produced in the home. As Sara Berk (1985) famously pointed out, the household is a gender factory. What economists have called home production includes the manufacture of gender through everyday heterosexual interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987). In other words, women do housework and men eschew housework, in part, to show off the feminine or masculine competence desirable for their gender. Known variously as the "gender construction" or "doing gender" explanation, this perspective offers an account of the relative income paradox in that men who fall short as dominant breadwinners can reassert their masculinity by avoiding "women's work" around the house. Gender construction could also explain women's tendency to do more housework when living with an adult of the opposite sex than when living with a same-sex adult or alone (Gupta 1999; South and Spitze 1994). Because gender identity is central to personal identity, it is hardly surprising that gendered domestic arrangements continue to subvert the most egalitarian impulses. Despite the drudgery, women find things to like about doing housework and even resist handing off some of this responsibility to men (Allen and Hawkins 1999; DeVault 1991; Robinson and Milkie 1998). Few married women see a 50/50 division of housework as optimal (Thompson 1991). In fact, most wives are quite satisfied when their husband shows he cares by providing token help with the "woman's work" around the house (Sanchez and Kane 1996).
The discussion of what women (or men) want begs the important question of why we want what we want. Theorizing in the social and behavioral sciences has moved beyond paradigms that view us as merely the passive products of socialization. We are no longer assumed to be captives of our social roles. Rather, we are seen as reflective individuals capable of resisting imperatives and exercising our human agency to change our lives and remake our environments. This is a nuanced view that makes explanations of behavior more contingent and problematic, even if there is no denying that we are shaped by our experiences. Take the example of childhood socialization. Growing up with a working mother is associated with more egalitarian housework arrangements in one's own marriage, but only, it seems, under certain conditions, such as coming from a two-parent family (Cunningham 2001; Gupta 2006).
Certainly our environment constitutes the frame that influences how housework is organized, because it constrains the set of options that are available and, indeed, imaginable to us. "Who washes the dishes" is not just an idiosyncratic, personal arrangement. The behavioral options we perceive are limited by a force field of normative expectations and societal structures that channel domestic activities in predictable directions. This observation points outward beyond the immediate household, because it acknowledges the influence of the broader context in which we live. Although this context surely includes the examples of parents and peers, it also includes pervasive cultural models and taken-for-granted assumptions about men and women, parents and children. These ideals offer handy prototypes for our lives. Studies of housework have only begun to grapple with a host of structural factors that suppress options or make conscious decision making largely irrelevant. Focused on the husband, wife, and household, studies of the division of household labor have only rarely addressed the broader context within which preferences are formed and housework arrangements are worked out. remedying this omission is the objective of this book.
The contributors to this volume are among the scholars at the forefront of new comparative scholarship on the division of household labor. Indeed, the contributors figure prominently in a representation of this field, which includes Batalova and Cohen (2002); Baxter (1997); Bittman et al. (2003); Cooke (2006); Crompton, Brockmann, and Lyonette (2005); Davis and Greenstein (2004); Evertsson and Nermo (2007); Fuwa (2004); Geist (2005); Gershuny (2000); Hook (2006); Iversen and Rosenbluth (2006); Pfau-Effinger (2004); Treas (2008); and Yodanis (2005).
In Dividing the Domestic, the authors embrace the broader social context to advance our understanding of the division of household labor. Leveraging on country-to-country differences in domestic organization, they systematically relate these country differences in the division of housework to national differences in welfare regimes, social policies, employment structures, cultural expectations, and more. Their chapters not only draw on existing theories of gender, culture, and the state, but they also introduce novel conceptual frameworks for understanding why the household remains a traditional bastion of gender relations, even as massive social forces of globalization, welfare state retrenchment, and individualism call into question existing relations between citizen and state, worker and employer.
Their frameworks integrate contemporary sociological perspectives, including some seldom applied to the study of domestic arrangements. Feminist critiques, social policy analysis, labor studies, the sociology of culture, and principles of social psychology all find a place in these chapters. Cross-national comparisons demonstrate that the causes of gender specialization in the household cannot be understood without looking beyond the home. As the contributors demonstrate, a full accounting of "who does the housework" includes the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, new cultural prescriptions for happy marriages, and other factors specific to particular countries. By identifying the critical conditions that promote or impede gender parity in the family, cross-national comparisons of household labor can also inform policies to advance equality between men and women in society.
This necessarily brief introduction to the previous research on the division of housework sets the stage for a preview of the substantive chapters that define this volume. Drawing on time diaries, cross-national sample surveys, official statistics, comparative policy data, and qualitative interviews, these chapters offer timely empirical descriptions and fresh explanations for the variation in domestic practices observed across countries.
In "Trends in Housework" (Chapter 2) Liana C. Sayer leads off by charting changes in time use for men and women in nine countries in western Europe and North America. Although there are certainly country-to-country differences in the onset and size of changes, time diaries going back 40 years confirm that women have been doing less housework and men have been doing more. In most countries, men are actually doing more of the cooking and cleaning chores that make up the "routine" drudgery of daily life. Despite the remarkable increase in female labor force participation, however, women continue to do the lion's share of work around the house in all nine countries. Also complicating the picture is the fact that the increase in housework for men has stalled in a number of nations. On the basis of these trends, it is too early to say to whether the gender convergence in time use heralds the dawn of gender equality or the remarkable persistence of female domestic disadvantage.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures and Tables....................viiAcknowledgments....................ix
About the Authors....................xi
CHAPTER ONE Why Study Housework? Judith Treas....................3
CHAPTER TWO Trends in Housework Liana C. Sayer....................19
CHAPTER THREE Women's Employment and Housework Tanja van der Lippe....................41
CHAPTER FOUR The Politics of Housework Lynn Prince Cooke....................59
CHAPTER FIVE Can State Policies Produce Equality in Housework? Shirley Dex....................79
CHAPTER SIX Economic Inequality and Housework Sanjiv Gupta, Marie Evertsson, Daniela Grunow, Magnus Nermo, and Liana C. Sayer....................105
CHAPTER SEVEN Cultural and Institutional Contexts Birgit Pfau-Effinger....................125
CHAPTER EIGHT Beliefs about Maternal Employment Maria Charles and Erin Cech....................147
CHAPTER NINE The Institution of Marriage Carrie Yodanis....................175
CHAPTER TEN Pair relationships and Housework Karl Alexander Röhler and Johannes Huinink....................192
CHAPTER ELEVEN Men's and Women's reports about Housework Claudia Geist....................217
CHAPTER TWELVE Concluding Thoughts on the Societal Context of Housework Sonja Drobnic?....................241
Index....................253