Couples

• Sex role theory - Parsons

  • Instrumental role: husband achieves success at work so he can provide financially as the breadwinner
  • Expressive role: the wife is responsible for primary socialisation of the children and meeting family's emotional needs as homemaker and full-time housewife
  • Based on biological differences and is beneficial to both sexes
• Sex role theory - Criticism

  • Young & willmott: argue men are now taking a greater share of domestic tasks and wives are becoming wage earners
  • Feminists: reject the view that the division of labour is natural and argue it only benefits men
• Joint & segregated conjugal roles - Bott

  • Segregated conjugal: couple have separate roles. Male is breadwinner and female the homemaker. Their leisure actvities are separate
  • Jint conjugal: couple share tasks e.g. housework, childcare. They spend leisure time together
• 'Symmetrical family' - Young & Willmott

  • Roles of husbands and wives are becoming similar
  • Women are going out to work (part-time)
  • Males helping with housework & childcare
  • Spend leisure time together
  • This is a result from a major social change: changes in women's position, geographical mobility such as living away from where you grew up
• Symmetrical family - Oakley

  • Research on housewives and husband's participation
  • 15% in housework
  • 25% in childcare
• Impact of paid work

  • British Social Attitudes survey 2012 - men do 8 hrs of housework per week. Women do 13 hrs
  • Women now carry a dual burden
  • Couples continue to divide tasks along traditional gener lines (laundry & shopping or house repairs)
• March of progress view

  • Gershuny: women working full-time is leading to more equal divsion of labour in the home
• 'Emotion work' - Hochschild

  • Women are required to perform emotional work of managing the emotions and feeling of the family
  • Duncombe & Marsden: women now have to perform a 'triple shift' of housework, paird work and emotional work
• Taking responsibility for 'quality time' - Southerton

  • Another responsibility is managing the family's 'quality' time together
  • Working mothers have to juggle demands of their career, personal leisure & family time
  • Men and women have less equal amounts of leisure time
  • Men experience uninterupted 'blocks' whereas women's are punctuated by child care
• Unequal division of labour - Crompton & Lyonette

  • Cultural or Ideological: determined by patriarchal norms and values. Women perform domestic labour because society expects them to
  • Material or economic: women earn lless than men so rationally do more housework while men spend more time earning
• Cultural explantion for division of labour

  • Man Yee Kan: a generational shift is occurring where young men do more than their fathers & women less than their mothers
  • Dunne: lesbian couples had more symmetrical relationships due to absence of traditional heterosexual 'gender scripts'
• Material explanation of division of labour

  • Kan: every £10,000 a year more a woman earns, she does 2 hours less housework per week
  • Arber & Ginn: better-paid, m/c women able to buy commercially produced producst and services e.g. domestic help and childcare
• Gender division of labour - Criticism

  • 7/8 households, men earn more as women more likely to work part-time if they have children
  • Crompton: equal division of labour depends on economic equaity between sexes
• Money management - Pahl & Vogler

  • Allowance system: men give their wives an allowance where they have to budget to meet family needs and the man keeps surplus amount
  • Pooling: both partners have access to income and joint responsibility for expenditure e.g. joint bank account
• Decision-making

  • Pahl & Vogler: men have major financial decisions
  • Edgell:
  • Very important decisions (moving house) were made by husband or jointly with husband having final say
  • Important: about children or a holiday made jointly or soley the wife
  • Less important: home decor or food shop made by the wife
• Decision-making - Laurie & Gershuny

  • By 1995, 70% of couples had an equal say in decisons
  • Women who were high earning more liekly to have an equal say
• Domestic abuse as frequent

  • Widespread: Women's Aid Federation 2014 found DV account for 1/4 to 1/6 of all reecorded violent crime. Crime survey England & Wales 2013 - 2 million reported victims of DV
  • Not occurring randomly: Coleman & Osborne found that 2 women per week are killed by a partner or former partner
• Patterns of violent incidents - Dobash & Dobash

  • Could be set off by what the husband saw as a challenge to his authority
  • Marriage legitimates violence against women by conferring power on the usband & dependency on the wife
• Gender gap in abuse

  • Walby & Allen: women are more liekly to be victim of multiple incidents of abuse & sexual violence
  • Dar: difficult to count separate accounts of DV as the abuse may be continuous and the victim cannot reliably count the instances
• Official statistics of DV

  • Victims may be unwilling to report it to the police
  • Yearnshire: women on avg. suffer 35 assaults before making a report
  • Police & prosecutors may be reluctant to investigate, report or record. Cheal: they are not prepared to get involved in family life as it is the private sphere
• Radical explanation of DV

  • Family and marriage as key institutions in patriarchy & main source of female oppression
  • Male domination state institutions helps to explain the reluctance of te police and courts to deal with DV cases
• Radicale explanation - Criticism

  • Elliot: Not all men are aggressive and most are opposed to DV
  • Fails to explain male victims of DV or why women are more likely to be victims
  • Office for National Statistics 2014 suggests women from some social groups are at a greater risk - young, low social class, living in deprived areas, substance abusers
• Material explanation for DV

  • Wilkinson & Pickett: see DV as result of stress on family members caused by social inequality
  • Inequality means some families have fewer resources - money worries can lead to domestic conflict
• Material explanation - Criticism

  • Doesn't explain why women are main victims
  • Ansley: describes wives as 'takers of shift'. Dv is the product of capitalism as male workers are exploited at work take their frustration out on their wives