Couples

• Patriarchal


  The man was in every sense the head of the household
• Grounds for divorce were very unequal - a man could gain a divorce on the grounds of his wife's adultery, but a woman had to prove her husband's cruelty or another matrimonial offence in addition to adultery
• Domestic division of labour


  The roles that men and women play in relation to housework, childcare and paid work
• Parsons' functional model of the family


  • The husband has an instrumental role, geared towards achieving success at work so that he can provide for the family financially
  • The wife has an expressive role, geared towards primary socialisation of the children and meeting the family's emotional needs
• Parsons argues that this division of labour is based on biological differences, with women naturally suited to the nurturing role and men to that of provider
• Parsons claims that the division of labour is beneficial to both men and women, their children and to wider society
• Segregated conjugal roles


  The couple have separate roles: a male breadwinner and a female homemaker/carer
• Joint conjugal roles


  The couple share tasks such as housework and childcare and spend their leisure time together
• Young and Willmott identified a pattern of segregated conjugal roles in their study of traditional working-class extended families in Bethnal Green, east London, in the 1950s
• Symmetrical family


  One in which the roles of husbands and wives, although not identical, are now much more similar
• Women now go out to work, although this may be part-time rather than full-time
• Men now help with housework and childcare
• Couples now spend their leisure time together instead of separately with workmates or female relatives
• Young and Willmott see the rise of the symmetrical nuclear family as the result of major social changes that have taken place during the past century
• Feminist sociologists reject the 'march of progress' view and argue that little has changed: men and women remain unequal within the family and women still do most of the housework
• Oakley found that only 15% of husbands had a high level of participation in housework, and only 25% had a high level of participation in childcare
• Husbands were more likely to share in childcare than in housework, but only its more pleasurable aspects
• Boulton found that fewer than 20% of husbands had a major role in childcare
• Warde and Hetherington found that sex-typing of domestic tasks remained strong, with wives 30 times more likely to be the last person to have done the washing while husbands were four times more likely to be the last person to wash the car
• Warde and Hetherington found that men would only carry out routine 'female' tasks when their partners were not around to do them
• Gershuny found that women doing full-time work led to a more equal division of labour in the home
• Sullivan's analysis showed an increase in the number of couples with an equal division of labour and that men were participating more in traditional 'women's' tasks
• The British Social Attitudes Survey found a fall in the number of people who think it is the man's job to earn money and the woman's job to look after home and family
• The British Social Attitudes Survey found that in 2012 men on average did 8 hours of housework a week, whereas women did 13 hours, and men spent 10 hours on care for family members, whereas women spent 23 hours
• The British Social Attitudes Survey found that couples continue to divide household tasks along traditional gender lines, with women much more likely to do the laundry, care for sick family members, shop for groceries, do the cleaning and prepare the meals, while men were more likely to do small repairs around the house
• Ferri and Smith found that fathers took responsibility for childcare in fewer than 4% of families
• Dex and Ward found that, although fathers had quite high levels of involvement with their three-year-olds, when it came to caring for a sick child, only 1% of fathers took the main responsibility
• Braun, Vincent and Ball found that in only three families out of 70 studied was the father the main carer, with most fathers holding a 'provider ideology' that their role was as breadwinners, while the mothers saw themselves as the primary carers
• Emotion work


  Women are often required to perform emotion work, where they are responsible for managing the emotions and feelings of family members
• Triple shift

  Housework, paid work and emotion work
• Emotion work

  What Arie Russell Hochschild (2013) calls the responsibility for managing the emotions and feelings of family members
• Feminists have noted that women are often required to perform emotion work
• Triple shift

  Housework, paid work and emotion work that women have to perform according to Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden (1995)
• Quality time

  The responsibility of coordinating, scheduling and managing the family's time together, which usually falls to mothers according to Dale Southerton (2011)
• Achieving quality time has become more difficult in today's late modern society with recent social changes such as the emergence of the 24/7 society and flexible working patterns
• Working mothers find themselves increasingly juggling the demands of work, care, personal leisure time and family, while at the same time managing and coordinating their own and their families' social activities
• Although some studies now show that men and women have more or less equal amounts of leisure time, they have different experiences of it
• Men are more likely to experience consolidated 'blocks' of uninterrupted leisure time, while women's leisure is often punctuated by child care
• Women are also more likely to multi-task than men
• There may have been some movement towards an equal division of labour, but perhaps not very much