Division Domestic Of Labour, Decision-making & Power

• The Symmetrical Family- Young & Willmott

  A family in which domestic duties, paid work and power is shared equally between the couple
• The March of Progress

  1. Stage 1: The Pre-industrial Family, in which all members work together in order to survive

  2. Stage 2: The Early Industrial Family, men and women started to have separate conjugal roles, men took control over leisure and work related matters, women looked after the private sphere

  3. Stage 3: The Symmetrical Family, greater advancements in tech meant that the standard of living rose, nuclear family spent more time together and implemented joint conjugal roles

  4. Stage 4: The Asymmetrical Family, a prediction in which they thought upper-class families would return to implementing segregated conjugal roles, they believed this trend would slowly spread down to the lower classes
• Features of the symmetrical family

  • equal domestic division of labour
  • equal division of labour outside the home
  • equal division of power in making decisions about money and major events in family
• Oakley

  • rejected Young & Willmott’s evidence for the symmetrical family
  • found that women do more housework than men, women have the dual burden of paid work and housework
• Ansley

  • domestic violence is a product of men’s pent up frustration at a capitalist system , often misdirected as anger towards their wives
• Greer

  • believes that heterosexual relationships are innately oppressive, and is therefore in support of political lesbianism
  • views the family as a patriarchal unit that reinforces male power
• Dobash & Dobash

  • the nuclear family is the key institution of patriarchy, and the main source of oppression for women
  • domestic violence is inevitable, as it preserves the power men have over women
• Delphy & Leonard

  • women have to take on “emotional labour” in which they are expected to cater to the family’s emotional needs; moral support, friendship, affection etc.
• Duncombe & Marsden;

  • women work the “Triple Shift” in which they are expected to complete paid work, domestic labour and emotional labour, compared to their male counterparts who are only required to take on ONE job
• Decision-making power explanations

  • material; men earn more money and thus have more power in decision-making
  • cultural; gender role socialisation propagates the idea that men must be dominant and assertive
• Edgell

  • found that women had more power in making decisions concerning household and childcare matters, eg. groceries, home décor.
  • on the contrary, men had the upper-hand when it came to the more important decisions like holiday destinations, big purchases and other financial decisions
• Pahl

  • Allowance System; men worked paid jobs and gave a budget to their wives, in which they were expected to spend on household costs and children’s needs
  • Pooling; a term used to refer to a dual-worker family’s joint responsibility for household costs, they often had joint bank accounts
• Gershuny;

  • suggested that there will always be disparity in decision-making power for as long as the the glass ceiling above female promotions and unequal pay exist
  • he claimed that when women started to earn more, there was a clear rise in the amount of domestic work men did in the house
• Schor

  • suggests that advancements in technology has led to the “commercialisation of housework“, to an extent, the emergence of household appliances have freed women from the burden of domestic labour
  • however, only wealthy families benefit from such appliances, whilst working class remain with the burden of housework
  • she also criticises Y & W’s theory of “stratified diffusion”, the gap between the w/c and m/c is extremely large due to the difference in income
• Dobash & Dobash

  • found that men behaved violently towards their wives when they felt that authority was being challenged
  • therefore, it was difficult to for women to achieve equality in decisive power and a fair distribution of housework, as they were subject to domestic violence if they attempted to defy the status quo
• Dunne

  • claimed that the gender stereotypes perpetrated by a patriarchal society make it impossible to achieve a symmetrical division of labour between heterosexual couples
  • found that lesbian couples had more of an equal partnership both in the private and public sphere, however, the individual with the greater income had less of an involvement in housework
• Weeks

  • same-sex relationships make more symmetrical families than heterosexual ones