Couples 👩🏾‍❤️‍💋‍👨🏿

• What are conjugal roles?


  Division of labor based on gender in a marriage.
• What are segregated conjugal roles?

  Role of husband and wife within the family being clearly separate. Husband usually breadwinner and wife deals with domestic duties and child-care.
• What are Congregated conjugal roles?


  Shared household responsibilities between spouses.
• Domestic labour is the work done by women in the home, such as cooking, cleaning and childcare
• power relationship refers to who controls finances and decision making
• What is the Functionalist Theoretical perspective on domestic labour?

  They argue that a move away from the traditional family model is damaging to society
• Parsons identified 2 marital roles by a husband and wife. These include instrumental and expressive roles.
• What is the instrumental role and who plays the part?


  it’s performed by the husband and is the breadwinning role which includes providing money and resources
• What is the expressive role and who is it played by?

  Is performed by the wife and provides care and emotional support for her husband and children’s
• What does Parsons believe about the division of labour?

  He believes that the division of labour between a husband and a wife is natural and based on biological differences. E.g women are naturally suited for the expressive role and men are naturally suited for the instrumental role
• Who supports Parsons view on domestic labour and what is their argument?


  It’s supported by Goldberg and argues that society has a patriarchal structure and that make dominance in the family biologically rooted based on the physical strength of men.
• What is the feminist perspective on the division on labour?

  Ann Oakley doesn’t think that the division of labour is natural and the traditional family set-up benefits men more than women.
• According to Oakley, the housewife role is socially constructed rather than biologically natural due to the Mines Act and Factory Acts
• What is ’the symmetrical family’?


  Family model where household responsibilities and decision-making are shared equally between partners.
• During Young and Willmott’s study (questionnaire and observation) on the symmetrical family, they found there has been a shift between segregated conjugal roles toward the symmetrical family. An egalitarian relationship (duties & obligations are equally shared by parent)
• Feminists such as Ann questioned the validity of Young and Willmott’s findings on the symmetrical family.
• Methodological flaws (flaws within their research). One of the questions asked was about wheather the husband helps around the house. It showed that 72% of them did help during the week. This doesn’t show any equality as the husband could have done chores once or twice a week. Therefore, the questionnaire was poorly structured as it didn’t take into account the daily volume of domestic chores.
• Over exaggeration of equality. Y and W study didn’t fully explain what they meant by ‘equality’. Oakley suggests answering ‘yes’ to the question doing at least one chore per week wasn’t a sigh of equality. Therefore Y and W exaggerated what equality is