cojugal roles

• functionalist views

  • men and women are naturally suited to two distinct roles within the Family
  • The Instrumental Role, male role, breadwinner. Involves devoting ones life to the pursuit of a career to obtain the best income he can to support his wife and children.
  • The Expressive Role, female role, homemaker. Involves housekeeping and childrearing.
• criticism of functionalists

  • Feminists argue that by viewing traditional roles positively, Functionalists are ignoring the oppression of women.
  • Ansley famously notes that Functionalists ignore conflict and domestic abuse within the family, and that women are often the ‘takers of shit’.
• segregated conjugal roles


  the traditional nuclear family
• joint conjugal roles


  a family where both adults share the paid work, housework and childcare (symmetrical familly)
• feminist views on conjugal roles

  argue that segregated conjugal roles were oppressive to women as they placed all of the power within the household in men's hands.
• feminists- Duncombe and Marsden

  • describe women as performing the “triple shift”.
  • This combines the traditional roles of housework and childcare, with paid employment, and also emotional caregiving.
  • They argue that  rather than liberate women, access to employment has further burdened and oppressed them.
• zaretsky- marxist

  • argued conjugal roles support capitalism by:
  • Freeing men from doing domestic tasks so that they can work full time all year round.
  • The woman's role of emotional support (“warm bath") is actually there to ‘cushion’ the pressures of capitalist exploitation that the man experience, so that he will keep going back to work every day.
• critisicm of marxism

  • They ignore diversity and that many women now work full time.
  • They see capitalism as the cause of domestic abuse rather than the men who commit it.
  • Marxism ignores that fact that the bourgeoisie tend to live in nuclear families as well.