Division of Unpaid Labor

Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt

By Arlie Russell Hochschild

            In “Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt,” Arlie Hochschild discusses the marital dynamic between the Holt couple.  Throughout the whole account, Nancy describes herself as a feminist.  As the marriage progresses, the author witnesses growing conflict that she realizes is the result of “a conflict between their two gender ideologies.” (39).  Hochschild then sees how they come to resolve their conflict.

Upon entering her marriage, Nancy’s goal was always to maintain equality between her and her husband, both in the house and at work.  However, she experiences mounting passive resistance from Evan, her husband, to sharing in the household tasks.  Hochschild explains how their respective gender ideologies are a result of their respective early experiences.  Nancy had a mother who Nancy perceived as a depressed housewife and Nancy’s life goal was to avoid becoming that.  So Nancy developed a career about which she was very passionate.  Evan respected his wife’s passion for her career, but he did not understand how her own decision meant that he had to change his own life.  As conflict between the couple continued to mount, separation arose as a possibility.  While this idea frightened both husband and wife, it scared Nancy more.  And so it was Nancy who took initiative to change.

Nancy explains to the author that they have developed an “upstairs-downstairs agreement,” in which Nancy takes care of the house, the child, and the cooking and Evan takes responsibility for the garage and the dog.  Hochschild explains the process Nancy underwent in order to “bring herself to believe the myth that the upstairs-downstairs division of housework was fair.” (46).  One way in which she did this was to stop comparing herself to her husband and rather, and instead she began comparing women to women and men to men.  Also, she focused on the advantages of what giving in to her husband provided.  She spoke of the house as hers and Joey as her child.  Further, she began to attribute the division of housework responsibility as a result of Evan’s and her differing personalities.  He was lazy both Evan and Nancy explained, while Nancy was organized and energetic.

I found this reading to be very frustrating.  It made me feel a certain hopelessness, like it is not possible to change our situation, but rather we can only change ourselves.  Further, it upset me to think about the delusions of which we convince ourselves in order to reconcile our beliefs with our actions or way of life.  

Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families

By Christopher Carrington

In “Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families,” Christopher Carrington investigates the lives of 52 lesbian and gay families.  From his investigation, he provides an account of the egalitarian myths many of these couples believe and the ways these couples actually divide work.  In his work with these couples, Carrington found that perceptions of egalitarianism continue among most of these couples, despite evidence that often points to the contrary.  One reason these couples maintain these perceptions are to portray a positive image of lesbigay families to the public.  Another reason is that domesticity is often invisible, thus the division of it is invisible.

            Most lesbigay families do exhibit a division of domesticity that heavily favors one individual.  However, according to Carrington, “a minority of lesbigay families do achieve a rough equivalence in the distribution of domestic work.”  Among wealthier lesbigay families, this equal division is achieved through the purchase of domesticity on the market place.  Thus these families rely on the labors of mostly working-poor people.  Other than the wealthiest of couples that Carrington followed, he found the egalitarian system to be stronger among couples in which, regardless of gender, both partners work in traditionally female-identified professional occupations.  Carrington believes that this is because these jobs have more family-friendly policies which allow the workers to devote more time to family work.  However, the downsides to these jobs are that they provide lower wages, less room for promotion, and less control over the matters of one’s work.  Finally, Carrington found this egalitarian pattern to be prevalent among families that he describes as a part of the “the downsized family.”  These families are usually composed of male couples, often living in urban environments.  They are mostly in their late twenties and early thirties and in their first committed relationship.  They achieve the system by living cheaply, doing little consumption work and sharing their living space with other people. 

However, Carrington found that in among longer-term families, a pattern of specialization usually emerges, in which one member of the couple focuses on domesticity, while the other focuses on paid work.  Carrington explains that “paid employment exerts the greatest influence upon the division of domesticity in most lesbigay families.”  He adds that it is usually the partner with less earning potential or less occupational prestige who ends up specializing in domestic labor.  Carrington believes that the families who establish this pattern do so in order to maximize both income and domesticity so that they may reap the greatest quality from the household lives. 

Carrington then explains that while few individuals choose to become more involved in domesticity, some actually do make the conscious choice.  Some of the reasons listed for making such a decision were a growing detachment from paid work, concern about saving troubled relationship, and simply a love for domestic life.  Overall, those individuals who gravitate towards domesticity do share common socioeconomic traits.  For the most part their partners earn, have greater career opportunities, and have a more demanding job than they do.  Carrington concludes that not all families are able to pursue a domestic life.  This is one of the many dilemmas of domesticities, dilemmas that Carrington maintains to be one of the reasons many lesbigay relationships do not survive.

Autonomy, Dependence, or Display?

The Relationship between Married Women's Earnings and Housework

By Sanjiv Gupta

In this article, Gupta discusses the relationship between women’s earnings and their time spent on household chores.  He begins reviewing the two dominant theoretical models of the relationship between women’s earnings and their housework.  These are the economic dependence hypothesis and the gender display hypothesis. The dependence theory responded to the latter descriptions by attributing the gender gap in housework to women’s economic dependence on their husband.  This explanation relies on the fact that women’s earnings are usually lower than that of their husband’s.  The display theory gives an inverse relationship than that of the previous theory.  It says that women who earn more than other women contribute a greater amount to housework in order to assert “their gender identities in the face of their gender-atypical relative incomes.” (400) 

Both theories, Gupta explains, arose in response to the functionalist and “new home economies” descriptions of the dynamics of heterosexual households.  In these descriptions, men and women are describes as joint agents, working together in order to achieve common goals.  They do so, according to these accounts, by developing specialization patterns whereby one group dedicates their efforts in the labor market and the other focuses on the domestic sphere.  The division occurs in these patterns according to each partner’s “respective skills, productivity, and the actual or expected rewards for time spent on particular activities.”  The accounts explained that men, who usually have higher earnings relative to women, gravitate towards paid work.  Where as women, who are generally better at domestic labor, tend to focus their efforts in the domestic sphere.

Gupta, identifies several problems with these theories.  To begin with, both theories rest on studies that only focused on women’s earnings relative to that of their husbands.  They, therefore, ignore the possibility of a relationship between women’s housework and their absolute earnings, separate from that of their husbands.  Gupta explains that it is necessary o study the latter possibility as recent studies have found that women with low earnings tend to have higher relative earnings—earnings compared to that of their husband’s—than other married women.  The dependence and display theories, with their narrow range of focus, do not provide an explanation for this phenomenon.

            Like the latter two theories, Gupta emphasizes the fundamentally gendered nature of housework in his studies.  However, he does not confine his studies to women’s relative earnings.  From his modified studies, he found that as women’s earnings increased between 1965 and 1995, their time spent of housework declined.  This finding does point to a correlation between women’s earnings and their time spent on housework.  However, he also found that effects of women’s absolute earnings on housework similar among married and single women, which supports his perceived need to study women’s earnings as autonomous from that of their husband’s.  Gupta maintains that we cannot determine the system by which women’s earnings result in their level of housework efforts.  He does, however, present “the use of their own earnings to substitute for domestic labor, bargaining over its allocation, and the practice of gender display,” (414) are three possible means for this.  Gupta asserts that in order to better understand the relationship between women’s earnings and their time spent on housework, we must investigate the relationship between potential, not just actual, earnings of women and their time spent on housework.  

 

 

The Time Bind

Overworked Individuals or Overworked Families?: Explianing Trends in Work, Leisure, and Family Time

by Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson

 

In this article Jacobs and Gerson address the debate concerning the rise in working versus leisure time.  They argue that the debate is incomplete, as the analyses of trends of working time have focused almost exclusively on the individual worker.  This would be sufficient if the increasing anxiety over balancing work and family was entirely a result of changes in the length of the workweek.  However, Jacobs and Gerson argue that it is a result of shifts in greater social trends, which can be condensed to the shift from the male-breadwinner system to dual-earner couples and single-parent households.  They therefore focus on the collective work schedule of the family as a whole.  They draw their findings from a survey of dual-earner couples and single parents in 1970 and in 1997.

            Jacobs and Gerson begin by presenting two theses.  The first maintains that Americans today are working more hours than their predecessors.  The second thesis claims that Americans today are actually logging more leisure hours than workers in previous times.  After criticizing the quality of data and conclusions of these theses, Jacobs and Gerson argue that both theses are vaguely accurate.  They agree that there is the “growing sense that family’s are squeezed for time.”  However, in their investigation, Jacobs and Gerson found only a minor increase in hours worked among individuals.  They found that the overall increase in hours worked was therefore insignificant.  Rather, they insist that this phenomenon is a result of a “decline in support at home rather than an increase in working time.”  This is a result of the evolving family structures and gender relations. 

            Jacobs and Gerson then go on to discuss the perceived increase in leisure time.  They attribute this trend to several previously ignored social trends.  Over the years more students are choosing to remain students for a longer period of time.  On the other end of the age spectrum, men these days are retiring earlier.  Furthermore, Jacobs and Gerson explain that “over the past 30 years, the average age of marriage has increased, the age at first birth of children has increased, and the number of children per household has declined.  All these demographic trends give people more leisure time without reducing their time on the job.”

            I found this article extremely informative.  It reminded me how easily data can be manipulated to support a certain conclusion.  Jacobs and Gerson did a really good job of taking apart such data.  They introduced and supported their own findings with strong research and appropriate attention to context.  Additionally, I liked how they pointed out the fallibility we encounter in only studying the individual.  The individual does not exist in a its indivual framework; the individual exists in many frameworks.  We, therefore, cannot debate or analyze the family—one primary frameworks in which the individual exists—by referring to the individual alone and by ignoring the family.

The Career Mystique

By Phyllis Moen

In this article, Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling address Betty Friedan’s concept of the feminine mystique in the context of their own concept of the “career mystique.  The feminine mystique presents the ideal wife as one who devotes her efforts to domestic upkeep.  The career mystique establishes the image of the ideal worker—usually seen as the husband—as one who devotes his “prime” adult years to his work, under the assumption that he will gain promotion and seniority.  Moen and Roehling discuss how these two mystiques promote and feed each other.  In their discussion, they sculpt their conclusion, which maintains the impracticality of the career mystique

            Moen and Roehling explain that fulfilling the image that the career mystique paints was only ever possible for a select few as it was economically unfeasible for most.  However, today it is even more unrealistic.  To begin with, in todays unstable economy, there is little assurance of job security regardless of how hard one works.  There is a greater risk of layoff accompanied by greater workload and fewer benefits available.  Furthermore, the age of retirement has greatly decreased even though the average lifespan has greatly increased.  With these phenomenons along with the rising price of college and graduate school, people are required to work harder in order to maintain the lifestyle of the their predecessors. 

            Previously, when there was less pressure on the worker, the feminine mystique was supported the career mystique, as it provided an environment in which husbands were able to devote all their time to work.  However, today, when there is greater pressure on the worker, the feminine mystique has undergone a fast process of deterioration as more and more women, who overwhelmingly include mothers, enter the workforce.  There have been no indications or burgeoning signs of a decline in the career mystique and so both women and men are struggling to conform to its ideals.  This has left the domestic sphere unsupported as women struggle to meet the expectations of their bosses.  Companies claim to have made efforts to aid this family struggle.  However, as Moen and Roehling point out, in reality these effort do not support the family system so much as they do the work system. 

            One cannot deny the struggle parents are increasingly facing in trying to balance work and family.  For the most part the debate on how to solve this problem focuses on how to do so in the context of our current social system.  Moen and Roehling assert that such solutions are insufficient.  According to them, we must not work for change with in the current system of the career mystique, but rather we should work to change that system.  I think this is really insightful.  It is so easy to see the problems a system creates and to focus energy on fixing those problems.  However, we are so often blind to the system itself that is creating these problems, that is the problem.   

The Time Bind

By Arlie Hochschild

In chapters 14 and 15 of her book The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild examines the relationship of workers to their jobs.  She does so by exploring the different types of workers in relation to the different types of family-work models.  She establishes the workers situation as a result of their pre-existing environment as well as of their own choices.

According to Hochschild, the first type of family-work model is the “haven model,” in which the worker finds his or her job unpleasant and considers his or her family to be a haven.  This model usually consists of workers of low occuputational levels, such as factory hands.  The second model is the “traditional family model,” in which the work sphere and the family sphere are divided according to gender.  Those partaking in this model “make pleasurable ‘homes’ for themselves at an office to which they devote most of their waking hours, while their real homes become like summer cottage retreats” (202).  Hochschild presents a third model she calls “no-job, weak-family” model, which consists of poor people who cannot find jobs and identify their family as the source of their need to find a job.  The prevalence of this model depends on the economic situtation of the time.  The former two however, particularly, particularly the second one, are in decline as a new model seems to be emerging.  Hochschild calls this model the “work-family balance” model and identifies it as a reversal model in which home is becoming work and work is becoming home.

In this shift, parents are devoting greater amounts of energy to work, while establishing a “cult of efficiency” in the home.  Hochschild acknowledges that it is monetary necessity and the fear of losing ones job as a result of this necessity that keeps people conforming with growing norms.  However, she insists that it is people’s personal choice that keeps them in the workplace.  Hochschild attributes this widespread personal choice to the fact that workers often feel more comfortable in the work place than at home.  Many workers say this is because they feel that emotional support is more available at work than at home.  Hochschild stresses the value that work assigns a worker as the reason for the comfort the workplace provides.  Work in the workplace is more widely acknowledged and rewarded than is work in the home.  People are more visibly and immediately commended in the workplace than in the home and they therefore may feel more appreciated, competent, and valuable in the workplace than in the home.

In chapter 15, Hochschild identifies the ways in which parents—particularly mothers—establish their work-family relations.  Since parents are less willing to compromise their work life for their family life, more and more they are choosing to hire outside workers to complete the domestic duties, such as housekeepers to tend to the cleaning and nannies or daycare to tend to the children.   

Maternal Employment and Time With Children: Dramatic Change of Surprising Continuity?

By Suzanne M. Bianchi

 

            In this article, Bianchi addresses the impact that the phenomenon of the working mother has on the children.  She argues that women’s increased participation in the workplace has not reduced their time spent with their children.  Furthermore, she insists that children of working mothers do not experience negative effects. 

            According to Bianchi, the argument that children of working mothers experience less care is based on several flawed assumptions.  The first of these assumptions is one that overestimates the amount of time non-working mothers spend with their children.  These mothers do not allocate all the hours to her children that a working mother devotes to work in the workplace.  Rather, stay-at-home mothers devote much of this extra time to domestic chores such as cleaning.  Bianchi explains that working mothers report less time spent on themselves, i.e. less sleep, less leisure time, and less time given to personal care.  However, Bianchi also claims that these women guard their time spent with their children as it is more confined and do not fill it with other activities.

            Bianchi identifies two other rising trends that counteract any negative effects children might endure from having a working mother.  The first is one of fathers’ increased participation in child rearing.  The second is the increased emphasis of and subsequent participation of children in pre-school, summer camp, after-school programs, and other such programs.  These programs make children less available to their parents and while they allow parents to focus to more time to work, they also provide children with enriching educational experiences.

   

Childhood

Children’s Share in Household Tasks 

By Goldscheider and Waite

In Children’s Share in Household Tasks, Goldscheider and Waite investigate the role of children in the home, focusing on how much they participate in household work and on the nature of their participation.  The authors describe how current definition of childhood is one that stresses the need for a child’s preparation for adult roles in the workplace rather than at home.  Children therefore take little responsibility in household work.  In order to better understand the role of children in the home, Goldscheider and Waite examine the results from their study, National Longitudinal Studies (NLS) of Young Women and Mature Women.  In this study, women answered a variety of questions about household chores.  Overall, the study indicated that children contribute about 15 percent of the share of household work.  However, the participation of children in household work varies according to the family structure, type of task, and age and gender of the child

In two-parent household, Goldscheider and Waite found that teenage children partake in a greater amount of household work than do younger children.  Further, the study showed that females contribute an overwhelmingly greater amount than do their male counterparts.  In fact, according to the study, Girls between the ages of 12 and 18 do the greatest share of work among children.  Upon further investigation, Goldscheider and Waite found that girls generally take part in such household tasks as cooking and cleaning, while boys are more likely to contribute to yard work.  When asked why parents assign “chores” to their kids, the overwhelming response was in order for their children to develop a sense of responsibility. 

Goldscheider and Waite found very different responses among single-mother homes.  In these families, all members are expected to contribute a greater amount.  Boys, in particular, contribute a greater amount.  This is partly because these boys often take on the roles of the absent father.  But this phenomenon is also due to the fact that in these families, the allocation of the tasks is less gender-specific. 

            I found this reading very relevant.  While I have always been exposed to the division of household tasks according to gender, I had never been aware of it.  Because of my own experience, I have always thought of fathers and children as useless around the house. 

Children’s Perspective

By Ellen Galinsky 

In Children’s Perspective, Ellen Galinsky confronts the issues of work and family through the lens of her Ask the Children study, which provides data from employed parents and children.  In studying this data, Galinsky found disparity between public opinion and research findings.  There our four debates that, according to Galnisky, expose this disparity.

            The first of these debates is based on the question of whether it bad for a child to have an employed mother.  Galinsky found that 76% of employed parents are do not think that an emplyed mother is deleterious to a child’s development.  Most of the 24% who disagreed with the majority were fathers.  The data revealed a greater opposition of mother employment among families in which the wife was not employed, which implies that people are more likely to support their situation.  While the parents of this study contributed passionate and divergent responses regarding this issue, there was relative uniformity of answers among children with employed- and unemployed-mothers.  Galinsky concludes that a children are more likely to be attached to their mothers according to how warm and responsive their mothers are, not according to their mothers’ employment statuses. 

            Galinsky then turns the attention to fathers.  The effects of employed fathers on their children are rarely debated.  Rather, the concern focuses on the negative effects of unemployed fathers.  According to Galinsky, this is due to society’s gender expectations, which demand economic responsibility of fathers.  Just like her conclusion of employed mothers, Galinsky maintains that it is not so much the father’s status of employment that matters as it is his attention to his children. 

Next Galinsky addresses the heated debate about childcare.  Is it good or bad for children’s development? According to Galinsky, childcare is often bad for children, but it is not because it displaces parental care.  Rather, it is bad for children if the care is of low quality.  It is the wuality of the childcare that determines the nature of its impact and Galinsky believes that it is in society’s power to establish good quality childcare.

            Finally, Galinsky discusses the debate of quality versus quantity.  According to the children in the study, they do not yearn for more time with their parents.  Rather, the wish that their parents were not so stressed and exhausted.  It is therefore the quality of time the parents spend with their children that matters.

            Adding children’s perspectives to the work and family debates added a very personal and innocent angle to the debates.  On the one hand, I was weary to accept some of the responses, as I did not feel that children could objectively assess their situation.  But then, on the other hand, I guess no one can provide objectivity about his or her situations.  

Fathering

Lost Fathers

In “Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America,” Cynthia R. Daniels examines the roles Black fathers play in the sponsorship of marital fatherhood as the solution for children’s well being.  Daniels maintains that fatherlessness in America is identified as a Black trait and seen as a Black problem.  She points out that unwed White mothers are seen as a cultural or racial defect and they are shamed.  Black unwed mothers, on the other hand, are defined as a major social problem and the are blamed rather than shamed.  “Black fatherlessness,” Daniels says, “is understood as a symptom of rebellious Black mothering, a symptom that dooms Black people to ruin” (Daniels 148).  But according to Daniels the high occurrence of fatherlessness in the Black community is partly the result of different notions of child rearing.  Black women have a distinct idea of motherhood that consists of sharing the responsibilities of child rearing with other women in the community.  Furthermore, “many presumably ‘absent’ Black fathers actually play a important role in child rearing” (Daniels 153).  Therefore the condemnation many Black fathers have received comes not from his under involvement with his children, but rather from his marital and economic status. 

            However, society continues to associate fatherlessness with the Black community because it is an easy explanation for Black people’s problems.  “Curing” fatherlessness, therefore, would an easy fix to their problem.  Daniels criticizes such policies as welfare and child support laws who maintain that goal.  She insists that “racial inequality—not fatherlessness—is the leading cause of Black children’s deprivation” (Daniels 157) and that “we cannot begin to judge Black fathers until we address the institutional forces that keep marriage a patriarchal system, devalue the work of child rearing, and deprive families of the social resources necessary to raise healthy children” (Daniels 158).

            At one point in this reading, Daniels tells us where the belief about the degenerate Black family as being the cause of Black people’s poverty comes from.  That information made me realize how much that belief, as ashamed as I am to admit it, has been ingrained in my own belief system.  Daniels made me realize that such a complex problem as poverty cannot be explained by such a simple situation as an “absent” father.  Further I believe he successfully conveyed the problem of broad cultural definitions of such personal things as family and parenthood.

Having It All: The Mother and Mr. Mom

In her book “Having it all: The Mother and Mr. Mom,” Francine Deutsch examines alternating-shift couple.  This group is comprised of blue-collar families in which the husbands and the wives work different shifts so as to share the responsibilities of caring for their children.  Deutsch identified two reasons for why these couples choose to alternate shifts.  The first was the issue of money.  since alternating shifters tend to have lower incomes, the shifts are necessary to the families’ economic wellbeing.  The second reason was the belief that family is the only group that should be taking care of children.  Deutsch identified a fear among these working-class couples that day care would stifle their ability to influence their kids with their own values.

Deutsch found that when middle-class families rejected day care, the mothers usually stayed home in order to ensure child care.  When working-class families rejected day care, however, the solution was for the father to forgo work time for the family.  This difference did not arise because working-class parents are revolting againt gender identities.  Rather, Deutsch that these blue-collar men still feel compelled to embody their traditional gender roles.  They still consider the domestic work they have taken on as women’s work, but they have accepted the work out of economic necessity.  The women from families also have not consciously separated themselves from their gender identities.  In fact Deutsch tells us that among these alternating-shifts families, the women are still seen as the primary caregivers. 

I thought it was really interesting that these alternating-shifts families established their family pattern according to traditional gender identities.  However, these very patterns ended up defying such identities.  I think the egalitarianism of these couples is truly impressive and I believe that families across all social classes would be better off adopting such a system.

 No Man’s Land

In her book “No Man’s Land,” Kathleen Gerson discusses the ongoing revolution taking place in the lives of modern day men.  In 1960, Gerson explains that ““the reigning ideology defined mature manhood almost exclusively in terms of achieving economic success and providing for wives and children” (Gerson 4).  However, since then, there has been a decline of men as the primary breadwinners.  Gerson explains that this decline has led to ambiguity about men’s identity and their proper place in society. In studying this phenomenon, Gerson focused on the differences among men, rather than the differences between men and women.  This is a necessary distinction, for according to Gerson the meaning of gender is undergoing a change and to understand this change requires an understanding of men’s perception.  Thus, she began her exploration by interviewing138 men chosen from alumni lists of a private university in New York and from a labor council’s lists of workers in order to chronicle the change and to better understand men’s behavior.  These men were between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five and varied in their social background, though they were mostly non-Hispanic white.  In conducting the interviews, Gerson found that the difference contrasted less between the groups of middle-class and working-class men than within the groups, which contradicts reigning belief.

Gerson’s identifies several trends that comprise the change.  “Staled revolution,” she says is one that is comprised of men who refuse to partake in domestic work.  “Male rebels” is the trend of men choosing autonomy over marriage.  “Estranged dads,” Gerson states, are men who have families, but are absent from them.  Then there is the nurturing father, who is one who has accepted increased involvement in the domestic sphere.  These trends, Gerson argues, cannot be explained by either “masculine personality” or “cultural masculinity.”  The former implies that men have set psychological orientations that define them; this is inconsistent with the vast disparity found among the psychology of individual men.  Gerson explains that the latter explanation is a ““the cultural tradition that idealizes male flight from commitment is as old as American culture itself” (Gerson 263) and so it cannot account for the recent changes of patterns in men’s lives.  Further, Gerson maintains that this cultural tradition does not establish a definite behavioral outline.  Rather, Gerson outlines three social shifts that have largely contributed to the revolution: (1) the decline in men’s economic privilege, (2) the increasing attachment of women to employment, and (3) the growing presence of alternative options to marriage.  Gerson insists that neither the past nor “culture is…static, consistent, or determining” (Gerson 265) and so the roles that future men will play in society and their families is mostly indefinable.