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.
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