Divided Time

Gender, Paid Employment and Domestic Labour

Richard Layte

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138311626
• eBook ISBN: 9780429858642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1999. Housework and child care are a major part of most peoples lives. The growth of part time work amongst women is just one example of the way our economy is structured to accommodate this fact. Yet very little research has been done on this subject in Britain and what little has been done tends to be small scale and impressionistic. This book examines how couples divide their time between domestic and paid work and the effect that tensions between the two can have. It provides valuable evidence on how domestic work is organized and why, when women are more likely to be employed than not, men have not increased their share of domestic work. Representative evidence is combined with previous small scale research to show how private troubles are related to massive social and economic changes in British society. Evidence of this sort has never been presented before in the British context.

1 The Theoretical Context: In Search of a Usable Framework

In this chapter, I examine the literature on the domestic division of labour from the last thirty years or so from both the UK and North America. My argument is that a coherent theoretical framework has been conspicuous in its absence from writings on the subject in the UK, although much of the sociology of the family, and later the household, has studied the subject. The north American literature on the other hand, has spawned three major schools of theoretical thinking that have, upon different premises, erected rigorous models of the household that have had varying degrees of success in empirical tests. Yet, as innovative and useful as these theories have been, they have suffered from theoretical problems that have limited their explanatory power in empirical analysis. This chapter describes the history and impact of these theoretical difficulties before going on to present a limited theory of the household which attempts to transcend these problems and in the process construct a set of hypotheses which the rest of the book will go on to test empirically. There are two main arguments in this chapter: firstly, past theoretical approaches cannot adequately combine cost/benefit and value oriented behaviour in the same model. To do this we need to develop a new theory of choice. Secondly, the chapter then argues that this is only possible if we adopt a longitudinal, rather than a cross-sectional approach to our explanations of the division of domestic work.

British Sociology of the Family and the Nature of Household Work

The last thirty years has witnessed a distinct shift in how British sociologists think about the household and domestic work. Until the early 1970s, the household was taken as a unitary concept, based upon consensus and collective decision making. As such, it was assumed that all the members of the household shared the same standard of living, and that the division of family roles by gender was self-evident. This unproblematic view of the household rendered inequalities in power invisible and saw conflict in the household as pathological. To a sociology that was still deeply steeped in functionalist theory (Parsons 1949, 1956), the family was uncritically taken as 'a good thing' that served the interests of both the individuals within it (irrespective of sex), and those of society at large.

Although studies such as that of Bott (1957) took issue with Parsons' notion of the universality of the instrumental/expressive division between husbands and wives, and instead linked it to the closeness of kin networks, gender roles were still not seen as problematic. In the same way, although Young and Willmott (1957, 1973) gave the differences identified by Bott a temporal dimension by arguing that a new and more 'companionate' type of relationship was emerging between men and women (and thus a greater sharing of domestic tasks), they were much more interested in the possible effects of these structural changes and thus did not attempt to look at the processes involved or the conflicts that may have ensued.

Doubts about this optimistic interpretation of the family were first expressed in studies such as that by Pahl and Pahl (1971), who examined the strain for middle class wives when the ideal of sharing in marriage was contradicted by the primacy attached to the husband's paid work, and the unequal division of labour that resulted. But the real sea-change in British sociology occurred with Oakley's Sociology of Housework (1974), which looked explicitly at housework as work. It is hard now to appreciate how great a change in perspective this move was, but it sensitised sociology to the labour involved in housework tasks, and women's attitudes to them. Such a move shed light upon the implicit sexism within sociology itself and allowed the processes within households and between partners to be portrayed as structured inequality, even oppression, rather than as a 'natural' part of a monolithic institution called 'the family'. However, the study of domestic labour remained within the remit of the 'sociology of the family' and the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of married life. Moreover, the dynamics of the relationship between partners remained largely implicit, and as the role of the 'housewife' (sic) remained essentially female the question of how the roles and obligations within the household were distributed remained unasked.

Oakley's evidence of inequity in the division of domestic tasks in Britain added to that of feminist researchers in North America (Robinson et al 1972; Vanek 1974; Meissner et al 1975) and directly confronted the optimistic picture outlined by Young and Willmott (1973). It did not, however, lead to increased investigation of the mechanisms in the household that led to this inequality. Instead, feminist scholars became increasingly embroiled in the 'domestic labour debate' (c.f. Finch & Groves 1983), seeking to develop theories of gender inequality which linked unpaid domestic labour to the system of paid labour and the capitalist economy at large. The empirical research that was carried out in the later part of the 1970s and the early 1980s (of which there was very little) also failed to develop any theoretical notion of the dynamics of the household (Martin & Roberts 1984; Yeandle 1984; Morris 1985, 1988).

With the rise of male mass unemployment and the continued growth of female part time (and later full time) employment in the 1980s, this emphasis on the formal (usually masculine) paid sphere became untenable. The work of Ray Pahl (1984) is important here as the first of a number of studies that have reoriented sociology toward the household as the central focus of study. From being a 'black-box' that supplied labour power to the paid sphere, and in turn consumed its products, the household became the focus of study to both sociologists and economists who wanted to understand the ways in which people respond to, and in turn, mould the wider economic situation. Like Oakley's redefinition of housework as work, this shift in perspective brought home to researchers the active role which the members of the household played in producing the lived material reality. Yet, although full of ethnographic detail on the relationships between the household members and both the formal and informal work spheres, Pahl largely failed to explore the relations between spouses and concentrated more upon what he termed the 'household strategies' in use (c.f. Wallace 1993)¹. Thus, the possibility that members of households may in fact have different interests and strategies was not taken into account. Instead, a largely implicit theory of the household as a joint-decision making unit rendered invisible inequities in both the distribution of work and resources. Moreover, even though feminist researchers initially focused upon the household 'as the theatre of many aspects of the relationship between men and women' (Morris 1988, p337) the relationship of the partners was only given descriptive analysis and no attempt was made to assess systematically just how partners negotiated roles between themselves. From this review it is plain that there has been no real attempt to produce a coherent theoretical schema about how the household 'works' in the British literature. At best, theoretical stances have been ad hoc; at worst, implicit or missing completely.

US ‘Theories of the Family’ and the ‘Problem’ of Culture

In the following sections, I want to outline three rather broad, but I think distinct, types of theories that have arisen in the American literature seeking to explain the structure of household 'work'; namely, 'resource theory' (which I have amalgamated with exchange theory), 'dependency theory', and 'human capital theory of household time allocation'. There are overlaps between theories, but at the heart of each lies a particular and specific logic that explains the inequalities that have been found in the division of household tasks. Before going on to examine resource theory, I want to look first at the theoretical context from which this, the earliest of the theories presented here, emerged. By doing so, I hope to bring into shaper relief the 'problem' which resource theory was attempting to deal with and, I believe the origin of its failure to combine within its explanation of the domestic division of labour an understanding of culturally meaningful social action with economic (scarcity related; cost/benefit) behaviour.

As with early British sociology, American theories of the domestic division of labour emerged from the shadow of functionalist social theory. The label 'functionalist' as applied to the study of the family can encompass a wide variety of perspectives among which there is not necessarily any high degree of agreement, but there are assumptions which are common to them all that are crucial to our understanding of the later theories. Although Murdock (1949), Coser (1964) and Goode (1964) all contributed much to the functionalist analysis of the family, it was the seminal work of Parsons and Bales (1956) that organised a range of topics such as the role of the family in industrial society and the socialisation process within a single theoretical perspective. Because of this, they not only provided a framework to argue within or against, but also largely defined the rules within which people argued. Central to Parsons and Bales' argument was the intricate relationship between the family subsystem and the wider social system. Bales' experimental work on the structure of small groups had shown that in all small groups there is a tendency for some person or persons to take on leadership roles and for others to take on more subordinate roles. More specifically, he argued that groups tended to differentiate along two intersecting axes: a vertical axis based on differentiation of power and a horizontal axis based on the distinction between instrumental and expressive roles. Parsons applied this finding to the small group of the family and tried to show that the sex specific roles that this spawned-the mother in the expressive role and the father in the instrumental-was a functional response to the wider needs of the social system. For the system as a whole, such differentiation allowed the family to fulfil the reproductive, socialisation and economic functions necessary to sustain the wider society. But it also functioned for the benefit of the members of the family individually in that it 'stabilised the adult personalities of the population of the society' (Parsons and Bales 1956, pl7). Parsons great contribution to the sociology of the family was in linking Freudian theory of personality development to Bales' findings; thence to the roles that spouses filled; and, finally, to the needs of the wider social system. Parsons showed that the development of functionally differentiated roles fitted neatly into Freud's theory of the universal oedipal complex and the identification of male and female children with the parent of their sex and the roles that they fulfilled. The theory thus rested upon the psychological theories of Freud, combined with the sociological idea of the internalisation of structured normative orientations. Parsons' and Bales' theory is cleverly constructed and seems to offer a theoretical framework within which we can analyse peoples decisions about how they organise domestic work. Unfortunately, the link between sociology and psychology in the theory is made in such a way that we are left with a model of human action which cannot respond to changing circumstances: the model is deterministic. In the introduction to this book, I stated that, to be of use to us, any theory should allow us to analyse choice under circumstances of scarcity, i.e. people should be able to respond to changes in the costs or benefits of a particular course of action. Parsons' and Bales' theory is, however, based upon a 'value theory of choice', thus, choices can only be made within the remit of the values given by the culture within which the person making the choice has been socialised. We can see why if we analyse Parsons' and Bales' model of social action as a three stage process.

In the first stage, an actor discriminates among different 'objects' within its environment; these can be of a social (what Freud would have called the 'alter ego') or physical nature (objects). The actor also assesses the significance of each of these objects for the 'gratification' of their needs, these being an outcome of the Freudian 'drives' that each person possesses. But, importantly, these drives are combined in the second stage of the model with 'values' internalised via the process of socialisation such that the person can differentiate among the alternative 'objects' (first stage) via their 'need dispositions', one of which is to comply with 'situationally adequate rules' of behaviour. The clever part of the theory is that when we come to the third stage of the model, the choice or behaviour stage, Parsons and Bales have made sure that values govern the definition of the situation in both a normative and a motivational sense. Thus, people will have similar and reciprocal expectations of each other because of their internalisation of the groups 'social system', but they also want to do what is expected of them. The primary aim of the theory is to get round the Hobbsian problem of social order (i.e. individual innate drives will inevitably cause social disorder) with a social and normative drive. The problem is that the model cannot accommodate aspects of scarcity or cost/benefit since changes in demand can only be modelled as changes in 'need-dispositions'. Given constant preferences from the social structure and innate drives, changes in relative prices cannot be accommodated.

If we leave the problem of combining Parsons' and Bales' theory with economic reasoning aside for one moment, there is another basic problem with the theory: it is essentially static in terms of the way it views social roles and their relationship to normative orientations. Such a theory could not survive the developments that followed in the wake of women's increased participation in paid work that had begun to occur in the 1950s. In reading Parsons and Bales, we are constantly left with the impression that what is, must be because of the vital functions which are being fulfilled That Parsons shows little concern for the range of human variability and potentiality is illustrated in the following passage

Put very schematically, a mature woman can love, sexually, only a man who takes his full place in the masculine world, above all in its occupational aspect, and who takes responsibility for a family; conversely the mature man can only love a woman who is really an adult, a full wife to him and a mother to his children (Parsons and Bales, 1956, p178).

Yet, in the 1960s, rising female employment was just one indication in US society that the old structures of prescribed social roles were lapsing (Scanzoni 1972; Brickman 1974). Sociologists were becoming convinced that the marital relationship in US society was changing from being 'fully structured', where 'the behaviour of each party is completely specified by prescribed social norms', to 'partially structured', in which 'rules constrain certain behaviours but leave others to the free choice of the parties' (Brickman 1974, p7). Now that marital relations seemed to be more free of normative constraint, and, moreover, sociologists were not blinded by an overarching explanation of the differences in spouses roles in the form of functionalist theory, where could they go for a conceptual structure which explained differential outcomes? One answer was to prescribe a new set of norms in the form of mutual support and affection, and hang on uncritically to the accepted division of labour which was still seen to a large extent as natural (Kimmel & Havens 1964). To many others though, the answer was to adopt the new social theories of such as Blau (1964), Thibaut and Kelley (1959) or Homans (1961), which looked at social relationships through the medium of 'exchange'.

This movement was picked up by two researchers on the family, Blood and Wolfe (1960) who asserted that marital power was no longer based on patriarchal notions, but rather on 'comparative resources'. Their book was to become hugely influential and precipitated a large literature based around what was to become known as 'resource theory'. Blood and Wolfe's thesis opened up the household to studies of conjugal power and decision making and led to more formal theoretical frameworks of exchange and choice. As I will now go on to show, this change in perspective was not entirely successful, primarily because, in the final analysis, sociologists had to step outside their theories of instrumental exchange to account for the specific social structure of domestic work. However, in doing this, they had to turn back to Parsonsian style overarching norms.

From Resource to Exchange Theory

Blood and Wolfe (1960) carried out a study of nine hundred families in the Detroit area of the US. Their chief concern was the distribution of power between husband and wife, and to measure this they asked the wife who made the final decision about such things as the job which the husband should take, whether the wife should work, where they should go on holiday, and so on. Against these data, they tested two models of the distribution of power, one based upon an 'ideological theory' and the other a 'resource theory'. Essentially, the ideological theory stated that the distribution of power would depend upon the norms held by the groups or subculture to which the family belonged, with Catholic and immigrant groups supposedly espousing more patriarchal norms than other groups. Their results showed virtually no support for this theory. When other relevant variables were controlled for, the fathers in Catholic families were found to have no more power than those in non-Catholic families, immigrant fathers no more than non-immigrants, and ill-educated fathers less power than educated. On the other hand, the resource theory received considerable support from the data. This theory held that

the sources of power in so intimate a relationship as a marriage must be sought in the comparative resources which the husband and wife bring to the marriage....a resource may be defined as anything that one partner may make available to the other, helping the latter satisfy his needs or attain his goals. The balance of power will be on the side of that partner who contributes the greater resources to the marriage' (Blood and Wolfe 1960, pl2).

Blood and Wolfe defined resources as the education, income and degree of participation in the community that each partner attained. This would seem to offer a useful theory for understanding the specific negotiations and decisions arrived at by individual couples in the organisation of domestic life, and especially the distribution of their unpaid labour. The connection seems simple: the partner with the greater power, derived through resources attained and applicable outside the home, will do less housework within the home. This seems to imply that the division of labour between husbands and wives is decided by a negotiation between the partners who use whatever valued resources they can to strike the best deal on behalf of self-interest. Such a bargaining perspective also implies that housework is a source of disutility, an onerous activity one wishes to 'buy out of'. Thus, if the wife does more housework, it is because she has less power. However, Blood and Wolfe (1960) did not see this theoretical relationship leading to conflict or coercion, and did not, strangely enough, see 'resource bargaining' as an exchange situation. Instead, couples were simply 'optimising' the household utility by allocating their relative resources to different tasks. Thus

A few tasks..... require skills which may not be distributed equally in the family, nor easily learned. Hence they are best performed by whoever has the technical know-how. Some tasks....require muscular strength in which husbands usually surpass their wives. But most household tasks are humdrum and menial in nature; the chief resource they require is time. Usually the person with the most time is the wife-provided she isn't working outside the home. If she does work the husband incurs a moral obligation to help her out in what would otherwise be her exclusive task areas (Blood and Wolfe 1960, pp73-4).

To Blood arid Wolfe then, the husband's relatively low contribution to domestic labour is not ideologically based, but a result of rational resource distribution. The use of the term 'moral obligation' points to Blood and Wolfe's continuing attachment to the functionalist notion of the family as a consensual unit, and this contributes in part to one of the theory's major flaws. Thus, firstly, the allocation of tasks in this theory is treated, as many critiques have noted, sometimes as an outcome, and at others as an indicator of power, rather than as a process requiring study and documentation (Heer 1963; Wilkening 1968; Blood 1963; Scanzoni 1979;...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Theoretical Context: In Search of a Usable Framework
• 2 Measuring the Household Division of Labour
• 3 A Preliminary Model of Partners' Time Contributions to Household Labour
• 4 Establishing the Pattern of Attitudes Toward Men's and Women's Work Roles
• 5 The Relationship Between Attitudes Toward Gender Roles and Domestic Work Practices
• 6 The Effects of Life and Work History on Gender Attitudes and Domestic Work Practices
• 7 Partners' Satisfaction With and Conflict Over the Domestic Division of Labour
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography