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This chapter considers the work of liberal feminists Christie Hartley and Lori Watson. Hartley and Watson argue that political liberalism can approve gender-egalitarian interventions on the grounds that gender inequality threatens citizenship. I agree with Hartley and Watson that the liberal concept of citizenship is the key to justifying progressive gender-egalitarian political interventions. I argue, however, that their argument establishes only that a hierarchal gendered division of labor threatens citizenship. This is problematic because the gendered division of labor is not essentially hierarchal, and morally objectionable harms inhere in its non-hierarchal components. Moreover, the policy initiatives licensed by a hierarchal diagnosis of the gendered division of labor could exacerbate the harms that inhere in its non-hierarchal features. Hartley and Watson’s argument may offer a partial reconciliation of liberalism and feminism, but on its own it could further entrench the injustice of the gendered division of labor.

Power dynamics in one’s family of origin shape internalized notions of normative family relationships. Therefore, the division of housework in one’s family of origin socializes children to hold specific attitudes and beliefs about how relationships should work. We examine this hypothesized empirical relationship in Chapter 9 of the book by using Latent Profile Analysis to identify profiles for the adult children of the NSFH couples used to construct the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload). We found three classes for adult female children (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, and Nontraditional) and three classes for adult male children (Traditional, Transitional, and Nontraditional). Children responded to their parental division of labor in gendered ways, providing evidence for not only the parental socialization of housework behaviors but also the challenges faced by women and men in the changing cultural climate of the United States around gender and family responsibilities.

This chapter explores how the economic difficulties of the 1970s and the early 1980s placed great pressures on the already weakened framework of support for women's household work, hastening its demise. It explains that rather than causing the breakdown of the male breadwinner family, the decline of the traditional manufacturing sector and the stagnation of men's wages simply accelerated a process that was well under way. It clarifies that financial pressures forced many men to accept their wives' employment. It discusses that new forms of home and work were emerging, though the foundations for such family life were denied to many, especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder. It concludes by showing how the old gender division of labor, in its different forms, broke down differently for black and white women by education.

In Chapter 2 of the book we provide a review of the theoretical and empirical scholarship that has studied housework and document how power dynamics have been integral to both strands of scholarship. We present reviews of time availability, relative resources, bargaining, gender ideology, and economic dependence perspectives. We explain how power has been implicit in previous theorizing than then present our argument for the use of housework to understand power within the social exchange that is an intimate relationship.

Chapter 7 of the book reports the results of Latent Trajectory Analysis examining stability and change in class membership over time. Using data from Waves 1 and 2 of the NSFH we document change and stability in class membership in the five classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload). We describe the couple and individual level characteristics associated with both change and stability as well as the new class profiles in Wave 2. We find great change in housework class over the time period studied with some couples becoming more egalitarian and others more traditional in their division of labor. Patterns in this change over time are presented and discussed.

Culture and gender are closely intertwined with biological factors creating predispositions for sex and gender development. However, sociocultural factors are critical determinants leading to gender differences in roles and behaviors that may be modest but culturally important. Culture has profound effects on gender-related behavior, values, identity, roles, and how these are regarded in various social contexts. Culture governs the socialization of children, the tasks children are taught, the roles adult men and women adopt, and the expectations that govern women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors. Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures. Culture can maximize, minimize, or even eliminate gender differences in social behaviors and cognitions. Indeed, it is impossible to separate gender and culture.

Chapter 2 draws on theories of the body, gender performativity, and dress, to show how gender was inscribed on the body to create the appearance of difference, which, in turn, shaped all social relations. The chapter analyzes aspects of indigenous gender ideology and concepts of the body as expressed in life-cycle rituals, native-language metaphors and terminology, and beliefs pertaining to the calendar, tonalism, and nahualism. The chapter argues that concepts concerning the fluidity of the body and gender identity undermined essentializing ideologies. The work examines the construction of gender through labor, drawing on Nahua and Bènizàa rituals as two central case studies. The chapter also considers clothing and adornment and speech and behavior, which served as mechanisms to stabilize the body and impose identity. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of cross-gendering which occurred when individuals adopted the dress, labor roles, and mannerisms of the “opposite sex.”

Chapter 6 examines a key component of the book’s argument, namely whether there are patterns across the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload) in other behavioral as well as attitudinal measures of power. In this chapter we investigate spousal preferences in their own and their spouse’s labor market hours as a measure of being able to enact power. We also examine reported conflict, disagreements, and intimate partner violence, all behaviors that reflect power dynamics in a couple. These findings provide important evidence for our argument that understanding housework dynamics can provide insights into other dynamics in couples and thus be a useful tool for practitioners working with families in crisis.

Chapter 1 serves as the introduction to the book. While housework is a frequent object of scholarly inquiry, in part because of its ubiquitous appearance across household types, we argue that it can be used to understand more than simply who does what around the house. Housework provides insight into the power dynamics in intimate relationships. After explaining resource-based and social psychological/symbolic perspectives for understanding the division of housework, the chapter concludes with a detailed summary of the remainder of the book.

To examine the effectiveness of our argument that housework can be used to understand power in families, we apply our theoretical framework across the family life course. In this chapter we empirically examine patterns across the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload) regarding shifts in measures of power. We focus on changes in labor market participation, income, and occupational prestige from NSFH Wave 1 to Wave 2. We find that couples where women secured more economic resources at a pace similar to their husbands were more likely to be more egalitarian in their division of housework over time. However, couples where women secured resources while men did not were likely to exhibit gender deviance neutralization and a traditional division of labor at the second interview.

This concluding chapter of the book summarizes our key findings, focusing on the evidence of housework as a proxy for understanding power dynamics in couples. We present suggestions for practitioners based upon the changing demographics of the United States along side our insights from the Latent Profile and Latent Trajectory Analyses described in the book. We conclude with suggestions for family scholars interested in trying to understand power dynamics in intimate relationships.

This chapter examines the very earliest forms of oppositional activity that emerged in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s coup. Focusing on the often-ignored period of 1952 to 1955, the chapter demonstrates that a vibrant, inclusive, and creative urban civic opposition movement was in the making. This movement developed a wide repertoire of public protest actions that included both women and men and often took place in consumer or leisure-oriented spaces such as movie theaters, department stores, and commercial thoroughfares. But the rise of state violence and the turn to armed opposition fostered a gendered division of labor in the anti-Batista movement. Many men henceforth sought to join the urban underground or the rebel army, while many women remained active in organizing, strategizing, or propaganda efforts.

This chapter argues that a liberal society cannot remain stable over time if its institutions are structured on the basis of an assumption that one’s sex will dictate the kind of work that one does. Stability in the relevant sense includes a moral dimension, and this chapter shows that moralized stability is threatened by arguing that the institutionalized assumption that sex will dictate the kind of work that one does is an affront to the political value of autonomy. When gender norms and social institutions built upon the assumption of breadwinner/homemaker specialization constitute formidable obstacles to the enactment of gender-egalitarian lifestyles, the citizenship interest in stability will license—and in fact demand—interventions to remove those obstacles. The criterion of reciprocity thus positively calls for gender-egalitarian political interventions under these circumstances. I go on to argue that the circumstances demanding those interventions obtain in the United States today.

This chapter addresses the legitimacy (roughly, the permissibility of using collective political power or force) of political interventions to change the gendered division of labor (of, for example, unpaid housework and childcare). Interventions such as work time regulation, subsidized dependent care provisions, and paid family leave initiatives are promising approaches, but they appear to violate a basic liberal requirement that exercises of political power be publicly defensible within the justificatory community of reasonable citizens. This in turn requires that the intervention must be neutral among the conceptions of the good that citizens may reasonably embrace. Although the author believes that gender egalitarian interventions can be so neutral and egitimate, the chapter argues against the view that they can be neutrally justified as a necessary means to remedy unjust distributions.

This chapter examines how the increasing scale and degree of specialization of commercial farms and the trend toward combining off-farm labor with small-scale farming affected the gender division of labor on farms and power relations in farm families in the Nanticoke Valley during the early twentieth century. It shows that both of these economic shifts generated a new form of class stratification in rural society. To some degree, this divergence corresponded with ethnicity; many immigrant families who moved to run-down or abandoned farms kept some family members working in the factory while others labored on the land to build up the enterprise. The chapter first considers the complex gender and intergenerational relations within farm families and rural communities before discussing how fundamental changes in the rural economy took place. It also explores how farming families resisted capitalist transformation so successfully for so long and what roles rural women played in sustaining diversifed family farms as well as the community networks on which they relied.

Chapter 5 describes each of the classes documented in the book (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload) based upon couple and individual demographic characteristics. Not only do we include basic demographic characteristics (e.g., race, religion, and marital distribution) but we also document how measures of power are distributed across the classes. We also describe who is in each of the five housework classes based upon labor market characteristics, income, and gender ideology.

Striking gender inequalities in Japanese society are rooted in beliefs about gender division of labour. Gender-based social norms have driven employment and working practices such as long working hours. The male breadwinner model has only recently started to give way to more diverse role identities. Despite persistent gender inequalities, Japanese women have the longest life expectancy in the world. This paradoxical relationship can be explained by 1) overall women’s positive health behaviours, 2) Japan’s post-war social security programmes, protecting the vast majority of full-time homemakers, and 3) women’s roles in the household and the relation with their psychological wellbeing. The rigidity in current social programmes has failed to meet the needs of increasingly diverse Japanese society, which has contributed to rising female poverty and associated health problems.

This chapter returns to the research questions posed in the introduction. The chapter concludes that norms of gender are changing; beautification is more important to gender socialization than ever, is more reliant on artifice, and is labor-intensive, diverse, and global. Beauty products, ideals, and images circulate through media and industry marketing, but also through the reproductive economy, where word of mouth, family, and friendship are as important as fashion magazines. Who benefits from the globalizing beauty economy is structured by the pronounced gendered division of labor within the beauty industry, and between it and other industries. As has been documented in other industries, and despite women’s overwhelming participation in beauty commercialization, masculinities are generally rewarded over femininities. Additionally, the most valued femininities are momentarily, if at all, achievable ideals of youth and beauty. The chapter concludes with suggestions for further research in Mexico, globally, on beauty, and with youth.

Chapter 4 presents findings from couple-level data from the National Study of Families and Households (Wave 1). We employ latent profile analysis to describe categories, or classes, of couples. We found that couples fell into five categories: Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload. This chapter presents the profiles of each of these classes of couples based upon their joint division of labor. The analysis is unique in that we use self-reported data from each spouse in order to document patterns across the 3,906 couples for whom we have complete data.

This chapter explores women’s contribution to parliamentary debates—how women access participatory time to contribute to debates through party mechanisms, which concerns they are likely to prioritize (for example party, constituency, issue-based), the extent to which they participate, whether if at all they foreground their identity as women (or other aspects of identity), and the ways in which their contributions are received and interpreted (promoted, lauded, acknowledged, prevented, ignored, silenced, or delegitimized) by others form the substance of this chapter. We argue that we should be concerned about the consequences of reproducing a gendered division of labour where only women MPs, and not men, are tasked to represent ‘women’s issues’, or where women MPs are only tasked to represent ‘women’s issues’ and not other issues.