F&H 4.5 Domestic labour, power relationships and the family

Question 1

What is Parsons’ functionalist view of the division of labour & power dynamic within the family?

Answer 1

Talcott Parsons:

• Distribution of labour stabilises because the nuclear unit gives men and women clear and distinct social roles.
• The husband is responsible for economic welfare and protection
• The wife is responsible for emotional care and socialisation of children
• He said that the power relationship was equally** **balanced but roles were different.

Question 2

How does Young & Wilmott’s March of Progress theory link to the power dynamic?

Answer 2

• Y & W carried out studies in the East end of London during the 50s. They theorised that conjugal roles and domestic labour was clearly segregated.
• However, by the 1970s their studies suggested that marriage dynamics had undergone a transformation. More likely to be symmetrical or egalitarian.
• Greater educational and job opportunities
• Women started going out to work in greater numbers
• Women acquired more power in a variety of ways
• Y&W concluded that these changes had resulted in a new family form - the symmetrical family (a type of nuclear unit) - in which men and women play similar roles to one another.

This was from their study in the 1970s.

Question 3

What was the feminist response to many fucntionalist thinkers in the 1970s?

Answer 3

Anne Oakley (1974)

• Anne Oakley (1974) was they first to point out that many sociologists ignored domestic work. This was an example of malestream sociology.
• She argued that patriarchy was still very much a major part of modem nuclear families and that women still occupied a subordinate and dependent role within the family and in wider society.
• Eg. Ben-Galim and Thompson (2013) found that 8/10 married women carried out more household chores than men

Question 4

Decision making in the family

Answer 4

• Stephen Edgell’s (1980) classic study of professional couples found that decision-making in nuclear families could be allocated to three broad categories.

Very important decisions eg. financial were taken by men.

Important decisions eg. child’s school - were taken by both but man had final say.

Less important decisions eg. shopping, clothing - left to the woman.

Hardill (1997) discovered that middle-class wives generally deferred to their husbands in major decisions involving where to live, the size of the mortgage, buying cars, etc. They concluded that the men in their sample were able to demand that the interests of their wives and families should be subordinated to the man’s career because he was the major breadwinner.

Vogler and Pahl (2001) also found that decision-making was shaped by income. In their study, only one-fifth of households were egalitarian decision-making units.Most household decision-making was controlled by men because they earned the higher incomes.

Question 5

Childcare and domestic work

Answer 5

• Craig (2007) found that women do between one-third and one-half more housework than men. She also discovered a ‘mother penalty’ -the decision to have a baby results in the mother being financially worse-off across her lifetime, compared to men in general and child-free women.
• Fisher (1999) argued that British fathers’ care of infants and young children rose 800 per cent between 1975 and 1997, from 15 minutes to two hours on the average working day
• Smith (2009) found that fathers in nuclear families carry out an average of 25 per cent of the family’s childcare-related activities during the week, and one-third at weekends. Crucially, this”childcare” is often playing with the child, whilst the housework: cooking cleaning and caring for the child can be left to women.
• Kan et al. (2009) found that the time spent by British men on domestic work had risen from 90 minutes per day in the 1960s to 148 minutes per day by 2004.
• Crompton (1997) argues that as women’s earning power increases relative to men’s, so men do more in the home. In 2015, women’s earnings still remain unequal at about three-quarters of those of men.
• Sigle-Rushton (2010) - showed that the divorce rate is lower when fathers actively engage in housework and childcare

Question 6

Emotion Work

Answer 6

• Some sociologists, such as Duncombe and Marsden (1995) argue that any measurement of equality within households must take account of ‘emotion work’.
• Duncombe and Marsden argue that women take the major responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of their partners and children, in addition to paid work and responsibility for housework and childcare. In this sense, women actually work a ‘triple shift’.

Question 7

Same sex couples & gender ideas

Answer 7

Gillian Dunne (1999) argues that the traditional division of domestic labour continues today because of what she calls deeply ingrained ‘gender scripts’

• In her study of 37 cohabiting lesbian couples with dependent children, Dunne found that such gender scripts don’t operate to the same extent and were more egalitarian from the perspective of labour division, with both partners respecting eachothers career.

Carrington (1999) carried out an study of gay and lesbian couple, he found that there was tension in these relationships about inequalities in the distribution of household tasks which was no different from that experienced by heterosexual couples.

This was largely when one member of the couple was paid drastically more than the other and therefore did less domestic labour