Topic 1 Couples Flashcards
Young and willmott - symmetrical Family
- marriage roles are similar ; couple share the work in home such as washing up, cleaning and decisions
- 72% of husbands help based on doing one chore a week
- Oakley dismissed this as her work showed a division of work remained across gender lines; wives saw housework and childcare as their job and husbands gave little help.
Commericialisation of housework (Silver and Schor)
Modern technology has relieved women of the burden of housework and cooking; they have washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, microwaves, ready meals.
Women are free to go out to work more and afford to buy the latest products. This in turn raises their status and makes them more equal.
Silver and Schor argued for the ‘death of the traditional housewife’ – this was a thing of the past.
Dual burden (Ferri & Smith)
This describes the workload of women who work to earn money, but also have responsibility for unpaid domestic work
Segregated and joint conjugal roles (Bott)
Joint conjugal roles: The husband and wife carry out many activities together and with a minimum of task differentiation and separation of interests. These marriages are thought to be more stable.
Separated/segregated roles: Husbands and wives do not share share housework and childcare, decisions and leisure time
Decision-making (Edgell)
Edgell (1980) interviewed mc couples.
Wives dominated the decision making in – decoration, children’s clothes, food; these were frequent unimportant decisions.
The men decided about moving house, buying a car – major financial decisions which were infrequent and important. Decisions about holidays/schooling were made by both.
This was a small unrepresentative study; it ignores ‘agenda-setting’ – the one who sets the agenda may be more powerful.
Also, the study ignores ‘non-decisions’ – which are not conscious, taken for granted decisions like women will do the childcare, washing, emotion work, that the man’s job is more important - things which follow norms.
The study showed that men gain from these non-decisions.
Instrumental and expressive roles (Parsons)
Women’s role in the family is an ‘expressive role’ – a familial role is to provide care, love, affection and security
The ‘instrumental role’ is the man’s role as the breadwinner. This role is a stressful, anxious challenge that it can cause men to breakdown.
Therefore a woman’s function is to relieve this burden or tension from the men’s shoulders by providing love and understanding as well as continuing to be the primary carer even if they work too.
‘Emotion work’ is the love, sympathy, understanding, praise, reassurances and attention involved in maintaining relationships.
e.g making meal time a happy occasion
Pooling and allowance systems (Pahl)
- where wives receive a fixed sum of money (for groceries and clothing) or a pooling system where both partners are equally responsible for jointly controlling the money
Dobash and Dobash - domestic violence
- found that violent incidents could be set off by what a husband saw as a challenge to his authority; marriage legitimates violence against women by conferring power and authority on husbands and dependency on wives.
Triple shift (Denscombe and Marsden)
paid work , housework and childcare/emotion work
