blog 7

Jackie Woods Fam and Work Blog 7
Hocschild’s “Joey’s Problem” follows a married couple, Nancy and Evan. The author pays particular attention to how they divide the household labor and what impact it has on their family life. Even though Nancy considers herself a feminist, she still finds herself working the dreaded “second shift”. She resented Evan for his lack of assistance with household tasks, but convinced herself that everything was fair (since Evan took care of the garage and therefore the upstairs was her domain). Their different expectations surrounding gender roles took a toll on their marriage, however. They are a prime example of the “stalled revolution” in household work.
The story of Nancy and Evan was very vividly relayed. It was quite refreshing to see how these gender-division issues play out in real life, not just from a statistical perspective. One thing that stuck out in my mind was how the author brought up Nancy and Evan’s relationships with their mothers as the most influential reason behind their respective views about housework (and their respective neuroses). As we have discussed in class, our culture today relies heavily on psychological theories that “blame the parent” for people’s problems. It is the go-to explanation for almost every personality problem. Since the mother is the parent that is more commonly considered the culprit, women feel even more pressure to intensively mother their children. This perpetuates the system of domesticity by keeping women feeling like they should be putting the most work into being the main caregiver.
In “Autonomy, Dependence, or Display?”, Gupta looks at the relationship between married women’s income and the amount of household work they do. He critiques the two existing explanations of the lack of correlation between women’s income and the division of labor: that wives are economically dependent on their husbands so feel obligated to do work for them, or that high-earning women feel the need to keep up on housework to confirm their femininity to themselves and their husbands. His study determined that women act as free economic agents based on their own income, and that higher earnings matter little in explaining the labor division.
I was rather confused by this article. I did not quite understand how Gupta used the point that there is little correlation between women’s income and household work to conclude that women are free economic agents based on their income. But, regardless, his critique of the two theories about labor-inequality was interesting. In my own personal life, I could see how the theory about doing housework to assert femininity could be legitimate. Women (my two student-athlete friends included) often do things here at college like bake cookies or clean the house and then say light-heartedly “I just wanted to feel all housewifey”. I know that these girls compete in college athletics, so often are insecure about being perceived as “girly” enough. Consequently, they overcompensate by doing ‘traditionally’ female things, like putting on lots of makeup after practice or baking things. A high-powered career can be considered similar to athletics in the sense that neither is considered an overwhelmingly “female” realm. So I imagine that women in both realms use similar coping mechanisms.
Carrington’s “Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families” consisted of personal interviews with lesbigay couples and the analysis of their household labor dynamics. Like many heterosexual couples, gay couples subscribe to the myth that everything is, and should be, egalitarian. But most modern relationships consist of a partner who is more domestically geared and one who is better described as a “breadwinner”. In lesbigay couples, the partner who has the less intensive (read: more ‘feminine”) job often shoulders more domestic responsibility. Carrington makes the point that lesbigay couples often find themselves falling into traditional domestic gender-roles.
The examples Carrington used of lesbigay couples struggling with the same issues as heterosexual couples demonstrated just how deeply we have internalized domestic gender roles. It is likely that these lesbigay people have internalized these ideas about domesticity and gender roles from their parents, since their parents were of the generation where that ideology prevailed. They revert back to the homemaker-breadwinner model even though they are both of the same gender. It would be interesting to see if these lesbigay couple’s children have the same notions about the division of household labor (that there is a domestic one and an earner one) and how it lines up to gender. If they do, despite being raised in a relatively egalitarian household, then it may warrant further investigation. Though, I don’t personally see how a household could get by without one partner being a little more domestic, though I understand the author’s point that it often perpetuates pseudo-gender stereotypes.
In “Doing Housework,” DerVault describes housework, particularly feeding, as something different than paid work. She explains that the process of meal-planning and meal-making is very involved, and is often looked upon as a labor of love. The meal-maker, usually the woman, tends to be deferent to other family members’ needs, tailoring it to their tastes and schedules and maybe even forgoing food her own food. DerVault ‘s purpose was to show that housework is complicated, necessary, and symbolic, not the busywork it is often portrayed as.
This article called attention to the hard work that goes into housework. So often, full-time workers see themselves as working “harder” than homemakers. This article proves that “hard” is such a relative distinction, it is difficult to really say who puts more effort into their respective tasks. I think that full-time workers may feel they work harder because they have less flexibility and less control over their workplace than homemakers. But, homemakers actually have to keep a lot of “rules” (albeit informal ones) in mind when they work to do things like create meals. This article just goes to show how housework is something different than paid work, so it is very difficult to compare.