Domestic Work. Chapter 5

In what is now seen as the classic study of housework done in 1974, Ann Oakley found that three quarters of her sample of housewives did 70, or more, hours of housework per week (Oakley, 1974). The explanation for this figure was in terms of standards and routines. Standards varied as between perfectionist and casual. Perfectionists aimed at cleanliness in all unnoticed parts of the room, and kept to a strict routine per day/week. Casual workers tolerated untidiness much more, and their routine was much more flexible. These standards and routines supplied a structure to the work that might otherwise be seen as unstructured when compared with paid work outside the home.

This structure gives a reality to housework; but a reality only by contrast with paid work. Domestic labour was not it’s own reality. A further problem is that as technology changes, the job becomes enlarged. More powerful technology makes for the possibility of higher standards. Almost all of the sample was full time housewives. So there was perhaps a felt need to make housework real by comparison with their working husbands.

Despite the existence of this structure to the daily housework, 70% of the housewives were dissatisfied with their work. The work was described as monotonous, not unlike factory work. However, unlike most factory workers they were lonely. There were no significant differences as between working class and middle class housewives in respect of these findings. The reasons given for the monotony were the repetition of the same daily tasks, which did not require the full attention of the worker. There was much day-dreaming.

A more recent study by Stephen Edgell found continuing similarities (Edgell, 1980) . The housewives disliked their domestic labour, and compared it to unskilled factory work. But childcare was preferred by both husband and wife to house cleaning. There were also a number of discoveries, in particular a focus on decision making about domestic life. A shared belief in joint decision making as between husband and wife indicated a desire for a more egalitarian, and less patriarchal, family life.

When the actual decisions were looked at in detail what Edgell discovered was that only about half of the family decisions were taken jointly. As the sample was entirely of middle class households, it might have been expected that this figure might have been higher. There were no comparable figures for working class households, as this a middle class sample. Further, on looking more closely at the details of what the decisions were about, a rather non-egalitarian picture of family life emerged. The husband dominated the less frequent and more important decisions. Typically these ‘important’ decisions were about moving house, family finances, and buying a car. The more frequent and less ‘important’ decisions were left to the wife. Typically these decisions were about interior decorating, food management, and children's clothes.

Further, most husbands and wives agreed about what was important, and unimportant. This had two consequences. Firstly the work of the housewife was trivialised. Secondly the housewife colluded in this trivialisation of her own work.

This richer picture of decision making does question how widespread equality is in domestic work. This is particularly the case if more equality was expected in the middle class sample. The authors go further and argue that the husband’s paid work outside the home gave him legitimacy in avoiding domestic labour. How far this argument was accepted by the housewives was unclear, some appeared to accept it, but remained dissatisfied. This argument works by giving priority to paid work in industry over unpaid work in the home. Reversing this priority would require extended paternity and maternity leave. The provision of crèches at work, and free nursery education for all three-year-old children may even reinforce the priority of people’s working lives. Certainly a more extended period of paid work would be facilitated by crèches and nurseries.

Without the provision of paternity leave, housewives and children ‘accommodate’ to the needs of the husband/father, typically the need to move job and house, to be less present in the home than the housewife. The provision of leisure and paid holidays by the husband's income may be seen as a form of compensation for this ‘accommodation’. However, the response of one wife to one family holiday was,

One attempt to discover the source of these divisions in domestic labour looked at the experiences of young girls in secondary schools. It was found that about 8% of fathers did house work. This compared with about 45% of the school girls. 75% of mothers did housework, as did 19% of sisters. Their brothers did no housework. Whenever there was an unusual problem in the family one of the daughters would take time off school. This was perhaps the first step in creating the expectation that domestic work was for women only. The next step was observing that neither brothers, nor many fathers did housework. The final step was to leave school and get a job. Then their domestic responsibilities fell to their younger sisters, who then went through the same process as their older sister. The following dialogue between the interviewer and a fifth form school girl makes some of these points more graphically:

There was some opposition on the part of some of the girls to performing the housework. Nonetheless the culture of expectations passed on to these schoolgirls is clear. At about the same time as this study a governmentsurvey of women in paid work found that a quarter of the women and a higher proportion of the men agreed that 'a woman's place is in the home'. Secondly over half agreed that 'a husband's job is to earn the money; a wife's job is to look after the family'. Finally over half the women felt that their partners were pleased that they, the women, worked outside as well as inside the home (Martin & Roberts, 1984).

The first finding looks rather low given the experiences described at school. The actual adult experience of paid work may well have had a strong, and positive effect on many of these women. There is the sociability at work; the existence of an independent income; and finally the need for women to be in paid work to support the family. The second finding returns to a gendered division of housework, and for about half of all women. But even this figure still seems a bit low, given the earlier school experiences above. The third finding goes some way explaining these figures. The majority of women do paid work and unpaid housework. The positive evaluation of paid work co-existed with the continuing existence of housework, and this pleased the partners. So here there are two jobs being done. The housework has been called the second shift. It is the impact of the first shift, or paid work, which goes to explain the low numbers of women agreeing to a traditional gendered division of domestic labour. However, pleasing the partners with the first and second shifts can be seen as evidence of a more traditional role for women. There is considerable ambiguity here with respect to paid work outside the home. If this paid work is done, at least in part, to please the partner, then how far can it be seen as giving the woman an independence?

An American study called "The Second Shift" (Hochschild, 1989) focused on marriages where both partners were in paid employment, often full time in both cases. Here there was a particular focus on young wives who had been influenced by feminist ideas of the previous 20 years. These wives defined their relation to domestic work as being based on fairness. Fairness was defined as husband and wife sharing domestic tasks, including child care, equally with each partner taking half of the total burden. Maintaining a belief that this fairness was actually happening was important to the concept that these women had of themselves. The legitimacy of this fairness in the first place was based on the fact that the wives had jobs just as valuable as their husbands, returned home from work just as tired, and so felt that both should share the domestic work.

One obvious solution, much discussed, was the possibility of the wife working part time, or not at all. In some cases of factory workers this was not an option, as a dual waged income was needed for the household to survive. In other cases of more professional or managerial workers, this was not so necessary. However, the life commitment to a profession such as the law or social work was so great that it defined a large part of who the person was. One party giving up, and the other not, seemed unfair. Where both jobs were kept, continual requests from wife to husband to help with specific domestic tasks were felt by one wife to be a form of begging; and was demeaning. There were a variety of 'solutions' to these conflicts.

One solution was geographical. The domestic space was dived into two unequal amounts. The basement, and the dog, was the complete responsibility of the husband; the remainder of the three storey house was the responsibility of the wife. This reduced the anger over inequality in the house generally. Anger over the dog and basement reduced significantly the total amount of anger; but also made legitimate to both parties the anger that did continue to relate to the dog. This was an agreement that maintained the marriage. It was far short of the earlier demand for half shares, but there were shares. This made it possible for this wife to see herself as a non-traditional domestic worker, whose paid work was respected.

Another solution was to redefine time. As the domestic work done after both parents arrived home in the evening was the second shift, and conflictual; then if the domestic work could be done in the late afternoon, this was the time of the first shift. In order to move the second shift back in clock time, the wife had to work part time, or some variant of flexi-time. The children could then be collected from school, given a meal, and played with. One wife called this her shift. One consequence of this was that she did not feel the need to cook another evening meal every night, in the second shift. What happened to the evening meal was not clear. The wife also lost some of her independent income from her paid work, which may have had consequences over her control of the domestic budget, and financial decision making. Equal sharing of domestic work was made less likely, as the wife did all the work in the late afternoon, where before she might have had some help in the later evening. However, the wife referred to the morning/mid-day in paid work, and the late afternoon in domestic work as the first shift, or my shift! Her work in the second shift of the late evening was dramatically reduced. This was a taking of some control over her life.

A third 'solution' was called need reduction. Husbands argued that they did not need so many clothes cleaned or ironed; more meals could be bought in from take-away restaurants. House cleaning could be cut back on. Traditional wives, dealing with this change, would apologise for the slip in standards. Egalitarian wives would boast about how little was done, especially after the birth of children. Emotional care of one partner by the other was frequently cut back on. Some partners grew apart and developed different interests. Childcare was also cut back on. This produces a picture of emotionally arid families, with little prospect for survival. The only gain for this solution was fewer arguments.

This study saw husbands and wives as being one of three types. There the traditional type, the transitional, and the egalitarian. Traditional partners were trying to conform to their memory of their parents, who they saw as giving them a good childhood. Egalitarian partners saw their childhood as either unhappy, or not as a model for them as new parents. The transitional parents had elements of both views. The traditional wife was keen not to work, or not full time. They wanted to be with their new children partly to see they grow, but also to give the children a sense of the culture they had from their parents. This was particularly strong amongst ethnic minority parents. Paying for child care might not achieve this objective. Passing on a language other than English was particularly important. The traditional parent could even be seen as preserving an earlier peasant style of life, where cooking could take a whole day. Whereas the egalitarian wife was more keen on preparing the child for a future industrialised life. Here learning the basics of reading and writing, and how to get on with others could not come soon enough. So children were in play groups long before schooling started. If one of the partners differed from the other over these issues, there could be conflict. This conflict could produce some compromises, and also produced the third group, the transitionals.

A more recent study by the same author found more evidence of cutting back on time spent in the home (Hochschild, 1997). A progressive local firm offered flexi-time to it's employees. About one quarter of employees signed up for this option. But none of them cut back on their total hours in the firm. Further, working parents with young children put in more hours than single workers. The question was asked, was working life winning out over life at home? One wife said:

Workers argued that they felt more appreciated at work, and got more emotional support there than at home. About one third of these working parents put their children in nurseries for 40 hours a week, or more. The argument here is that work life is becoming more like home life in terms of emotional support; and home life is becoming more like work life in terms of rigid time routines that have to be met. This was particularly true of the more middle class workers. The factoryx workers still attempted to make home different from work, more of a haven.

This latest study paints a picture of work as an escape from the pressures of domestic labour for a majority of workers. This is nothing new. In the nineteenth century the rooms in poor housing were so small that the fathers used the home for bed and board, and nothing else. Most of the leisure was spent in the pub, or at sport. What is new, as the above quote shows, is that wives are now escaping the drudgery of domestic labour. This creates the need for nurseries and paid domestic labour. In the case of California, this was often supplied by illegal immigrant labour from Mexico!

An influential study in Britain took a more optimistic view of domestic labour. Whilst some of the findings produced above were present, there was less perceived unfairness. Specifically only 24% of female partners felt that they were doing more than their fair share, and only 21% of male partners felt that they were doing less than their fair share. These two figures were from interviews done separately, so they tend to confirm one another. Assuming the accuracy of these figures, the level of resentment between the genders appears less in this study than in any of the others. Yet the division of household tasks was very conventional with the female doing more than half of the washing up, tidying and hoovering/brushing. Further, when the male partner was unemployed there was a greater likelihood that the tasks would be done by the female. In the case of washing up, where there was the highest level of claimed sharing of the task, during male unemployment even this task was more likely to be done by the female. To emphasise the more positive aspects of this clearly unequal division of labour a number of points are made.

Firstly, there is the suggestion that these extreme levels of inequality are “transitional and relatively short-lived” (Pahl, 275: 1984). This is because of the life cycle. When there are young children in the house and the male has a full time job and the female is not in paid work, then this is the period of extreme inequality. Secondly, outside this period there is greater likelihood of greater sharing. This sharing may reach half each in the case of washing up; but only about a quarter of the tasks of tidying, and hoovering/brushing will be shared. Thirdly, where both male and female partners are in full time paid employment the amount of domestic improvements such as putting in a new bathroom or painting, plastering or vegetable growing, was almost twice as great than when one partner was full time in the home. The double income made these home improvements possible financially. But the positive point being made is that more energy and commitment comes into the home when there is a dual income. Employment has a greater impact on domestic labour than anything else, including male dominance. Unemployment did not seem to produce more home improvement as an alternative to paid employment (Pahl, 268/9: 1984).

This research paints a positive picture of domestic work where it co-exists with both partners in full time paid work. Where the male is in shift work then even more home improvements take place. 18% of the sample put in a reinforced steel joist into their homes! Where one partner, or neither, is in full time paid work a much more negative picture is painted. Here there is very little home improvements. Also there was little evidence of informal work being done for a neighbour. Whereas, those in paid work, and with tools, were doing high levels of informal work for neighbours.

Another kind of evidence assessing the attitude of people to domestic work looks at changes over space and time. The British Social Attitudes looked at five European countries, Western Germany, Britain, Irish Republic, Netherlands, and Sweden; and over an eight year period to 1994. When asked if they agreed or disagreed with a battery of questions about domestic labour produced a response that appeared non-traditional for the majority. Two of these questions, with responses from those who disagreed are listed below.

Western Great Irish Netherlands Sweden

Germany Britain Republic

A man's job is to earn

money; a woman’s job is

to look after the home and family. 46(+12) 58(+5) 52(+7) 63(+10) 69.

Being a housewife is just

as fulfilling as working

for pay. 35(+4) 33(-1) 24(+3) 31(+1) 31.

Adapted from Scott et al.:30, 1998. Figures in brackets represent the change over 8 years.

Disagreeing with the first question produces a majority of the international respondents as being non-traditional. The exception is Western Germany, but it's 46% disagreeing had grown by 12 % over the previous eight years. West Germany was not very different from the Irish Republic; but was very different from Sweden, which was the least traditional country in Europe.

Disagreeing with the second question produced a minority across Europe, and a minority that had changed little over eight years. There was no data for Sweden in 1988. Those who disagreed with this statement, around one third of the samples, were indicating a positive preference for paid work over unpaid domestic work. On this basis the majority, about two thirds, were traditional, indicating a preference for domestic work. Alternatively this could be read as claiming an equality of value, or satisfaction with domestic work as compared with paid work. This is a weaker interpretation, which might fit with non-traditional views. However a majority claiming that being a housewife is fulfilling sits uneasily with a majority disagreeing that a woman's job is to look after the home and family.

One possible explanation of this seeming contradiction is to see the above two questions as being of different kinds. The second question asks those house wives who disagree to denigrate the house work that they almost certainly do. Hence a majority do not wish to denigrate this work, and by implication themselves, in this way. The first question is less about work that is done , and more about sharing. It is about the value of equality. As posed the question implies a rigid separation of roles for men and women. This goes against the facts that a majority of women do paid work, at least part time. This alone would produce a majority disagreeing. However, the idea, or ideal, of sharing both paid work outside the home, and unpaid work in the home is being denied by the above two statements. So the majority disagreeing are expressing their commitment to this ideal. This is less a statement of what actually happens in the home or outside it. The lack of sharing in the home is well documented by the studies already discussed. So what the contradictory figures show is the majority desire for domestic work to be fulfilling and shared; which does fit with earlier evidence.

When questions were asked about the details of who actually does parts of domestic labour, a lack of sharing and a strict separation of tasks was revealed. Asking if it is usually or always the woman who does the washing and ironing, produces more than three quarters of all the samples who agree. Around three quarters agree that it is the man who always or usually does small repairs around the house. Looking at households where both partners work, and comparing those cases where the man earns more or less than the woman produces the following data.

Western Great Irish Nether-

Germany Britain Republic lands Sweden

Man earns more

than woman 85 83 79 85 82

Woman earns

more or same 78 63 80 70 72

What this table shows is that where the woman earns more than the man , or the same, then she does significantly less of the traditional work of washing and ironing. This was true of true of 5 of the 6 countries. The Irish Republic was the exception.

This table is an attempt to address the issue of fairness. A traditional argument used by men in full time work is that their long hours at work, high pay, and promotion prospects are their major contribution to the running of the home. So, in the case of Britain, where the man earns more, the woman does 83% of the traditional work. Where the woman earns the same or more than the man she only does 63% of the traditional work. This is a drop of 20 percentage points, and the biggest in the sample. The figure of 83% seems to support the man's argument, as the woman does more as she is earning less. The higher earning woman does less house work, and this also seems to support the man's argument that bringing in more means that less house work can be done. The fairness here is achieved by somehow seeing paid work outside the home as being on a par with unpaid work in the home. So if one does more outside the home one is entitled to do less in the home. However, if the man is doing little anyway, and we do not know how much time is spent on the small repairs the man traditionally does, then earning more can legitimate doing even less. It is not clear that this is fair. In any case high earning women in all 5 countries still do much more than half of the ironing and washing. A further question is whether the work in the home and that outside the home are on a par. The American evidence suggests that for many women there is less stress at work than at home, and that the paid work is more interesting. A pessimistic reading of this evidence would suggest that men and women are competing to get into paid work to reduce their domestic work. Further, high paid British women are much more successful in reducing domestic work than women in the other 4 countries. A small piece of more optimistic evidence is that where men earn more this makes little difference to the amount of small repairs that they do in the house. Although this can also be read pessimistically as evidence of the great rigidity of the separation of domestic tasks.

A somewhat controversial, and much more positive research report, argues that the last half of the twentieth century was a period of progress for women with respect to both domestic work and paid work (Hakim, 1996). The second world war was a disaster for men, but a gain for women. This is because women were drafted into men's jobs when the men were called up into the armed forces. Then in the 1960's contraception opened up the possibility of voluntary childlessness. Then in the 1970's equal pay legislation raised women's pay by about 10% over what it had been before; although it was still largely below men's pay. Finally, in the 1980's and 1990's the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the increase in service sector jobs created a congenial environment for women workers. Further, women now have more of a choice than before. They can work full time, part time, or be full time house wives. The author argues that this choice is in itself a form of progress and should be respected.

In the case of those women who choose full time domestic work, there are a series of advantages which flow from the specialisation in both paid and unpaid work. Where this specialisation of tasks occurs there can be more efficiency in both domestic and paid work. Productivity in both may rise. This is mutually advantageous to both the man and the woman. Further, as child care is a major part of domestic work, where conception is voluntarily limited, there can be more time spent with one or two children. The author claims that this can produce "Quality Children" (Hakim, 15: 1996). Further, if there is a decision to have children early in life and the mother becomes bored with motherhood, then the woman may start a late career. Conversely, if the woman starts an early career, and becomes bored with the rat race , she may retire into the haven of the family, and domestic work, including child care.

However, this second choice to retire into domesticity although respected, is heavily criticised. Hakim suggests that full-time housewives spend 40 hours a week on domestic work (excluding childcare), whereas when the woman has full time paid work she only does 18 hours per week. So this evidence is used to suggest that full time housewives make their domestic work expand to fill the time available. The difference between the 40 and 18 hours suggests that the lower figure is the minimum necessary to do the task. So the full time housewife spends twice as much time, which may be unnecessary. This suggests there is a form of make work, or even self indulgence, here! Where both the man and the woman are in full time paid work, the man does about 10 hours of domestic work. This produces a total of 28 hours per week; still much below the 40 hours of the full time housewife. (Hakim, 10: 1996)

All this raises the question of what the definition of domestic work should be. In the research quoted above it included house cleaning and tidying, meal preparation, washing up after meals, repairs, gardening, shopping and laundry; but excluding childcare. This may appear at first glance as the minimum necessary domestic work. The advantage of excluding childcare is that playing with the child could be seen as leisure and not work. Alternatively it could be seen as the most important form of educational pre-school work that a parent can do. To avoid this ambiguity there is the substitution rule. This rule suggests that if a third party can be introduced to do a task, and the task then lost it's value, then the task is not work. So, for example, routine house cleaning is work because it is a matter of indifference who does it. Whether it is done by a full time housewife or a paid servant the result is the same. Whereas studying, or playing with a child, may produce different results if done by the housewife or the paid servant. Getting someone else to do your studying for you may well not have the same value to you as doing it yourself. Similarly, the child may experience their play time differently depending on who plays with them. So these tasks are not work. This attempt may help future research, but is not yet widely accepted. Nonetheless this attempt at clarity as to what domestic work is, is helpful. It makes the decision to remove childcare from the evidence above support the contention that there is much make work in full time domestic work.

The author then argues a defence of the low figure of 10 hours per week that the man does where both partners are in full time work;

"One explanation for the reluctance of husbands to help with domestic work is the knowledge that there would be no need for it, if efficient work methods were used."

This plausible suggestion, at the least, implies that there is some considerable tension in those house holds where the man is in full time paid work, and the woman is a full time housewife. Indeed this is a slippery slope which leads to the denigration of housework as seen in other studies.

Despite these criticisms of, and tensions within, full time domestic work there is evidence of much recent commitment to it. In 1993 some 84% of housewives saw homemaking as their principle activity long term. Some 37% never intended to return to paid work. And some 47% only wanted part time paid work. Only half of this sample had young children to care for, and spent 73 hours per week on child care, and 28 hours on other domestic work. Only about one quarter of the sample showed any dissatisfaction with their work (Bonney & Reinach, 1993). Perhaps one reason why there was so little dissatisfaction with domestic work was that up to half of it was what the author calls make work. Put differently, although maybe half the work was above the minimum necessary, it was an expression of pleasurable activity, even creativity. The suspicion remains that the unnecessary work was entirely redundant, at least that was the way many husbands saw it. This opens the question as to whether there is some agreed minimum standard; or as Oakley argued there were different standards operating in different households. Perhaps this difference needs to be recognised, and respected too!

The same author's more recent work based on the 1991 census returns, attempts to show that women are exercising greater choice both in paid work and domestic work" (Hakim, 1998). In paid work women are doing a greater variety of jobs than before. She gives the following examples :

The argument that none of these tasks are essentially feminine is made by claiming that none of them are essentially related to typical domestic work. But a part of the job of a sales assistant is to encourage the customer to try some item of clothing on, and to encourage the customer to see themselves as wearing the clothes well. Is this so very different from dressing a five year old for school? Is counting out daily pocket money so different from being a check out operator? Is sending notes to the teacher, and keeping a record of school reports so different from being a secretary? This particular list from the 1991 census of paid work, that women are increasingly entering, does not make the point that women are breaking away from stereotypical forms of paid work.

The other choice that women are exercising is with respect to domestic work. Here

"Between the ages of 25 to 64, at least a quarter of all women are non-working with no other specific status."

This implies the exercise of a choice to spend about 10 of the years between these two ages home making. And these 10 years are focused on that part of the life cycle with young children. It was found that only 11% of mothers, when their youngest child was under 5 years, did full time paid work. These figures seemed to show a preference for domestic work, including child care, at least at this point in the life cycle. There also seemed to be less economic need for paid work than in the past. This will not be the case where there is divorce, and/or unemployment in the family. There was always the possibility of returning to some paid work as the children grew older. Indeed the very stereotyping of some jobs as essentially feminine would help to keep these jobs open for women even in times of recession.

All of this evidence is presented to argue that for the majority of women domestic work is a positive preference, especially when related to periods in the life cycle. However, when the children grow up most of these women return to some form of paid work. Does this mean that the positive commitment to domestic work was rather temporary, even rather superficial? Or should the preference be seen as a commitment to child care rather than routine work of washing and ironing? This is the distinction the author made earlier, but seems to have been forgotten! This raises the question of what domestic work means to the worker; or rather is there a changing meaning over the life cycle? When there are children under 5 this creates the larger part of domestic work. The rearing of children arguably has more prestige than regular ironing and washing. When the children mature and leave home only the routine tasks are left for domestic work. It seems plausible that domestic work will be more satisfying when there are children in the home, as compared with no children. Looking after elderly relatives also increases the hours and may change the meaning yet again.