- The mother-housewife role may limit women’s employment opportunities by the responsibility of the “school run”. If the women has to drop of her child(ren) at school in the morning and collect them at the end of the school day she may not be employed as she may be needed to work a full day eg. From 9am-5pm.
5.
Young and Willmott claim that the roles in the family between the husband and wife are shared. They state that the domestic labour is shared, as is the leisure activity. They call these families joint conjugal rolled families.
It has been found that the majority of the housework and childcare in the home is completed by the female/wife/mother. This even appears to be the case when the man of the household is unemployed, leaving him with no job to prevent him doing housework.
Oakley argues that Young and Willmott’s claim of increasing symmetry amongst the family is based on inadequate methodology. (S)he says that this is because Young and Willmott’s conclusions were based on only one interview question, which was worded in such a way, that it could exaggerate the amount of work done by me.
Although Edgell found that decision making tended to be shared he also found that the decisions made by the women were about domestic spending and childrens clothes rather than the “major” decisions such as moving house or overall finance which were dominated by men.
Young and Willmott, as well as Sullivan, carried out investigations in order to find out differences between the hours of work and leisure for men and women. Both investigations found that the amount of work time in the house was not that different for men and women. In regards to leisure time it was found that although men spent slightly more time sleeping, relaxing, socialising and eating, the differences were not that great.
6.
Although Young and Willmott claim that household tasks are divided equally amongst men and women it has been found by DeVault that it is women whom do the majority of the invisible work within the family. Such as emotionally feeding the family.
Edgell also suggested that the amount of decision making within the family was higher for the men than it was for the women. Men are able to say that as the breadwinner, their careers were placed above the interests of the wife and family.
In the early 1990’s many sociologists believed that the role of the father was changing. They said that men were more likely to attend the childbirth and that they were more likely to play a greater role in childcare than their fathers did.
In a back up to the views of these sociologists, Beck in 1992 claimed that men were no longer able to rely on their jobs to bring them a sense of fulfilment and identity, and that men were now looking towards their children to do this.
Functionalists see the sexual division of labour in the home biologically inevitable. They claim that women are naturally suited to the caring and emotional role. In contrast, Marxist Feminists claim that the housewife role simply serves capitalism by providing the next labour power. Radical feminists see the first oppression being of women. Their role as housewives is created in patriarchy and serves men and their interests.
