This article reviews more than 200 scholarly articles and books on household labor published between 1989 and 1999. As a maturing area of study, this body of research has been concerned with understanding and documenting how housework is embedded in complex and shifting social processes relating to the well-being of families, the construction of gender, and the reproduction of society. Major theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the study of household labor are summarized, and suggestions for further research are offered. In summary, women have reduced and men have increased slightly their hourly contributions to housework. Although men's relative contributions have increased, women still do at least twice as much routine housework as men. Consistent predictors of sharing include both women's and men's employment, earnings, gender ideology, and life-course issues. More balanced divisions of housework are associated with women perceiving fairness, experiencing less depression, and enjoying higher marital satisfaction.

Research on household labor : Modeling and measuring the social embeddedness of routine family work

This study used two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 to 1988 and 1992 to 1994) to examine the effect of the transition to parenthood on the division of labor among married couples, hypothesizing that parenthood would produce a more differentiated gender division of labor, but that attitudes and preparental division of labor would moderate parenthood. There were no effects of parenthood nor direct or moderating effects of gender attitudes on husbands' employment or housework hours, with the exception that fathering more than one child results in slightly longer employment hours. Motherhood increases wives' housework hours and reduces employment hours. Wives' traditional gender attitudes reduce their employment, but not their housework. Women married to full-time breadwinners have the largest reductions in employment after motherhood. Last, wives' initial economic dependency increases wives' subsequent housework and husbands' employment. Parenthood crystallizes a gendered divisi...

BECOMING MOTHERS AND FATHERS Parenthood, Gender, and the Division of Labor

1. Understanding Gender. 2. Dominance and Interdependence. 3. Development of Gender Relations. 4. Content and Origins of Gender Stereotypes. 5. Descriptive and Prescriptive Stereotyping. 6. Self-Sustaining Prophecies. 7. Obstacles to Gender Nonconformity. 8. Sexism in the Workplace. 9. Love and Romance. 10. Sex. 11. Gender and Violence. 12. Progress, Pitfalls, and Remedies.

The Social Psychology of Gender: How Power and Intimacy Shape Gender Relations

Work–family linkages among self-employed women and men.

The clearly defined work and family roles of the traditional American family model-husbands as breadwinners and wives as homemakers-have been replaced by a model where both husbands and wives are employed, creating the need to re-negotiate family roles. The current study examined: (1) differences in perceived decision-making, gender-role attitudes, division of household labor and perceived marital equity in dual-earner husbands and wives (n = 233); and (2) the impact of perceived decision-making, gender-role attitudes, and division of household labor on perceived marital equity. Findings indicated that decision-making, low-control household labor, and high-control household labor differed significantly between husbands and wives. Wives spent more time in household labor and were much more likely to be involved in low-control household tasks. Perceptions of marital equity were influenced by decision-making and time spent in low-control household tasks for both husbands and wives.

Husbands and Wives in Dual-Earner Marriages: Decision-Making, Gender Role Attitudes, Division of Household Labor, and Equity

In examining factors relating to how married couples make work and family decisions, we discovered that gender and marriages are constructed and, in turn, reconstructed through the decisions couples make about work and family. We qualitatively analyzed longitudinal data gathered from 61 couples who made a work and family decision. Husbands and wives provided information concerning their marriages in general and their work and family decision-making process in particular. We took a feminist critical stance on what couples considered as they faced the decision, and how their considerations were related to aspects of their relationship. The focus of this article is to illuminate how married couples construct gender and their marriages through their decisions concerning work and family. Building on decision-making research and feminist critiques of marital roles, we scrutinize work and family decisions. We show how interpersonal processes--those underlying and emergent patterns of interaction in intimate relationships--are experienced in ways that reflect the couples' construction of gender in their interpersonal lives and how that construction impacts the process of decision making. Through qualitative analysis, we illuminate how important the couples' own construction of gender and their marriages is in explaining the decisions they make and the ways those decisions change or cement their ideas about gender and about marriage. Thus, this research is aimed at providing a more complete understanding of why couples make the decisions they do regarding work and family. How is it that couples continue to make decisions that, from an economic standpoint, simultaneously disadvantage women and overburden men? The answer to this question points to how decisions that couples make about work and family perpetuate patriarchy. REVIEW OF LITERATURE The Gender Perspective and Construction of Marriage The gender perspective sees gender as produced in everyday activities (Ferree, 1990; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Rather than describing gender as an individual property based on biology, the gender perspective focuses on how people in their interactions with others come to perceive each other and each other's behaviors as gender appropriate or inappropriate. Stemming from symbolic interaction theory, the gender perspective views interactants as striving to create meaning out of their behaviors and the behaviors of others. Through this active process of deriving meaning from interaction, the behaviors of men and women are seen as diametrically different (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Particularly important for the study of married couples making decisions, gender is socially constructed and embedded in social contexts and processes through a system of boundaries that help to define what is appropriate for each gender, and through self-concepts, beliefs, and expectations for behavior (Potuchek, 1992; Risman & Schwartz, 1989; Thompson, 1993). Seen in this light, the ways that couples make work and family decisions and the outcomes of those decisions have implications for how gender and marriages are constructed for individual couples and for the larger society. Rather than surmising that married women are forced into unrewarding jobs and are constrained by their family obligations, the gender perspective suggests a deeper look into the processes through which couples make the decisions that result in women's economic marginalization and women's "second shift" in the household (Hochschild, 1989). What sorts of marital behaviors are gendered? In terms of responsibility, we know that men typically have responsibility for bread winning; women typically bear responsibility for home care, including housework, dependent care, and attentive care and emotional labor (Hood, 1983; Thompson, 1993). From a gender perspective, Potuchek (1992) suggests that these responsibilities are not passively stepped into by spouses; rather, role taking and role making are negotiated and renegotiated throughout marital interaction as an "active and contentious" process of constructing gender boundaries (p. …

The Marital Construction of Gender Through Work and Family Decisions: A Qualitative Analysis

Resource theory has suggested that power in a relationship rests on the ability to control important resources. With power defined as a potentiality, economic power as a concept needs to incorporate both the actual economic reward of income as well as the marital partners' potential as economic providers. One way to assess potential as an economic provider is by educational attainment. This research is drawnfrom a sample of 128 individuals (64 married couples). Using the couple as the unit of analysis, we divided the sample into different groups of couples. Results indicated that husbands' stress is related to the disparity of education, while wives' stress is related to the disparity of income. Results also indicated that stress was experienced when marital partners used certain influence strategies during the process of making a recent work/family decision.

Kathleen M. Greaves

Papers

The Marital Construction of Gender Through Work and Family Decisions: A Qualitative Analysis

Economic Resources, Influence, and Stress among Married Couples