Abstract
Unpaid household labor is still predominantly performed by women, despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation over the past 50 years. For this article, interviews with 76 highly skilled women who had returned to the workforce following the birth of children were analyzed to capture reflexive understandings of the balance of paid and unpaid work in households. Alongside a need to work for selfhood was a reflexive awareness of inequity in sharing household labor and dissatisfaction with the ways in which male partners contributed around the home. However, in parallel with this discourse of inequity was one of control, manifest in perceptions of male partners’ inability to competently complete household tasks. Although the discursive aspects of women’s understandings of inequality in the home can be understood as manifestations of reflexive modernization, participants’ general incapacity to effect everyday changes is better explained by the more fully socialized feminist reading of Bourdieu’s conception of embodied practice.
That our form of social organization has any necessary features is, I take it, rather questionable
The literature on the sharing of domestic labor, including housework and child care, is virtually unanimous in the view that women, despite the level of paid work undertaken outside the home, carry a disproportionate load of unpaid work at home compared with their male partners (e.g., Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2006; J. Miller & Garrison, 1982; P. W. Miller & Mulvey, 1998; Paulsen, 1998; Wright, 2007). This level of unpaid work for women in the home only increases with the birth of children (Baxter, Hewitt, & Haynes, 2008). Research has also provided a comprehensive view of the persistence of this imbalance over time and the resistance of the gender allocation of household work to changes in other variables such as women’s labor market participation, family arrangements, and relative financial resources (e.g., Baxter, 2000, 2002). Most of this research, with some exceptions that will be detailed below, has been large-scale quantitative work focused on objective measures. Where research has addressed women’s subjective accounts of unpaid labor, the imbalance is often attributed to an enduring legacy of gender ideology and its deterministic power over the fate of women in families and the fact that many women saw it as a duty or essential gender role to manage and maintain the domestic sphere (e.g., Coltrane, 1996; Dempsey, 2002; Oakley, 1974). The relative lack of interpretive research on gendered inequality in the home has meant that the literature has little to say about the extent of, or changes in, women’s reflexivity, their ability to reflect on their own domestic situations, and their place in the institution of the family in conditions of late modernity, as anticipated in the work of Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994).
The aim of this article is to provide insights into the ways in which women reflexively understand and manage a persisting gender bias in the division of unpaid household labor in conditions of reflexive modernity. The first goal is to examine the extent of reflexivity, and the second is to “test” the limits of that reflexivity insofar as it affects actual outcomes in the home. We use semistructured interviews with 76 Australian women who had returned to the workforce after the birth of a child. The women were from professional and managerial occupations and were relatively well-resourced. The article takes as its starting point analysis of the data from the perspective of women’s own subjective understandings of their household roles according to the insights provided by theories of “reflexive” modernity and investigates whether this reflexivity about household roles was translated into greater equity in the home for working women.
Literature Review
The idea of the housewife or homemaker as part of a nuclear family coincides with full industrial modernity. The advent of suburbia, the increasing mobility of the labor market, the breakdown of premodern social structures, and increasing distance between workplace and the home solidified the nuclear family and the sharp division of gender roles in the household that persists (Gilding, 1993; Jamieson, 1987). In what Jamieson (1987) calls the “classical account” of the strict gender roles of the nuclear family, the social processes of modernity strengthened the propensity of parents, particularly mothers, to build boundaries around their families and to direct their own energy and emotion inwards toward their children. These norms of woman as mother and homemaker were perhaps at their zenith in the postwar years, reinforced by popular cultural and media stereotypes of the mother as nurturer and custodian of a safe and caring home (see, e.g., Gilding, 1993; Robinson & Hunter, 2008).
However, the empirical reality behind these stereotypes has been steadily eroding in the years since World War II. The dramatic increase in the presence of women in the labor market has meant that expectations and norms for women in the public sphere have changed, with few occupations or professions still closed to women (Blau, Ferber, & Winkler, 2006). The move by many women from the private sphere of the traditional nuclear family to an increasing involvement in the public realm of the labor market coincided with the emergence of the debate about women’s concurrent role in the home, in particular the persistence of the gendered nature of unpaid household labor. Although the achievement of gender equity in the labor market is clearly not yet realized (see, e.g., World Economic Forum, 2010, for information on ongoing gender gaps in labor force indicators), the advancement of women’s status in the workplace in the West has been steady and mostly positive, at least in comparison with the persistent inequalities that these same working women with partners and children have generally experienced in the home with regard to the sharing of unpaid household labor (ABS, 2006; Baxter, 2002; J. Miller & Garrison, 1982; P. W. Miller & Mulvey, 1998; Paulsen, 1998; Wright, 2007).
For the purposes of this article, household labor refers to those tasks that are “low control” (Riley & Kiger, 1999), that is, work that must to be done by someone and for which there is little flexibility in how or when it is done. Tasks include house cleaning, washing, ironing, food shopping, and routine preparation and picking up after others. Veltman (2004), using Beauvoir’s (1949/1972) classic portrayal of immanence and transcendence, argues that such housework is an immanent task for which there is little intrinsic reward. Veltman argues that in comparison with tasks such as the project of raising children, housework is seen as repetitious and mundane, merely serving to perpetuate life and the status quo. Transcendence, on the other hand, Veltman argues, can be achieved through work or activity that has a durable legacy, allows the expression of individual creativity, or in some way advances the cause of humanity. Although paid work by no means guarantees transcendence, it still holds that possibility, particularly for those whose work involves any degree of discretion or creativity. Although arguments might be mounted about the classification of household labor as “immanent,” we use the distinction to clarify our analytical focus and seek evidence on participants’ perceptions about this kind of work and the ways in which it is shared in the household.
There is a significant literature on the continuing and seemingly intractable inequitable division of household labor that in the main argues that the conduct of housework is not an essential condition of gender, particularly where it concerns the “dual-career” couple (Rapoport & Rapoport, 1971, 1976). The research literature suggests a broad spectrum of causality behind the persistent imbalances and trade-offs in families. Looking at research from the last decade, inequity in housework has been analyzed across the sociological spectrum from the individual to the societal, beginning with the innate or cognitive qualities of individual women who either consciously choose a traditional role and remain at home to care for children (Dempsey, 2001; Gill, 1993; Hakim, 2000) or, in a more constrained fashion, have an inability to negotiate better outcomes for themselves (Mannino & Deutsch, 2007). A second strand of research incorporates the social, at an intersection of the constructed fields of gender and the family where differing gender ideologies dictate, more deterministically, the behavior adopted by women and men respectively, influencing them to reproduce the traditional gender roles of the nuclear family characterized in modernity (Allen & Webster, 2001; Dempsey, 2000; Evertsson, 2006; Gupta, 2006; Kan, 2008; Kroska, 2004; Nordenmark & Nyman, 2003). This ideology is also expressed as a gender imbalance in familial resources and consequently diminished negotiating power for women in marriages (Evertsson & Nermo, 2007; Gupta, 2007; Voicu, Voicu, & Strapcova, 2007) and as based on men’s vested interest in maintaining the status quo (Singleton & Maher, 2004). These ideological factors have been found to vary with age cohort and levels of education and the birth of children (Baxter & Western, 1998; Wright, 2007). A third strand “widens the lens” to incorporate a more macro-structural view of the problem, acknowledging the public and private realms. From this perspective, imbalances in unpaid household labor are attributed to persisting gendered norms in the paid labor market and wider constructions of the “ideal worker” as enablers or barriers to women forging meaningful careers for themselves outside of the home (Fuwa, 2004; Fuwa & Cohen, 2007; O’Connor, 2006; Voicu et al., 2007).
This literature provides a comprehensive view of the resilience of imbalances in household labor in light of the changing variables of women’s labor market participation and family composition. With some exceptions (e.g., Coltrane, 1996; Dempsey, 2002; Mannino & Deutsch, 2007; Nordenmark & Nyman, 2003; Oakley, 1974), research on household labor tends to be based on large-scale quantitative methods and is less likely to be able to capture changes in the ways that women subjectively understand and accept or reject these imbalances (Wilkie, Ferree, & Ratcliff, 1998). Research that does reflect these subjective understandings tend to perpetuate a view that a significant proportion of women, although clearly the subjects of inequality in the home, tend to justify it as the fulfillment of an understood gender contract (Baxter, 2000; Blair & Johnson, 1992; De Vault, 1990; Dempsey, 1999; Ferree, 1991; Lennon & Rosenfield, 1994; Mikula, 1998; Nordenmark & Nyman, 2003) rather than demonstrating a reflexive awareness of the ideological roots of inequities in the home. This view was well illustrated in Oakley’s (1974) landmark study, The Sociology of Housework, in which she found that although many of the women she interviewed were not enamored with the mundane nature of housework, there was very little evidence that women thought that someone else should be doing this work in their place. In other words, women felt a “high or medium” identification as housewife (Oakley, 1974) and had little reflexive awareness of themselves as in any way oppressed or part of any systematic socially constructed gendering of roles. For better or worse, they viewed themselves as housewives or homemakers.
It is against this backdrop that the concept of reflexivity is introduced in this article. Reflexivity, or the idea that one has the capacity for self-awareness and reflection on one’s own actions and experience, can be traced back to George H. Mead (via Hegel) and symbolic interactionism. It was Mead, using Hegel’s idea of “self-consciousness,” who socialized the theory of mind. Mead recognized the social basis of all language; that humans could have conversations with themselves and that this has an important part to play in the taking of roles (Outhwaite, 1998). In more recent times, the concept has been applied by authors such as Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) to distinguish a break from modernist conceptualizations of stable social structures and to explain a feature of “late” or “reflexive” modernity in which the individual, to cope with the rapidly changing and fragmenting nature of social institutions such as the family, has been required to develop an ability for “reflexivity” or the ability for self-awareness and reflection on one’s own actions (Beck et al., 1994) in order to arrive at satisfactory outcomes. Put differently, reflexivity is the ability and need to reflect back as an observer on the course of one’s own life, as a means for the construction of a future course of action. This requirement for reflexivity was not evident in traditional modernity, where the life course progressed unreflexively, where the future was “mapped out” as a function of one’s social standing or position, and where expected roles and obligations, such as family and career, were unambiguous and unquestioned and proceeded, in this case, according to established “gender scripts.” The expression of reflexive modernity in intimate relationships, such as exist in the nuclear family, is what Giddens (1992) describes as an inexorable progression in conditions of late modernity toward the “pure relationship,” where people, progressively freed from the expectations and strictures of traditional institutional arrangements, are able to form intimate relationships for the sake of the relationship itself.
The analysis presented below assesses the extent of reflexivity among respondents as well as providing a “test” of the idea of reflexivity and the extent to which women’s ability to reflect on their own situation in the home and at work affects the ways in which household labor is shared.
The Study
The fact that household gender inequality exists across the socioeconomic spectrum is well established empirically (Baxter, 2000, 2002). Acknowledging this strong empirical basis, this article draws on the qualitative analysis of in-depth semistructured interviews conducted in 2007 with 76 women with children living in three major Australian cities in order to capture changing understandings and challenges faced by contemporary women in managing this inequality. The women were drawn from a group of 100 who had been recruited from respondents to the 2005 Parental Leave in Australia Survey (PLAS; n = 3,573) to participate in detailed interviews (Whitehouse, Baird, Diamond, & Soloff, 2007). PLAS surveyed the infant cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (n = 5,107), which was designed to be a nationally representative sample of children born between March 2003 and February 2004 (Soloff, Lawrence, & Johnstone, 2005).
The group selected from PLAS for detailed interviews reflected the response bias in the wider PLAS sample, which included an overrepresentation of mothers who had completed higher secondary education and who had undertaken further tertiary education or training and an underrepresentation of women who spoke a language other than English in the home. In addition, among the 100 detailed interviews conducted, we focused only on those who were employed and who were working in relatively high-skill occupations. Table 1 presents information on the 94 interviewees who were employed at the time of interview, among whom we selected women in managerial, professional, and semiprofessional roles (n = 76). This overrepresentation of educated and professional women provided the opportunity to access the understandings and meanings associated with unpaid labor at the more privileged end of the occupational and income spectrum, serving as a “critical case” (Flyvbjerg, 2006)—that is, a set of cases that allows for a degree of confidence in theoretical generalization about the issues under investigation to other similar or less advantaged cases. In other words, a group of women who are well educated, with higher echelon jobs should have the discursive and institutional resources both at home and at work to negotiate particular outcomes. If negotiating these outcomes is an ongoing problem for this group, then it might be inferred that less well-resourced women would face equal or greater difficulties.
Interview Sample: Employment Characteristics of Mothers Employed in the 12 Months Prior to the Birth of Their Child
Participants were interviewed for approximately 1 hour by researchers from the project team. Almost all interviews were conducted face-to-face, mostly in the participant’s home, but occasionally in her workplace, or in a public space such as a café during the day. On a small number of occasions the participant’s male partner was also present and participated in the interviews. The interviews were conducted according to a brief interview schedule comprising four main questions designed to elicit the participant’s account of her domestic and workplace experiences leaving and reentering the workforce following the birth of a child and her perspectives on how satisfactory those arrangements were for her, her life partner, and her family. Interviews were professionally transcribed, and transcripts were managed using NVivo qualitative data management software. Analysis took place using an interpretive categorical approach, with coding according to three emergent themes that were selected on the basis of their salience to an overarching theme of women’s level of reflexivity about their household roles. The following sections are organized according to these three main themes: (a) the grounds for reflexivity about household labor, which illustrates the extent to which respondents recognized and expressed dissatisfaction with unequal divisions of labor in the home; (b) accounting for the persistence of gendered household roles, which reviews women’s perceptions about their limited capacity to achieve greater equity in household labor; and (c) the limits to reflexivity, which reflects on the apparent incompatibility of the first two themes. Following these accounts of women’s understanding of paid work and the barriers they faced in balancing their work and home life is a discussion of how and why women’s reflexivity influenced their acknowledged outcomes in the home.
The Grounds for Reflexivity
To investigate the grounds for dissatisfaction with an unequal burden of household work, it is useful first to establish the nature of women’s competing roles. Earlier work on the gendering of household labor has been limited by a lack of “transcendent” alternatives for women, who then tended to construct the care of the home and children as a calling in itself (Oakley, 1974). However, our respondents, by nature of their professional or managerial occupations, had a clear alternative. Although financial considerations played a role in the reasons why women returned to work after the birth of children, there was also a very strong desire to be defined by more than just motherhood:
But I think when you look at the bare facts, I mean, I have been around for the kids, which is what I wanted to do, I have worked, which is what I wanted to do, I wanted to stay in touch, I wanted to feel like I was a lawyer again, and dealing with adults and using my brain and that kind of thing. (353)1
Participants also felt that they had an important role to play in providing a role model to their children; that women could be defined by more than just their traditional role as homemaker. For example, one participant felt “very proud to be able to tell my children about the sorts of things I do and contribute, and in my particular role [as an engineer]” (275).
This active construction of self as worker and professional led to the identification and articulation of a problematic contrast between work and home. Women with better skills, larger incomes, and more education typically have access to greater resources such as greater bargaining power in the workplace, more flexibility with hours and location (Kangas & Rostgaard, 2007), and probably greater choice about whether to work at all. However, in the home environment, there was a remarkable lack of satisfaction among these women with the choices available to them about the sharing of unpaid household labor with their male partners. When asked questions relating to the distribution of household tasks, there was, in keeping with previous research outlined above, an almost unanimous view that although they had finished up with responsibility for the bulk of household labor and domestic management, they saw this by no means as their destiny:
Once [baby] came along I didn’t help outside much and so [husband] sort of did outside and I did inside. But then we got a gardener so [husband] doesn’t have to anything now and with me working three days a week [he] sees it as my job to do everything inside. . . . We’ve had discussions about it, but I asked him one night and he said with two days off a week I should be doing everything, so I thought, “Oh okay that’s interesting.” (183)
For most participants the problem had not resulted in overt conflict (although this did occur); it was rather a differing ideological position from their male partner on how a household should be managed and by whom. With echoes of Hochschild and Machung’s (1989) Second Shift, this participant reflected critically on the dilemma, including a sense of resignation in fighting a losing battle:
Yeah, it definitely feels unfair. You know, like every night, it’ll be 8.00 p.m. when the kids are in bed, he’ll [husband] turn off, and that’s his downtime then. I understand he needs that but I’ve still got the laundry to do, I’ve still got packing lunches for the next day to do, packing their bags, making sure their hats are in. You know that stuff? And I just think, I often think well, and I’ve talked about it. We should have a rule: if one of us is working [at home], both of us should be working—and that’s not going to work because he couldn’t keep up with me. So I don’t know, I think we just live with it. (219)
Participants’ views suggested awareness of a (yet to be realized) ideal in the sharing of household labor. Even relatively positive assessments of their male partners were somewhat lukewarm and underlined issues such as the need for direction:
Yeah, my husband is pretty good. I mean he is capable of cooking a meal for everybody and he does vacuuming and stuff around the house. (335) We both had issues, there’s that kind of thing, just the man issue and yeah you’d be prompting: you need to put the washing on, or things like that, a bit of prompting, but now he’s a bit more of a self-starter. (349)
For some, this was expressed as partners “trying” but clearly falling short of an ideal:
And then in terms of domestic work is that evenly split?
He does try at times. I’ve got to say—well I probably do the majority . . . I mean he does most of the outside work.
That’s the standard split I think.
He does try. (253)
The perception is thus that, despite good intentions, men have failed to achieve what women might reflexively understand to be a fair distribution of household labor. Their sense of inequity was based primarily on what Thompson (1991), using empirical research, labeled “between gender” comparisons. In Thompson’s view:
Women sense an injustice if they lack some outcome they desire, have a high standard for comparison, and believe there is no acceptable justification for being deprived of desired outcomes. To understand women’s sense of fairness, researchers need to consider (a) valued outcomes other than time and tasks, (b) between- and within-gender comparison referents, and (c) gender-specific justifications for men’s small contribution to family work. (p. 181)
In our study, we found little evidence that women were seeking equity compared with women in other families; rather, their focus was on their own male partner, and they were in no doubt, reflexively, that their situation was unfair. Traditional justifications for household inequity such as the man’s more important work outside of the home or the relative absence of married/partnered women with children in the workforce (Oakley, 1974) were no longer relevant for these women. This situation was compounded for participants who saw their own paid employment as a rewarding, and often well remunerated, career rather than as a mere supplement to household income. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) acknowledge women’s increasing reflexivity and that “the degree to which expectations are conscious and the degree to which they are expressed and fulfilled, varies according to the woman’s social and educational level” (p. 56). Ideologically, on one level at least, the participants believed that they were under no culturally constructed, or biologically determined, obligation to manage their household.
Accounting for the Persistence of Gendered Household Roles
By demonstrating the ability to reflect on their own positions in the household, and to question the structural inevitability of women and mothers as homemakers, participants were engaging in the sort of reflection about their biographies that is characteristic of reflexive modernity (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1991). However, the explanatory model implicit in this theory falls victim to its own weaknesses. One of the major criticisms of theories of reflexive modernization, and particularly that of Giddens (1991), is that it assumes a creative agent who is able to act individually on her or his own environment or circumstances (Alexander, 1996).
According to the accounts provided by the women in this research, a cognitive ability for reflection did not neatly translate into the sort of liberated outcomes that Giddens implies. Despite the ability of participants to reflexively recognize and articulate inequities in the home, and to aspire to a better outcome, some other competing constructions and norms were in play that worked against these aspirations.
It would be misleading to represent the level of dissatisfaction that participants felt, or even the nature of the household labor they undertook, as an unequivocal case of gendered dominance in the home. But participants, although proclaiming a clear sense of gendered inequity in the home, were nevertheless in many cases unprepared to fully resolve this imbalance. The critical reflexivity we have recounted existed alongside a more traditional discourse that did not quite return women to a position where housework was a natural role but did disparage men’s capabilities to a point that this could have been implied. Narratives of an imbalance in the home existed alongside, rather than in opposition to, a need to retain a degree of control in the home and a need to retain some of the role boundaries that have defined the nuclear family in modernity. Although lamenting the lack of help their male partners provided them in the home, there was also an accompanying discourse of innate male incompetence around the house:
I knew fundamentally that his standards were not my standards, so I sort of assumed that I would have to clean [the house]. (97) Because men are not designed for that multi-tasking thing, they can’t do it, the brain’s wired differently, and they run a household very differently. Once they’ve got into it, it’s not bad. The wife has to step back apparently and not be involved in the running of the household and just not see the pile of clothes in the corner, just not see any of that. (293)
Because men were seen to set naturally lower standards around the home, this participant felt forced to provide a bridging service between what her male partner saw as an acceptable level of household order and what she herself felt was acceptable:
Like taking out the rubbish and stuff like that. He does do that sometimes but you know he’s a male he doesn’t see it and you know stuff like that rubbish on the bench doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t see it like I do and he’s happy to leave the washing up for I don’t know a week, you know until he runs out of plates. It doesn’t sort of bother him. And I think if I hadn’t vacuumed for a week, that doesn’t bother him either. (183)
Views of the intrinsic immanence of housework reflect judgments that it requires little skill or training so that, in effect, anyone can do it (Cox, 1994). It thus delivers little sense of accomplishment or self-development. If this is the fundamental problem with housework, then for those with the resources the choice may be to outsource the problem, avoiding further erosion of household harmony (Bittman, 1998; Wilson & Lande, 2005) and preserving, in this case, a sense of a hegemonic gendered norm:
I’m not a nagging person, so if I notice the grass is getting a little bit too long, sorry that’s a boy’s job. There are some things that are just boy’s jobs and if he doesn’t pull his finger out well I go and get the lawn mower man to do it. He’ll come home and go what are you doing? I go, “well you haven’t mowed” and he goes “well why didn’t you say something? I could have done it on the weekend.” I shouldn’t have to say it, “you can see it, you do it.” (106)
Similarly, this participant was able to justify the employment of a household cleaner on the basis that it would save both of them time in the house as well as retaining the conceit of gendered competence:
He really isn’t very good at it [housework]. So we decided then that he was happy to pay for it so we paid for a cleaner back then and that saved all the arguments. (167)
The Limits to Reflexivity
The relative ease with which participants felt that male partners were able to avoid “pulling their weight” around the home and the related constructions of incompetence sit uncomfortably with many participants’ reflective understanding of the nature of the injustice in the division of household labor. It speaks of a certain powerlessness, despite a refined sense of the nature of the problem. Although the reflexive theories of Beck and Giddens might adequately account for the fact that women could reflect on gendered roles in the household, they fail to fully account for why these reflexive understandings and actual practice did not align. One of the more effective responses to this disconnect, and one that might account in some part for the dissonance in evidence here, comes from a particular interpretation of Bourdieu.
Adkins (2004) uses the work of Bourdieu to criticize the reflexivity described by Beck and Giddens as excessively cognitive and individualistic. This “self-conscious fashioning of identity” (p. 198) is insufficient to account for the more embedded and embodied roles that go toward a full understanding of gender identity and therefore fail to fully account for the way in which women are required to perform as social actors. For Bourdieu, a reflexive awareness of the inequity of one’s position in a field of practice (in this case the family in its institutional form) is made possible when one senses a lack of fit between “the feel for the game” (the habitus) and the game itself (Bourdieu, 1990). However, unlike the disembedded subject of reflexive modernity, Bourdieu’s subject is embedded in fields of practices, manifest in a particular preconscious habitus, or set of dispositions (Bourdieu, 1977). Although dissonance between the game and the feel for the game potentially open up space for transformation, women’s “conventional expectation of being there for others” (Adkins, 2004, p. 198) is an unconscious or prereflexive and highly socialized component of women’s habitus and in direct conflict with the reflexive need to establish oneself as an individual:
I wouldn’t want [my husband] to take care of a child. Not anything bad but you know what I mean? I think it’s a lot different. Even now it’s like you know, “just brush their teeth” or something. [he says] No, “she’ll be right.” [I say] “All right, I’ll do it.” Just things like that. Men and women are very different. (40)
As this participant recalls, “the game” can be a serious impediment to one’s ambitions:
Yeah look we’ve battled with it over you know time, I’m probably more mellow about it now but you know I’m the “fairness queen,” it all had to be 50/50 when we were first married. Before kids it was like well you know, if I’m going to do cleaning you have to do the washing and you know, that sort of thing. Because he’s grown up where his mother’s done everything for him so yeah. . . . I’ve tried to basically get him to do more stuff and the cooking, he used to do cooking, but he’s just not into it. (378)
The outcome of this is that even if reflexivity has become a “habit of gender” (Adkins, 2004, p. 202), it cannot be “separated out” from unconscious identity, and so there is a lack of corresponding transformation in actual practice. This “habit of gender” could be seen to be working through practices of gender inequity as discursively expressed by participants, including the characterization of males as inadequate around the home. The normalization of time pressures and related stresses also became a habitual practice and reflected a certain inevitability about participants’ roles, albeit an undesirable one. This rendered the possibility of transformation or the detraditionalization (Heelas, Lash, & Morris, 1996) of gendered household roles less certain.
Discussion
One of the challenges in representing gendered power relations as ideology has been the problem of what might be called, in a Marxist interpretation, “false consciousness” and the corresponding need to “document women’s oppression so that they may recognize exploitation when they experience it in their daily lives” (Hartmann, 1981, p. 387). The challenge in those circumstances is to take an emancipatory standpoint when the objects of emancipation are not themselves reflexively critical of their own situations. The idea that household labor is in some way definitive of a normative gender experience for women is something feminist authors have been attempting to expose since at least the middle years of the 20th century (Beauvoir, 1949/1972; Friedan, 1965; Greer, 1971; Johnson & Lloyd, 2004). The common message is that the role of women as housewives and guardians of the domestic sphere is not innate, that it is a construction, and a comparatively recent one that developed along with the modern conception of the nuclear family in the developed West. Reaching back to the 1950s, Beauvoir was a relatively solitary voice, speaking of a condition that, for most women, had few means for articulation or reflection. That these constructions have been challenged over the intervening half century was manifest in the voices of the participants in this research who were under little illusion, or “false consciousness,” about the inequity in their own homes. Participants demonstrated, on one level at least, little propensity to define themselves in terms of the modernist conception of homemaker. Almost without exception, these women understood that a gender role demarcation existed in their household and were reflexively aware of the inequities and their implications. In this regard at least, Beauvoir’s and her successors’ ideas had become part of everyday discourse, if not practice.
This reflexivity from participants conforms to what theorists of late modernity (Beck, 1994; Giddens, 1990) characterize as the need for individuals to constantly “reflect on the conditions of their existence” (Beck, 1994, p. 174) and construct their biographies as an active project. The nuclear family and the institution of work, once quite separate institutional realms, have become subject to fragmentation and overlap as women remain in, or return to, the workforce after having children. Consequently, expectations about unpaid housework are increasingly open to individual negotiation within families rather than subject to unreflexive gendered norms. An ability to reflect becomes necessary for negotiation to take place at all.
This script of reflexive modernity, however, becomes less convincing when held up against the experiences of those women who were less successful in actually effecting change in their homes than they were in articulating the problem. Many spoke of a need to retain control of household management through the elevation of housework as a task beyond the capabilities of male competence, and in this context often reverted to essentialist statements about gender difference. Along with women’s reflexive desire to be free of their unequal share of the burden of unpaid labor, there was what amounted to an endorsement by them of the traditional institutional structure of the family, which gives this inequity its current form through the mitigation of their male partners’ culpability. Participants’ representations of men’s incompetence or unwillingness to engage in housework have been recorded in earlier research, but in the past these representations have been used by women to construct their unequal burden of housework as fair, in light of a perceived innate aptitude for the role (Berk, 1985; Komter, 1989). In this case, it was more through a sense of resignation that this was done.
It is here that Bourdieu’s more socialized theory of how structure and agency coexist becomes useful, because although there was an ability to reflect, there was also an acknowledgement of the relative inertia of social structure, manifest in the norms of household roles and the primacy of care. This aspect was well illustrated by those participants who saw themselves as attempting to instigate change not for their own generation but for their children.
So discourses of household gendered control and demarcation persisted despite a resistance by participants to describe themselves, or act, as homemakers. The desire to retain some control of household management was reduced to a symbolic significance, that is, a measure of control in the household realm, but devoid of its everyday drudgery, rather than manifest as a desire to retain overall carriage of household labor. The institution of the nuclear family as understood in terms of traditional modernity persisted, although with new pressures brought to bear. The family in these terms is now encumbered, rather than sustained, with the very ideology that until now has accounted for its existence. Gender roles in marriage acted in a straightforward way as an obstacle to women’s desire for greater freedom; but also in a more subtle and pre-reflexive way, as Adkins describes it, as an object for preservation, or at least as a “more enduring aspect of identity” than “strategic and self-conscious self monitoring” (Adkins, 2004, p. 198). It is this paradox that lies at the heart of these women’s struggle for balance and highlights the intractability of such a situation when viewed from two incompatible perspectives.
Conclusion
There is a certain clarity of purpose or vision when considering the institutions of the workplace organization or the state in giving women more meaningful choices surrounding paid work and unpaid work. The institution of the family however is more problematic. When viewed from the perspective of the status quo, the women interviewed for this study clearly had the reflexivity to realize that they were being (perhaps unreflexively) prevailed on by their male partners, making it difficult for them to achieve greater transcendence in their lives.
Previous research on women and housework has found that in the past many women, although not necessarily enjoying housework, had not expressed a reflexive sense of injustice with an inequitable burden of household labor (Baxter & Western, 1998; Dempsey, 1999; Oakley, 1974). The reasons given by these researchers tend to attribute this to a manifestation of gender ideology; that women were living according to a normative gender script by not only competently managing and doing the bulk of household work but also deriving a sense of selfhood from it. It must also be noted that this previous research tended to involve more representative samples, including women from a broader spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds with a broader range of labor market experience (cf. Lennon & Rosenfield, 1994). In this research, it is the women at the more privileged end of the socioeconomic spectrum, with greater choices and more resources, who have been investigated. The study of such a group allows conclusions to be drawn about women with an abundance of choice that then might usefully be contrasted in further research with less advantaged groups.
The women in this study, in common with previous research on household gender inequality, were burdened with an unequal share of unpaid household labor despite having reentered the workforce following the birth of children. None of them spoke of any subjective satisfaction from domestic chores, including the mundane tasks that children generate in the home, bearing in mind these routine, low control, repetitive tasks (Riley & Kiger, 1999) associated with the care of children were seen as distinct from the overall project of raising children, which remained a highly valued role.
What was apparent among these women though was an ability to reflect on their roles, to be able to recognize the gendered inequality that had led them to their current roles. There is a risk in describing this disposition toward a reflexively considered life as a liberating experience for the well resourced (Sweetman, 2003). The qualitative evidence presented in this article provides a more complex scenario for a group of women who, relatively speaking, fall into this category and here the theories of reflexive modernization fail to fully account for the situation faced by participants. The choices available to the agent in narratives of late modernity were certainly in evidence; however, few participants would have described them as liberating. Their reflexivity did not generally translate into action. It takes the more structured perspective of Bourdieu to explain this inertia, as the effect of a habitus, the precognitive structures of expectation inherent in both the gendered self, but also by the field of family and women’s role as carer. It is this clash between what Bourdieu calls the “feel for the game” and the “game itself” that results in the dissonance between women’s need for greater independence of selfhood and lack of ability to implement change in the household.
This study has neglected the views of men regarding the inevitable pressures and compromises they face in managing their own involvement in the division of household labor in a family where both partners are engaged with the labor market. Further research on men’s perspectives will serve both to highlight the structural considerations in their own behaviors as well as shed more light on the circumstances, and indeed prospects, for women in their households. Marriage, as reflected in these women’s accounts, is perhaps not yet providing the basis for, or is antithetical to, Giddens’s (1991) “pure relationship.” Instead, the institution and the relationships it sustains continue to be influenced by enduring pre-reflexive forces, which predict very gradual rather than revolutionary change.
The “taken for grantedness” (Beck & Lau, 2005, p. 528) of institutional arrangements, particularly the family, in traditional modernity still advantages males while their female partners practiced a discourse of inequity. The perceived immanence of household tasks limits the scope to make arguments for greater participation by men simply on a rational basis of utility. In the absence of sanctions by women, such as, say, a withdrawal from intimacy or a physical separation from the relationship, one strategy used by a number of the participants was to outsource this work to a third party, an option not available to less well-resourced families. In conclusion, we call on Ulrich Beck (1992) to summarize the dilemma:
The liberation of women from housework and marital support is to be forced by the regression of men into this “modern feudal existence,” which is exactly what women reject for themselves. Historically, that is like an attempt to make the nobility the serfs of the peasants. But men are no more willing than women to follow the call ‘back to the kitchen!’ . . . . the equalization of men and women cannot be created in institutional structures that presuppose their inequality. (p. 109)
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their detailed comments and suggestions. The article is much stronger as a result.
Authors’ Note
This article uses interview data collected as part of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP0453613, which was conducted by Gillian Whitehouse and Chris Diamond (University of Queensland) and Marian Baird (University of Sydney). The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the funding agencies but retain full responsibility for the ideas and interpretations presented in this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was funded by the Australian Research Council in collaboration with five industry partners: Australian Human Rights Commission, New South Wales Office of Industrial Relations, Queensland Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, New South Wales Office for Women, and the Women’s Electoral Lobby.