Conjugal Roles

When spouses share domestic work and leisure activities this is called joint conjugal roles; when they do not, this is called segregated conjugal roles. According to the stage theory of Young and Willmott, families at stage 2 experience segregated roles, whereas families at stage 3 experience more joint roles.

Elizabeth Bott made a study of conjugal roles published in her work Family and Social Network. She claimed to show a relationship between conjugal roles and social class, with the most extreme segregation occurring in working-class families.

Bott also described different kinds of social networks. When all members of a social network know each other the network is called close-knit. In this case it has a high degree of connectedness. A loose-knit network is one were people only know each other through one individual. Bott found an association between close-knit networks and segregated conjugal roles. “The more connected the network, the greater the degree of segregation between the roles of husband and wife.” This is because the more connected the networks to which the husband and wife belong, the less dependent each will be on the other for companionship and emotional support.

Bott's arguments are based on a study of only 20 families and her measurement of connectedness lacks rigor. Consequently, her findings have been challenged. Rosser and Harris argue that the domesticity of the woman is the crucial factor in determining how segregated the conjugal roles are. Since women have more opportunities for employment they are becoming less domesticated. They have less time to build and maintain networks of female friends and relatives. Social networks are becoming more loose-knit and conjugal roles are becoming more joint.

To support their theory of the increasingly symmetrical family, Young and Willmott found that 72% of husbands did housework other than washing up during a week. However, this finding is open to the criticism posed by Ann Oakley that any man who did only one thing other than washing up in a week would be included in the 72%.

Ann Oakley presents a different picture of conjugal roles in her study of 40 married women between 20 or 30 with one or more children less than 5 years old. She found that middle class men share more in domestic tasks than working class men, and only 15% of men had a high level of participation in housework, and 25% of men in childcare. The British Social Attitudes Survey of 1992, based on a sample of 1000 married couples, showed that child-rearing was more often shared than household tasks, and a slight movement towards a more symmetrical sharing of tasks over time.

The lack of equal sharing of domestic tasks was highlighted by the survey conducted by the Lancaster Regionalism Group based on a sample of 323 predominantly middle class families. Women cooked the last meal in 79% of these households, last washed the clothes in 87%, last tied up in 72% and last bathed the children in 71%.

According to a study by Oakley, women spend on average 77 hours a week on domestic tasks, even if they also have part-time jobs. Oakley argues that women are increasingly facing a dual burden — maintaining their prime responsibility for the household whilst also taking paid employment. Additionally, Graham Allan argues that women's domestic work is more tedious and less satisfying than the work that men do.

Conjugal roles and power

Edgell's study of Middle-Class Couples found that decision making in families is not equally divided. Wives make decisions in matters such as interior decoration, domestic spending and children's clothes, which are relatively unimportant areas. Men make decisions in areas of housing, finance and car purchases, which are important areas. Husbands have the final say on what happens to large sums of money.

Power is also expressed through agenda setting — who decides what shall be discussed. Edgell's study indicated that women did not have the power to set the agenda in areas where men made the decisions. Women also do not have ideological power either — that is the power to persuade their men-folk to do something against their interests. However, Edgell's study indicated that women accepted this uneven distribution of power, wanted gender roles to be maintained, and accepted that the husband should be the dominant partner.

The domestic labour debate

There is a debate as to whether we live in a patriarchal capitalist society, which is a society dominated by men and the bourgeoisie.

According to Susan Himmelweit there are differences between wage labour and domestic labour.

1		Wage labour is paid and for specific periods of time. Domestic labour is not paid.
2		Domestic labourers cannot negotiate pay and conditions and have no contract.
3		Since domestic labour is not included in figures for GNP domestic labour does not appear to have an economic role.

Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James argue that women in domestic roles are just as productive as men. The housewife produces labour power. — that is people who can sell their labour to employers. This makes the family a 'social factory', creating (through procreation) and maintaining (through domestic labour) labour power that is vital to capitalism. According to Costa and James “women are the slaves of the wage slaves”. Wally Secombe agrees arguing that domestic labour is an example of what Marx called unproductive labour — that is domestic labour produces labour power, and hence indirectly produces surplus value for capitalists who hire that labour power. In addition, he comments that since women are physically isolated at home and exploited indirectly they have less power to change society than men.

This analysis, however, is based on the assumption that capitalism and patriarchy are linked. Some feminists unhook the two concepts and regard patriarchy as a structure that is separate from capitalism. According to Christine Delphy the exploitation involved in domestic labour is not primarily exploitation by capital over labour, but exploitation of men over women. She is a radical feminist that wants women to organize so as to overthrown men.

In contrast Humphries argues that domestic labour benefits all the family. He comments on the principle of a family wage. This means that men have to be paid enough to support an entire family. When men are paid a family wage this liberates women who can work to improve the living standards of the family as a whole.