Pg 102-105 Family Roles and Changing Relationships: Feminist Perspectives on Equality in the Family

Gender Roles and Family Life

• In the past, there were clear guidelines for the roles of men and women in a nuclear family, with the wife/mother working at home and the husband/father being the economic provider.
• Contemporary gender roles are still connected to those of the past, but people have more personal freedom to decide how they want to interpret parental roles.
• Women of all ages, ethnicities, and classes do more domestic labor than men, with women spending more time on routine domestic tasks and men spending more time on jobs like repairs and gardening.
• The division of labor reflects both traditional beliefs about parental roles and the fact that men, on average, spend more time in the paid workforce.
• Women in families with dependent children generally perform many of the 'boring' aspects of childcare, such as feeding and clothing, while men focus on the less 'boring' and more pleasing aspects, like playing with their children.

Feminist Perspectives on Equality and Power in the Family

• Liberal feminism promotes equality of opportunity, where men and women are free to choose their roles and how they are performed in a family context.
• Radical feminism sees patriarchy as the primary source of male domination within the family, and argues that women should exploit the 'values of femininity' such as a sense of community, family, understanding, and sharing.
• Marxist feminism applies Marxist ideas about economic equality to an explanation of gender inequalities in conjugal roles in capitalist societies, seeing women performing a service role in the family, which gives them the status of 'unpaid servants'.

Domestic Labor and Technology

• Technology has changed the way people perform domestic labor, but it has not necessarily reduced the amount of time women spend on domestic tasks.
• Silva's research found that the saving of time was unequal between men and women, with men having little interest in using washing machines and leaving laundry tasks to their wives.
• Technology has reinforced a gendered division of tasks in the home and placed further demands on women.

Conjugal Roles and Debates about Gender Equality

• The significant factors in deciding 'who does what' in the family are time and preference, not gender.
• Changing family and wider social relationships mean that domestic labor is 'negotiated by every couple depending on their individual circumstances'.
• Industrial societies have experienced a 'quiet revolution' in conjugal roles based on a general acceptance of gender equality, with evidence showing men doing a greater share of housework and women doing less, and men spending more time on childcare.

Marxism and Family Life

• Marxist analysis focuses on families as involving complex conflicts and power struggles, with the husband/father usually controlling the most valued resources and having the greatest power.
• The political economy is about how money is received, controlled, and managed, the moral economy refers to the values and norms relating to conjugal roles and responsibilities, and the emotional economy relates to interpersonal relationships and 'affective power'.
• Domestic violence is an extreme form of the exercise of power within families, with women and children being most at risk.