Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

Part One: Family Labor and the Construction of Gender

1 Part One Family Labor and the Construction of Gender To think about the relationship of work and family is to think about gender. Until recently, studying work within families seemed to mean studying women (just as studying paid employment seemed to mean studying men). The massive increase in women’s employment has changed all that. By the end of the twentieth century, 65% of all women, 70% of married women, and 72% of unmarried mothers with children under 18 were employed at some point during the year. Less than 20% of married couples were “traditional” in the sense that only the husband was employed. As women, especially married women with children, participate in the labor force in numbers almost equal to men, there has been a parallel pressure for men to increase their share of work within the family. Not only liberal feminists but also menonly social movements directed toward family, like the Promise Keepers, the Million Man March on Washington, the Mythopoetic movement, and various fathers’ rights groups, have urged men to accept new responsibilities. So far, however, most evidence suggests that changes in the rhetoric of masculinity have outstripped changes in its practice. Have increases in women’s paid work outside the home led to changes in the division of labor inside the home? So far, the answer is that they have, but only a very little. Although employed women do less than they used to, women, regardless of their employment, continue to do most of the work in the home. Attitudes toward this division of labor are clearly more egalitarian now than they were in previous decades. Nonetheless, neither men’s fathering nor men’s housework has kept pace with attitudinal changes. There is little agreement about how to explain such intransigence in the allocation of family work. A few, mostly much cited near classics, explain the division of labor by the continuing force of early socialization. Others explain it by men’s and women’s divergent positions in adulthood.1 Most important, paid work reinforces gendered expectations about who should do what kind of work. In the context of labor markets that remain segregated by gender, different kinds of jobs allow men and women more or less time, energy, and flexibility for domestic work. Moreover, while nearly as many women as men are now holding jobs, women continue to earn less than men. As a result, women and men may enter into an implicit contract wherein a woman exchanges household labor for economic support from a man, who, if no longer the only breadwinner, remains the primary breadwinner. Yet another set of explanations for the tenacity of the division of labor within the family can be grouped around the concept of gender construction. Men and women are not equally involved in family work because their different efforts—men on the job, women in the home—affirm and reproduce gendered selves. These different efforts help create and reinforce a sense of masculinity or femininity. Thus, by per- 2 Families at Work forming different work, men and women actively “do gender”(West and Fenstermaker, 1993). Of course, neither socialization nor gender contracts nor gender construction operates independently. The gender construction approach, for example, posits active agents making choices but acknowledges the limitations imposed on those choices by social structure and imbalances of power (Ferree, 1991; Coltrane, 2001). All the articles in this section analyze the ways in which ongoing job demands and the reproduction of gender operate simultaneously. Part of a rapidly growing literature on fatherhood (Marsiglio et al., 2001), the first two papers in this section focus primarily on men. Both contribute to our understanding of the processes underlying the allocation of domestic labor in which mothers do more family work. Both ask not only how much fathers do but why they do not do more. Both emphasize the ongoing construction, and reconstruction, of masculinity as a means to resist demands for labor at home. In “Being the ‘Go-To Guy,’” Marianne Cooper analyzes an emergent Silicon Valley high-tech masculinity, hegemonic at least within the glamour industries of northern California. As one respondent told her, “Guys constantly try to out-macho each other, but in engineering it’s really perverted because out-machoing someone means being more of a nerd than the other person.” It is a masculinity bolstered not only by job demands on time and energy but also by a nascent workplace ideology of gender. Nerd-macho depends in part on a willingness...