The domestic division of labour

The domestic division of labour broadly refers to who does what in terms of household chores and childcare. Functionalists such as Talcott Parsons claimed that men and women were ‘naturally’ programmed to take different roles in the family and society. Men were the breadwinners, and those with the greater contact with the outside world, while women were the home-makers and nurturers of children. This differential division of tasks was known as ‘segregated conjugal roles’. In America in the 1950s, when Parsons was writing, most families would have conformed to this pattern. Few married women, especially those with children, had jobs outside the home and spent most of their time on domestic and childcare tasks.

In the UK, the classic 1957 study of inner-city working-class life carried out by Young and Willmott (‘Family and kinship in East London’) also found that gender roles broadly followed the same pattern. This too was an era when most married women were stayat-home housewives and mothers. However, when Young and Willmott published their book The Symmetrical Family in 1973, they saw evidence that the strict division of domestic labour by gender was changing, with conjugal roles becoming more similar, or symmetrical.