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- Title
Marital status and the division of household labour.
- Authors
Baxter, Janeen
- Abstract
One of the major changes in Australian family patterns in recent years has been the huge increase in the numbers of couples who cohabit prior to marriage. Most research on the domestic division of labor has concentrated on married couples looking at the factors which promote or hinder egalitarian allocations of household labor between husbands and wives. But recently a number of studies have appeared which examine the allocation of housework across households with differing living arrangements, for example amongst cohabiting and remarried couples. The results of this research tend to suggest that cohabiting and remarried couples have less traditional patterns of domestic labor than married couples. These results have primarily been interpreted in light of the gender perspective that argues that housework is not simply about doing household tasks, but involves the symbolic enactment of gender, a process which is most evident within marriage. Thus cohabiting women are likely to be less dependent on their partners than married women, and hence to have reduced responsibility for domestic labor compared to married women.
- Subjects
AUSTRALIA; UNMARRIED couples; MARITAL status; DIVISION of labor; COUPLES; MARRIED people
- Publication
Family Matters, 2001, Issue 58, p16
- ISSN
1030-2646
- Publication type
Article