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Summary readings week 2 (Bianchi, Goldscheider, Oppenheimer, Shelton)
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Summary of all the readings of week 2 from the second year sociology course 'Life Courses, Family and Health'.
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Summary readings LFH week 2Oppenheimer, V. (1997). Women’s employment and the gain to
marriage: The specialization and trading model.
This review examines several aspects of the research on the hypothesis that women’s increasing
market work has discouraged marriage formation and encouraged marital instability, hereafter
referred to as the ‘independence hypothesis’.
Evidence from time-series: independence theory and:
- Marital instability trends in marital instability had their inception long before the rapid
rise in married women’s employment started.
- Time series these patterns raise serious doubts about putting too much reliance on a
truncated time series’ apparent support of the independence hypothesis.
- Delayed marriage/non-marriage the independence argument may still be potentially
useful in explaining the apparently sharp rise in nonmarriage among African Americans.
However, unless the hypothesis can be made more explicitly relevant to the question of
delayed marriage, it can explain little of the observed trends in marriage formation for white
women despite the enormous postwar changes in their labor-market behavior and in their
marriage behavior as well.
Types of multivariate analyses:
- Aggregate-level analyses use census data; the unit of analysis is a geographic area such as
a metropolitan area or a labor market area.
- Micro-level analyses longitudinal data, individual is the unit of analysis.
Evidence from multivariate analyses: independence theory and:
- Aggregate-level analyses seen to support the independence hypothesis, but have serious
drawback (difficult to establish causal relations and aggregate-level is macro level and
independence theory is micro level)
- Micro-level analyses women’s education, employment and earnings were negatively
related to the proportions married in an area, but again: serious drawbacks (incapable of
establishing causal ordering, indicators labor market position have little effect on marriage
formation, unlikely that the independence effect is the driving force behind recent trends in
marriage formation)
Theoretical underpinnings:
- The notion of the efficiency of specialization and exchange as a basis of the marital
relationship largely depends on certain assumptions regarding the stability and benevolence
of the environment. However, real-world conditions indicate that specialization can be a
risky and inflexible strategy for maintaining a family’s economic well-being over time;
achieving this has often been a result of having more than one earner in the household.
- Tendency to equate independence with equality of earnings. However, this approach fails to
appreciate the economic gains to marriage where earnings are approximately equal, and the
low gains that may result from a weak labor-market position, whether or not earnings are
equal. Moreover, the underlying causes of low gains to marriage may be obscured when
earnings ratios become the major focus rather than the conditions producing these ratios.
Conclusion
, - Although the popularity of the women’s economic independence explanation of marriage
behavior remains strong in the 1990s, this review of the literature found little real empirical
support for the hypothesis.
- The only support for the hypothesis from multivariate analyses is found in aggregate-level
studies. However, aggregate-level analyses have serious drawbacks for investigating this
micro-level hypothesis, not the least of which is establishing a convincing causal ordering.
- While it is widely recognized that the marriage behavior of the early postwar period is
statistically atypical of American historical patterns, it has nevertheless achieved a moral
stature that seems to justify its use as the model against which more recent family behavior
is evaluated, often in a pejorative light.
Shelton, b., & John, D. (2012). The division of household labor.
In this paper, we review the central issues and questions that arise in research on the division of
household labor. In brief, these issues pertain to how housework can and should be measured, what
factors, either historical or contemporary, can help us understand the current division of household
labor and variation in it, and finally, the consequences of the unequal division of household labor.
Explanations/measurements for the division of household labor:
- Socialist feminism patriarchy is causally related to the division of labor, with men
benefiting, directly and indirectly, from the control of women’s labor.
- Marxist feminism capitalism is directly related to the division of household labor and to
women’s position in the family more generally
- Relative resource explanation division of housework is reflecting the resources men and
women bring to relationships. The individual with the most resources (education, earnings,
occupational prestige) uses those resources to negotiate his/her way out of housework.
- Ideology explanation women and men with more egalitarian attitudes will have a more
equal division of household labor than those with more traditional attitudes.
- Time availability explanation men and women participate in housework and childcare to
the extent that there are demands on them to do so and they have available time. Time
constraints are employment, hours worked, presence or number of children (larger effect on
women’s housework time than on men’s) in the household, work schedule.
Factors affecting the division of household labor:
- Marital status married women spend more time on housework than do cohabiting
women. Cohabiting men spend more time on housework than do married men. Married
couples have a more traditional division of household labor than do cohabiting couples as
well as a more segregated distribution of tasks.
- Race and ethnicity there are racial or ethnic differences in the division of household labor,
but the results of these studies are mixed outcomes.
- Contributions of others children’s household labor varies by family type, parents’ sex-role
ideology, mothers’ employment status, and age and sex of the child. Children’s household
labor is sex-typed in the same way that adult tasks are patterned
- New household technologies increased women’s workload in some areas but reduced the
time required to complete other tasks.
- Industrialization has been linked to the separation of paid and unpaid work and the
development of the role of housewife as well as to women’s dependence on and through
their reliance on their husbands’ wages.
- Gender is created and recreated in interaction with others and therefore gender is
determining in household labor time in the sense that women remain responsible for the
household
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