The Symmetrical Family

There has been a wealth of study in this area by feminist scholars, as you might expect.

Ann Oakley (1974)

Ann Oakley claimed that Willmott and Young’s data was mistaken; therefore, the whole idea of a symmetrical family was flawed. She did her own qualitative research on how housework is shared between partners and found that women still did the majority of the housework. When men claimed that they did domestic duties, it often meant ironing their own clothes. It did not extend to other household duties.

Oakley found that working-class men participated less in domestic work than middle-class men. Morris (1990) found that working-class men refused to participate in the housework even when they were unemployed and their female partners worked full-time outside the home. She argued it was seen as non-masculine to do chores around the house.

Oakley’s argument was that instead of a symmetrical division of labour, women suffered from a ‘dual burden’ of paid jobs and domestic labour, including childcare.

Duncombe and Marsden (1995)

Duncombe and Marsden claimed that instead of symmetrical households, women had to deal with a ‘triple shift’; besides their paid work and domestic work, they had to do the emotional work for the whole family, especially for the children.

Caroline Gatrell (2008)

Gatrell's recent research done in Britain shows that 40 years after Ann Oakley’s findings, women are still doing the majority of domestic duties while working more and more in paid jobs outside the house.

Stephen Edgell (1980)

Edgell proposed another way to assess the symmetry between partners. He looked at how decisions were made in middle-class families, and at the importance of husbands' and wives' say in family matters.

Edgell found that women had more power in making decisions about household and childcare matters, such as groceries, clothing for the children, and home decoration, while men made the decisions about moving, holiday destinations and bigger purchases, like a car. Edgell argued that men had more say in the more important decisions because they earned more money.

On the other hand, feminists at the time argued that patriarchal society taught children from a young age that men were the decision-makers while women naturally assumed a more passive, obedient role.

Pahl and Vogler (1993)

Pahl and Vogler established two types of money systems in the household.

The allowance system meant that men worked in paid jobs and gave a budget to their wives (who usually did not work outside the home) for household costs and for the children’s needs. In this system, men naturally held more power, as women could only access money through their husbands.

The term pooling was used to refer to a dual-worker family’s joint responsibility for household costs. This often included a joint bank account. It seemed like a more symmetrical setup, but Pahl found in 1994 that even if both partners worked, men earned more. So, they had more power in the decision-making, especially when it came to bigger costs, like a house or a car.

Jonathan Gershuny (1994)

Gershuny agreed with Edgell and Pahl and Vogler that economic factors weigh more in the division of labour than personal or societal values. He argued that until women get paid equal to men and until the glass ceiling above the promotions of women disappears completely, men will naturally have more say in the household of the nuclear family.

He claimed that as women started to earn more, there was a visible rise in the amount of domestic work that men did in the house.

Willmott and Young were criticised for only focusing on the traditional nuclear family in their research, ignoring the growing diversity in contemporary family forms.

Fig. 2 - Some sociologists argued that homosexual couples are more symmetrical than heterosexual couples.

Gillian Dunne (1999)

Dunne claimed that the patriarchal system’s gender role socialisation makes it impossible for heterosexual couples to have a symmetrical division of labour. She conducted research on lesbian relationships and found that because lesbian couples do not have to act according to traditional gender stereotypes, the partnerships are more equal both in and outside the home.

She pointed out, however, that the better-earning partner worked more outside the household and took less part in domestic duties.

Jeffrey Weeks (1999)

Jeffrey Weeks, in the same year as Dunne, argued that same-sex relationships make more symmetrical families than heterosexual ones.