Conjugal Roles

• Responsibilities within the households are clearly divided into “male” and “female” tasks.

• This was especially the norm in the early 20th century. Women are expected to solely manage all household responsibilities and childrearing, while men are expected to work and act as the main breadwinner of the family.

• Men and women spend their leisure time separately. Husbands have different interests and different groups of friends from their wives.

• Families are male-dominated. The men have the responsibility to earn a living, but thus are also usually the authority on how and where to spend the money.

However, it is also critical to note that conjugal roles have always differed for families of different social classes. In segregated conjugal relationships, while women of all classes are expected to be homemakers and childcarers, working-class women also have to take up paid labour outside the home to make ends meet. In contrast, middle-class women have tended to manage their households and oversee their staff, such as maids and nannies.

• The husband and wife spend a lot of their leisure time together, they share many interests and many friends.

• Many sociologists claim that this has become the new norm in families, thanks to the feminist movement and women’s entry into the workforce.

• In contemporary Western society, men and women tend to share both domestic and public responsibilities and tasks, at least in theory. This type of family is called a ‘symmetrical family’ by Willmot and Young.

Nevertheless, sociologists who are critical of the idea of the symmetrical family have found that even in homes where both partners believe that the responsibilities are equally shared, women do more for their families than men. Some theorists have also argued that heterosexual marriage cannot ever be completely equal in a patriarchal society. They contend that homosexual couples share conjugal roles more equally.

Fig. 1 - Joint conjugal roles mean that both partners take part in the domestic tasks.

Functionalists tend to view traditional family structures and segregated conjugal roles in a positive light.

Key functionalist sociologist Talcott Parsons claimed that gender roles are allocated according to the functions of each parent. He believed that men take up the instrumental role of breadwinner and women the expressive role of mother and homemaker because they are biologically suited to these specific roles. Women have the ability to bear children, so they are “naturally” best suited to raising them as well. At the same time, men’s physical abilities set them up best for working and earning wages.

Parsons also argued that seeing the separate conjugal roles of the parents is essential in a child’s primary socialisation or upbringing.

Fig. 2 - Children learn gender roles through watching their parents act in segregated conjugal roles based on their sex.

Marxist sociologists are critical of separate conjugal roles. They argue that the separation of conjugal roles in the home creates a hierarchy within the family, which resembles the hierarchy of capitalist society. The children who grow up in these family types learnt to adapt to the capitalist values and rules which help the ruling class maintain their position in society.

Marxists compare the experience of different social classes with conjugal roles. They conclude that working-class women suffer more from the segregation of conjugal roles than middle-class women, who have more control over their family life.

In general, Marxists advocate for a more equal division of labour, both within and outside the home.

Ann Oakley (1974) researched housework and found that women do the majority of it, even in the second half of the 20th century. She noticed that when men claim that they participate in domestic duties, they often refer to activities such as ironing their own clothes.

According to Oakley, working-class men participate less in domestic work than middle-class men. It seemed that working-class men refused to participate in housework even when they were unemployed and their female partners worked full-time. It was considered “unmasculine” to do chores around the house.

Oakley argued that in the 1970s, instead of joining conjugal roles between partners, women took up a ‘dual burden’ of a paid job and domestic duties.