ABSTRACT
This chapter considers housework as one aspect of the way in which the family is reproduced. It also considers the theoretical aspect of the way in which women relate to material resources through their position in households and families. The chapter looks at the ways in which race and class work together in forming black women’s ideology of emotional and material independence and how this ideology is related to the distribution of material resources in households and families. Women’s relationship to material resources within households and across families is articulated through gender relations and this too will take particular forms amongst black women. Social research into the Afro-Caribbean community has concentrated on youth culture seen as both ‘exotic’ and a problem, or on employment. The overall picture to emerge was that, in these households, the role of men was crucial in defining women’s relationship to housework.
