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Changing the Division of Household Labor: A Negotiated Process Between Partners

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Abstract

This short-term longitudinal study expands on previous theoretical approaches, as we examined how women’s assertiveness and the strategies they use to elicit more household labor from husbands help to explain the division of labor and how it changes. Participants included 81 married women with 3- and 4-year-old children who completed two telephone interviews, approximately 2 months apart. Results based on quantitative and qualitative analyses show that (a) relative resource, structural, and gender ideology variables predicted the division of housework, but not childcare; (b) assertive women were closer to their ideal division of childcare than nonassertive women; (c) women who made a larger proportion of family income were less assertive about household labor than other women, but when they were assertive, they had a more equal division of childcare; (d) women who earned the majority of their household’s income showed the least change; and (e) the nature of women’s attempts to elicit change may be critical to their success.

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Notes

  1. Married and cohabiting couples differ in the way they divide household labor (Clarkberg, Stolzenberg, & Waite, 1995; Shelton & John, 1993), the factors that affect their union stability (Brines & Joyner, 1999), and the way in which gendered power relations operate (Cunningham, 2005). For example, married women spend more time on housework than cohabiting women do (Shelton & John, 1993). None of the participants in this sample identified themselves as cohabitors.

  2. In the factor analysis, first, the principal component analysis method was employed. Next, two factors were chosen to extract based on the component eigenvalues and corresponding scree plot. Finally, the maximum likelihood extraction method was used to extract the factors, and the varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization was used to rotate them. A loading coefficient of at least .4 was used as a cut-off.

  3. The wife’s percentage of total household income and her number of hours at work were highly correlated, r(72) = .80, p < .01.

  4. In a multiple regression this gender ideology item had the only significant relationship (p < .01) to the division of housework in a model, which included the gender ideology item and the wife’s percentage of total household income, adjusted R 2 = .14, F(2,72) = 6.88, p < .01.

  5. The same did not hold true, however, for a woman’s hours at work, r(74) = .12, p > .05.

  6. The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that, even though the housework predictors of wife’s hours at work, wife’s percentage of the total household income, husband’s hours at work, and the gender ideology item, all at Time 2, were not significant individually, some aspect of their joint effects on housework made them significant, R 2 = .14, adjusted R 2 = .09, F(4,66) = 2.71, p < .05.

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Acknowledgement

We thank the Harap Fund for their generous donation for expenses associated with this project.

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Author notes

  1. Clelia Anna Mannino

    Present address: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Education, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College Street, South Hadley, MA, 01075, USA

    Francine M. Deutsch

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  1. Clelia Anna Mannino
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  2. Francine M. Deutsch
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Correspondence to Francine M. Deutsch.

Additional information

This research is based on an undergraduate honors thesis at Mount Holyoke College, conducted by Clelia Anna Mannino under the direction of Francine M. Deutsch. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Eastern Psychological Association 2005 meeting in Boston, and at the 2005 Association of Women in Psychology conference in Tampa.

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Mannino, C.A., Deutsch, F.M. Changing the Division of Household Labor: A Negotiated Process Between Partners. Sex Roles 56, 309–324 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9181-1

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