Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-05-23T18:10:00.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Crossing the boundaries of the home: a chronotopical analysis of the legal status of women's domestic work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Ellen Gordon-Bouvier Open the ORCID record for Ellen Gordon-Bouvier [Opens in a new window]
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier*
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in Law, School of Law, Oxford Brookes University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: e.gordon-bouvier@brookes.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Women's domestic work is largely deemed to be a ‘labour of love’ and lacking any value outside the private family. This reflects an ‘ideology of domesticity’, whereby women's natural place is deemed to be in an imagined private sphere. In this paper, I examine the status of housework in the context of asserting property rights in the home upon relationship breakdown. Using Valverde's legal chronotope as a lens, I argue that the ideology of domesticity is not merely present in legal discourse, but also takes on material form through the spatiotemporal ordering of the home. Housework is spatially and temporally concealed behind the powerful veneer of the imagined ideal family home, with corresponding invisibility in the law. For domestic work to be acknowledged, the individual often has to demonstrate that her work transgresses boundaries between private and public. However, as I argue, this transgression is particularly difficult for women, who remain spatiotemporally anchored in the home.

Keywords

legal chronotopesfeminist theoryunpaid workfamily propertytrusts
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 479 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amoore, L (2004) Risk, reward and discipline at work. Economy and Society 33, 174–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, B (2000) Doing the Dirty Work. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakker, I (2007) Social reproduction and the constitution of a gendered political economy. New Political Economy 12, 541–556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beaumont, C (2017) What do women want? Housewives’ associations, activism and changing representations of women in the 1950s. Women's History Review 26, 147–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackstone, W (1765) Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Blomley, N (1998) Landscapes of property. Law & Society Review 32, 567–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blomley, N (2005) Flowers in the bathtub: boundary crossings at the public–private divide. Geoforum 36, 281–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boardman, K (2000) The ideology of domesticity: the regulation of the household economy in Victorian women's magazines. Victorian Periodicals Review 33, 150–164.Google Scholar
Bowlby, S, Gregory, S and McKie, L (1997) ‘Doing home’: patriarchy, caring, and space. Women's Studies International Forum 20, 343–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapman, T and Hockey, J (1999) The ideal home as it is imagined and as it is lived. In Chapman, T and Hockey, J (eds), Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–14.Google Scholar
Cossman, B and Fudge, J (2002) Privatization, Law, and the Challenge to Feminism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crompton, R and Lyonette, C (2008) Who does the housework? The division of labour within the home. British Social Attitudes: The 24th Report 24, 53–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalla Costa, M and James, S (1973) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. London: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
Daly, HE and Cobb, JB (1994) For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Darke, J (1994) Women and the meaning of home. In Gilroy, R and Woods, R (eds), Housing Women. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 11–30.Google Scholar
Davidoff, L and Hall, C (2013) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Day, K (2000) The ethic of care and women's experiences of public space. Journal of Environmental Psychology 20, 103–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupuis, A and Thorns, DC (1998) Home, home ownership and the search for ontological security. Sociological Review 46, 24–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Everingham, C (2002) Engendering time: gender equity and discourses of workplace flexibility. Time & Society 11, 335–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Federici, S (1975) Wages Against Housework. London: Falling Wall Press.Google Scholar
Fehlbaum, A (2016) Cult of domesticity. In Shehan, CL (ed.), Encyclopedia of Family Studies. New York: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 1–4.Google Scholar
Finch, J and Groves, D (1983) A Labour of Love: Women, Work, and Caring. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fineman, MA (2013) Equality, autonomy and the vulnerable subject in law and politics. In Fineman, M and Grear, A (eds), Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 13–28.Google Scholar
Flynn, L and Lawson, A (1995) Gender, sexuality and the doctrine of detrimental reliance. Feminist Legal Studies 3, 105–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Folbre, N (1991) The unproductive housewife: her evolution in nineteenth-century economic thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, 463–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francus, M (2012) Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, E (2011) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gorman-Murray, A (2014) Materiality, masculinity, and the home: men and interior design. In Gorman-Murray, A and Hopkins, P (eds), Masculinities and Place. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 209–226.Google Scholar
Grabham, E and Beynon-Jones, S (2019) Introduction. In Beynon-Jones, S and Grabham, E (eds), Law and Time. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–28.Google Scholar
Gregson, N and Lowe, M (1995) ‘Home’-making: on the spatiality of daily social reproduction in contemporary middle-class Britain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 224–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gregson, N and Lowe, M (2005) Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender and Waged Domestic Work in Contemporary Britain. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, JW (1999) Doctrine, justice and home-sharing. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 19, 421–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Himmelweit, S (1995) The discovery of ‘unpaid work’: the social consequences of the expansion of ‘work’. Feminist Economics 1, 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, AR (2001) Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In Hutton, W and Giddens, A (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 103–146.Google Scholar
Holloway, G (2007) Women and Work in Britain since 1840. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P (2007) Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, with a New Preface. Berkley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keenan, S (2017) Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration. Law and Critique 28, 87–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, J (1689/1978) Of property (from chapter V of Locke's ‘Second Treatise of Government’ (1689)). In Macpherson, CB (ed.), Property, Mainstream and Critical Positions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Madigan, R and Munro, M (1991) Gender, house and ‘home’: social meanings and domestic architecture in Britain. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 8, 116–132.Google Scholar
Madigan, R and Munro, M (1999) The more we are together: domestic space, gender and privacy. In Chapman, T and Hockey, J (eds), Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Lives. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Madigan, R, Munro, M and Smith, SJ (1990) Gender and the meaning of the home. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 14, 625–647.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mawani, R (2014) Law as temporality: colonial politics and Indian settlers. UC Irvine Law Review 4, 65–96.Google Scholar
McKie, L, Gregory, S and Bowlby, S (2002) Shadow times: the temporal and spatial frameworks and experiences of caring and working. Sociology 36, 897–924.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McRobbie, A (2007) Top girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract. Cultural Studies 21, 718–737.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oakley, A (1974) Woman's Work: The Housewife, Past and Present. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Philipps, L (2008) Helping out in the family firm: the legal treatment of unpaid market labor. Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender, & Society 23, 65–111.Google Scholar
Price, J (2002) The apotheosis of home and the maintenance of spaces of violence. Hypatia 17, 39–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riach, K, Rumens, N and Tyler, M (2014) Un/doing chrononormativity: negotiating ageing, gender and sexuality in organizational life. Organization Studies 35, 1677–1698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, J (2004) Selves, Persons, Individuals: Philosophical Perspectives on Women and Legal Obligations. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Roberts, DE (1997) Spiritual and menial housework. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 9, 51–80.Google Scholar
Rousseau, J-J (1979) Emile, or On Education (1762). New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rowthorn, R (2002) Marriage as a signal. In Rowthorn, R and Dnes, A (eds), Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 132–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, P (1984) Beyond housing classes: the sociological significance of private property rights in means of consumption. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 8, 202–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunders, P and Williams, P (1988) The constitution of the home: towards a research agenda. Housing Studies 3, 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silbaugh, K (1996) Turning labor into love: housework and the law. Northwestern University Law Review 91, 1–86.Google Scholar
Sloan, B (2015) Keeping up with the Jones case: establishing constructive trusts in ‘sole legal owner’ scenarios. Legal Studies 35, 226–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staples, D (2007) No Place like Home: Organizing Home-based Labor in the Era of Structural Adjustment. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, F (1982) The Rise of Suburbia. London: Burns & Oates.Google Scholar
Valverde, M (2015) Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waitt, G and Gorman-Murray, A (2011) ‘It's about time you came out’: sexualities, mobility and home. Antipode 43, 1380–1403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
West, C and Zimmerman, DH (1987) Doing gender. Gender & Society 1, 125–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, F (2010) Migration and care: themes, concepts and challenges. Social Policy and Society 9, 385–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, JC (1991) Domesticity as the dangerous supplement of liberalism. Journal of Women's History 2, 69–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wong, S (2007) Would you ‘care’ to share your home? Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 58, 268–286.Google Scholar
Young, IM (2005) House and home: feminist variations on a theme. In Young, IM (ed.), On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar