Anything Goes

The lives of the two sexes are rapidly converging. Or so the mass media keep telling us: ‘The role models are changing before our eyes. Children think nothing of mum doing the house repairs while dad cooks the dinner’ (Glasgow Herald, 28 March 1994). Introductory social science texts have been telling a similar optimistic story for the last two decades. The Family: An Introduction (Eshleman 1985) was typical in assuring its student readers that contemporary American marriage was shifting from the ‘complementary’ type where husbands were employed outside the home and wives did the domestic work, to the ‘parallel’ type where both spouses were employed and both were responsible for childcare and housework. Often such change is explained in terms of the inexorable flow of modernity. In Sociology (Hessetal. 1985: 265) we find:

Enthusiasm about the direction of change can overwhelm the distinction between present and future: the future is right here. According to the then director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies: ‘The family of the future is with us now. It is a family of partnership, of shared responsibility for earning a living, for caring for children and other (elder) dependants and for managing the home with all the housework, shopping and time arrangement that these demand’ (Edgar 1990: 51).