Introduction

Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrated how class membership based upon couples’ division of housework was connected to individual-and couple-level characteristics. Chapter 5 documented the general characteristics of the five classes. Housework performance, as measured by class membership, reflected how power was negotiated within the household. We saw differences across the five classes in spouses’ relationships to the labor market, their gender attitudes, and demographic characteristics like race/ethnicity and religious affiliation. Chapter 6 provided an empirical assessment of our key claim that housework performance can be seen as a proxy for household power dynamics. We found that there is some support for this claim as men in the Ultra-Traditional couples and women in the Egalitarian High Workload couples seem to be exercising overt power. Additionally, both women and men seem to exert latent power in structuring their spouses’ labor-market hours, and both women and men acquiesce to the exercise of this power. These insights regarding the associations between housework class and the possible utilization of power can be seen as evidence of the key claim of this book. Additional evidence to support this claim may be observed when examining couple class membership over time.

Housework performance as reported in survey data is a snapshot in time. Our arguments about power dynamics among U.S. couples are based on analysis of survey data collected from couples at one point in time. The question that follows next in this logic asks about the extent to which class membership is stable over time. As individuals age, they may (or may not) gain tenure in employment, seek more education, secure better jobs, have more children, and simply have more life experiences. These and similar events have the potential to either reinforce current power dynamics in the household and housework distribution or lead to a renegotiation. If our argument is sound—that housework performance is a proxy for power dynamics in a couple—then we should be able to discern changes in family dynamics over time as a result of power, in this case, as correlated with the typology of housework performance. To examine whether class membership changed over time, we performed latent trajectory analysis (for details, see the Appendix).