Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to help family scholars and practitioners working with couples by highlighting how our work can move both research and family support efforts forward. After summarizing our argument that housework performance provides a window into power dynamics in households and the empirical contributions that this book has made to evaluating that argument, we present potential implications of this work for both researchers and practitioners.

Summary of key findings

We started this volume by asking “Why study housework?” Or, to paraphrase the title of this book, “Why does who cleans count?” In Chapter 1, we argued that by studying housework, we can learn something about relationships. Studying the negotiation and renegotiation of the division of household labor tells us about the exercise of three kinds of power—overt, latent, and hidden—and how inequalities and inequities in intimate relationships emerge and are maintained. We argue that a key contribution of this book is to present the argument for how housework can be seen as a proxy for household power dynamics.

Chapter 2 laid out four theoretical frameworks or perspectives that attempt to explain the division of household labor: two that are resource-based (time availability and bargaining theory) and two social-psychological/symbolic frameworks (gender ideology and economic dependence). A fundamental assumption of all four of these frameworks is that household labor is seen as undesirable by both women and men, and that both will attempt to minimize the amount of housework that they do. Consequently, women and men engage in various methods of exerting overt, latent, and hidden power to avoid doing housework. Importantly, this means that inequalities in the division of household labor reflect this exercise of power.

As the unique data that we used to empirically examine our claim that the division of housework can be seen as a proxy for household power dynamics was collected in the late 1980s–early 1990s in the U.S., we used Chapter 3 to provide some of the cultural and historical context that framed the lives of the couples. As readers of this volume may not have substantial familiarity with that time period, we see this introduction to the politics around families as important to contextualize the analysis of housework that was performed by couples during that time frame.