Sociology of Housework

by Ann Oakley

Book Overview

In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed sociologist Ann Oakley undertook one of the first serious sociological studies to examine women's work in the home. She interviewed 40 urban housewives and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394730887
• ISBN13: 9780394730882
• Release Date: July 1975
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

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Book arrived in excellant condition considering its nearly 30 years old. Only trouble I had was trying to get it out of the very secure packaging. Great service, will use seller again.

Do Housewives Like What They Do?

This book reports the results of a study on the attitudes of British working and middle class women in the 1970s towards housework, children, and marriage. Oakley was frustrated at the lack of attention that traditional sociological research had given women to date, so she undertook this project to try to understand and document this understudied population. She interviewed 40 women between the ages of 20-30, all married, with children, living in a London suburb. As classified by their husband's occupations, half were working class and half were middle class. Several of the women also worked outside the house part-time or even full-time, but in her definition, any woman who is the one primarily responsible for doing the domestic chores is a housewife, regardless of her other employment status. The study was designed to get at a variety of questions: What are the attitudes of the women towards housework-do they think it worthwhile? Is there a correlation between social class and domesticity (a personality characteristic of being well-suited to doing housework)? How satisfied are women with the kind of work they do and with their status as housewives? What are the standards that women have for their work, where do these standards come from, and what are the women's daily routines? How much do the husbands help out with the domestic chores? How do the women feel about having children and caring for them? Answers to each of these questions were tabulated from the responses to the surveys. Oakley includes a number of tables summarizing the results and noting whether there were statistically significant differences between groups, such as by class or by number of children. She also includes quite a few quotes from the women themselves, explaining their feelings on the subject. At the back of the book are appendices discussing the method of scoring the responses and the survey questions used. There are also endnotes and an index. One idea that Oakley expands upon is how housewives structure their work through self-specification of standards and routines. By spelling out rules, housework is placed into the category of other types of work. This also serves "as a means of job enlargement, a process of elaborating housework tasks so they take up endlessly increasing amounts of time," which serves to keep the worker fully employed. These rules and standards also give the worker a means to measure whether she is doing a satisfactory job. If she measures up to her standards, then she can give herself a pat on the back and a reward; otherwise, she will feel guilty and perhaps attempt to redouble her efforts. I'm not sure whether the results of this survey can be generalized to American women, or to society some 30 years after the study was completed. Nevertheless, the book does include some interesting observations and points. For instance, it is remarkable to read of the "amenities" that many of these women did not have, such as an insi

subject that has not been looked at enough

The research study undertaken by Oakley shows two conflicting stereotypes of housework exist in popular thinking. They are the housewife as the oppressed worker and the housewife who has endless creative and leisure pursuits. Through the interviews of 40 women Oakley shows that no matter whether they were working class or middle class, housewives had the same feelings about housework.