Autonomy, Dependence, or Display? The Relationship Between Married Women’s Earnings and Housework

I argue that both the dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, economic dependence and gender display, have fundamental defects. They focus on the effect of women's earnings compared to their husbands' on their housework and ignore the possibility of an independent relationship between women's own earnings and their time spent on housework. Using a sample of 914 married women employed full time from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, I show that women's housework is affected only by their own earnings, not by their husbands', and not by their earnings compared to their husbands'. Further, I show that findings suggestive of dependence and display in earlier research are more simply explained in terms of women's absolute rather than relative earnings. These results invalidate the dependence and display models of the relationship between earnings and housework time and suggest that married women have a substantial degree of economic autonomy in the areas of domestic life for which they are normatively responsible. Key Words: gender, gender display, housework, relative earnings. Do women's earnings ease their housework burden or add to it? An extensive literature on domestic labor has not yielded a clear answer to this fundamental question (see Coltrane, 2000, and Shelton & John, 1996, for reviews). Although it has been amply documented that the daily work of providing nutrition, clean clothing, and a sanitary environment to members of heterosexual households is done largely by women (e.g., Blanchi, Milkie, Sayer, & Robinson, 2000), the relationship between married women's earnings and their time spent on housework is not well understood. A growing body of research has articulated and tested two important theories about the nature of the association between women's monetary resources and their performance of domestic labor, the economic dependence and gender display hypotheses (e.g., Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Matheson, 2003; Brines, 1994; Evertsson & Nermo, 2004; Greenstein, 2000). It has failed to reach an empirical consensus, however, about the validity of these models. In this article, I argue that the inconclusiveness of earlier research stems from its focus on married women's earnings compared to their husbands', that is, their relative earnings. Both the dominant theoretical models of the relationship between women's earnings and their time spent on housework posit an association between spouses' relative earnings and housework. The first describes the gender gap in housework as a consequence of the economic dependence of women on men, given that wives' earnings are typically lower than their husbands'. This dependence creates an exchange of women's domestic labor in return for access to monetary resources. The second model hypothesizes gender-specific deviations from this inverse linear relationship that facilitate gender display. Women whose earnings exceed their husbands' will spend more time on housework than other women in order to affirm their gender identities in the face of their gender-atypical relative incomes. Despite their differing predictions, both these theories derive their explanatory power from the notion that what affects women's housework is their earnings compared to their husbands'. They ignore the possibility of a relationship between women's own earnings, separately from their husbands', and their time spent on domestic labor. Yet there is considerable evidence for such autonomous effects of women's earnings on household outcomes related to their normative areas of domestic responsibility. Several studies have found that women's earnings have a greater association than their husbands' with household expenditures on substitutes for domestic labor and on child care (Brandon, 1999; Cohen, 1998; Phipps & Burton, 1998; Soberon-Ferrer & Dardis, 1991). This research suggests that women's earnings may have a distinct, or autonomous, association with their housework time, but few studies to date have analyzed this possibility. …