Doing it Fairly: A Study of Postgender Marriages.

Little is known about married couples who share the responsibilities of paid and family work without regard for gender prescriptions. Fifteen married couples who divide household work and child care equitably and without regard to gender are interviewed to determine how they arrived at this arrangement and what consequences such a distribution of household labor has on their relationship. Findings suggest that there are four paths to an equitable division of household labor: a dual-career household, a dual-nurturer relationship, a posttraditional relationship, and external forces. An egalitarian arrangement appears to affect both the power and emotional quality of couples' relationships. The concept of gender itself, with its impliedhierarchy in values, symbols, beliefs and statuses, is cornerstone of the edifice of gender inequality. Komter, 1989, pp. 213-214 Key Words: division of labor, gender, marriage. In this article, we explore how both behaviors and meanings in heterosexual marriages change when the spouses reject gender as a basis for organizing marital roles or responsibilities. We work from a feminist theory that defines gender as a system of stratification based on categorization that is created and recreated daily (Bem, 1993; Ferree, 1990; Ferree & Hess, 1987; Lorber, 1994; Risman & Schwartz, 1989; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Historically, the family is a "gender factory," where the polarization of masculine and feminine is created and displayed (Berk, 1985). Perhaps the best explanation for why women do an inequitable share of household labor is because we have defined such work as part of "being a woman" and "doing gender" appropriately (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Although gender is theorized within feminist scholarship as being forged at all levels of social life (Lorber, 1994), it is perhaps most evident in the family and other intimate relationships where gender is still seen even ideologically as a reasonable and legitimate basis for the distribution of rights, power, privilege, and responsibilities. (See review by Thompson & Walker, 1995; and Komter, 1989.) For example, in families in which there is an inequitable division of family work, wives and husbands often compare their household workloads with those of other wives and husbands, rather than with each other, because gender, rather than partner, is considered the appropriate referent (Thompson, 1991). Much recent research on contemporary families focuses on the division of household labor and child care in American homes. Studies investigating the division of paid work and family work in most families suggest that the revolution of women entering the paid work force in the past decades has not resulted in a consequent shift in the practices of men at home, a fact that Hochschild has termed the "stalled revolution" (Hochschild, 1989). In the majority of American homes, even when wives spend as many hours in the paid labor force as their husbands, they retain primary responsibility for homemaking and childrearing (Berardo, Shehan, & Leslie, 1987; Berk, 1985; Ferree, 1991; Hiller & Philliber, 1986). The power of gender in shaping the household division of labor is apparent in these typical families. Gender theorists, particularly Connell (1987) and Lorber (1994), suggest that, although structural conditions systematically support male privilege, human beings not only follow social dictates, but create them. The paradox of gender, according to Lorber, is that in order for feminists to eradicate gender, we must first recognize and highlight its ubiquitousness in all social institutions. One project for feminist social scientists is to locate and make visible the power of gender in families and occasionally to highlight when that power begins to diminish, to show that gender is a social institution, and, therefore, social change is possible. The research presented here is a study of heterosexual married couples who have moved beyond hegemonic conceptions of gender as they organize their daily family life. …