Page 400 - Essencials of Sociology

Marriage and Family in Theoretical Perspective 373

FIGURE 12.2 In Two-Paycheck Marriages, How Do Wives and Husbands
Divide Their Responsibilities?

70

60.1
60 58.1 7.8
55.5 6.8
54.2 54.4 53.3 54.0 53.9
51.4 9.6 13.9 13.9 2.5 2.6 52.6 4.2
2.6
50 10.2 48.3 49.7 4.4 6.0 10.2 10.2 9.2 9.5
8.4
8.6 18.9 46.4 45.4 42.8
Hours per week 40 31.9 23.6 20.4 18.1 17.4 39.8 39.5 42.1

30

25.7
24.2
20 20.9 22.4
16.1
10
9.3

0
1965 1975 1985 1995 2005 2008 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005 2008
Wives Husbands
Hours per week
Paid work Housework Child care
Source: By the author. Based on Bianchi 2010:Tables 1, 2.

family members spend on food preparation and cleanup. Home hygiene could well
be about the same as in years past.

More Child Care. From this figure, you can see another significant change: Both Read on MySocLab
husbands and wives are spending more time on child care. How can children be getting Document: Women and
more attention from their parents than they used to? This flies in the face of our mythi- Men in the Caregiving Role
cal past, the Leave It to Beaver images that color our perception of the present. We know
that today’s families are not leisurely strolling through life as huge paychecks flow in.
So if parents are spending more time with their children, just where is that time coming
from?
The answer isn’t very exciting, but researchers know what it is. Today’s parents
have squeezed out some of the extra time for their children by cutting down on their
reading and the time they spend on preparing meals. However, the main way that
parents are getting the extra time is by spending about 5 hours a week less visiting
with friends and relatives (Bianchi 2010). We don’t yet know the implications of
this change, but if the individual family is withdrawing more into itself, it could be
increasing the “emotional overload” that was just mentioned.
Total Hours. Figure 12.2 holds another surprise. You can see that both husbands
and wives are now putting in more hours taking care of family responsibilities. How-
ever, each week husbands average 4.6 hours more than their wives. This comes to
240 hours a year, the equivalent of today’s husbands spending 30 8-hour days a year
more than their wives.

A Gendered Division of Labor. Something else is evident from Figure 12.2. Look
at how differently husbands and wives spend their time. Sociologists call this a gendered
division of labor. You can see that husbands still take the primary responsibility for earn-
ing the income and wives the primary responsibility for taking care of the house and