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The fundamental question in the study of the gendered division of household labor has come to be why, in the face of dramatic changes in women's employment and earnings, housework remains "women's work. " As a possible answer to this question, Brines (1994) presented a provocative conceptual model of the relationship between economic dependence and the performance of housework by wives and husbands. She concluded that the link between economic dependence and housework follows rules of economic exchange for wives, but among husbands, a gender display model is operative. This paper replicates and extends Brines' model by (a) replicating her work using a different data set; (b) adding additional controls to the model, including a measure of gender ideology; and (c) modeling a distributional (as opposed to absolute) measure of housework. For a measure of hours spent doing housework, the results of my analyses are consistent with Brines' suggestion of separate gender-specific processes linking economic dependence and amount of housework performed. For a distributional measure of housework, on the other hand, my analyses contradict Brines' findings and suggest that both husbands and wives are acting to neutralize a nonnormative provider role when they do housework. Further analyses suggest that the phenomenon is more likely one of deviance neutralization than of gender display.
Key Words: division of household labor, economic dependence, housework.
The past 15 years have seen a veritable explosion of research on the gendered division of household labor. This time period has also seen dramatic increases in labor-force participation of married women, with an increasing number of wives becoming primary breadwinners in their households. Despite these changes, however, married women still do the majority of housework. In the face of these shifts from traditional gender-based economic roles, the fundamental question in this area has come to be: Why does housework remain women's work?
The consensus of the empirical literature is that the division of household labor tends to be relatively traditional. Wives perform a far greater proportion of household tasks than do their husbands in households where the wife earns more than her husband (Atkinson & Boles, 1984) and even in households where the husband is not employed (Brayfield, 1992). This combination of market and nonmarket work is likely to force married...