Housework

With the late twentieth century proliferation of diverse family forms, the potential has increased for different divisions of housework. Unmarried cohabiting couples, for instance, have more egalitarian gender attitudes and show more flexibility than married couples in how they divide family labor (Seltzer 2000). Cohabiting women do less housework than married women, and cohabiting men do more than their married counterparts, although cohabiting women continue to do more housework than their male partners. Similarly, attitudes in lesbian and gay couples may be more egalitarian than in most heterosexual couples, but equal sharing is still difficult to attain, and partners with more financial resources in homosexual unions, as in heterosexual ones, tend to perform less routine housework (Carrington 1999). Finally, remarried couples also share more egalitarian attitudes, decisions, and sometimes, chores than do couples in their first marriage, but housework generally continues to be governed by traditional gender roles and remains, essentially, the wife's duty (Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000).