| dc.contributor.author | Blain, Jenny Marion M. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:34:53Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1991 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1991 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINN64527 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55209 | |
| dc.description | In a study of 16 dual-earner two-parent families, parents of young children were asked to describe and give reasons for their daily domestic labour practices and childcare arrangements. Their descriptions confirm findings from previous studies, that with few exceptions women in the labour force continue to perform the bulk of domestic labour, and carry responsibility for the organization of housework and childcare. | en_US |
| dc.description | Analysis of data uncovers the structuring of their family lives by the differing resources available to families, and to men and women within the same family. These resources include not only money, time and household space, but patience and knowledge of various childcare and domestic skills. Reasons parents give for their allocation for domestic labour function as justifications and legitimations of practices based on traditional gender assumptions. These reasons work to confirm mothers as carrying major responsibility for housework and for tasks relating to basic childcare and the preparation of children for school. Parents' talk may construct this work as "naturally" easier for women, or as less valuable to the family than work claimed as performed by their husbands. | en_US |
| dc.description | Further analysis of this talk reveals four underlying discourses, often contradictory, common to parents' descriptions and reasons. (1) Tasks are freely chosen according to each partner's preference. (2) Domestic labour is easier for women, who are trained to do it. (3) Women and men are socialized into traditional roles. (4) Mothers and children bond together, so are naturally close. The third and fourth of these are traced, through the popular literature parents read, to scientific literature, and link parents' discursive practices with the ideology of a professional establishment. | en_US |
| dc.description | These underlying discourses structure parents' perceptions of resources, and the meaning they give their practices, and hence the choices available to them. Parents' practices in turn reconstitute gendered and classed power relations. Their discursive practices act to mask the operation of power. However in the inherent contradictions and multiple meanings of parents' practices, there may lie possibilities for change both in these practices and in power relations within the family. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1991. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Sociology, Individual and Family Studies. | en_US |
| dc.title | Gender, class and family: The social structuring of mothers' and fathers' everyday lives. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
