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HOME versus WORK CONFLICT
Paid vs unpaid
Training Handout
Why has the conflict between working outside the home and who does the work inside the home increased in intensity?
Today’s society has
an
economy based on money and the market.
That means much of the requirements for maintaining a household means a need for money (to pay for rent or
mortgage, food, power, water, insurance, taxes, recreation and
entertainment).
At the same time, prices of labour being high, most of us can not afford to hire some person to come into
the house to do the housework (laundry, cooking, cleaning,
nurturing children).
That means there are two kinds of
work related to maintaining a household, outside paid work, and inside
unpaid work.
Both are needed.
This is more applicable
to urban living, and less applicable to rural living.
In our recent history, and in our
ideals, we have in the past made a simple division, men (fathers, husbands)
work outside the home for pay and women (wives, mothers) work inside the
home for no pay.
This ideal is still supported by
social and religious conservatives, even though it is not universal. Neither,
we discover, was it ever universal.
It is a product of the industrial revolution.
The
conflict
approach in sociology, deriving from the view of Marx
that inequality is based on relations to production, is based on the idea
that competition for scarce resources lies at the root of
conflict.
In a family, that relationship is turned upside down.
The conflict is based on the need
for both outside and inside work, and the competition for not doing the
needed work in the house.
Many men have been socialised into
a situation where men were expected to work for pay outside the house and
that women should stay home and do the housework for free. In contrast,
many women have been asking why should they stay at home when they have
the needed skills, training and experience to work for pay outside the
house.
What happens, usually, is that women
get to work for pay outside the house, and then are expected to come home
and work for free in the house.
This is the basis of conflict within the household.
Three different situations may apply:
(1) men working outside the house and women working inside, (2) women working
outside and inside the house, and (3) men and women both sharing inside
and outside work.
Change does not happen instantaneously,
so some families of several generations may have all three patterns working
at the same time.
Women working for pay outside the
home had a big boost 1914-1919 (World War I) where many men were called
to go into the military for the war, and women were hired to do
paid work.
This was not permanent, however,
and during the twenties and thirties women reverted to the home to a large
extent.
The depression of the thirties, with
high unemployment, saw many women fired so as to allow men to
work.
World War II (1939-46) saw a similar
situation as in the previous war, with many women getting paid work outside
the home.
It also saw more women entering the military itself.
After the second world war, there
was less of a swing back to the earlier situation, and more acceptance
of women working outside the home.
The feminist movement
was not the cause of this change, so much as a reflection of it.
We relate the change inside families,
women increasingly working for pay outside the household, to broad economic
and political changes outside the home, social change, but the ensuing
conflict between men and women inside the household as a result of changes
in family responsibilities.
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