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Why has the conflict between working
outside the home and who does the work inside the home increased in intensity?
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| Today’s
society has an economy based on money and the
market. |
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| 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). |
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| 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). |
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| That
means there are two kinds of work related to maintaining a household, outside
paid work, and inside unpaid work. |
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| This
is more applicable to urban living, and less applicable to rural living. |
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| 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. |
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| This
ideal is still supported by social and religious conservatives, even though
it is not universal. Neither, we discover, was it ever universal. |
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| It
is a product of the industrial revolution. |
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| 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. |
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| In
a family, that relationship is turned upside down. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| This
is the basis of conflict within the household. |
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| 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. |
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| Change
does not happen instantaneously, so some families of several generations
may have all three patterns working at the same time. |
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| 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. |
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| This
was not permanent, however, and during the twenties and thirties women
reverted to the home to a large extent. |
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| The
depression of the thirties, with high unemployment, saw many women fired
so as to allow men to work. |
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| World
War II (1939-46) saw a similar situation as in the previous war, with many
women getting paid work outside the home. |
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| It
also saw more women entering the military itself. |
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| 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. |
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| The
feminist movement was not the cause of this change, so much as a reflection
of it. |
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| 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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