ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a series of research projects on the organization of the family and woman’s location within it, conducted between 1977 and 1978 in the city and province of Trent. Family labour provides the response both to family needs and to social organization, primarily the labour market. The labour of husband-father, on the other hand, though carried out for the family, maintains a space of independent meanings, and furnishes an identity, though partial and alienated, which is not reducible to the family identity. Men and women, husbands and wives, thus live two different lives not only because of the different relationships they have to the world outside the family, but because of the different relationships they have within the family. Material problems combine with the psychological–cultural ones in bringing about a rigidity to the familial scene. The process of construction of ‘two families’ is deep-rooted and derives only in part from the rigidity of working hours and social organization.
