ABSTRACT
Despite their increased participation in paid work, women’s traditional roles as wives and mothers remain fundamentally significant, both socially and to women themselves. As shown in the previous chapter, evidence on the distribution of household work reveals the extent to which housework and caring work (including caring for children) remains ‘women’s work’. Thus far, household work has been examined as ‘work’, for example its distribution between members of a household, the allocation of particular tasks, and the time spent performing tasks. However, being a wife and a mother clearly amounts to much more than the performance of routine housework and caring tasks: it also involves relationships with other people (partners or husbands and children), based on emotional attachments. It is not enough, therefore, to examine household relationships merely in terms of the work that living together generates. Household relationships must also be examined as personal, intimate bonds with love, happiness and sexuality as central features. In this chapter, therefore, the focus shifts away from women and work, to evidence and debates about the personal relationships that women enter, via sexual relationships, cohabitation, marriage and having children.
