ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some data on the division of household work, with a specific focus on the conditions under which wives, husbands, and children interact with the household as “workplace.” It focuses on a general comparison of the contributions of wives, husbands, and children to household labor. The household environment and division of household labor described will be that of predominantly white, upper-income families. The chapter summarizes the specific goal of charting some determinants of the “work” lives of household members in this environment, the results of a nonrecursive multivariate regression analysis. Interest in the impact of physical environments on the lives of women might well begin with scrutiny of the household. The process of explaining variation in the contributions of family members to household labor was simplified by the fact that none of the variables tapping “preference” or “feelings” about certain tasks proved important to predicting variation in the division of labor proportions for the six areas in question.
