ABSTRACT
This discussion of housewifery explores women's roles within the family by focusing on the home which provides a site where gender identities are forged and reaffirmed through the division and allocation of labour, time, space and material resources. Gendered divisions of labour and women's association with tasks such as cooking and laundry date back many centuries. By contrast, the identification of married women with full-time housewifery is a much more recent phenomenon. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the male breadwinner earning a family wage and increasingly elaborate domestic rituals, first within the middle class and later the working class.
