ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the literature on the domestic division of labour or so from both the UK and North America. It argues that a coherent theoretical framework has been conspicuous in its absence from writings on the subject in the UK, although much of the sociology of the family, and later the household, has studied the subject. The chapter describes the history and impact of these theoretical difficulties before going on to present a limited theory of the household which attempts to transcend these problems and in the process construct a set of hypotheses which the rest of the book will go on to test empirically. It shows that British authors writing on the sociology of the family. The chapter also describes a theoretical approach to the study of the domestic division of labour that should allow to provide better explanations for the patterns in the data that will become evident.
