Domestic Divisions of Labour in the Twentieth Century: ‘Change Slow A-Coming’

Abstract

Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works, He Works. How Two-Income Families Are Happy, Healthy and Thriving, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, paper £9.95, xii+260 pp.

Francine Deutsch, Halving It All. How Equally Shared Parenting Works, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, paper £15.50, 327 pp.

Richard Layte, Divided Time. Gender, Paid Employment and Domestic Labour, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, xiv+190 pp.

These three books each focus on the way heterosexual couples manage the household and caring work of family life along with paid work, and each were published in the last years of the twentieth century. The other millennium bug (the infectious tendency to reflect back over the century) inevitably means that here I locate their findings within the body of British evidence on the distribution of household and caring work between women and men during the twentieth century.