Power, gender, and relative income: negotiating domestic labour in female breadwinning households in the United Kingdom

Thesis

In the United Kingdom, the decline of the ‘male breadwinner model’ resulting from structural changes in the economy and gender relations over the past decades has led to an increase of female breadwinning households – understood in this thesis as households where women earn more than their male partners. I present chapters examining the processes and power relations underlying the negotiation and division of domestic labour implemented in some of these households. The thesis highlights the interactions between the structural and individual levels by paying attention to the meso-level of the household and to the emotional and relational processes underlying the division of domestic labour.

I present a qualitative account of these phenomena based on several types of data collected by interviewing 26 female breadwinning couples and seven individual female breadwinners. I first used a combination of two methodological tools, the Household Portrait and a time schedule inspired from time-use studies, to assess both the quantitative and qualitative division of labour in the participants’ households. I then used joint and individual face-to-face in-depth interviews to grasp both the participants’ subjectivities, and the interactions between women and men in these couples.

Despite women’s relative economic power and couples’ professions of ‘gender equality’, these couples reproduced some aspects of traditional gender roles in relation to domestic labour. I argue that a ‘marital contract’ tacitly defined women’s roles as household managers and carers of the emotional sphere, leading to an unequal division of mental load and emotion work. A fundamental content of the participants’ female breadwinning marital contract was the devaluation of women’s labour. Overall, there were asymmetries of positions and power between women and men that characterised their negotiation of domestic labour. Within this context, change was restricted to specific conditions in which women’s agency was framed by their partners’ inertia.

Authors: Masson, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-r8nz88anm
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: marital contract; housework; female breadwinner; female breadwinning; domestic labour; emotion work; mental load
• Subjects: Sociology