Does Marital Status Make a Difference?

Abstract

In this article, a comparison is made between the time that cohabiting and married women and men spend doing housework, to determine whether there are differences between them and to isolate the sources of those differences. Differences in cohabiting and married women's and men's household labor time are interpreted in light of the way that marital status may affect how gender is accomplished. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, the authors found that marital status affects women's household labor time but not men's; married women spend significantly more time on housework than do cohabiting women. In addition, the gap between cohabiting and married women's housework time cannot be accounted for by sociodemographic differences between them. It was also found that cohabiting women are more like single, noncohabiting women than they are like married women. That is, the research demonstrates the uniqueness of married women. It is not simply the presence of a man that is associated with women's spending more time on housework; it is the presence of a husband.

Whose money, whose time? A nonparametric approach to modeling time spent on housework in the United States

“…Among the exceptions are early studies by Maret and Finlay (1984) and Ross (1987), who found that women's wages had an independent and negative effect on their housework responsibilities, but did not determine the actual associations between earnings and housework. A subsequent study by Shelton and John (1993) found that the effect of women's own earnings on their housework hours was ten times greater than that of their partners' earnings. However, their focus was on housework differences between married and cohabiting women, and they did not pursue the implications of their finding for the bargaining and gender display theories of housework.…”

´Just Living Together´

“…Most studies have focused on the gender division of domestic work (Shelton andJohn 1993, Fuwa andCohen 2007), and the effect of premarital cohabitation on the division of household labour (Gupta 1999, Batalova and Cohen 2002, Fuwa 2004. Furthermore, child care has been frequently analysed within the general notion of "household chores" (which may include, for example, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other routine domestic activities) using samples of married couples (South and Spitze 1994;Gupta 1999;Bianchi, Milkie, and Sayer 2000), even though recent studies have shown that the determinants of parents' participation in child care and housework activities are very different (Deding and Lausten 2004).…”

Distintas o iguales: las diferencias en el trabajo doméstico de las parejas de doble ingreso entre las uniones libres y los matrimonios

“…Este hallazgo se ha sostenido a lo largo de distintos países europeos, aunque con diferencias en el tamaño del efecto de la unión (Domínguez-Folgueras, 2013). Por ejemplo, algunos estudios encontraron que mientras el tiempo dedicado al trabajo doméstico no variaba entre hombres en unión libre y en matrimonio, sí variaba considerablemente entre las mujeres; las que viven en unión libre dedican menos tiempo al trabajo doméstico que las casadas (Shelton y John, 1993;Blumstein y Schwartz, 1983).…”