Autonomy, Dependence, or Display? The Relationship Between Married Women’s Earnings and Housework

Abstract

I argue that both the dominant models of the relationship between earnings and housework, economic dependence and gender display, have fundamental defects. They focus on the effect of women’s earnings compared to their husbands’ on their housework and ignore the possibility of an independent relationship between women’s own earnings and their time spent on housework. Using a sample of 914 married women employed full time from the second wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, I show that women’s housework is affected only by their own earnings, not by their husbands’, and not by their earnings compared to their husbands’. Further, I show that findings suggestive of dependence and display in earlier research are more simply explained in terms of women’s absolute rather than relative earnings. These results invalidate the dependence and display models of the relationship between earnings and housework time and suggest that married women have a substantial degree of economic autonomy in the areas of domestic life for which they are normatively responsible.