The dominant characteristic of routine housework is that it is never complete. It is both less satisfying and more tiring than nonroutine household tasks. For women the home represents a sphere of work; for men it is a site of leisure, an escape from the world of paid work. Furthermore, a major problem with the research referred to above is that it does not recognize that the essence of housework is to combine many things, usually concurrently. This has a profound bearing on the interpretation of time spent in child care and the apparent growth of leisure. As I outlined in chapter 3, shopping accompanied by children lends leisure time a diferent quality than consumption as an individual leisure activity. While both male and female parents are devoting more time to child care, mothers typically remain much more emotionally and practically involved with their children than fathers. Moreover, they tend to have the management of—and responsibility for—the main elements of family life. Child care is perhaps the activity least amenable to technological solutions as time spent caring for others has a unique quality, a topic I will return to below.
Is Technology the Solution?
In the absence of a radical redistribution of the domestic workload within families, modern machinery holds out the promise of at least solving the problem of the routine types of housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. But what is the impact of so-called time-saving appliances, such as the microwave and dishwasher?
This question is harder to resolve than it may at first seem. Most researchers rely on the passage of the years as a proxy for ownership of appliances, since a higher proportion of contemporary households now own domestic appliances. In general, however, they do not have direct data about which households actually own or do not own particular domestic appliances. Nor do they provide information about the relationship between the appliances and time spent in the specific task for which they are designed. The Australian Time Use Survey is rare in providing such detailed information. Analyzing this data, I found that household technologies rarely reduce women’s unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produce some increases in domestic labor.16
Chapter five
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