A Limit to Reflexivity

Abstract

Unpaid household labor is still predominantly performed by women, despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation over the past 50 years. For this article, interviews with 76 highly skilled women who had returned to the workforce following the birth of children were analyzed to capture reflexive understandings of the balance of paid and unpaid work in households. Alongside a need to work for selfhood was a reflexive awareness of inequity in sharing household labor and dissatisfaction with the ways in which male partners contributed around the home. However, in parallel with this discourse of inequity was one of control, manifest in perceptions of male partners’ inability to competently complete household tasks. Although the discursive aspects of women’s understandings of inequality in the home can be understood as manifestations of reflexive modernization, participants’ general incapacity to effect everyday changes is better explained by the more fully socialized feminist reading of Bourdieu’s conception of embodied practice.