Gender as Structure or Trump Card?

Abstract

In ‘‘An End to Gender Display Through the Performance of Housework?’’ in this issue, Oriel Sullivan has paid the compliment to Brines (1994); Greenstein (2000); Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, and Matheson (2003); Gupta (2007, 2008); and others to engage thoughtfully and critically with their work. In a nutshell, Sullivan’s thesis is that gender simply doesn’t matter as much as we have come to believe. Married and single women with high incomes are more autonomous and do less household work. Money matters. Men who are dependent on their wives’ income and have more time at home, or different time, do more household labor, even if some of them don’t want to admit it. The takehome message here is to scale back a gender lens on marriage and notice that other variables, such as time and money, actually predict husbands’ and wives’ household behavior. Is this a convincing argument, on the basis of a reanalysis of the empirical research? Partly. The evidence needs to be considered separately for women and men, and with close attention to historical context and class dynamics. Although Sullivan carefully and consciously integrates findings from quantitative and qualitative research, she does not pay enough systematic attention to change across historical era. The Atkinson and Boles (1984) research more than three decades ago presented convincing evidence that wives who were economically senior partners in their marriages indeed bent over backward, including picking up dust balls, to protect their husband’s pride. There is no reason to deny that, in the past, gender-structured