Weak Men and Disorderly Women: Divorce and the Division of Labor

Abstract

There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things – their} occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women. … The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on. (De Tocqueville, 1835, ch. Ⅻ) De Tocqueville's observations about the political economy of gender relations at the beginning of the nineteenth century reflected the prevailing patterns of employment; husbands were gainfully employed for pay, and wives cared for home and family (see also Brinig and Carbone, 1988). In the new millennium, this pattern no longer describes most American couples. Some writers have surmised that the divorce rate has increased because the modern marriage deal is unfair to women (Parkman, 1998), who must do “two shifts” – their labor force hours plus the hours of housework that remain (Hochschild and Machung, 1989).