According to ‘Gender Transformations’ by Sylvia Walby (1997) there has been a reduction in the number of households where men earn the majority of the household income because wives work full time. This has changed from 83 per cent in ’73 to 55 per cent in ’93. There has also been an increase in the number of households where earnings are equal which has in the same time span gone from 14 to 30 per cent. The statistics for the wife earning the most has gone from 3 per cent to 15 for those that are in full-time employment. Many people are arguing that there has been a small decrease in inequality in the home and with the assignment of jobs and overall power in the household over a small amount of time. This is associated with the rise of women’s employment.

Other cases like Lorna McKee and Colin Bell’s where they interviewed 45 families in Kidderminster, where the man was unemployed, was done outside the unemployment benefit office, with an interview 6 months later with 41 of them. It showed ‘unemployment of husbands does little to create new opportunities for women workers, but instead can be restrictive and perpetuate male/female inequalities in the labour market’. These two examined attitudes to roles, the allocation and control of money, social life, domestic and maternal happenings. Their research did show traditional views, but their subjects had young children, which is hard and that might be the reason. They showed that male unemployment makes an enlargement of the domestic role for the wife. They also showed female arguments about nature, skill and expertise and male arguments about job searching. Another case was Lydia Morris who researched the re-negotiation of housework done with redundant steel-working men in Port Talbot, South Wales. Her sample included many families with dependant children. But it showed that only 2 out of 40 wives had become the main money-makers in the household. This shows that there might be problems in the availability of female employment. Most of her samples said that it’s the man’s role to earn but she said that that is a bad judge for behaviour. Morris found three types of domestic work in her research: traditional rigid, traditional flexible and renegotiated. Her conclusion was that ‘We are witnessing a re-negotiation of certain details of everyday life within the household which is distinct from any serious re-negotiation of the underlying principles (1983).

Some topics in this essay:
South Wales, Sylvia Walby, Joseph Pleck, Wheelock It’s, East Middlesborough, Colin Bell’s, Turner Arthur, , Gateshead Turner, Evidence America, budget studies, twentieth century, full-time employment, household income, changing roles, housework childcare, doing housework, changes happened, women full-time employment, traditional view, women full-time, twentieth century women, half twentieth century,