Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr.
- Nickie Charles
- Date:
- [1988]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Women, food, and families / Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![Woman's work 43 This couple were both working full-time as teachers and yet the sexual division of labour as far as food preparation and cooking was concerned was clearly unaffected by the woman's full-time employment outside the home. In fact, our findings suggest that women's employment does not have any effect on whether their partners cook or not, at least at this stage in the life cycle. Those who worked part time were just as likely to be responsible for all meal preparation as those who were full-time housewives. Even the few women who worked full-time did not receive any more help from their partners. They did, however, tend to have nannies who cooked for the children during the day or relied on their parents to look after their pre-school age children. The nature of men's employment, on the other hand, seems to have some bearing on the extent of their involvement with cooking. The two men who shared cooking equally with their partners were both unemployed and in the other families with unemployed men it seemed that women were less likely to be solely responsible for the preparation of main meals than in other families. This finding needs to be treated with caution, however, as our sample of unemployed families was extremely small. Social class seems to have more of an impact on men's participation in cooking than either the woman's or the man's employment: indeed, the gender division of labour seems to be mediated in interesting and significant ways which we explore in Chapter 8. Here it is worth quoting an exchange on this topic between one of the women and the interviewer: I think men should be able to do some basic things like peel potatoes, fry an egg, fry bacon, but most men are absolutely useless aren't they? Really no idea, it's terrible. [I think some try, don't they?] Not in my walk of life. [My husband is not too bad.] Is he good? I wish mine would - you'll have to give my husband some lessons then. I think actually though if you're ... 'cos you're quite middle class aren't you? I think middle class men are more - they don't think it's sissy do they, whereas working class men think it's real sissy even to be seen washing up. Say if on a Sunday if one of my brothers comes round for dinner well John won't wash up and if my sisters are there he won't but if there's only us he'll wash up whereas if there's anyone else there he won't. It's funny really. I think as I say - maybe middle class mothers are more ... I don't know but definitely I would say they're more adaptable I think, they're a lot less set in their ideas, you know, I think working class... especially men are really stick in the mud, you know. [They tend to be](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18028706_0056.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
