More on fairness and motivations; class issues

I thought of one more reason why women would see an usual unequal division of labor as fair, and this was actually prompted by the reading I've been doing of Scott Coltrane's Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity. He notes in the chapter "Explaining Family Work" that in some households in which women have higher-paying or more prestigious jobs the women attempt to compesate for what might be an emasculating situation for their husbands by not demanding that the husbands do more work.

This got me to thinking about the post I made a couple of days ago about women having personal motivations for work, rather than working for the good of the entire family. If a woman has what she perceives to be personal motivations for work, that is something she might see as taking her away from her duty that is for the good of the household -- childcare and housework. Those things then are still her responsibility, and working outside of the home is more like an optional leisure activity. She might then be grateful for her husband making a contribution to the housework, even if that contribution is much smaller than hers (and even if she works hours that are just as long as her husbands).

Coltrane also talks about differences between motivations and sharing in working-class and middle-class families. In working-class families, women's work is more likely to be seen as a necessity (i.e. not personally motivated, but done in the interest of the entire family). And women in working-class families, while they still make less than their husbands, do make proportionally more than wives in middle-class families. Both of these things might tend to tip working-class families closer to equal sharing than middle class families, however the research results on this have been mixed.