“I wonder what he’s saying”: Investigating domestic discourse in young cohabitating heterosexual couples

Abstract

The gendered division of domestic labor has proven of significant interest to scholars and social policy analysts seeking to understand how changing employment patterns are interacting with domestic work and constructing domestic life in contemporary Western societies. This article reports on the use of narrative methods to examine domestic labor in heterosexual couples. The study entitled Whose Turn to Cook? Domesticity and Gen X revealed the disjunctions between what women and men say and what their descriptions reveal that they do. It demonstrated that young women in heterosexual cohabitating couples do more but they also worry more about how their domestic lives appear and what it suggests about them and their male partners. The usefulness and importance of the narrative method of this study is evident as the data gathered here reveals complexity that would not have been apparent in survey or short answer data, even if couple responses had been compared. While both partners often talked of shared domestic burdens, it was plain that women bore the burden of domestic work and also the burden of the myths of shared involvement that are current in contemporary Western accounts of domestic labor.