Did you know that women still do the majority of housework, even in families where both partners believe they divide duties equally?
When a couple shares the domestic duties, paid work and power over family decisions, they are a symmetrical family. The term was created in the 1970s, but many sociologists think it refers to a mythical phenomenon.
Has the symmetrical family ideal put forward by Willmott and Young ever been possible?
- We will consider research on symmetrical families.
- We'll discuss the main characteristics of the symmetrical family.
- We will look at the functionalist view and Willmott and Young's research on families.
- We will discuss the three features of the symmetrical family.
- We will mention the advantages and disadvantages of the symmetrical family.
- Then, we will move on to sociological perspectives on the division of labour and power in families.
Characteristics of the symmetrical family
Let us first define the symmetrical family.
A symmetrical family is one where the roles and responsibilities both outside and inside the home are shared equally.
This means that both partners have paid jobs outside the home, and they participate in domestic labour, childcare, emotional work, and decision-making around the family equally.
The functionalist view of the symmetrical family
Willmott and Young (1973) have done extensive research based on large-scale social surveys on family life in Britain. They based their theories on functionalism, especially on Talcott Parsons' ideas, and concluded that the family has been developing through stages in history.
They termed these stages the ‘march of progress’. Willmott and Young (1973) distinguished four different stages of family progression, with their different characteristics influenced by societal and environmental factors.
Symmetrical family examples
Let us look at symmetrical family examples.
Stage 1: Pre-industrial family
Before the Industrial Revolution in Britain, families lived in rural areas and worked in agriculture. Households produced their own goods that they either consumed or traded with, for goods and services outside their production means.
All members of the family worked collectively in and outside the home towards the survival of the family.
Stage 2: Early industrial family
People moved to urban areas in the 19th century and started to work in manufacturing. They worked for wages, which they used to buy and consume goods. The extended family often gave educational and childcare support to the nuclear family.
In the early industrial family, men and women had separate conjugal roles: men usually controlled the public space of work and leisure, while women looked after the private sphere and cared for the children.
Stage 3: Symmetrical family
In the 1950s, after WW2, people's average standard of living rose in the West, which contributed to the emergence of the symmetrical family. People had more free time and more options like radio and television to spend time on. Families started to spend more time together in the home.
Greater social mobility resulted in nuclear families moving away from the extended family and becoming more self-sufficient. Technological developments brought about labour-saving devices in the home, such as washing machines, which reduced the number of domestic duties.
More and more women started to work paid jobs. Dual employment became the norm. As a result, families implemented joint conjugal roles. The different tasks were still gendered, but the organization became more and more symmetrical. Women worked outside the home, and the 'new' man took part in domestic labour.
A decade after Willmott and Young's first research, Robert Chester (1985) created the term 'Neo-conventional family'. He referred to those dual-earning, symmetrical families that became the new norm after the general decline of the traditional nuclear family.
Stage 4: Asymmetrical family
The asymmetrical family was a prediction of Willmott and Young. It would first appear among upper-class families, where due to travelling, men and women spend a lot of time apart, and so conjugal roles were segregated. Due to financial stability, women did not have to work outside the home.
The trend would slowly trickle down to the working class. This idea was called ‘stratified diffusion’.
Willmott and Young claimed that 'stratified diffusion' was another example of how it has always been the upper classes that introduced certain societal trends and values, which were eventually adopted by the lower classes.
When they returned to their research, Willmott and Young could not provide sufficient evidence for the existence of numerous asymmetrical families, neither among the wealthy nor among the working class.
The three features of the symmetrical family
These include:
Equal division of labour in the home. This covers domestic duties and childcare.
Equal division of labour outside the home. Dual-worker partnerships.
Equal division of power in making decisions about money and major events in the family.
Fig. 1 - One of the key characteristics of the symmetrical family is an equal division of power in making decisions about money.
Advantages and disadvantages of the symmetrical family
We will now consider sociological perspectives on the division of labour and power in the family, including how different theorists view the symmetrical family's advantages and disadvantages.
Feminism and the division of labour
There has been a wealth of study in this area by feminist scholars, as you might expect.
Ann Oakley (1974)
Ann Oakley claimed that Willmott and Young’s data was mistaken; therefore, the whole idea of a symmetrical family was flawed. She did her own qualitative research on how housework is shared between partners and found that women still did the majority of the housework. When men claimed that they did domestic duties, it often meant ironing their own clothes. It did not extend to other household duties.
Oakley found that working-class men participated less in domestic work than middle-class men. Morris (1990) found that working-class men refused to participate in the housework even when they were unemployed and their female partners worked full-time outside the home. She argued it was seen as non-masculine to do chores around the house.
Oakley’s argument was that instead of a symmetrical division of labour, women suffered from a ‘dual burden’ of paid jobs and domestic labour, including childcare.
Duncombe and Marsden (1995)
Duncombe and Marsden claimed that instead of symmetrical households, women had to deal with a ‘triple shift’; besides their paid work and domestic work, they had to do the emotional work for the whole family, especially for the children.
Caroline Gatrell (2008)
Gatrell's recent research done in Britain shows that 40 years after Ann Oakley’s findings, women are still doing the majority of domestic duties while working more and more in paid jobs outside the house.
Economics and the division of financial power
There has been a lot of interest in this field from economists as well.
Stephen Edgell (1980)
Edgell proposed another way to assess the symmetry between partners. He looked at how decisions were made in middle-class families, and at the importance of husbands' and wives' say in family matters.
Edgell found that women had more power in making decisions about household and childcare matters, such as groceries, clothing for the children, and home decoration, while men made the decisions about moving, holiday destinations and bigger purchases, like a car. Edgell argued that men had more say in the more important decisions because they earned more money.
On the other hand, feminists at the time argued that patriarchal society taught children from a young age that men were the decision-makers while women naturally assumed a more passive, obedient role.
Pahl and Vogler (1993)
Pahl and Vogler established two types of money systems in the household.
The allowance system meant that men worked in paid jobs and gave a budget to their wives (who usually did not work outside the home) for household costs and for the children’s needs. In this system, men naturally held more power, as women could only access money through their husbands.
The term pooling was used to refer to a dual-worker family’s joint responsibility for household costs. This often included a joint bank account. It seemed like a more symmetrical setup, but Pahl found in 1994 that even if both partners worked, men earned more. So, they had more power in the decision-making, especially when it came to bigger costs, like a house or a car.
Jonathan Gershuny (1994)
Gershuny agreed with Edgell and Pahl and Vogler that economic factors weigh more in the division of labour than personal or societal values. He argued that until women get paid equal to men and until the glass ceiling above the promotions of women disappears completely, men will naturally have more say in the household of the nuclear family.
He claimed that as women started to earn more, there was a visible rise in the amount of domestic work that men did in the house.
Class and the division of labour
Clearly the class the household belongs to matters in these discussions, and a lot of studies have focused on those dynamics as well.
Juliet Schor (1993)
Juliet Schor claims that the Western world experienced ‘the commercialisation of housework’ as more machines and services appeared and were advertised. She claims that these products (such as the washing machine) and services (such as organised childcare) reduced the time women needed to spend on domestic duties and, to a certain extent, freed them from unpaid household labour.
However, only wealthy families could benefit from such products and services, whilst working-class women had the same burden as before. She claims that the gap between the upper and lower classes is bigger than ever before due to income inequality, and she criticises Willmott and Young’s idea of stratified diffusion.
Domestic violence and power relations in the family
Dobash and Dobash found that husbands behaved violently towards their wives when they felt that their authority was challenged. This shows that symmetrical division of labour and decisive power is difficult to achieve for women who cannot balance out the physical strength of men, and hence are subject to violence when they challenge the status quo.
Domestic violence is a very serious problem in contemporary society, as many women do not report their male partners’ crimes for fear of stigma, and the police and the courts often fail to take control of it.
Same-sex couples and the division of labour
Willmott and Young were criticised for only focusing on the traditional nuclear family in their research, ignoring the growing diversity in contemporary family forms.
Fig. 2 - Some sociologists argued that homosexual couples are more symmetrical than heterosexual couples.
Gillian Dunne (1999)
Dunne claimed that the patriarchal system’s gender role socialisation makes it impossible for heterosexual couples to have a symmetrical division of labour. She conducted research on lesbian relationships and found that because lesbian couples do not have to act according to traditional gender stereotypes, the partnerships are more equal both in and outside the home.
She pointed out, however, that the better-earning partner worked more outside the household and took less part in domestic duties.
Jeffrey Weeks (1999)
Jeffrey Weeks, in the same year as Dunne, argued that same-sex relationships make more symmetrical families than heterosexual ones.
The Symmetrical Family - Key takeaways
- Willmott and Young distinguished four different stages of family progression: pre-industrial family, early industrial family, symmetrical family, and asymmetrical family.
- The three main characteristics of the ideal symmetrical family are an equal division of labour in the home, equal division of labour outside the home, and equal division of power in making decisions.
- According to Ann Oakley, instead of a symmetrical division of labour, women suffered from a ‘dual burden’ of paid jobs and domestic labour, including childcare. Duncombe and Marsden in the 1990s claimed that women had to deal with a ‘triple shift’.
- Gillian Dunne and Jeffrey Weeks argued that same-sex relationships make more symmetrical families than heterosexual ones.
- Willmott and Young's theory of the symmetrical family has been widely criticized. However, it remains influential in sociological considerations of family relations and conjugal roles.
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