Inside the Household

This chapter looks at the household, focusing on women: how they were consigned to the home and how their status and power over household resources have been historically shaped by men. While women had achieved a degree of emancipation and the role of housewife a degree of status and importance previously lacking, the return of male servicemen to their homes and communities following the end of the Second World War raised policy issues on several fronts. A number of needs had to be met: servicemen had to be found work and the demographic decline needed reversing, requiring women to be child bearers and homemakers. Policymakers turned their attention to these, often competing, policy demands. But ultimately the sexual division of labour in the household was not questioned; so men remained the main breadwinners and the principle prevailed that first and foremost women should devote themselves to their families and be dependent on men's earnings. From the 1970s, there was a major conceptual shift in the social sciences as feminist researchers deconstructed the ‘family’ in order to counteract dominant discourses surrounding a single family form as both desirable and the norm. In this process, households in all their variety began to be identified in the context of rising rates of lone motherhood and step-families.