Why who cleans counts. What housework tells us about American family life.

In this book review, I will present the book by Shannon N. Davis and Theodore N. Greenstein, which was published in 2020. This topic is an integral part of people's daily lives. Their research examined how American heterosexual couples divide the housework among themselves. The idea for the book came from the cover of Time magazine, which was published in August 2011. In this article, the authors argued that the distribution of full-time work is equal between men and women, taking into account both paid labor (that is, men's and women's market work) and unpaid labor (non-market work, principally housework). This finding did not correspond to the experiences of the average American people in their daily lives. Nor did it with the accepted fact that women do more housework than men. We know from sociological research that the participation of women in the labor market is steadily increasing, while men play an increasingly important role in household chores. The authors were motivated by a discussion in Time Magazine to examine the distribution of housework within the family. In their book, the authors take a special approach to housework. Housework is seen as a manifestation of the power dynamics in a couple. Through housework, they write about the power dynamics between American heterosexual couples and ultimately about the functioning of American families. The combination of housework and power dynamics in this way is novel in this field. According to the authors, housework as a social institution is about more than just washing dishes after dinner. Housework and its distribution and the way it is distributed say a lot about the relationships between heterosexual couples, but also about the systems of relationships between women and men, inequalities and the values, principles and perceptions associated with them. The authors examine the power and its dynamics as a central concept in their analysis. They start from the premise that housework is seen by everyone as an unwelcome activity, i.e. the less you do the better. How women and men can escape the compulsion to do housework depends on the power dynamics between the members of the couple. According to the authors, the power of people in this situation is mainly determined by their status on the labor market and the number of hours they have worked in the world of paid work. If we look at housework in this way, we can see that the reasons for who washes dishes after dinner are due to inequalities between women and men, the world of values and the latent power dynamics in a couple. Inequalities, values and power in a society are worth talking about constantly in everyday life and it is worth doing research in the world of science. The authors write about all these important topics in their book. The housework as an institution helps them to understand the topic.