The three corners of domestic labor: Mothers', fathers', and children's weekday and weekend housework.

Feminist scholars concur that the family is one of the primary settings in which gender is constructed (Ferree, 1990); West & Zimmerman, 1987). One of the visible signs of this process is the way in which family work is divided among family members. Time use studies document that wives generally take on the majority of household tasks, even when both spouses in the family hold full-time employment (Berk; 1985; Pleck, 1985), and that girls are generally assigned more household chores than are boys (Goodnow, 1988; White & Brinkerhoff, 1981). While time use studies of the division of labor have contributed significantly to our understanding of the powerful role of an individual's gender in defining family processes, they have generally presented an incomplete picture of family roles and family functioning. The participation of parents and children in housework, for example, has been addressed in separate lines of scholarship with the result that few studies portray the division of labor as an intergenerational family process. A second limitation of the literature is that, although many studies have addressed the relationship between familial earner status and the distribution of domestic labor, a differentiated categorization of wives' employment is rarely employed. Frequently, women are labeled as either working or nonworking, ignoring the distinction between maternal part-and full-time employment. Moreover, all but a few studies of domestic labor adopt a static conceptualization of house work, thereby missing an opportunity to examine the role of "social time" (Sorokin & Merton, 1937) as a feature of the cultural context that may shape parents' and children's household task participation. As a result, we are left with the unsatisfactory task of piecing together results from a variety of studies in order to construct a picture of family household task participation. The goals of the present study are: (a) to assess mothers', fathers', and children's involvement in housework, and (b) to examine conditions that facilitate or constrain the distribution of tasks including familial earner status, the target child's gender, and social time, defined here as the distinction between weekdays and weekends. HOUSEHOLD TASK PARTICIPATION AS "THREE-CORNERED" Although some empirical studies have incorporated mothers and fathers from different families into analyses of domestic labor (e.g., Shelton, 1990), Goldscheider and Waite (1991) are among the few who have examined mothers, fathers, and children from the same families. They argued for a reconceptualization of the division of labor as "three-cornered." Their investigation included an examination of which family members were typically responsible for specific household tasks. They reported evidence suggesting that "substitution" is an important dynamic in American households, a process in which husbands, and children (especially girls) substitute for each other, rather than reducing the household task load of wives and mothers. They also emphasized that the amount of housework performed by any one family member is highly dependent on how much others are already doing. Although Goldscheider and Waite's (1991) study conveyed a complex picture of the dynamics underlying the division of labor, it had limitations. First, the measure of task responsibility employed by these researchers required respondents to generalize about their activities over a long (and unspecified) period of time, a strategy fraught with memory demands, definitional problems, and social desirability pressures (Huston & Robins 1982). Moreover, mothers were the sole informants with regard to all family members' involvement in housework. Data from fathers or children were not obtained. Finally, housework was treated as a static phenomenon rather than a dynamic process that varies systematically with social time. Despite these limitations, Goldscheider and Waite's (1991) study provided important insights into the family economy as a whole and argued for the inclusion of mothers, fathers, and children in future studies. …