Homemaking

Homemaking is mainly an

In North America, early 19th-century ideals required homemaking be the responsibility of the woman; "the wife is properly supposed to be the light and centre of the home."[2] Traditional wives who stayed home and did not work for pay were required by social ideals to create and maintain a peaceful space to provide to her husband and children. For women in a pre-modern environment, "it is the duty and privilege and solemn responsibility, which make this art of home-making more interesting and important to her than any other art in the world."^[2] Author of these statements, Annie Swan was not alone in the late 1800s viewpoint that women were encouraged, if not required, to maintain the home solely themselves. In 1875, Harper's Bazaar published an article outlining the duties of a housewife and the esteemed respect those duties deserve: "but if one only staid to think how countless and how onerous those duties really are, more respect would be paid to the faithful effort to perform them, and an added reverence extended to the mother who is also the housekeeper."^[3] Harper's Bazaar recognizes that women do the majority of the work within the home, pointing out that the work is detailed and at many times, difficult.

20th century

The 20th century began with similar homemaking roles as the 19th; however, the century concluded with a much different perception. In the late 1990s, marriage consisted in most cases of both wife and husband participating in homemaking. Darlene Piña and Vern Bengtson who are anthropologists and professors at the University of Southern California, extensively researched marriage dynamics and household labor in the late twentieth century. They concluded that "all wives benefit equally by their husbands' greater involvement in household labor."^[4] The division of labor within the home promotes a healthy relationship between husband and wife. Concluding, that likelihood of increased happiness within marriage is vastly improved when homemaking is shared with the husband. West and Zimmerman, concluded an analysis of over 487 couples and found that "women were rewarded for performing feminine behaviors, such as housework, whereas men receive positive reinforcement for engaging in masculine tasks, such breadwinning."^[5]

In contrast, a study performed by

Married women who are economically and emotionally dependent on their husbands are less likely to report the division of household labor as unfair. This significant group of married women felt that household labor reinforced their female gender identity and connection to femininity.^{[citation needed]}

21st century

Sex and gender continue to shape the division of household responsibilities in the United States in the twenty-first century. According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, 84 percent of women and 69 percent of men reported that they spent some time performing household duties, which included "housework, cooking, lawn care, or household management." Women reported spending an average of 2.6 hours a day on household activities, and men 2.0 hours. On a surveyed day, 49% percent of women and 20% of men reported doing housework.^[6]

Men and women's perception of household responsibilities differ. Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that fathers were more likely than mothers to say that chores were evenly split between both partners (56% vs. 46%). When asked, 50% of mothers reported they handled more responsibilities around the house than their partners; only 12% of fathers reported they did more household tasks. Despite this difference in perception, a majority of married U.S. adults (56%) said that sharing household chores as "very important" to a successful marriage.^[7]

In a 2008 article, social scientists Susan L. Brown and Sayaka Kawamura reported that the unequal distribution in housework was attributed mainly to time availability. They concluded: "wives typically work fewer hours than their husbands, [so] they have more time available to perform household tasks."^[5]

Housekeeping

Housekeeping by the homemaker is the care and control of property, ensuring its maintenance, proper use and appearance. In a private home a maid or housekeeper is sometimes employed to do some of the housekeeping. Housework is work done by the act of housekeeping. Some housekeeping is housecleaning and some housekeeping is home chores. Home chores are housework that needs to be done at regular intervals.^[8] Housekeeping includes the budget and control of expenditures, preparing meals and buying food, paying the heat bill, and cleaning the house.^[9]

Cooking

Most modern-day houses contain sanitary facilities and a means of

The diversity of cooking worldwide is a reflection of the aesthetic, agricultural, economic, cultural, social and religious diversity of people across the globe. Applying heat to a food usually, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus changing its flavor, texture, consistency, appearance, and nutritional properties. Methods of cooking that involve the boiling of liquid in a receptacle have been practised at least since the 10th millennium BC, with the introduction of pottery.

Cleaning

Outdoor housecleaning chores include removing leaves from rain gutters, washing windows, sweeping doormats, cleaning the pool, putting away lawn furniture, and taking out the trash.[10]

Laundry

Household management by the homemaker is the act of overseeing the organizational, financial, and day-to-day operations of a house or estate. It differs from housekeeping, which consists of the physical maintenance and cleaning of a house.

House organization

House organization or home organization includes interior design to make the home aesthetically pleasing by arranging furniture, plants, blinds, and so forth. De-cluttering means removing unnecessary things from the house.

De-cluttering

Household de-cluttering involves putting things in their proper place after they have been used. "Cleaning up your mess" might involve removing glasses, eating utensils or gadgets i.e. toys from the living room if you have eaten a meal there in front of the television. If several people have done that over a few days and not removed their glasses, dishes and utensils from the living room, the living room is considered to be "cluttered" with dishes. The dishes are out of place because they belong in the kitchen, washed and put away in the cupboards. That is the most common example of clutter in a modern North American household.

There is another definition of clutter, which refers to having simply too many things and not enough room for all of it. Sometimes as happens in Asian households, the items are necessary, but the home is simply too small, and ingenious methods are needed to organize everything to minimize unsightly clutter. Removing unneeded or no longer necessary objects from a household or home is also an aspect of de-cluttering. Objects can be

Homemakers may manage household workers or "domestic workers".

Work strategies

In

1. in the market economy, including home-based self-employment second jobs, in order to obtain money to buy goods and services in the market;
2. domestic production work, such as cultivating a vegetable patch or raising chickens, purely to supply food to the household; and
3. domestic consumption work to provide goods and services directly within the household, such as cooking meals, child–care, household repairs, or the manufacture of clothes and gifts.

Household work strategies may vary over the life-cycle, as household members age, or with the economic environment; they may be imposed by one person or be decided collectively.^[14]

Household production

"Household production" is an economic category for activities including homemaking. It is defined as "the production of the goods and services by the members of a household, for their own consumption, using their own capital and their own unpaid labor. Goods and services produced by households for their own use include accommodation, meals, clean clothes, and child care. The process of household production involves the transformation of purchased intermediate commodities into final consumption commodities. Households use their own capital and their own labor."^[15]

There are efforts to construct estimates of the value of household production in a way analogous to

Many home appliances have been invented that make housework faster or more effective compared to before the industrial revolution. These include:

• Washing machine
• Clothes dryer
• Dishwasher
• Sewing machine
• Vacuum cleaner
• coffee maker
• Microwave oven
• Refrigerator, reducing the number of grocery trips or the amount of food preservation work to do

Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan estimated that homemakers in the 1800s performed about 50–60 hours of work per week, and that this is the same as the 1990s. She says that, rather than reducing the amount of time devoted to housework, labor-saving devices have been used to make the same amount of time do more work, such as by vacuuming a rug instead of sweeping it, or washing fabrics more frequently. Modern parents also more frequently transport their children to after-school activities, and doctors no longer make house calls.^[20]

See also

• Handyman
• Scientific management

References