Gendering or Equality in the Lives of Nordic Heterosexual Couples with Children: No Well‐Paved Avenues Yet

Abstract

This article presents a Nordic comparative study of the joint accounts cohabiting women and men with children give about their everyday organization of house‐work and child‐care. The study was part of a Nordic study of political gender equality discourses at different societal levels. The article focuses on how heterosexual couples in Denmark, Finland and Sweden give meaning to house‐work sharing, and the consequences of these meanings. For instance, do differences in the degree of sharing of tasks relate to differences in how couples recruit traditionally gendered discourses in the conversations, and in how they “gender” house‐work, or rhetorically use masculinity and femininity in their accounts? Distinctly different patterns of rhetorical gendering appeared in couples with very unequal, as compared to fairly equal, house‐work sharing patterns. The article discusses these differences in terms of variations in gendered boundaries and limits of personal space, and their relations to power issues in couples.

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