Images of Work: Women's Work, Men's Work, Housework

Abstract

Resume: Ce papier examine l'image des adolescents par rapport aux travaux des hommes, aux travaux des femmes et le travail menager. Les donnees du papier proviennent d'interviews de 1200 adolescents ages de 17 ans de la region de Hamilton, Halifax et la Nouvelle - Ecosse rurale. Les jeunes expriment leurs attitudes concernant a) les emplois domines par les hommes et les femmes, b) l'emploi de leur mere, l'emploi de leur pere et le fait d'etre une menagere a temps plein, et c) des descriptions de leur propres attentes d'emploi futur, les emplois de leur pere et leur mere et le travail menager. Les travaux des femmes est rapporter moins desirable que les travaux des hommes, le travail menager es vu comme le travail des femmes et moins desirable (a tous sauf les femmes de la classe ouvriere) que le travail renumere. Les emplois des peres de la classe moyenne sont a la fois desirables et decrit en manieres similaires aux emplois attendus par leurs fils et leurs filles de la classe moyenne. Les femmes de la classe ouvriere sont vraisemblablement a decrire le travail de leur mere en termes positifs et a definir le travail menager comme un option viable. Abstract: This paper examines youth images of men's and housework, based on interview data from 1200 seventeen year olds in Hamilton, Halifax and rural Nova Scotia. Youth respondents report their attitudes to (a) male and female dominated jobs, (b) their mother's job, their father's job and being a full-time homemaker, and (c) their descriptions of their own expected job, their father's and mother's job and housework. Women's is reported as less desirable than men's housework is seen as and as less desireable (to all but working class females) than work. Jobs of middle class fathers are both desireable to and described in ways similar to the jobs expected by their sons and middle class daughters. Working class females tend to describe their mother's in positive terms and define housework as a viable option. Introduction This paper looks at the images that youth have of work. In Canada, as in other industrialized nations, the realm of dominates the lives of young people and shapes their images of themselves (Krahn, 1995; Spenner and Rosenfeld, 1990). Given its salience, we expect that adolescents will have developed relatively detailed images of the world of work.(1) Many of these images are developed within a family context and are anchored in youths' perceptions of their parents' work. A guiding principle in our paper is that images are socially constructed and socially distributed. That is, the images we have of reflect our own social location and the social locations that are associated with that type of work. Men's work, for example, is seen differently than women's work (cf. Beechy and Perkins, 1987), and images males and females construct of the world of will reflect the gender constraints they have themselves experienced (Glick et al., 1995: 565-566). We conceptualise as activity that entails obligation and responsibility. In this way our concept includes both paid work (i.e. participation in the labour force) and unpaid particularly the associated with running a household and caring for children.(2) We argue that youth develop conceptions of what their own will be like in relation to their images of the of others they see around them, particularly their parents. That is, they are likely to use their parents' as a reference point for their own both in terms of the specific type of to which they aspire and more generally what they see as important characteristics of desireable and undesireable jobs. We see images of as containing two important dimensions: evaluation and linkage. Certain attributes are judged as desirable and others not. For example, creative may be seen as desirable, dirty not. …

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