Comment on Brines and Fiorentine

Abstract

In this comment, the author commends Julie Brines for her contribution to our understanding that housework is about more than getting the housework done. In Brines's words, it is about doing gender, especially the importance of the symbolic display of gender norms, which she seems to assume is equally important to both women and men. The commentator suggests that other dimensions, such as the exchange of nurturing services, may be more important than symbolic display. She urges Brines to consider how much agency women have in the situation and not assume that displaying gender symbolically is either their choice or what they think they are actually doing. In her review of Robert Fiorentine, the commentator challenges the primacy he gives cultural and psychological explanations of the continued sex segregation of the labor market. She argues that structural barriers are likely more salient and that strong enforcement of existing laws would help bring those barriers down and reduce the sex segregation observed. Finally she suggests that both Brines's and Fiorentine's articles would have benefited from explicit consideration of the role that sexuality, and the use of sexuality as a base for male power, plays in the division of labor in both the home and the marketplace.