Why Who Cleans Counts: What Housework Tells Us about American Family Life

Every household has to perform housework, and researchers know a lot about what predicts who does which chores, drawing frequently from theoretical explanations that highlight the importance of power dynamics.

This book moves beyond the existing scholarship by using quantitative, nationally representative survey data to theorize about how power dynamics as reflected in housework performance help us understand broader family variations. The authors investigate how knowing who cleans the house explains how households of differing forms, demographics and compositions operate, both cross-sectionally and over the life course of the household.