Why Who Cleans Counts

While housework is an often-studied phenomenon, Why Who Cleans Counts frames the performance of housework as a way to understand power dynamics within couples. Using couple-level data from the United States-based National Survey of Families and Households (N = 3,906), we perform Latent Profile Analysis to identify five categories, or classes, of couples: Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload. The book describes how the housework classes and the behaviors of the couples within them reveal the power dynamics within the couples, power dynamics that center around gendered norms. Using Latent Trajectory Analysis, we follow the couples over time to examine change and stability in their housework performance; their behavior over time also reveals the use of power in their relationships. Finally, we examine the reported housework time of the adult children of the NSFH couples to determine the extent to which the power dynamics experienced in one’s childhood home shapes one’s own adult gendered performance of housework. The book concludes with suggestions for how practitioners and scholars might use the book’s findings given the changing demographics of the United States.