In our civilisation, men benefit from women’s paid earnings and their domestic labour due to the fact that woman have acquired the ‘dual burden’, in which they uphold paid employment outside the home while still remaining responsible for the majority of household tasks. This idea within our culture has cultivated a society that the family remains internally patriarchal and women continue to be oppressed.
It is claimed by some sociologists that women correspondingly work a triple shift, as an addition to performing a double shift of both housework and paid work. Performing the triple shift entails of being a mother, housewife and also working a waged job, also known paid work, domestic work and emotional work.
In her classic book ‘The Managed Heart’ (published in 1983,) sociologist Arlie Hochschild first presented the idea of emotional labour. It stated that women are accountable for the emotional well-being of their partners and children: Hochschild found that females were expected to deal with adolescence’s emotions while growing up, and maintain a good relationship with their husband, this of which is considered “emotion work”. Hochschild put emphasis upon how The Triple Shift exploits and subjugates women as they are socialised to be dependent on men; the existence of inequalities in the home are built upon former hegemonic ideas that have simply failed to cease and thus, have been passes from one cohort to another.
Women are most habitually the people who do the most emotional work for it is seemingly what is expected of them: it’s anticipated that when a couple has a child, the woman stays home and watches it. It’s naturally presumed that women are better caretakers, are more emotionally proficient, and are to remember important things for relationships (such as birthdays and concerts) and fundamental information concerning specific individuals. This emotional work often leads to the neglect of women’s psychological well-being and can have detrimental consequences for their mental and physical health.
In order to eradicate such happenings within the family, it has been proposed Joint Conjugal Roles should be obtained. This means couples share childcare and housework, while both being in paid employment. Hence, the family becomes more ‘symmetrical’; the relationship between the husband and wife becomes more equal and caring.
