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Gender Roles in Marriage and the Family

A Critique and Some Proposals

University of Wisconsin—Madison

Gender role issues permeate nearly all aspects of marital and family life, and understanding the ways that women and men and girls and boys are different and similar will heighten our understanding of marriage and family relationships in general. Although theory and experience seem to insist that gender differences clearly exist, empirical evidence about similarities or differences—with few exceptions—is not so clear. In this article, I argue that these ambiguities can be traced in large part to conceptual and methodological issues, such as construct definitions, measurement techniques, and sampling, as well as inattention to the historical context. Throughout the article, I focus particularly on division of household labor to illustrate how attending more carefully to method, theory, and history can enlarge our understanding of how gender roles are played out in the family. In the last section of the article, I discuss ways in which gender role issues might be thought about and studied beyond the individual and the dyad to the family as a whole.

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