Labor Market Work Plus Housework example essay topic

While the number of hours men reported spending on such work rose steadily from 1965 to 1985, the increase subsequently stalled. This lack of recent growth in housework hours among men may reflect the strong labor market during the 1990's. 'Vanishing housework's e ems to be a result of the good job market for women as wall as men. But there's some reason to believe these low levels of housework will persist even in today's weaker job market, since our research shows that most people rate routine housework as the least-enjoyable use of their time. Despite the popular perception that Americans are working longer than ever, the time-diary data dearly show that total work hours - defined as labor market work plus housework -- decreased substantially from 1965 to 1985 for both males and females.

From 1989 to 1999, the questionnaire recall data indicate that paid work in the labor market increased by 10% for men and 17% for women, reflecting the decade's strong job market and the increasing labor market participation of females. As a result, total work time for men increased by eight percent over that decade, but, given the drop in housework time for women, their total work time rose by a mere two percent. Another interesting book related to our subject is written by Linda Nicholson and is called Feminism / Postmodernism. This work is a bit modern but still with a possession of interesting ideas and approaches to the issue of gender. Here the author discusses the development of new paradigms of social criticism which dont rely on traditional philosophical models. She claims that feminists have for the most part been interested in social criticism.

Feminists have moved from political to philosophical claims, while postmodernists have moved from the philosophical to the political. Nicholson would like to find some common ground between the two movements, or ways of thinking. The aim is to give substance and politics back to postmodern thinking and practice and at the same time to draw some lessons from the debates in postmodernism in order to apply them to feminist thought. Postmodern thinking cannot be summarized because in part the aim of postmodernism is to resist the idea of the summary, to resist the notion that there is a foundation upon which ideas and actions are built and sustained. The "modern conception must give way to a new postmodern one in which criticism changes; it becomes more pragmatic, ad how contextual and local. With this change comes a corresponding change in the social role and political function of intellectuals".

(Nicholson, 21) Nicholson also claims that this new postmodernism pragmatism often sacrificed political action and responsibility for eclecticism and an inward looking approach to social criticism. She turns her attention to the work of Jean-Francois Leotard who asserted in his book The Postmodern Condition that the meta narratives which governed social analysis were now longer useful. For example, the idea of class conflict as developed by Karl Marx explicitly assumed that the forces of conflict would eventually lead to revolution. The question is whether these narratives still function within the present context? And if they don't, what are the implications of their absence? How do we legitimate one narrative over another?

How do first order narratives influence second order narratives? There is a loss of privilege for philosophical discourses which at one time claimed that they were not only true but were the basis for all other discourses. This process overthrows singularity in favour of multiplicity. "We cannot have and do not need a single, overarching theory of justice.

What is required, rather, is a justice of multiplicities". (Nicholson, 23).