Stuart C. Aitken and Matt Carroll
Home, Work and the Nuclear Family Myth
The empirical basis of the paper is derived from an ongoing project in San Diego on the geography of families with young children. The study joins a decade of social science research into the gender divisions of labor and the patriarchal basis of urban modeling. We are particularly interested in the enduring power of nuclear family myth, and the political identities and urban spaces that this myth creates. We use the term myth in the sense that Roland Barthes meant when he suggested a process whereby a concept becomes naturalized and, in effect, depoliticized. Barthes (1972, 109) attributes myths to specific geographies and histories because there is usually a particular point in time, and place of origin, from which they "ripen and spread." The nuclear family myth first began to look irrepressible when it gained academic and institutional legitimacy with George Peter Murdock's (1949, p. 1) use of the term as "... a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults." Modern notions of the nuclear family restrict one part of its adult complement to wage-employment outside the home and the other to domestic and child-rearing activities. Most often, these two occupations are filled by the adult male and female members of the family respectively and they are thought of, at least in our enduring conception of nuclear families, as mutually exclusive. The purpose of the larger study is to tease out aspects of the mythic geographies and histories of families and communities as they relate to spatial and gendered power relations (Aitken 1997). The birth of a first child often highlights important questions for parents that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, work, community and society. We document changes in family members' commitments and attitudes towards domestic work and paid employment from pregnancy to the child's first birthday and then every year until the child was between 3 and 4 years old. Our inquiry also documents the effects of newborn children on space-time geographies.
The impetus for the larger study derives from an earlier time-geography study of the constraints that encompass home-work separation (Aitken and Fik 1988). The current project broadens this work with a consideration of changes in gender roles and relations, including the effects of homework, on our understanding of urban space. In depth interviews with men and women focus upon the spatial and gendered changes that occur with young children. We question issues relating to the spatiality of families, work and community. In this paper, we look specifically at how new technologies and work ethics are dissolving and blurring the traditional boundaries between home/work, feminine/masculine, private/public, and interior/exterior that feminist scholarship attempts to deconstruct. We map our empirical findings onto an emerging post structural and feminist theory on urban space and scale. At this time, we are unable to comment on a series in depth interviews that are currently underway with men who use telecommuting technologies and/or work from home. The results from this part of empirical study will not be available before August 1996. The balance of this research note discusses some of the theoretical implications of our work.
Telecommuting Technologies and the Politics of Identity
Telecommuting emerges in a world where home and work are constructed as spatially separate, dichotomous, and gendered realms of social life. Stereotypically, the workplace is the public, productive realm of men, while the home is private and domestic, more often associated with women's reproductive roles. Feminist analysis has challenged this dichotomy of home and work, claiming that it conflicts with empirical realities of gender preferences (Saegert 1980), does not respond to changing economic contexts (Watson 1991), ignores the complexity and androgyny of the home (Bondi 1992), and underestimates the overlap that has always existed between home and work (Lozano 1989, Watson 1991). Most importantly, the conceptual and spatial separation of home and work are fundamental to persisting gender inequities. Dolores Hayden (1980, p. S171) stresses the importance of developing a "new paradigm" for the home and urban space that recognizes the evolving needs of men, women, and children.
As portrayed by Toffler (1980) and Hewlett Packard, telecommuting appears as a means of blurring the distinction between home and work and increasing available time for household responsibilities. It does so for both women and men; however, modern conceptions of womanhood have been constructed around the home, and recent research suggests that telecommuting by women reinforces gender inequities by reducing husbands' involvement in household responsibilities (Falconer 1993, Gottlieb 1988). Men's presence at home presents a clearer challenge to the gender identification of the home and roles associated with gender and space.
Most telecommuters are men (Olson 1989), underscoring the importance of a study focusing on their experiences of home. Feminists have shown that one of the patriarchal bases of urban structure is that men perceive the home as a retreat from a harsh world (Monk 1992, p. 128). Under American capitalism the home has signified a place where a man can return from his day in the factory or office to a private domestic environment, secluded from the tense world of work in an industrial city characterized by environmental pollution, social degradation, and personal isolation.... [and] enter a serene dwelling whose physical and emotional maintenance [is] the duty of his wife (Hayden 1980, p. S172).
From this perspective, the home is also connected to a sense of male control -- even tyranny -- over women and family (Watson 1991, p. 138). A related perspective holds that the values symbolized by the home -- femininity and intimacy -- are threatening, emasculating, and best avoided. Men's gender roles pressure them to disassociate themselves from the home, lest they be "judged feminine--which is intermingled with the fear of being homosexual" (Kron 1982, p. 113). Fittingly, Joan Kron (1982) calls men's fear of domestic emasculation "home-phobia." This fear does not banish men from the home, but limits their acceptable activities there to eating, sleeping, and procreating. According to Kron (1982, p. 116 and 286), many societies attach the label "suspect," "ridiculous," or "woman" to the man that spends too much time at home rather than conquering and subduing the outside world. Whether perceived as a threat to masculinity, a safe haven, or a seat of control, men's associations with the home are unrelated to work -- paid or unpaid. It is not surprising, then, that despite the movement of women into paid work outside the home, men have shown little increase in their contributions to household work (e.g., Hochschild and Machung 1989; Aitken 1997).
The experiences of telecommuters -- or more broadly, home-based workers -- are documented by several empirical studies. This research finds gender to be important in differentiating the motivations, experiences, and satisfactions of telecommuters. Men, unlike women, rarely choose telecommuting as a way to perform childcare responsibilities, but do so in order to increase productivity and escape the environment of the corporate workplace. Men see telecommuting as an opportunity to balance leisure with work, not childcare with work (Wajcman and Probert 1988, Lozano 1989, Olson 1989, Gurstein 1991, Holcomb 1991). Gurstein (1991) finds that these priorities are apparent in the resulting time/space patterns of women and men. Men spend more time than women on recreation, sleep, and work and less time on housework and childcare. The lack of temporal and spatial boundaries between home and work means that telecommuting often entails working long hours (Lozano 1989, Gurstein 1991). This is especially so for men, who are more likely to work in professions prone to "workaholism" (Wajcman and Probert 1988, Massey 1995). One of Penny Gurstein's respondents, concerned for his family, notes that his "goal is to cut back to six days a week" (1991, p. 173).
Some telecommuters express little emotional attachment to the home, despite the amount of time they spend there (Gottlieb 1988). For others, telecommuting allows the home to act as a refuge from the face-to-face authority often found at the corporate workplace. Some also feel that working at home offers them more control over their lives. Many, however, find that their expectations of home and work are not compatible. One man interviewed by Gurstein suggests that telecommuting diminishes the ability of the home to function as a refuge from the world of work: The merging of work and personal life is a crazy set-up. I feel very resentful about it...my whole life is one big lump -- doing everything at the same time ... My whole home has become my office. Every room has paper in it. I can never retreat (1991, p. 175).
Many telecommuters find that a separate home office or workspace is necessary to increase control over their work and preserve the identity of their homes. Nina Gottlieb (1988, p. 152), on the other hand, finds that working from the comfort of home improves some men's attitudes about work, rather than work destroying their notions of home.
Besides the identity of their homes, the identity projected by the men themselves is an issue. Telecommuters are often perceived as not working or not performing "real" work because they do not leave the house with a tie on every morning. According to Gottlieb (1988), men struggle with the unconventionality of their image. Interestingly, Gurstein finds that men with children prefer a greater spatial separation between home office and the rest of the house than other men: "this can be attributed to wanting to maintain a professional identity apart from their domestic life" (1991, p. 175).
As already mentioned, men rarely choose telecommuting as a means to care for their children and those with children appear to attempt to isolate themselves spatially from childcare roles while working at home (Gurstein 1991). Olson finds that telecommuting's effect on family involvement is purely symbolic for men, allowing them to "share regular meals with their families and be physically present in the evening hours, even though they might be off in a separate room toiling over their terminals while the rest of the family watches television" (1989, p. 223). Wajcman and Probert (1988) indicate that men, unlike women, become more work-oriented and less family-oriented after telecommuting than before they began. This increased orientation toward work is manifest by workaholism. Wajcman and Probert (1988) attribute the failure of telecommuting to change gender roles to long hours. A supposition that men working at home increases availability for family by reducing time wasted in commuting and workplace distractions seems incorrect; the extra time is used for more work, not childcare or household chores. Clearly, we need a better understanding of how these changes relate to men's political identities.
Scaling Men's Work
Feminists raise issues that relate women's political identity to the space of work, home and community (Dyck 1990; Young 1990; Wilson 1991) but, as yet, little is known of the relationship between men's political identity and urban space. As part of this agenda, we feel that there is need to highlight the problems that arise from the metaphoric appropriation of the terms "home" and "work" as things that are natural and separate. This separation clearly has an important consequence for masculine political identity. We argue that it is precisely the "givenness" of space which suggests that the separation of home and work is unproblematic. If we assume that gendered power structures are reflected in and formed by space, then we must also take account of how they are hierarchically ordered. Like space, scale is neither natural nor unproblematic. Neil Smith (1992, 73) points out that "There is nothing ontologically given about the traditional division between home and locality, urban and regional, national and global scales. The differentiation of geographical scales establishes and is established through the geographical structure of social interactions." Telecommuting technologies require us to reconsider the assumed naturalness of the separation of home and work and, consequently, the "givenness" of the urban spatial hierarchy. We suggest that it is precisely the assumed naturalness of hierarchical oppositions such as man/ woman, public/ private and home/ work that results in "givenness" of urban spatial hierarchies. As such, we consider it important to look critically at how home-work separation has come to relate to the naturalness of scale in urban modeling. Smith (1992) notes that the language of difference and diversity (including the difference between men and women, work and home) may very well be articulated through spatial scale because it is the social construction of this hierarchical ordering that creates borders and boundaries between people and places.
In this paper, we attempt to determine the issues raised by men working at home and their effect on patriarchal structures that currently place multiple responsibilities on women. These multiple responsibilities couple with what some feminists call an oppressive urban structure that denies women (and men) the potential to realize an unconstrained political identity (Young 1990; Wilson 1991; Bondi 1992). Perhaps telecommuting is one example of a "new paradigm" for the home that will "free each of us to find his or her niche, to select or create a family trajectory attuned to individualized needs" (Toffler 1980, p. 223). On the other hand, it may be that the lack of spatial and temporal boundaries between home and work leads to compulsive work behavior for men, as indicated by Wajcman and Probert (1988). This study is well-situated to address the effect of communications technologies on the distanciation and gendering of home and work.
Literature Cited
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Biographical Sketches
Stuart Aitken is a Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. He is author two books dealing with the space of children and families (Putting Children in Their Place, 1994; Family Fantasies and Community Space) and is co-author of an edited volume on cinematic representations entitled Space, Place, Situation and Spectacle (1994). In addition he has published over 40 papers in books and academic journals including Environment and Planning A and D, The Annals of the AAG, Transactions of the IBG, Progress in Human Geography, Journal of Cartography and GIS, The Journal Architectural and Planning Research, and Geographical Analysis. His interests cover feminist and critical theory, community and urban design, and GIS applications.
Matt Carroll is an MA candidate at San Diego State University. His broad interests are in transportation geography and urban planning. A specific concern with telecommuting began with an undergraduate dissertation at UC, Santa Barbara. He is also interested in theories of masculinity and space.