Gendered Labour in the Family: A Project of TWU’s History of the Family After 1600 Class

Robynne Rogers Healey, PhD

Who does the dishes, cooking, laundry, and housework in your family? Is it the same person who does the yard work, takes out the trash, or fixes things around the house? Do you consider these tasks gendered and the work of particularly gendered individuals in your household? Or is your family one of those families where the division of labour is not particularly gendered? Designating household tasks in categories based on gender is not new. The gendered division of labour in families has a long history; studies suggest it is still entrenched in some way in families today. When we stop to think about the reasons we associate particular tasks with gender performance we begin to understand the reasons why we continue to hold strong gender associations with household work. 

This blog highlights the work of some of my History of the Family After 1600 students at Trinity Western University. Each student was asked to select two tasks that have historically been particularly gendered in families. One task was to be gendered feminine, the other gendered masculine. These tasks were to be ones that they did not engage in regularly. In addition to researching the gendered history of each of their tasks, they were to engage in their tasks from an historical perspective. What you’ll find here is a combination of narrative description of each task as well as analysis of the ways particular types of household labour have been gendered over time, and how the gendering of tasks may have changed over time. Students have included photographs and in some cases video of their experiences. Their analysis and the way they have contextualized their own experiences historically reveals the ways that the past is present. History is all around us, even in the ways we divide work in our families.