Work and Leisure

The devil still makes work 41marriages end in divorce, though most involved will remarry, men rathermore than women.Changed attitudes towards cohabitation, marriage, parenting and childcarehave transformed generational experience and household composition.The traditional nuclear family, though remaining an aspiration, has proveddifficult to sustain. Yet many of the cultural patterns inside the intact familychange but little. A key example is domestic labour. Though men havebecome marginally more involved in the maintenance of the home, the divisionof labour is still highly gendered. Women spend half as much time againas men on household tasks. They have primary responsibility for cleaning andtidying, cooking and childcare, washing and ironing. Men’s contribution tothese tasks is consistently less, the only areas where they outperform thewomen being do-it-yourself (DIY) and gardening. Like the single good-timegirl, the ‘new man’ is largely a myth. Based on their own restricted experience,media commentators and dramatists, and some sociologists, take the experienceof a tiny minority as an index of change, when much behaviour insidefamilies is relentlessly conventional.As in the case of work, political ideologies have taken an ultra-conservativeposition. Divorce and lone parenting are lamented, with constant threats tomake either or both more difficult. Tax and benefit systems do little to supportparents living apart. The traditional family is assumed to be the optimumcondition for social integration. Labour and Conservative parties viedwith each other to be identified as the ‘party of the family’ in the run-up tothe 2001 election. The family has been placed ideologically at the heart ofcommunity-care policies by various New Right and then New Labour initiativesof privatising welfare. This is at the precise time when families are tooculturally fragmented, geographically dislocated and financially stretched torespond to increased responsibilities for caring. The burden of dependencybetween generations has consequently changed. As the state withdraws publicfunding from collective consumption, parents have to fund their childrenthrough education; adults become ‘liable relatives’ for the care of their elderlyparents. On the other hand, current rates of longevity ensure the presentworking population has to pay for a growing pensions bill, which was generouslycrafted, index linked and enhanced in the welfare-state era. The state’sresponse is to devalue the state pension, encourage private schemes and deferretirement.These chains or patterns of dependency become even more financially andlegally complicated if considered in the context of growing numbers of singleparents, common-law marriages, and high rates of both divorce and remarriage.Heritage and inheritance are not only national but also local problems.For many people, even kinship ties are negotiable and problematic ratherthan the taken-for-granted bedrock of solid family and local communityidentities. The ideology of the ‘traditional family Christmas’ (Finnegan 1981)becomes less convincing and less binding on all family members whose duties,