Abstract

The very root of familial ideology can be described to contain a set of values pertaining to kinship & household structures namely the patriarchal nuclear family and the sexual division of labour. Herein women are constructed as wives, mothers, responsible for child rearing as their role was seen as natural and biological for the purposes of procreation and domestic labour. Men on the other hand, men are being constructed as husbands and fathers, are responsible for familial welfare. This exact sexual division of labour gave rise to the concept of family wage that propagated men to be able to earn a wage that was sufficient to support the family. It was actually intended to release women from dual responsibilities of earning for the family and doing household work. But this instead had negative implications and created a negative narrative. It created economic dependency of women on their husbands, amplifying patriarchal structures further. As a result, women remained confined within these private domesticated spheres, which over centuries, led to a gender disparity between the exposure and growth of men and women. The concept of house work that had genesis in the familial ideology and family wage has been generalised from a viewpoint that household work does not require as much labour as going out and working in the external corporate environment. Demographics in India show a range of familial structures belonging to lower and middle economic classes, wherein a majority of married women are house makers or housewives as the nomenclature goes, making the wife to become a direct dependant on the husband for all her needs. This arrangement promotes abuse abuse.violence and mistreatment that can be predominantly understood from theories of dependency and exchange theory of violence. Underlying factors that aid in women taking the role of house maker or house wife may be choice, but are usually motivated by lack of access to education, gender roles that confine women to the household, unsafe and unsuitable working environments, cultural, familial and societal as well as biological pressure. The change this paper seeks to bring about is one wherein the work done by one half of the society is granted due legal, political, economic recognition and safeguarding, without having to bear disproportionate costs that the other half does not have to. It deals with the central idea of whether housework done by housewives can be given tangible and monetary credit in the form of paid work promoting substantive equality and challenging the familial ideology of division of labour. It seeks to challenge the cult of domesticity embedded by virtues of piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness, restricting a woman’s contribution in household chores without regard from a feminist viewpoint.

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