11.9: The Household

There is often a debate between spouses and partners about what is a need and what is a want. A need is something important to our health and well-being. A want is something we'd like to have. The trick of being united in your budget and spending choices is to work together, communicate about needs and wants, and to yield to one another's wants at times.
Unfortunately there is no universal standard of a true need versus a true want. It depends on each individual family member.

What about household and workplace tasks? When one considers the day-to-day lives of women in today's marketplace, and perhaps more importantly in their personal lives, the concept of what women do as their contribution to the functioning of families and of society becomes important. Instrumental tasks are the goal-directed activities which link the family to the surrounding society, geared toward obtaining resources. This includes economic work, breadwinning, and other resource-based efforts. Expressive tasks pertain to the creation and maintenance of a set of positive, supportive, emotional relationships within the family unit. This includes relationships, nurturing, and social connections needed in the family and society. Today, women typically do both types of tasks while men still focus more on instrumental tasks.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution both males and females combined their economic efforts in homemaking. Most of these efforts were cottage industry-type where families used their family's labor to make products they needed such as soap, thread, fabric, and butter. When the factory model of production emerged in Western Civilization, the breadwinner and homemaker roles became more distinct from each other. A breadwinner is a person who earns wages outside of the home and uses them to support the family. A homemaker is a person, typically a woman, who occupies her life with mothering, housekeeping, and being a wife while depending heavily on the breadwinner. Since World War II more and more women have become breadwinners or co-breadwinners. Not as many men have made the move into the homemaking role.

If we look at the changes in family functions (functionalism) overtime, we see that in prior to the Industrial Revolution there were many more functions of a family. All education, including religious, took place within the family when they lived too far from a town and the family was the center of economic activity (producing goods needed for the family). Today we send our children to school and religious education classes and we buy our clothes, soap, and food at a store.