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’Where’s me dinner?’: foodpreparation arrangements inrural Australian families*Deborah LuptonSocial Sciences and Liberal StudiesCharles Sturt University

AbstractIn the wake of the second-wave feminist movement and related social changes,including the participation of more women in the paid workforce, an egalitariandiscourse has dominated notions of the ideal division of domestic labour in

heterosexual households, including those tasks involving food preparation. Somecritics have argued, however, that this discourse is not taken up in practice, withwomen still taking more responsibility than their partners for cooking for the family.This article presents findings from a qualitative study involving interviews with 34heterosexual couples living in a rural region of Australia about their food preparationarrangements. The findings demonstrate that for most of the couples the femalepartner did indeed take major responsibility for cooking for the family. Three dominantrationales were expressed by the participants to explain why the division of labourremains unequal in relation to cooking: those of expertise, enjoyment and fairness.Importantly, however, there was evidence of a weakening in gendered assumptionsabout who should cook and of significant participation by men in food preparation. Thiswas particularly the case among younger, more highly educated participants or thosein professional occupations or in couples where the male partner was unemployed.

Introduction .

It has been argued by some feminist researchers that women’s cultural andeconomic subordination to men is reproduced in the power relations around thedivision of domestic labour, including food preparation (see, for example, Charlesand Kerr 1988; DeVault 1991). Some commentators have argued that, despite theegalitarian discourse relating to the sharing of household tasks that has emerged

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over the past quarter-century in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement,’

women (including those in full-time and part-time paid employment, as well as theminority who work only in the home), overwhelmingly continue to take the majorresponsibility for food preparation tasks and most other household work.

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Research undertaken in Australia would seem to support this argument. For

example, a time-use survey carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)in 1992 found that women living in families did 75 per cent of the food preparationand clean-up (Bittman and Pixley 1997: 98). The survey also revealed that comparedto a single woman of equivalent age living alone, a married woman spent 40 per centmore time cooking. Conversely, men living alone spent twice as much time cookingas those of an equivalent age who were married, clearly because the wives of thelatter had taken on the major responsibility for preparing their meals (Bittman andPixley 1997: 106y. White there were some changes to men’s participation in cookingdemonstrated in time-use surveys between 1974 and 1987, very little had changedby the time of the 1992 survey (Bittman and Pixley 1997: 134).

In their own separate interview study of 138 heterosexual couples in Sydney,Bittman and Pixley (1997) identified a strong commitment to egalitarian attitudesrelated to housework on the part of both men and women, but continuinginequalities in relation to the division of labour. So too, a study conducted byDempsey (1997) of 128 heterosexual households in Melbourne found that,regardless of ethnicity, educational status, class position or income, and whetheror not the woman was in full-time employment, women took major responsibilityfor conventional ’inside’ or ’female’ tasks, such as cooking and cleaning, whiletheir male partners positioned themselves as ’helpers’. Only 3 per cent of men saidthat they took most of the responsibility for these tasks. Almost 60 per cent of thewomen said that they had attempted to persuade their partners to engage to agreater extent in cooking, although they tended to ask them for occasionalassistance with this task rather than requesting that their partners take it over orshare responsibility equally.

These Australian findings echo research into domestic food preparationarrangements in heterosexual households carried out over the past two decadesin other Western societies, such as the United States (DeVault 1991), Britain(Murcott 1982, 1983; Charles and Kerr 1988) and Sweden (Jansson 1995),although the latter country appears to be characterised by greater participation ofmen in family cooking tasks compared with the Anglophone countries. Many ofthese studies were undertaken only of women with young children, however, andwere conducted quite some years ago, in the 1970s or early 1980s. There is somemore recent British evidence that among some predominantly middle-class

couples where the woman is in full-time employment (Warde and Hetherington1994) and younger couples (Kemmer et al. 1998), cooking tasks are slowlybecoming more of a shared responsibility.

The most recent time-use survey undertaken by the ABS (1999) in 1997 foundthat among heterosexual couples in which partners engaged in similar hours ofpaid work, men spent only an average of 37 minutes in food preparation andclean-up, while women spent an hour longer on these activities. Sixty-nine percent of men in such couples engaged in these activities compared with 92 per centof their female partners. These findings, demonstrate that in the late 1990sAustralian women in paid employment were still bearing the brunt of foodpreparation tasks, although they also show that the majority of men were takingpart in these tasks, albeit for shorter periods each day than their partners.



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While such large-scale statistical analyses are important in demonstrating overallsocial trends, they can reveal little about reasons for these trends. Qualitativeresearch using semi-structured interviews are useful to provide some insights intohow domestic tasks such as cooking are negotiated in households. The presentarticle draws upon the findings of a qualitative research project focusing onAustralian heterosexual cohabiting couples both with and without children livingat home. It was decided to focus on couples living in a rural region, as very littleAustralian sociological research has explored the food habits, preferences andarrangements of people living outside the major metropolitan centres.

Details of the study and participantsThe 34 couples (a total of 68 participants) were living in small towns or on nearbyproperties in the central west of New South Wales, a region where agricultureremains a dominant industry. They were recruited using convenience sampling,with several interviewers resident in the area asked to recruit among their socialnetworks and to use snowball sampling for further recruitment, bearing in mindthe need to maximise heterogeneity of the group as far as possible. A semi-structured interview schedule was used, preceded by a brief questionnaire whichparticipants were asked to complete themselves, giving demographic details andsome details about food preparation and eating out arrangements in theirhousehold. Once this had been completed, the more detailed interview followed,which was audio-taped and later transcribed. Interviews took place in 1997 andearly 1998, with each partner in the couple interviewed separately.

The participants ranged in age from 17 to 82, with ten participants aged 25 orbelow, 23 aged between 26 and 39, 27 aged between 40 and S9 and eightparticipants aged 60 or more. All except four said that English was their firstlanguage, with the exceptions all noting that their first language had been aEuropean language other than English. Although relatively homogeneous in itsethnic make-up (reflecting lower ethnic diversity in rural regions in Australiacompared with the cities), the participant group was quite diverse in terms oftypes of employment. Eleven of the participants were working in managerial,semi-professional or professional occupations, ten were in clerical, technical oradministrative positions, six were in service or sales, nine were employed inunskilled, manual or farming work, ten were retired, two were universitystudents, five were unemployed, eight described their occupation as housewife ormother and seven were self-employed. Only 19 of the participants (less than one-third) held a university degree or had some university education. Half of thecouples had at least one child still living at home.

The study’s major objectives were two-fold: first, to identify the food habits andpreferences of the participants and second, to explore issues around domestic

arrangements about food preparation and consumption in the context ofcohabitation and family life. The first aspect of the research has been discussed

, elsewhere (Lupton 2000). The present discussion focuses on the latter topic, drawingon an analysis that searched for emergent themes and discourses in the interviewtranscripts to answer the following questions: What were the food preparation



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arrangements among the couples? Vlhat rationales underpin these arrangements?What was the influence, if any, of gender and other attributes such as age,

employment status and social class? (AII names used below are pseudonyms.)

The division of labourThe participants were asked in the questionnaire preceding the interview to estimatethe percentage of meals cooked at home that they would be responsible forpreparing in an average week. As Table 1 shows, in the majority (25 out of 34) ofcouples, partners’ estimations of their own and their partners’ relative contributionwere identical or fairly close to each other (estimations differing by no more than10 per cent). In many of the remaining nine couples, however, there was a strongdisparity between each partner’s assessment of the breakdown of cookingresponsibility.

Table 1: Participants’ estimations of the percentage of meals prepared by themselves andtheir partners



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* The couple’s children do the remaining 10% of the cooking.*~ Each partner cooks separate meals for themselves.



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Gender was a clear structuring factor in the couples’ division of labour. As thetable demonstrates, in 15 of the 24 couples who agreed on their estimation ofdivision of labour, it was reported that the woman prepared more than 50 percent of the meals. In only two of these couples did both partners agree that themale partner took most responsibility for cooking. A further six couples,however, agreed that they shared the cooking equally. Another couple agreed thateach did 80 per cent of the cooking, explaining later in the interviews thatbecause of a specific diet to which one of them had to adhere, each partner tendedto cook meals for themselves only.Of the nine couples who did not agree in their estimations of the breakdown

of the division of labour, at least three couples acknowledged that the femalepartner did most of the cooking and another two acknowledged that the malepartner did the most, even if each partner’s respective estimations of the actualproportions differed somewhat. The other four couples could not even agree onwho did the most cooking, with one partner claiming that he or she shared thecooking equally and the other seeing it as far more one person’s responsibility.

The age of the participants also appeared to have an influence on cookingarrangements. Those couples in which it was agreed that the male partner didmost of the cooking tended to be younger: in three of the four couples bothpartners were aged 33 or less. The participants in the six couples where cookingwas equally shared had more of an age range, but in four of them the women andmen were younger than 45 years.

In the ten households where the male partner was not in paid employment,either because of unemployment or retirement, the (retired) older men were lesslikely to contribute significantly to cooking tasks than were the younger(unemployed) men. For the five older couples where the male partners had retiredfrom paid work, it was the case for four of them that the female partner (none ofwhom was in paid work) continued to take almost all responsibility for foodpreparation. The exception was one couple, where the woman was 62 and herpartner 82, who shared cooking equally. They differed from the other oldercouples, however, in having met late in life-their relationship was only two yearsold. There was a different pattern in the five younger couples where the malepartner was unemployed at the time of interview. In three of these couples, themale took equal or greater responsibility for cooking.A social class pattern (where education level and occupational status are used

as markers of class) was also evident among men who were in paid employment.Of these men, those who took more responsibility for cooking tended to bemiddle-class, with higher status and better paid occupations and universityeducated. These findings are consistent with recent research conducted in Britain,which suggests that married middle-class and younger men tend to participatemore in cooking than do working-class and older men (BVarde and Hetherington1994; Kemmer et al. 1998).

Ratianales for the division of labourAmong those couples where it was agreed by both that one of them took moreresponsibility than the other for food preparation, three dominant rationales were



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employed to justify this division of labour. They include the rationales of expertise,enjoyment and fairness. Each of these rationales is discussed in turn below.

The rationale of expertiseThe rationale of expertise was dominant in the participants’ explanations for whyone of them took major responsibility for food preparation. This rationale wasgenerally put forward in relation to women having greater expertise than men,and was articulated by both women and men from a range of occupations andeducation levels. The youngest participants in the sample, however, tended not touse this rationale as often as did the middle-aged or older participants.

In the interviews, those who did more than half of the cooking were asked ifthey would like their partner to contribute more. A reluctance about sharingresponsibility for cooking was evident in many women’s replies, citing as areason, for the most part, their partners’ lack of expertise. They said that their

partners could not be relied upon to simply ’do the job’ but required assistance.For example, Linda (aged 38) said that she does nearly all of the cooking, butdoesn’t want her partner to do more because ’he’s just not a very good cook. Imean, he’s okay, but you have to tell him what to do all the time. You might aswell do it yourself.’ Her partner, David (aged 42), gave a similar reason for whyLinda did most of the cooking: ’Because she’s better at it, I guess. I don’t know,she just does it.’ He said that he wouldn’t mind doing more cooking, butacknowledged that he required Linda’s assistance to do so: ’I’ll cook if she doesn’tfeel like cooking, which is very rare. And yeah, as long as she tells me what tocook and how to cook it, I’ll cook.’

In explaining why they continued to do all or most of the cooking, severalwomen laughingly represented their partners as utterly at a loss in the kitchen.Lorraine (41), for example, said that she would never want to relinquish cookingto her husband:

God no! He burns cliops! He cooks baked beans on number ten setting [on the stove]instead of number two. So all the baked beans are stuck to the bottom of the saucepanand you have to get a chisel and chisel them off after they’ve been soaking for four days.That’s usually Sunday, so by about %Vednesday, if I have half a day off on Wednesday, it’susually spent cleaning the pots from Sunday! He’s hopeless-that’s why I do the cooking.Some women referred to ’my’ kitchen, suggesting that they did not want

anyone else to enter into what they saw as their domain, over which they hadcontrol and in which they could display their competence. Lisa (36) said, forexample, that her partner would ’burn my kitchen down if he tried to cook’,noting further that: ’I accept that it’s my responsibility and we don’t argue overthat’. These attitudes have emerged in other studies on couples’ division of otherhousehold tasks, in which participants argued that women have greatercompetence and higher standards than their male partners (for example, Bittmanand Pixley 1997). It is often contended by women that, as a consequence, theyfind themselves having to remind their partners or instruct them in how to dotasks, which is often seen to be more trouble than it is worth.



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Men themselves often use their partners’ greater competence and their ownineptness in performing household tasks such as cooking and cleaning as a reasonfor the gendered division of domestic labour in their households (Bittman andPixley 1997: 164-5). This rationale was also commonly expressed in the currentstudy. As noted above, men who did little meal preparation often gave the reason,’she’s a better cook’ as an explanation of why their partner did most of thecooking in their household. These men often went on to note that their owncooking skills were very rudimentary when they got married, particularlycompared with those of their partners. Such men spoke of their ’lack ofconfidence’ in cooking. Jim (46), who estimated he did 20 per cent of the cooking(while his wife estimated his contribution to be much lower at 4 per cent), vividlydescribed his lack of competence and clumsiness in the kitchen in explaining whyhe left much of the work to his wife:

It’s not so much what do I dislike about it, I just haven’t got the coordination for it. I getsplattered with the fat if I’m cooking sausages or bacon or something, which I hate

immensely, as I’m sure everyone else does. If I cook an egg, it’s usually hard in the centreand I’m trying to make it soft, and the toast is burning and I’ve got something elseburning while I’m trying to make the tea or something. I just haven’t got thecoordination or something.

Such explanations for the division of labour in relation to food preparationrely not on assumptions about the ’naturalness’ of this division but rather onideas about gendered socialisation. The rationale of expertise presents cookingfor the family as the woman’s responsibility because she is better at it through hersocialisation as a woman and long years of practice, not because women areinherently better at or more suited to cooking.

The rationale of enjoymentIn giving another rationale for taking on the major responsibility for foodpreparation, many of the women said that they enjoyed cooking, and would notwant to relinquish the task for that reason. Unlike many other domestic tasks,cooking may be seen as more than just doing a boring and unpleasant job, butrather as a creative activity, a way of providing great pleasure and satisfaction foroneself and others. Middle-aged women, in particular, tended to employ therationale of enjoyment. Sandra (42), who cooks nearly all the family meals,commented, for example, that: ’It’s a real pleasure to be able to give something tosomeone that they enjoy that’s good for them. Like, you know, that’s actually lifegiving.’ Lorraine likened cooking to other creative pursuits:

I get a lot of pleasure out of cooking. I find it enjoyable and I love eating the end result.I like putting the ingredients together and finding the end composition. Like I imagine,like a writer writing a composition or writing a story. Finding the end result is somethingthat’s enjoyable for a lot of people.

This rationale was not confined to the female participants. Several men-. predominantly those who considered themselves to have expertise in cooking-

also enjoyed the opportunity it gave them to ’show off’ their skills and capacity



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for creativity and to please others. These men tended to be in middle-classoccupations and to be middle-aged or younger. For example, Graham (45), whoestimated that he cooks around 50 per cent of the meals in his family, said that ifhe had the time he would probably do more cooking. He liked the fact that:’You’re doing something positive. It’s probably, I don’t know, it’s nice playingwith food. Preparing it, creating something I guess.’ Giovanni (40) cooks most ofhis meals for himself as his partner is on a restricted diet. He is happy to do thisand to cook for guests, as cooking for him is:

just so creative. I will rarely consult a recipe. When I don’t know about a particular typeof food or the way to prepare it, I will consult a recipe, but it would be highly unlikelythat I stick to it, even at the very first jtage. I just love experimenting and that’s part ofthe creativity of cooking. When we have visitors coming along, I really try to preparesomething special. But I love cooking because it’s that added entertainment and

socialising value that goes with it. I just love the creativity of cooking.

Roslyn (44), whose 47-year-old partner Andrew takes most responsibility forthe preparation of meals, noted that the division of labour they had negotiatedworked out well for both. Both Roslyn and Andrew work full-time as medicalpractitioners and they have school-age children to feed. They had come to anarrangement in dealing with the hurly-burly of family evenings after work thatsuited their own preferences. As Roslyn commented:

Andrew has a busy day in the office and he just finds it very therapeutic to chopvegetables and prepare food. He can sip his wine and just concentrate on that andunwind. Dealing with the kids and all that drama and homework is too much for him,so I do that while he does the food. It works out quite well.

As Roslyn’s comments suggest, in some households there appeared to be littleproblematisation of or thought about the division of labour. The arrangementsseemed to suit both partners, even if one did far more cooking than the other.Those who adopted the rationale of enjoyment for explaining the division oflabour were particularly likely to see little reason to change their household’sarrangements. As 54-year-old Janice put it: ’I think it’s just, there’s a sense ofsatisfaction with a job well done.’

The rationale of fairness

Notions about the division of domestic labour between partners in relation totheir outside (paid) work were also employed by both female and male

participants when explaining food preparation arrangements in their household.This rationale was less commonly evoked than those of expertise and enjoyment,and was articulated by those people who undertook most of the cooking ratherthan their partners.

Several women, particularly those who were not currently in paid employment,said that they saw it as their responsibility to provide the meals for their husband.They believed that he worked hard at paid labour and did not deserve to have towork in the kitchen when he came home. This explanation echoes that found byMurcott (1983) in her studies of working-class women in South Wales in the



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1970s, who insisted that their husbands deserved to be able to relax and providedwith a cooked meal at the end of the working day.

Yvonne (46), who is not in paid work but studies full-time at university, wasone person who saw it as her ’duty’ to do all the cooking in the householdbecause she was no longer in paid employment but ’just’ at home. According toYvonne:

It doesn’t really worry me. I think it’s because when my husband and I had a business,I found it harder then, but before, when I was just at home raising the children, Iconsidered that was my job, you know, looking after the house. He was the one thatwent out and worked and I was the one who looked after the home and supplied food.

Similarly, Kylie (24), who described her occupation as ’home duties’, said thatideally she would like her partner to do all the cooking, because she finds it a

chore. However, she went on to add that she would not ask or expect him to doso, ’because I don’t think it’s fair. Because he works and looks after the kids. Andhe does his fair share and it’s not fair that I should be greedy.’

It should be noted that, here again, this rationale was not confined to women,although more of them employed it to explain their greater involvement in foodpreparation. It was also used by one man, Ian (33), who took primaryresponsibility for cooking. He noted that his partner worked longer hours than hedid, and that therefore his household’s division of labour was ’fine with me-it’snot an issue’. This man had clearly accepted the notion that domestic labourshould be apportioned to each partner according to the extent of hours they spentin employment outside the home, regardless of gender.

Several people employing this rationale also tended to mention the constraintsimposed upon the partner in paid work who could not arrive home in time toprepare the family dinner, while the other partner, often a woman at home, hadmore time available to do so. For example, Anne (32), noted that she does all thecooking and would like her partner Martin (33), to do more. But she has toaccept that his work takes precedence:We don’t have disagreements or arguments over it I suppose. Only the point when I say,’Hey, one night a week [cooking a meal] wouldn’t be too bad for you.’ And his reply isusually ’Well yeah, I could if I could just pinpoint the night that you want me to do it andit stuck that way.’ But it won’t stay that way. Things fluctuate too much with his work.

Martin, for his part, articulates the same rationale to the interviewer for whyAnne does all the cooking: ’Because she’s at home and has more set hours to dowith the children than what I do. I’m not home at four o’clock every day. I mightbe home at four o’clock one day and six o’clock the next. I can’t change it.’

These explanations for the division of labour were often underpinned byassumptions about the value of paid versus unpaid labour. For Yvonne, forexample, her full-time university studies were not accorded the status of the paidlabour that her partner undertakes. Therefore she feels it proper that she should

reciprocate by preparing the meals and providing other domestic support. Whenboth partners in the couple work full-time, this rationale cannot be employed. In‘these instances, either the other two rationales detailed above tended to come intoplay to explain unequal division of labour, or else disputes occurred.



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Disputes over the division of labourThere was little indication from the findings that domestic arrangements aboutcooking were a source of significant marital disagreement. Most couplesappeared to have settled into a pattern of food preparation that both partnerswere happy with, at least for most of the time. As the discussion above

demonstrates, much of the disquiet that participants who had most responsibilityfor cooking may have entertained was dispelled or at least reduced through theuse of one or more of the three major rationales.

There were, however, a small number of women interviewed in the study,mostly from younger age groups, who chafed somewhat at the responsibility ofhaving to prepare most of the meals, and this resulted in disputes with theirpartners. For example, Tracey (21), who is working at home caring for her smallchild, said that she would prefer it if her partner Gavin (20), who works full-timeas a labourer, ’helped out more’. She estimated that Gavin did only one per centof the cooking. She said that she sometimes gets fed up and makes a scene: ’It’llbe like, Gavin will say &dquo;BX1here’s me dinner?&dquo; and I’ll say, &dquo;Well, you know wherethe bloody kitchen is!&dquo;’ Gavin, for his part, said of the division of labour in hishousehold (where he estimates that he does 25 per cent of the cooking) that:

I think it’s a very sexist way, but I think it’s because my partner is a girl, ultimately it’sbecause she’s a girl. But then because she does cook better than me and has had moreexperience. But ultimately I think because she’s a girl.

Gavin asserted that he wouldn’t mind doing ’his fair share’ of the cooking andthat indeed he should do so. He admitted that Tracey sometimes criticised him fornot doing more. But this criticism, and his own acknowledgment that the cookingarrangements are ’sexist’ and he should contribute more, did not seem tomotivate him to actually engage to a greater extent in the household’s foodpreparation. When Tracey is particularly vocal in complaining about his lack ofeffort, Gavin said, he will make the dinner that night, but nothing changes inrelation to how much he cooks on a regular basis.

As this suggests, awareness of ’sexism’ or inequality in domestic labourarrangements on the part of the male partner in a couple is clearly not enough forchange to occur. Some men responded to their partner’s occasional assertion thatthey do some cooking for a change with the suggestion of getting a takeaway mealor, less commonly, dining out. Others had their ’special’ meals or dishes that theyprepared, perhaps once a week on a certain day (often breakfast on the weekends,but sometimes dinner) or when they ’felt in the mood’ to do their special dish (seesimilar findings by Charles and Kerr 1988 and DeVault 1991). These concessions,however, are largely token, doing little to ease the burden of responsibility for mostmeals carried by these men’s partners.

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A few of the men who took major responsibility for cooking the family’s mainmeal also sometimes became resentful, occasionally employing the notion ofcooking as a female responsibility to attempt to persuade their partner to domore. For example, Danielle (25), whose partner Jay (28) makes the familydinner most nights, said that he sometimes gets annoyed with her: ’He tells meI’m lazy and it’s a woman’s job to do the cooking. He’ll say to our daughter, &dquo;I’d



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better get up and cook you something to eat because your mother’s not and you’llstarve!&dquo;’ Notions about the links between femininity, motherhood and providingmeals for the family are clearly enunciated in Jay’s criticisms of Danielle. It wouldappear, however, that such claims are not enough to persuade Danielle to take onmore responsibility for preparing family meals. Neither Danielle nor Jay is in paidemployment, although she takes most responsibility for caring for their youngdaughter and clearly expects Jay to ’do his bit’ by preparing the meals.

DiscussionThe findings of the study support in several ways previous research carried out inAnglophone countries into food arrangements in heterosexual couples and

families, particularly those that highlight the continuing dominant role played bywomen in preparing meals for their partners and children. In the present study,however, there was little evidence of what DeVault (1991) refers to as the‘traditional’ view to gendered division of labour in the preparing of meals whichshe identified among some of her American respondents in the 1980s. Nor wasthere evidence that women or men ’took it for granted that cooking was women’swork’, as Murcott (1983: 78) reported of her female BVe1sh respondentsinterviewed in the 1970s. In very few couples in my study, with perhaps theexception of the older couples, or where women were working full-time in thehome, was cooking seen as automatically the province of the female partner.Although the female participants did take more responsibility for cooking thanmen overall, in almost one-third of the couples it was reported that men tookresponsibility for at least half of the meal preparation.

The apparent consent of many of the women in the study to taking on moreresponsibility for cooking and the lack of continuing conflict between partners inmost of the couples about this may be explained in various ways. The rationale ofexpertise allowed several couples to explain this division of labour in terms of skilldistinctions rather than in terms of overt gender distinctions (although skill

development was linked to gendered socialisation). The rationale of fairness wasalso a dominant way of explaining the apparent inequitable division of labouramongst the participants in the present study. This rationale has been employed inprevious studies of the division of labour in the home. Dempsey (1997) notes thatit is not simply male resistance that underlies the continuing unequal distribution ofdomestic labour but women’s own ambivalence about pressing their partners forchange. He observes that: ’An inequitable distribution of housework persists in partbecause most wives do not think that their husbands are overloading them withunpaid work’ (Dempsey 1997: 222). Indeed, three-quarters of the women he inter-viewed said that they thought that the division of labour in their household was fair(see also similar findings of an Australian sample in Baxter and Western 1998).

In a different explanation, Bittman and Pixley (1997: 169-70) suggest that theapparent mutuality of egalitarian principles shared by couples, paradoxically_combined with the continuing unequal division of labour in which women do mostof the housework, tends not to be acknowledged by participants in interviews orsurveys. They argue that this is the case because in the interests of marital harmony



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it is difficult for women to express their frustration or resentment with their

partner’s lack of willingness to share domestic labour more equally. Further, suchfrustrations tend to be submerged in everyday married life as well as in people’sresponses to social researchers. If this argument is accepted, it may be surmisedthat many of the participants in the present study, although they were interviewedin the absence of their partner, were loath to recount instances of marital

disharmony over food preparation arrangements to the interviewer, accounting forthe apparent low level of conflict expressed in the interviews.

Bittman and Pixley’s argument represents one perspective influenced by feministcritiques, in which the power differentials inherent in heterosexual relationshipsare regarded as benefiting the male rather than the female partner and thatmarriage is regarded as a fundamental site for the reproduction and playing out ofgender inequality and the oppression of women. It is also put forward, forexample, in Charles and Kerr (1988) and DeVault (1991) in relation to domesticarrangements over food preparation. Such critics have assumed that women’sgreater participation in domestic tasks such as cooking the family meals is alwaysevidence of gender inequality.

Not all feminists, however, subscribe to this perspective. Some feminist criticshave argued that women’s continued responsibility for such household tasks ascooking for the family is not simply a matter of their oppression by men or theinability to acknowledge conflict, but rather is deeply associated with women’sown active desire to exert control over the domestic domain. They claim thatdomestic labour is not necessarily experienced by those who undertake it as

uniformly unpleasant. Cooking, and tasks involving caring for infants or smallchildren, are often interpreted by those (predominantly women) who do them asintrinsically satisfying, creative, self-fulfilling, enjoyable and part of a lovingrelationship. This perspective does not necessarily, or for the most part, see suchtasks as ’labour’ or ’work’. Indeed, women may resist their partners attemptingto take over such tasks (see, for example, Urwin 1985 on women’s attitudestowards caring for young children). This was the case for many of the women inmy study, particularly those who employed the rationale of enjoyment for whythey undertook most of the cooking.

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One reason put forward for the pleasure women may experience in cooking fortheir partner or family relates to the inherently female meanings of food andcooking themselves (Murcott 1983; Blaxter and Paterson 1983; Lupton 1996;Furst 1991, 1997). Some feminist philosophers have referred to the mode of’maternal thinking’ that characterises the orientation to the world of women whocare for children. ’Maternal thinking’ involves a certain way of relating to others,one that goes beyond a concern with the self to a concern with others and in which’others’ responses serve as an intrinsic and primary measure of achievement’(Ruddick 1994: 34). Preparing food for others as a caring practice may be seen tobe a part of ’maternal thinking’. From the provision of nutrients across theplacenta on to breast milk and then cooked meals, food is seen to be strongly

,

linked to the female body and the maternal role. The kitchen itself has beentraditionally culturally coded as a ’feminine’ space and linked to feminine genderidentities far more strongly than it is to masculinities (Bell and Valentine 1997: 72).



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Furst (1997) argues that this linking of femininity, cooking and the kitchen neednot be assessed as negative. Rather, cooking and food provision may be interpretedas positively related to particular forms of positive feminine subjectivity andrationality. As found in the present study, cooking meals for one’s partner or familyis often seen by women as demonstrating their love and affection, indeed as a giftwhich bestows pleasure, including upon the person who cooks (see also Charles andKerr 1988; Lupton 1996). Thus, even for women who are not mothers, cooking forothers such as one’s partner may be experienced as a practice of femininity.

However, as Ruddick points out, ’maternal thinking’ need not be linked togender: men as well as women can adopt it via caring practices, as long as theyengage in them intensely enough. Indeed, the findings outlined above, as well asthe recent British research of BVarde and Hetherington (1994) and Kemmer et al.(1998), suggest somewhat of a weakening in the gendering of assumptions aboutwho should cook and a disruption in notions that cooking the family meals(particularly the main meal of the day) is necessarily a woman’s job. Several menas well as women saw cooking as an intensely creative activity, and enjoyed givingpleasure to others through their efforts. This would suggest that in Australia andother Western countries, the kitchen is no longer coded exclusively as a femininedomain and family meals as the product of women’s labour only.

As no comparable studies of couples living in Australian urban areas have beenpublished, it is difficult to draw conclusions about how the rural location of thecouples interviewed for the present study may have influenced the findings. It hasbeen contended that gender relations in rural Australian families, particularlythose on the land, tend to be more patriarchal than amongst the metropolitanmiddle-class (see, for example, Alston 1998). If it is accepted that people living inrural communities are more conservative in their attitudes and social relations thanare those living in large cities (and certainly the couples’ food choices andpreferences were largely conservative (see Lupton 2000)), then perhaps the de-feminising of cooking has progressed to an even greater degree in urban Australiancouples and families. Future research efforts might usefully direct attention todocumenting food preparation arrangements across a range of locations.

Note&dquo;This research was funded by a NHMRC grant awarded to the author.

ReferencesAlston, M. (1998) Tarm Women and Their Work: Why is it Not Recognised?’ Journal of

Sociology 34(1): 23-34.Australian Bureau of Statistics (1999) Australian Social Trends 1999 Canberra: Australian

Government Publishing Service.Baxter, J. and M. Western (1998) ’Satisfaction with Housework: Examining the Paradox’

Sociology 32(1): 101-20. Bell, D. and G. Valentine (1997) Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat London:

Routledge.Bittman, M. and J. Pixley (1997) The Double Life of the Family: Myth, Hope and

Experience Sydney : Allen and Unwin.



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Blaxter, M. and E. Paterson (1983) ’The Goodness Is Out of It: The Meaning of Food toTwo Generations’ in A. Murcott (ed.) The Sociology of Food and Eating Aldershot:Gower: 95-105.

Charles, N. and M. Kerr (1988) Women, Food and Families Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press.

Dempsey, K. (1997) ’Trying to Get Husbands to Do More Work at Home’ Australian andNew Zealand Journal of Sociology 33(2), 216-26.

DeVault, M. (1991) Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as GenderedWork Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Furst, E. (1991) ’Food, Identity and Gender: A Story of Ambiguity’ in E. Furst, R. Prattala,M. Ekstrom, L. Holm and U. Kjaernes (eds) Palatable Worlds: Sociocultural FoodStudies Oslo: Solum Forlag: 111-30.

Furst, E. (1997) ’Cooking and Femininity’ Women’s Studies International Forum 20(3):441-9.

Jansson, S. (1995) ’Food Practices and Division of Domestic Labour: A ComparisonBetween British and Swedish Households’ The Sociological Review 43(3): 462-77.

Kemmer, D., A. Anderson and D. Marshall (1998) ’Living Together and Eating Together:Changes in Food Choice and Eating Habits During the Transition from Single toMarried/Cohabiting’ The Sociological Review 6(1): 48-72.

Lupton, D. (1996) Food, the Body and the Self London: Sage.Lupton, D. (2000) ’The Heart of the Meal: Food Preferences and Habits among Rural

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Social Science Information 21(4/5): 677-96.Murcott, A. (1983) "’It’s a Pleasure to Cook for Him": Food, Mealtimes and Gender in

Some South Wales Households’ in E. Gamarnikow, D. Morgan, J. Purvis and D.Taylorson (eds) The Public and the Private London: Heinemann: 78-90.

Ruddick, S. (1994) ’Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth’ in D. Bassin, M. Honey and M.Kaplan (eds) Representations of Motherhood New Haven: Yale University Press:29-45.

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