Homemaking
[citation needed] In North America, early 19th-century ideals required homemaking be the responsibility of the woman; "the wife is properly supposed to be the light and centre of the home.
"[2] Traditional wives who stayed home and did not work for pay were required by social ideals to create and maintain a peaceful space to provide to her husband and children.
"[2] Author of these statements, Annie Swan was not alone in the late 1800s viewpoint that women were encouraged, if not required, to maintain the home solely themselves.
Darlene Piña and Vern Bengtson who are anthropologists and professors at the University of Southern California, extensively researched marriage dynamics and household labor in the late twentieth century.
West and Zimmerman, concluded an analysis of over 487 couples and found that "women were rewarded for performing feminine behaviors, such as housework, whereas men receive positive reinforcement for engaging in masculine tasks, such as breadwinning.
Hochschild's study directly debunked the previous theory that women performed housework because they contributed significantly less to household income.
Instead, the results of the study indicated that even in marriage dynamics where women contributed more than half of the household income, they still completed the vast majority of homemaking tasks.
This significant group of married women felt that household labor reinforced their female gender identity and connection to femininity.
[citation needed] Sex and gender continue to shape the division of household responsibilities in the United States in the twenty-first century.
Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that fathers were more likely than mothers to say that chores were evenly split between both partners (56% vs. 46%).
[7] In a 2008 article, social scientists Susan L. Brown and Sayaka Kawamura reported that the unequal distribution in housework was attributed mainly to time availability.
They concluded: "wives typically work fewer hours than their husbands, [so] they have more time available to perform household tasks.
[8] Housekeeping includes the budget and control of expenditures, preparing meals and buying food, paying the heat bill, and cleaning the house.
The process encompasses a vast range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to alter the flavor, appearance, texture, or digestibility of food.
Factors affecting the outcome include the variability of ingredients, ambient conditions, tools, and the skill of the individual doing the actual cooking.
Applying heat to a food usually, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus changing its flavor, texture, consistency, appearance, and nutritional properties.
Outdoor housecleaning chores include removing leaves from rain gutters, washing windows, sweeping doormats, cleaning the pool, putting away lawn furniture, and taking out the trash.
In some parts of the world, including the US, Canada, and Switzerland, apartment buildings and dormitories often have laundry rooms, where residents share washing machines and dryers.
Most dryers consist of a rotating drum called a tumbler through which heated air is circulated to evaporate the moisture from the load.
Homemakers that follow preventive maintenance methods ensure that household equipment and the house are in satisfactory operating condition by providing for inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects.
In autumn, lawns are mown by homemakers at a lower height and thatch build-up that occurs in warm season grasses are removed.
Lawn care in the winter is minimal, requiring only light feedings of organic material, such as green-waste compost, and minerals to encourage earthworms and beneficial microbes.
Household management by the homemaker is the act of overseeing the organizational, financial, and day-to-day operations of a house or estate.
"Cleaning up your mess" might involve removing glasses, eating utensils or gadgets i.e. toys from the living room if you have eaten a meal there in front of the television.
Sometimes as happens in Asian households, the items are necessary, but the home is simply too small, and ingenious methods are needed to organize everything to minimize unsightly clutter.
Compressed natural gas is used in rural homes without connections to piped-in public utility services, or with portable grills.
[17] Goods and services created by households are generally consumed within the same country, and hence contribute in a "Domestic Consumption" category in national accounts.
[18] The International Wages for Housework Campaign was a global, social movement co-founded in 1972 in Padua, Italy, by author and activist Selma James.
The Campaign was formed to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the base of all industrial work and to stake the claim that these unavoidable tasks should be compensated as paid, wage labor.
Modern parents also more frequently transport their children to after-school activities, and doctors no longer make house calls.
