Au pairing and domestic labour
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
With her 1974 study The Sociology of Housework, Ann Oakley offered a comprehensive sociological study of women’s work in the home. Analysing interviews with urban housewives, she found that most women, regardless of class, were dissatisfied with housework. It was a finding that contrasted with prevailing perspectives, and a study that challenged the scholarly neglect of housework. Now that this landmark text has been reissued, Ann talks to Laurie Taylor about its significance and reflects on what has changed in the decades since it was published.
Also, Rosie Cox discusses her co-authored study of au pairing in the twenty first century, As an Equal? Drawing on detailed research, the book examines the lives of au pairs and the families who host them in contemporary Britain, arguing that au pairing has become increasingly indistinguishable from other forms of domestic labour. Revised repeat.
Producer: Alice Bloch
Transcript
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| 0:47.4 | Hello. |
| 0:48.3 | Two weeks ago the dishwasher suddenly stopped working. It's happily word away but left the plates as dirty as ever in technical terms it was completely knackered. |
| 1:02.0 | Quick, quick, do we have an emergency number? |
| 1:05.0 | I asked my partner. |
| 1:06.0 | Some sort of hotline. |
| 1:08.0 | But even as I knelt and cursed the dysfunctional machine, |
| 1:11.0 | my partner was gently pointing out that we were hardly facing an emergency. |
| 1:16.0 | After all, there was a viable alternative at hand. It was called washing up, but you don't want to go back to washing up, do you? |
| 1:27.0 | Even as I said those words, I knew I'd undermine my rather comfortable belief that as a perfectly |
| 1:32.1 | modern man, I more or less shared the |
| 1:34.7 | household duties with my female partner. I did after all take the rubbish down, |
| 1:40.2 | manage the television zapper and occasionally move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer. |
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