Patterns of traditional patriarchal norms often began in families of origin when children were growing up where girls helped out and male family members benefited. This taken for granted practice then formed a backdrop for how later roles were worked out and enacted. Acceptance was not unusual when practices tended to
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perpetuate the notion that gender roles were natural rather than socially constructed within gendered divisions in households (Tilly and Scott, 1978; Oakley, 1981). In the interviews participants discussed their experiences of gendered food work both within their family of origin and later when they formed adult relationships and had children. As their accounts reflect their own experiences and trajectory across the life course, a varied picture emerges.
When recalling mealtimes as they grew up, a set order of seating and girls helping serve the meal was part of some interviewees’ experience. Older and younger women spoke of their father having a particular seat, usually at the head of the table, from which he maintained order and compliance during mealtimes. Girls were expected to help out whereas boys were not, and were treated differently by virtue of being male. Cora (3) an older woman recalls the distinct difference in how females were treated at mealtimes; ‘There was a pecking order. My father was always served first, then my brothers, and it was always the girls, it was the girls that served them and then we sat down with my mother to eat’. But we all sat together like, around the table and ate our meals’
Nessa (25) a young mother with one child was also brought up in a household where she experienced distinct differences in the way girls were treated as secondary to the males in the family.’ My dad always had his seat, my brother had his seat , I don’t remember having a seat like, but I don’t know what it is with the men, but that is where they sat, and you were put out if you were sitting in it, if you did sit in’.
The contradictory nature of the different treatment of children was perpetuated by her mother who also colluded in the distinction;
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‘Mam made us independent but she always, she still irons for my brother, my little brother is twenty two still lives at home…. She made us very independent women, but her sons were her sons’.
Similarly, Sara (32) an older mother, explained that food was also provided with gendered distinctions;
‘Oh they always got the best of everything… it would have started we’ll say with Daddy, he would have got the best piece of meat, the biggest piece and down along the lads, by the time it got to the girls at the bottom,’
When asked if the boys ever helped out as they got older, the emphasis on household and cooking skills was reserved for females displaying a clear line of demarcation between the sexes in relation to this work, where a path of distinct roles operated. “That was just for the girls [laughter] the boys were busy going off and things like that. They would never need any sort of skills in that way. But funny enough they actually were good at cooking, you know,”
When discussing how caring responsibilities were worked out in their own lives, some of the older participants expressed a sense of inevitability in relation to
gendered work in the past. Patricia (1), Aine (2), Eve (4), Avril (8) , Rosa (9), Sonia (6) and Joan (17), all followed and at least partly accepted what they saw as the established order and realities of family life when they got married and had children (Parsons and Bales, 1956). The skills associated with cooking were primarily seen as the work of females’, as part of the way family life was structured in the past, and this pattern was replicated for many women when they married and had children. When I asked who in the household typically did the cooking when she got married and whether or not it was discussed, Patricia (1) explained, that the role of food provision just automatically became hers on marriage in line with what were seen as appropriate gendered roles, despite her husband’s ability (and perhaps willingness) to share the work; “It was just something that happened. I think it’s, you know most people think
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it’s the women, the woman, that’s her job to do the cooking and the cleaning and stuff, even though the husband’s great at cleaning and stuff like that”
For Aine (2) this was also her experience, one she accepted as the norm, ‘It was just the way. Well I was at home with the kids. A year after I married I had the first and then a year later I had the second one…where he worked shifts, so I mean he wasn’t home at the same time every day… so I cooked and that was just the way it was’ Sonia (6) initially had little interest cooking when she was working and her first child was fed in the crèche. She began to cook when she gave up work after her second child was born and she gave up paid employment. ‘When the kids came along and after my second child, I stopped working and I learned to cook as a necessity because someone had to cook. I had two children to feed and that is the reason I learned to cook’.
In contrast to the sense of inevitability and acceptance by some of the respondents Magda (21) a young mother with three children from outside Ireland showed a strong level of frustration and unease that on marriage to an Irish husband all work related to household was hers from the beginning. As she was brought up in a household in which men participated in cooking and caring duties, the entrenched gendered roles in Ireland was a shock. ‘It was just assumed. I am the one at home so I am the one who has to think of what meals are cooked and you know things like that…even when I was working, yet it was always me’.
For Magda (21) , Nessa (25), Emma,(26) and Connie (28) as young parents the reality of full-time caring is part of what they experience as an unequal division of labour which constrains their wish to participate fully in all facets of society. Their views and concerns are discussed later in the chapter.
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Alternatively, Alison, (16) a young mother with one child, and working part-time, willingly took on full responsibility for feeding her family and general household work. She identifies with the role and believes it is part of her gendered make up as a woman rather than having been socialised into it;
“Because we are just programmed like that [laughter]. I think we are made like that, you know… I honestly think we are genetically made that way…And then maybe it is handed down through the generations that really it is your job to make sure everyone is ok and fed well, you know”.
She also displays an understanding of gender roles that comply with a division of labour in which women take on responsibility for all emotional and physical labour associated with maintaining an ideal family life, whereas her husband attends to the outdoor work (Oakley, 1981; Delphy and Leonard 1992).
‘I suppose well if I don’t do it and if Sean is working shifts no one would eat properly for starters… would everyone come together as a family unit then. It’s about; I think the woman creates the home, the atmosphere in the home… If I didn’t do any of that they would eat rubbish and maybe we wouldn’t all sit down together’
Carl (10) one of three male participants, has one pre-school child and also takes full responsibility for food work and caring while his partner works full-time. He had an expectation of a sharing this responsibility as he works at weekends but it has not occurred. His perspective is discussed in detail in Chapter Seven.
This snapshot of the gendered reality of a division of labour for some of the
participants interviewed reveals a familial past that held some common experience for them, across different age categories, and circumstances. Their perspectives based on an unequal division of labour between men and women echo the findings of early food provision studies of Charles and Kerr (1988), Murcott, (1982), on cooking in
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families showing a hierarchy of gendered work allocation supporting a continuity of inequality for females and a sense of privilege for males in a contemporary context.