Leisure, Busy work and Housekeeping: 
A Note on the Unequal Division of Labor by Sex 
Judith K. Brown 
I will attempt to apply the formulations of Lévi-Strauss (1956) con 
cerning the division of labor by sex to data from certain societies in which this 
division is markedly unequal. Lévi-Strauss suggested that the division of 
labor by sex should be regarded as a series of prohibitions. Each society arbi 
trarily assigns certain tasks to one sex while prohibiting them to the other. I 
would like to qualify this statement in two ways. First, such prohibitions are 
hardly restricted to tribal and peasant societies. Consider our own emotional 
attitudes when a man knits or hangs out the family wash or a woman tunes the 
motor of a car. No one is jailed or fined for such a breach. The prohibitions are 
internalized and do not require external sanctions 4 
Second, task assignments are not entirely fortuitous. Murdock’s (1937) 
analysis of the cultural task assignment by sex, in a cross-cultural study of 
224 societies, must be used to qualify Lévi-Strauss’s position. All the subsist 
ence activities, crafts and household tasks which Murdock examined could be 
ordered along a continuum: some were conducted more usually by women 
than by men ; some were conducted by both sexes equally; some were conducted 
more usually by men than by women ; and a few were conducted only by men. 
Murdock writes: “While a number of occupations are universally masculine, 
none is everywhere feminine” (1937: 553). In a previous paper (Brown 1970) I 
have examined the nature of subsistence activities and have suggested why 
some tasks are more usually performed by women. 
These qualifications do not detract from the basic soundness of Lévi- 
Strauss’s formulations. According to Lévi-Strauss, the prohibitions of tasks 
by sex result in the interdependence of the sexes and in making the condition 
* This paper was read at the Meetings of the Northeastern Anthropological 
Association held in Ottawa in 1969. 
1 Harrington (1970) has recently used the sex division of household tasks in our 
own society in a study of errors in sex identity in adolescent boys. 
Anthropos 68. 1973 
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