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 56