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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