Drawing upon anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives, this volume provides a unique insight into women’s domestic consumption. The contributors argue that domestic consumption represents an important lens through which to examine the everyday production and reproduction of socio-economic relations. Through a variety of case studies (such as gambling, wedding day consumption and bedroom décor), the essays explore and reconsider the nature of public and private spaces, and the subsequent nature of domestic space - often by challenging traditional notions of what constitutes ’the domestic’. The volume demonstrates the broad range of experiences that domestic consumption offers women and reveals some of the complex meanings and motivations underpinning women’s consumption practices.

Homes are powerfully defined by smells, sounds, textures and objects, all of which reflect how people live their everyday lives. From spray-painting the toilet wall to relaxing in the bath, the products we use speak volumes about who we are, how we relate to others and who we want to be. Based on extensive fieldwork, this fascinating book explores the intimate, material and sensory spaces of the home to uncover how gender roles are performed within our personal, private worlds. Pink shows how everyday items ranging from perfumes to soap powder imprint and reinforce daily experiences and a sense of identity. How has the home been affected by the fact that more and more women now go to work and increasingly more men spend time engaged in domestic tasks? How do more traditional family-centred homes compare with those belonging to diverse family forms and people living alone? What does a study of domestic gender tell us about how change occurs? Answering these questions and many more, Pink combines the most recent approaches in gender studies and material culture to show how everyday activities can be deeply revealing of gender roles in the 21st century.

This text explores men's and women's changing experiences of home. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary, comparative and historical material, it reassesses a range of mainstream sociological, historical and feminist interpretations of marriage, the family and home life. It looks in depth at the relationship between men's and women's paid work, consumption and leisure; and at other household forms, including gay/lesbian households, older people, single people and communal living.

Drawing on cases, Stark identifies the problems with our current approach to domestic violence, outlines the components of coercive control, and then uses this alternate framework to analyse the cases of battered women charged with criminal offenses directed at their abusers.

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

In this exciting new study Tim Meldrum explores the "real lives" of domestic servants. From close examination of court records and other documentary evidence, he has reconstructed the lives of ordinary domestic servants in London. A revealing account of life below the stairs, the gendered nature of domestic service, how different members of the household interacted with one another, it makes a valuable contribution to the "separate spheres" debate.

In Dividing the Domestic, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of "who does what" needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.