A growing body of literature is currently drawing attention to the disadvantaged position of women in society today. Despite legal changes, smaller families and improved educational and employment opportunities over the last century or so, marked inequalities remain between the social and economic roles of men and women. The revival of organized feminism, in the form of the women's liberation movement, has attached a powerful polemic to these differences. It seems that the situation we are witnessing is neither the effect of a biological underpinning of sex roles, nor can it simply be seen as the persistence of institutional inequalities. Discrimination against women is still, of course, to be found in law, and it is codified in other institutional practices determining sex-differentiated rights and opportunities; but a more fundamental source of discrimination lies in the realm of social attitudes and beliefs. The reality of women's situation is daily constructed out of these attitudes: women are, in part, the way they are because of the way they are thought to be.

Thus one finds discrimination against women not only in society at large, but in the academic domain. This is particularly true of sociology, the ‘science’ that studies social reality. The counterpart to discrimination against women in society is sexism in sociology. In much sociology women as a social group are invisible or inadequately represented: they take the insubstantial form of ghosts, shadows or stereotyped characters. This issue of sexism has a direct relevance to the main topic of this book: a survey of housewives and their attitudes to housework which I carried out in London in 1971. The conventional sociological approach to housework could be termed ‘sexist’: it has treated housework merely as an aspect of the feminine role in the family – as a part of women's role in marriage, or as a dimension of child-rearing – not as a work role. The study of housework as work is a topic entirely missing from sociology. My survey departs from sociological tradition and takes a new approach to women's domestic situation by looking at housework as a job and seeing it as work, analogous to any other kind of work in modern society.