Out of the conceptualization of housework as work which is a major theme of this study arises the need to spell out the different components in what is broadly termed women's ‘domesticity’. One of the most important of these is the concept of overall satisfaction with housework. Other components relate to attitudes to housework and the perceived status of housewifery. The discussion in this chapter has a twofold purpose. On the one hand the aim is to describe patterns of domesticity in the present sample of housewives. But these findings are also tied in with assertions about social class differences in domesticity which abound in much of the literature dealing with women's place in the family.

Various authors have suggested or claimed that working-class women are satisfied with housework while middle-class women are not. For example, the psychological dilemmas of women's two roles discussed in the late 1950s by Myrdal and Klein are said by them to affect only the minority of educated middle-class women. Discontent with the traditional role of housewife is seen as a middle-class prerogative. In The Family and Social Change, an account of kinship in a South Wales town, Rosser and Harris make a similar assertion, that ‘for a variety of reasons’ the ‘domesticity’ of working-class wives is higher than that of their middle-class counterparts. Strangely, they do not examine these reasons, although the level of feminine domesticity is a crucial link in their argument about the existence of close-knit kinship networks in working-class communities. Mirra Komarovsky, in her study of American Blue Collar Marriage, finds that higher education is correlated with a ‘less favourable’ attitude to housewifery, and a number of other studies back up this contention as applied to the American scene.

None of these writers looks at housework satisfaction; the notion of feminine domesticity is undefined and usually rather vague. The categorization of social class used in these studies is the conventional one based on husband's occupation. For the present sample the relationship between housework satisfaction and social class assessed in this way is shown in Table 4.1.

The concept of ‘satisfaction with housework’ follows the concept of ‘work’ or ‘job’ satisfaction as used in the sociology of industry and paid work; it represents an overall assessment of the degree to which housewives are positively or negatively oriented to their work.