One preoccupation of the sociology of industrial work has been the causes of job dissatisfaction. What accounts for the fact that some workers are satisfied, while others are not? The difference cannot simply be dismissed as a question of personality, since certain patterns of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction seem to be associated with particular kinds of jobs. Thus jobs which involve social interaction with other workers are generally more satisfying than socially isolated work; monotonous, repetitive work is more likely to be linked with job dissatisfaction than more varied work; jobs which involve responsibility and the ability to organize work time and work methods are generally preferred over those which lack these qualities, and so forth.1 It would seem that one source of industrial discontent in the modern world is the structure and content of work itself.

This is a general conclusion. But does it apply to the case of the housewife? Answers given by the forty women in the sample to questions about work tasks suggest that certain characteristics of housework may be more or less uniformly experienced as dissatisfying while others are potentially rewarding. A look at the social class dimension also indicates that there is a considerable area of shared response to housework which may reflect on the nature of the work itself, and the conditions under which it is done. Hence it would seem both helpful and important to examine a number of aspects of work that industrial sociology has highlighted as critical in the explanation of job satisfaction. These are the experiences of monotony, fragmentation and excessive pace in work and social interaction patterns. Two other dimensions of work which have been found less important in the case of the industrial worker are also looked at in this chapter: working hours and the technical environment.

1 Monotony, fragmentation and excessive pace

A common charge levelled against housework is that it is inherently monotonous and repetitive. Although the tasks that make up housework are dissimilar, there is said to be a ‘sameness’ about them which derives from their frequent need to be repeated, their lack of intrinsic meaning, and the impermanence of the goals they achieve.