One unusual aspect of housework as a job is that it is combined with another job: child-rearer. The majority of housewives have children, and virtually all mothers are housewives. Throughout the previous chapters children have put in brief appearances in the guise of factors affecting the way housewives do their work. Children are mentioned as influencing the enjoyment of particular work tasks, for instance, and they appear to make a long working week more likely. They are also cited as a general source of frustration for the housewife as houseworker – her work is interrupted by the constant need to look after children. Satisfaction with housework is more likely when a woman's husband takes over some of the child-care burden; when this happens, the strain of combining the two roles is lessened. Since the object of the research was to find out about housework attitudes and satisfaction, the main focus of the interviews was not on women's feelings about child-care or their definitions of the maternal role. However, a small amount of material was collected in the course of the interviews on the subject of children, and this chapter is devoted to a brief discussion of it.

The child-care/housework combination, as previous chapters have implied, poses certain problems. But the contradiction is not simply that children are messy creatures who untidy the tidy house, and demand to be fed and played with while a meal is being cooked or a room cleaned. The two roles are, in principle, more fundamentally opposed. The servicing function is basic to housework; children are people. Child-care is ‘productive’; housework is not. Housework has short-term and repetitive goals; the house is cleaned today and again tomorrow, and so on, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ahead. Motherhood has a single long-term goal, which can be described as the mother's own eventual unemployment. A ‘successful’ mother brings up her children to do without her.

It was a criterion used in selecting the present sample that all the women interviewed should have at least one pre-school child. Altogether, the forty women are responsible for seventy-nine children, although three of these are children of a husband's previous marriage.