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Data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young and Mature Women are used to test both static and dynamic models of the division of household task responsibility. Static results provide weak support for both the time availability and the powerlearnings perspectives. Changes in wife's hours worked or earnings over a tuvo- or three-year period lead to adjustments in task division, although the unequal starting point for that division leads one to question economists' view of its rationality. Women's responsibilities for housework and child care are emerging as central to their continuing low status in industrialized societies. While the consequences of this unequal and, to many, inequitable division of labor are clearly pervasive (Coverman), its source and determinants at the individual level are still under investigation. Attempts to explain divisions of household labor have included the recently formulated New Home Economics (Becker), and sociological research, which emphasizes less rational features of family life. For the most part, the implicit models tested in the resulting empirical research have been static. Current divisions of labor have been predicted from both unchanging family and individual characteristics (such as education and race) and from current values of potentially changeable factors (such as wife's employment). Further, economic theory assumes that households make rapid adjustments to a changing environment (Berk and Berk,b), but no one has attempted to determine whether such adjustments really occur. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to suggest two research hypotheses which emerge as most salient from previous re
Glenna Spitze (Sat,) studied this question.