Most housewives are married women. On a national scale, one British survey of women's work came up with a figure of ninety-two per cent for the proportion of housewives who are married. (A further six per cent were divorced or widowed.) Legal definitions current in our culture tie the status of ‘wife’ to the role of unpaid domestic worker. The husband is legally entitled to unpaid domestic service from his wife, and this is a right that courts of law uphold. National insurance and social security systems are based on the presumption that married women are financially dependent housewives, and income tax regulations take the same view; for example, because ‘wife’ means ‘housewife’, neither partner in a marriage can claim against tax the cost of paying a housekeeper. These legal constraints are, of course, supported by other economic, social and psychological pressures which weight the balance firmly in favour of the equation ‘wife equals housewife’.

This cheerless picture of inequality is contradicted by a number of studies of marriage published over the last ten years or so. Ronald Fletcher's The Family and Marriage (1962) and Husbands and Wives by Robert Blood and Donald Wolfe (1960) are two of the earlier works in this genre; Michael Young and Peter Willmott's The Symmetrical Family (1973) is one of the most recent to appear. In general these books stress the equality of husband and wife in marriage today, compared with the situation in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. They attach a great deal of importance to the legal emancipation of women and to the growth in the proportion of married women employed outside the home – now nearly half, as opposed to a fifth in the early 1950s. The area of the division of labour in the home has received rather less attention by comparison, but the general consensus of opinion is that husbands now participate much more than they used to: