Based on research carried out for a doctoral dissertation in sociology, including interviews with forty British mothers of pre-school children, this book carefully differentiates housework, "unpaid domestic labour", from wifehood and motherhood, and points out and questions "the socially imposed tie between femininity and domesticity". ... Housework itself she considers to have beeen denigrated and trivialized in sociological study; here is a full analysis of what it entails.