Love and Housework

Jessica Valenti reads USA Today's writeup of a study concluding that married women do more housework than do cohabiting women, and concludes that she may have to stay single.

I'm not so sure that the study is really showing a causal connection here. It seems very plausible that the cohabiting sample going to contain people who are less tradition-minded than does the married sample. Married people are also probably more likely to have children than are are cohabiters and one can much more easily understand why the presence or absence of children might cause a shift in the housework burden (which isn't to say that one should endorse this dynamic) than why marriage, as such, should cause a shift.

Photo by Flickr user Rick Takagi used under a Creative Commons license