The term "second shift" from Hochschild's (1989) classic volume is commonly used by scholars to mean that employed mothers face an unequal load of household labor and thus a "double day" of work. We use two representative samples of contemporary U.S. parents with preschoolers to test how mothers employed fulltime and married to a full-time worker…

Revised estimates of the time married women spent in household work were made using data from the 1920s and 1960s. Results showed an overall decline from 7.35 hours per day in the 1920s to 6.31 hours in 1967-68. Household work by full-time homemakers declined by 7.5% to 6.84 hours per day; employed married women's household work declined to 5.13…

Examined time allotments to household, paid, and unpaid work for farm, rural nonfarm, and urban women. Findings from 2,100 two-parent, two-child families revealed no significant differences among groups in allocation of time to household work. Of three groups, farm women spent more time in unpaid work, and rural nonfarm women devoted most time to…