Doing Gender with Class: Gender Division of Unpaid Work in Russian Middle-Class Dual Earner Heterosexual Households

Abstract

This article is concerned with examining the relation between gender division of unpaid work and class. Drawing on in-depth interviews with middle-class dual earner heterosexual couples conducted in Russia, I show how the gender division of housework and care could be shaped by processes of accountability not only to sex category (“doing gender”) but also to class category (“doing class”). I discuss how my interviewees perceived various gender contracts that have evolved in post-socialist Russia as profoundly classed. I further show how their resulting understandings of middle-class (in)appropriate ways of doing masculinity and femininity influenced the division of work in their families. Men were not only accountable as breadwinners but also as carers; while women, in addition to their caring roles, were accountable for their career and sex appeal. In several couples, this double gender and class accountability underpinned their comparatively more equal—although not necessarily more egalitarian—gender division of housework and care.