Indian women's experience of household labour: Oppression or personal fulfillment

This article examines the time spent by urban middle class women in household work with accompanying subjective states. Participants carried beeper watches for one week and reported their time spent in different activities with their subjective states, when signalled at random times. The findings reveal that women spend much more time doing household labour than their husbands, but they experience choice over these activities and do not experience them as aversive. Women often report feeling hurried, but do not feel less in control. Their emotional states neither suggest a high rate of distress, nor a high feeling of self-filfillment while doing family work.