The hidden work of coping: gender and the micro-politics of household consumption in times of austerity

Abstract

This article explores the coping strategies of women in 10 middle-class Italian families facing economic crisis. We investigate food provision revealing the ceaseless extra work that goes into meal preparation. Adopting anthropological theories of thrift and sacrifice, we unpack participants’ micro-coping strategies, observing their tendency to redirect resources towards their loved ones and abnegating their own needs for the greater good of the family. This sacrifice is done out of necessity, reinforcing traditional gender inequalities in the home. However, there is also evidence that women take pride in their coping, developing new competencies and maintaining control over meal provision and thus the wider patterning of family life. We explore the significance of recessionary times for the constitution of female subjectivities at home.

Keywords:

• austerity
• consumption
• family
• gender
• thrift
• sacrifice

Notes

¹ Despite the emergence of the popular image of the male cook through the success of international celebrity chefs (Brownlie & Hewer, 2007), this image is still yoked to the professional (and paid) realm of the restaurant. This masculine mode of cooking is usually framed in the language of art and aesthetics (Fine, 1995). Here cooking seems to be much more about leisure, pleasure and lifestyle (Adler, 1981; Coxon, 1983), and the more mundane practical considerations of family health and budgeting don’t often get a look-in.

² An example of an allocative system which perpetuates inequalities can be seen in the study by Commuri and Gentry (2005) which finds that couples organise their finances to include multiple pools. These pools are not necessarily used to create efficiencies but rather they are important symbolically, serving to ‘obfuscate income differences and, when necessary, enable the enactment of roles that resemble those in men as chief wage earner households’ (Commuri and Gentry, 2005, p. 192). This creative resource reallocation serves to mask symbolically the economic power of the woman and reproduce the normative ideal of the male partner as the primary economic provider.

³ Recent national data highlight that Italian women spend an average of 36 hours per week engaged in domestic work, compared with 11 hours by their male partners (OECD, 2013). On average Italian women spend more time per day on housework (an average of 5 hours) than women in the rest of Europe (an average of 4 hours). However, Italian men spend less time engaged in domestic work than the European average (an average of 1½ hours against the European average of 2 hours) (Eurostat, 2012).

⁴ Damocles is the main character of a legend in Tusculanae Disputationes by Cicerones. Damocles is a prince at the court of the tyrant Dionysius II in Syracuse during the fourth-century BC. Damocles and the tyrant decide to swap roles for a day. Dionysius II hangs a sword over Damocles’ head by a thin horsehair to teach him that privileges come with anxieties and responsibilities. At night Damocles enjoys a rich banquet, but when he discovers the sword he decides to terminate the swap and is happy to go back to his previous life. Today the expression ‘sword of Damocles’ is commonly used to describe situations which involve inevitable danger and the constant anxiety associated with it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benedetta Cappellini

Benedetta Cappellini is a lecturer in Marketing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are in food consumption, material culture and family consumption. She has published in referred journals including Journal of Business Research, The Sociological Review, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Advances in Consumer Research.

Alessandra Marilli

Alessandra Marilli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology and Political Studies, University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests are media consumption, media representation of gender and ethnicity and family consumption. She has held various research and teaching positions at the University of Florence and has recently concluded a European Union-funded research project on Italian media representations of immigrants.

Elizabeth Parsons

Elizabeth Parsons is a professor in Marketing and Consumer Research at the University of Liverpool Management School. Her research interests include consumer culture, critical marketing, and gender, identity and subjectivity at work. Recent co-edited books include Branded Lives: The Production and Consumption of Meaning at Work (Edward Elgar) and Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies (Sage). She is also co-editor of the journal Marketing Theory.