Abstract

Currently, Research on the division of household labor for male veterans in Taiwan is scanty. This paper attempts to explore how they construct and mold their gender roles for their careers of military servicemen who have long-term highlighting everything in a patriarchal masculinity manner, to understand how they display on their division of housework, and to analyze what factors affecting their taking part in their household division of labor.

Interviewing with nine male veterans who re-enter the workplace, the research found that their gender role attitudes are interactively influenced by the following factors-- their original family, their military dependents' community culture, military experiences, and workplace accommodation. Thus, for the division of housework, the veterans show the bipolar types—“the traditional rigid division of gender roles” and “swing in the traditional and the modern division of gender roles.” Therefore, in the division of household labor, there are multi-appearances-- “wife tradition, husband tradition”, “borderline's limited participation”, “partnership”, “negotiation between husband and wife”, and “modern wife, modern husband”.

Moreover, sharing “the second shift” is based on the factors including the military compensation psychology, spouse gender intensity, spouse economic contributions, family commitments, observation of a negative family impact on children, housework preference, life cycle, childhood housework participation, marital intimacy, and time at home.