Women's domestic work is largely deemed to be a ‘labour of love’ and lacking any value outside the private family. This reflects an ‘ideology of domesticity’, whereby women's natural place is deemed to be in an imagined private sphere. In this paper, I examine the status of housework in the context of asserting property rights in the home upon relationship breakdown. Using Valverde's legal chronotope as a lens, I argue that the ideology of domesticity is not merely present in legal discourse, but also takes on material form through the spatiotemporal ordering of the home. Housework is spatially and temporally concealed behind the powerful veneer of the imagined ideal family home, with corresponding invisibility in the law. For domestic work to be acknowledged, the individual often has to demonstrate that her work transgresses boundaries between private and public. However, as I argue, this transgression is particularly difficult for women, who remain spatiotemporally anchored in the home.

中文翻译：

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跨越家庭的界限：女性家务工作法律地位的年代学分析

妇女的家务工作在很大程度上被认为是“爱的劳动”，在私人家庭之外没有任何价值。这反映了一种“家庭意识形态”，即女性的自然位置被认为是在一个想象的私人领域。在本文中，我在关系破裂时主张家庭财产权的背景下研究家务劳动的状态。以巴尔韦德的法律时间表为视角，我认为家庭意识形态不仅存在于法律话语中，而且还通过家庭的时空秩序呈现出物质形式。家务在空间和时间上都隐藏在想象中的理想家庭的强大外表之下，在法律上也相应地不可见。为了承认家庭工作，个人经常必须证明她的工作超越了私人和公共之间的界限。然而，正如我所说，这种越界对女性来说尤其困难，因为她们在时空上仍然锚定在家里。