head of household
head of household This term conventionally refers to the senior male in any household, in the role of husband and (perhaps) father, but in his absence is usually ascribed to the principal earner. The practice of taking the adult male of a household as the ‘head’ has been much criticized—at least in most industrialized countries—for its implicit assumption of male primacy. For example, the literature on social class is characterized by a long-standing controversy about the appropriate unit of analysis, a debate which turns on the acceptability or otherwise of classifying a whole household, in class terms, according to the class standing of its (usually male) head of household.
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head of household