I argue that the breadwinner model is not traditional but was a radical invention that was little more than a century old at its peak. It carried within it the very pathologies that now afflict the dual-earner model that succeeded it. If we want to understand why men and women struggle to build genuine partnerships today, we need to go further back than the postwar golden age to really understand what the breadwinner model replaced.
The line that feminists neglected motherhood has become the standard entry point for arguments about why feminists shouldn’t neglect motherhood now. Yet mid-to-late twentieth-century feminist work on motherhood and mothering is rich and complex. To view it as failed or inadequate because other feminisms and other priorities became dominant risks replicating the matrophobic dynamics this feminism sought to challenge
The hard truth about breadwinning wives and masculinity is this: society has changed, but our expectations of men have not fully caught up. Men still feel pressure to provide. Women still tend to prefer higher-earning men. And couples still navigate outdated assumptions baked into modern relationships.
Fatherhood is in flux in many contemporary societies today. Over the last 75 years, women have entered the paid workforce en masse. Now that mothers are contributing income to their families, fathers’ role in childcare has increased, too. According to recent time diary studies, the average daily minutes that men spent in childcare have tripled since the 1960s.
The conflation of selfhood with professional identity and self-worth with productivity and ambition is, of course, why stay-at-home motherhood is regarded as such a lowly vocation. At home, there’s no remuneration for services rendered or ladder to climb, nor is there much external validation. To be a stay-at-home mother is, therefore, to step outside of the productivity paradigm entirely, “to [fall] off the edge of the working world,” in the words of Mary Harrington.
While there has been post-pandemic progress in areas such as education (albeit a gender attainment gap still persists), recent figures on employment, suicide and crime have not “recovered.” These have been featured in the CPRMB report (Missing Men Business Scorecard).The national level messaging and narrative (including the political message) has changed since Netflix’s Adolescence due to evidence-based research from the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys Report, The narrative has changed from “The problems (young men) and boys cause” to” The problems (young) men and boys have – and now we do something to help them.”
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