Everyone wants a male breadwinner

When I was heading off to college, my father gave me some advice. He told me to find and marry a man who could earn enough money to make working outside the home an option, rather than a requirement, for me once I had kids.

This was good advice! It turned out to assume a lot that didn’t turn out to be true about me. But, if you’re new here, I am, in many respects, an “edge case.” If I’d ever given birth, I’d have appreciated the option. Plus, dad was (and is) feminist enough – and cynical enough about men – to put me through school so I had a degree to fall back on should anything go sideways.

What dad was describing is a male breadwinner marriage. The husband is responsible for bringing home the money the family needs to live, regardless of whether or how much the wife works outside the home.

Unfortunately, to my high school ears, this sounded like patriarchy. I’d taken in too much BUST, Bitch magazine, Daria, and mom’s small-but-mighty feminist paperback collection.

I wanted to know why I couldn’t bring home the bacon and make my husband cook it up.

What I didn’t understand then, what I’m really just starting to understand now, is that sometimes, oftentimes, the smartest thing to do is the dumb thing everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it and they’re going to make life harder for you if you don’t.

That is, in a nutshell, the male breadwinner model. Genitalia is, in fact, a very dumb basis for determining who earns and who cooks. But woe unto anyone who does it the smarter way.

High school me had no idea how much pressure everyone would put on me and whoever I was married to to pretend the male breadwinner model isn’t dumb and conform.

I, contrary to my father’s advice, married a man who was extremely uninterested in winning any bread. Only after doing so did I begin to understand the situation. One day, my mother-in-law came over to our house. Looking around, she asked me about the state of it. This, despite the fact she knew that I worked a full-time job and her son barely worked part-time.

And like, I’m not even mad at her. She’s the normal one.

As much as people might claim they’re okay with female breadwinner marriages, they’re not.

“Scholars find that attachment to norms about men’s responsibility as providers remains strong, despite the growing economic insecurity that increasingly exposes men to unemployment, and despite the fact that most families do not solely depend on men’s incomes,” wrote the authors of a 2021 paper.

The male breadwinner norm is so strong that researcher Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues attributed 23% of the marriage rate drop between 1970 and 2010 to the gap between supply and demand for male breadwinners.

So many people demonstrably prefer never marrying over a female breadwinner marriage that it’s meaningfully decreased the overall marriage rate. They found that the male breadwinner norm is so strong that women will turn down raises and promotions – they will even drop out of the labor force entirely – to avoid becoming breadwinners. In fact, enough women have leaned back or quit to avoid becoming breadwinners that it’s meaningfully distorted the overall labor market.

Why are women willing to, in essence, pay to keep their husbands in charge, financially?

Because they’re not insane.

Marriage is already a shaky deal, at best, for women. But marriages where wives earn more than their husbands are even less happy and are even more likely to end in divorce. Men in these marriages are also more likely to cheat.

source

One thing that makes marriage not-great for women is how disturbingly common wife beating still is. Guess what? Non-breadwinner husbands are also more likely to commit domestic violence.

Well, surely these men are making up for what they lack in income with housework and childcare, right? Hahaha. No. Men who are financially dependent on their wives spend less time on housework and childcare than breadwinner husbands.

These men also tend to be in worse health. Breadwinner wives, meanwhile, are more likely to use anti-anxiety medications and suffer from insomnia.

It’s worth asking why female breadwinner marriages are so bad, on average.

Professional clowns like Matt Walsh claim that female breadwinner marriages are bad because they’re new and unnatural. The only problem with this theory is that it’s horseshit.

The real reason probably starts with the fact that most female-breadwinner marriages are (likely) bottom-half marriages. Marriage among people in the bottom-half of income and education is already so completely different (read: worse) from marriage among people in the top-half, on average, that it might as well be a different institution. These marriages start out shittier just because of that.

Adding masculinity threat to an already bad situation makes it much worse. It’s like, really, really, really, really, really well-established that men tend to act horribly when something or someone makes them feel like “less of a man.”

This is even more true among bottom-half men, who tend to be more sexist and less gender-egalitarian.

And there may be nothing, except maybe rape, that makes men feel like “less of a man” than not breadwinning.

For example, in one study of Black impoverished teenagers in Baltimore, “Several participants suggested that the worst thing a man could do is to depend on a woman for money,” the authors wrote. Every participant strongly associated breadwinning with masculinity.

These boys weren’t sure they’d be able to be breadwinners, and responded to the masculinity threat this created by trying harder to have sex earlier and with more women, even when they otherwise didn’t want to.

I’d love to report that the male breadwinner norm is weakening in light of the rising number of female breadwinners, but “Being a man is still almost exclusively defined by bringing material stability,” Liz Plank wrote in For the Love of Men, published in 2019.

It may actually be getting stronger.

Plank cites researchers Joanna Pepin and David Cotter, who found that young men were more likely in the 2020s than in 1994 to endorse male breadwinner supremacy.

Anti-feminist backlash in Britain, Germany, and France is driving more young men to say that a woman’s place is in the home than in previous years. One survey of 30 countries, including the US and UK, found that Gen Z men were much more likely than older men to agree that “a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man.”

Despite the fact that “egalitarian aspirations for family life imply that there should be parenting content by-and-for men,”

Matthew Yglesias

recently wrote, women still write and read nearly all of it.

Far be it from me to deny the reality of sex differences or the fact that they’ve often formed the basis for labor division throughout space and time.

Boobs make breastfeeding easier, I’ll give you that. But, as far as I can tell, a penis confers little advantage in a tech, service, or care work job.

It will never not be funny to me, in a deeply sad way, that nursing/care work is one of the very few growing fields where physical strength and stamina are actually really important. And yet masculinity threat made men abandon the field en masse once too many women showed up. Similarly, men want to blame women for boys doing poorly in school and in life. But it’s men who abandoned the teaching profession, to the significant detriment of boys.

As real as sex differences are, the idea that a woman shouldn’t out-earn her husband is even newer than the industrialization and wage labor that created the concept of the stay-at-home mom (only ever possible for a minority of families) in the first place.

Stigmatizing female-breadwinner marriages never helped anyone.

Thankfully, today I can mark myself safe from the male breadwinner norm. My boyfriend, Rob, earns more money than me, is an excellent cook, does all the grocery shopping, roughly half the cleaning, and most of the decorating.

But overall, the male breadwinner norm makes marriages rarer, shorter, and more miserable than they need to be — while also making women, and the entire country, poorer.

A norm this strong, and pernicious, begs for re-evaluation. If I were trying to save marriage (ahem, Matt Walsh), I might try challenging the male breadwinner norm instead of, you know, lying to prop it up.