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The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Angélique Janssens
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In recent years feminist scholars have called for a complete rethinking and revision of the foundations of labour history as a necessary prerequisite for the integration of gender as a core concept into histories of labour and social class. In this attempt one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in male-oriented labour history needs to be identified and made subject to careful rethinking, namely the assumption that the public and the private sphere should be seen in terms of an essentially gendered opposition. Undoubtedly, one of the most powerful images used not only to represent but also to justify the gendering of the public and the private sphere is the image of the male breadwinner family and the male household head as the sole provider for his dependent wife and children. For this reason, the articles in this volume are all firmly at the heart of what may currently be seen as the crucial intersections in the history of labour, gender and social class.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 42 , supplement S5: The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? , September 1997 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1999

References

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3 Ibid.

4 Seccombe, Wally, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Social History, 11 (1986), pp. 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 In another paper by Sara Horrell, written together with Deborah Oxley, on the household budgets of British industrial workers around 1890, it becomes clear that even amongst the better-paid workers the family could not survive without their children's labour: see “Breadwinning, Poverty and Resource Allocation in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain”, unpublished paper for session B17 of the forthcoming Twelfth International Economic History Congress, to be held in Seville in 1998.

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20 See Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, p. 50.

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22 See ibid., p. 375. A note of caution seems appropriate here. The official statistics obviously do not cover all the economic activities that poor women may undertake in the home, varying from domestic production to self-provisioning activities.

23 Some parts of the following account are based on the excellent review article by Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family”.

24 Additional supply-side variables for female labour force participation are numbers and ages of children present in the household. Whereas in more recent times the presence of very young children has had negative effects on labour force participation by married women, this effect is not generally found in more historic populations. See the article by Humphries and Horrell in this volume, or Hatton, T. J. and Bailey, R. E., “Female Labour Force Participation in Interwar Britain”, Oxford Economic Papers, 40 (1988), pp. 695–718CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8 (1968), pp. 478–481, entry: “Labour force: participation, women”.

26 Plantenga, Janneke, Een afwijkend patroon. Honderd jaar vrouwenarbeid in Nederlanden (West-)Duitsland (Amsterdam, 1993)Google Scholar. See p. 189.

27 Pott-Buter, Facts and Fairy Tales, see in particular pp. 319–321.

28 See Hatton and Bailey, “Female Labour Force Participation in Interwar Britain”, pp. 695–718.

29 Historical evidence shows that working wives were not necessarily married to the poorest workers. Two examples, both relating to industrial textile towns, Preston in England and Enschede in the Netherlands, suggest that the organization of the local labour market based on informal labour recruitment systems may help explain the labour force participation of these wives. See Savage, M., The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 74–79Google Scholar; Posthumus-Van der Goot, W.H., Onderzoek naar den arbeid der gehuwde vrouw in Nederland (Leiden, 1938), pp. 21–22Google Scholar.

30 Dual systems theory continues to inform research in the field of women's subordination in the home, at work and at the level of the state. See, for instance, Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, pp. 37–41.

31 Barrett, M., Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London, 1980), p. 211Google Scholar.

32 See, for instance, Hartmann, H., “Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex”, in Eisenstein, Z. R. (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; idem, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union”, in Sargent, L. (ed.), Women and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Walby, S., Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar; idem, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford, 1990). Other authors also recognize the dynamic dimension of the patriarchal system, which may make it differ historically or cross-culturally. See, for example, Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, p. 38.

33 Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex”; idem, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”; Walby, Patriarchy at Work; idem, Theorizing Patriarchy.

34 These claims are difficult to substantiate. Protective legislation did not always lead to falling participation rates for women; and countries with different legislative measures had similar gender divisions of labour. But judgements differ. See, for instance, Goldin, C., Understanding the Gender Gap. An Economic History of American Women (Oxford, 1990), p. 198Google Scholar; Hudson, P. and Lee, W., “Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective”, in Hudson, P. and Lee, W. (eds), Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar.

35 See Rose, Sonya O., “Gender at Work: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism”, History Workshop 21 (Spring 1986), pp. 113–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Gender Segregation in the Transition to the Factory: The English Hosiery Industry, 1850–1910”, Feminist Studies, 13, 1 (1987), pp. 163–184; idem, “Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Exclusionary Strategies of Male Trade Unionists in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, Social History, 13, 2 (1988), pp. 191–208; idem, Limited Livelihoods. Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1992).

36 Seccombe, Weathering the Storm, pp. 71–80.

37 Ibid., p. 79.

38 Ibid., p. 74.

39 Ibid., p. 79.

40 Ibid., pp. 82–83. In a forthcoming article on Spain, however, Enriqueta Camps has shown that in the Catalan textile industry the second Industrial Revolution actually led to an increase in married women's participation in paid labour, as a substitute for children's work. A reduction in skill qualifications and declining fertility rates together with compulsory schooling for children and a relative improvement of female wages are considered to be key factors. See Camps, Enriqueta, “Transitions in Women's and Children's Work Patterns. Implications for the Study of the Family Income and the Household Structure, a Case Study from the Catalan Textile Sector (1850–1925)”, The History of the Family. An International Quarterly (forthcoming, 1997)Google Scholar.

41 Seccombe, Weathering the Storm, p. 114.

42 Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family”, p. 322.

43 This concept is derived from Sen, Amartya (Resources, Values and Development (Oxford, 1984), pp. 374–376)Google Scholar and denotes a family bargaining model in which all members cooperate to achieve certain outcomes beneficial to all compared with non-cooperation, whilst all parties at the same time have conflicting interests in the choice of effective cooperative outcomes.

44 Seccombe, “Patriarchy Stabilized”.

45 Humphries, J., “Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family”, Cam-bridge Journal of Economics, 1, 3 (1977), pp. 241–258Google Scholar.

46 The argument that the male breadwinner family served the interests of the working-class family as a whole may also be found in Brenner and Ramas. However, their perspective is different. Brenner and Ramas argue that the gendered division of labour within the working-class family arose out of the conflicting demands between childcare and work outside the home under the conditions of capitalist production. Families opted for the male breadwinner system in order to ensure their family's biological survival. See Brenner, J. and Ramas, M., “Rethinking Women's Oppression”, New Left Review, 144 (1984), pp. 33–71Google Scholar.

47 Lown, Judy, “Not so Much a Factory, More a Form of Patriarchy: Gender and Class during Industrialisation”, in Gamamikow, Eva et al. , Gender, Class and Work (London, 1983), pp. 11–27Google Scholar; Rose, Limited Livelihoods.

48 Benenson, H., “The ‘Family Wage’ and Working Women's Consciousness in Britain, 1880–1914”, Politics and Society, 19, 1 (1991), pp. 71–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Compare for a similar argument on Central and Latin America, Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner, pp. 46–58.

50 See Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family”, p. 329.

51 Kalb, Don, “Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, North Brabant Illustrations, ca. 1850–1950” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1995), p. 13Google Scholar.

52 Bradley, Men's Work, Women's Work, pp. 166–171.

53 van Drenth, Annemieke, De zorg om het Philipsmeisje. Fabrieksmeisjes in de elektrotechnische Industrie in Eindhoven (1900–1960) (Zutphen, 1991), p. 89Google Scholar.

34 It is tempting to associate this case of female breadwinners with manual production, which allows for greater flexibility in work schedules than mechanized production. That female breadwinning and a fully mechanized production system are not mutually exclusive is demonstrated, however, by Joyce Parr's study of two Ontario towns in the first half of the twentieth century. In Paris, one of these two towns, female breadwinning throughout the family life cycle was made possible in the local textile industry through adaptations by employers, family members, the community and working mothers: see Parr, Joyce, The Gender of Breadwinners. Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (Toronto, 1990)Google Scholar.

55 See, for instance, Pederson, Susan, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; and Sainsbury, Diane, Gender, Equality and the Welfare States (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 On this debate see, for instance, ibid., pp. 40–44.

57 For a comparable position see Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State. Pedersen argues that the weak French male breadwinner system was supported by employers' policies, which were later incorporated into state policies, providing family benefits for both male and female workers with children. This undercut male workers' claim for a family wage. Pedersen contrasts the French case with the British system, which directed state efforts more towards protecting the integrity and superiority of male wages, thereby institutionalizing relations of dependence within the family.