From December 10–11, 1999, the Department of History of the University of Salzburg, Austria, hosted around forty scholars to reflect on the combination of women, work, and the breadwinner ideology. The conference was cofinanced by the Austrian government. This can be called a significant gesture in a country where the extreme right-wing politician Jorg Haider recently proposed in his victorious election campaign to increase the child allowance for Austrian couples if the mother opted to stay at home. Should Haider's proposal be carried out, it would constitute yet another example of successful breadwinner ideology in practice. Indeed, western European society seems to have been trapped for centuries in set ideas on the division of work, care, and income between the sexes. But could this be an illusion?