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.

The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the out-lines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neo-classical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from men's earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to women's employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on women's and children's employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of men's wage demands by references to their need for a family wage. Our view is that systematic empirical investigation of the male breadwinner family has been lacking, even the timescale of its appearance and development remains obscure. Unless we fill in the outlines with more empirical detail we will never discover the reasons for its origins and expansion.

In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These separations, often expressed in the generalized formula of a “private-public” divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be “won” by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives' and daughters' unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the “family wage” paid to husbands and fathers.

The organization of production by employers was not indifferent to gender. Labour markets were sexually differentiated, since women and men were considered to be distinct labour forces distinguished by virtue of the differing roles they were supposed to play. The male role was that of the bread-winner, and the fact that this often reflected the reality of the situation should not obscure the point that it was a social construction. Women, on the other hand, were considered as mostly occupied with unpaid domestic work, regardless of whether they were also engaged in work for the market. Bread-winning patterns have been widely debated, particularly with respect to whether the male breadwinner system appeared as a result of industrialization or existed previously as a consequence of a universal system of patriarchy. In parallel with a more cyclical conception of industrialization, recent studies on breadwinner patterns do not support theories based on capitalism or patriarchy but rather support a more historical approach based on the importance of other exogenous factors such as the regional economy, the local labour market and the customs and associations acting upon it, employers' choices or the legal and institutional framework. The following paper is a case study related to working-class women, the cigarreras, who were the main wage earners in the family. It relates to an industry (tobacco) which operated under a monopoly system, and to a particular region (southern Spain), which was fairly underdeveloped in terms of industry. This paper examines from a micro-perspective the universality of patriarchal breadwinner patterns, the discontinuity of the industrialization process, and the importance of other exogenous factors in explaining patterns of bread-winning. It asks whether changing exogenous factors during the industrialization process make it possible for a female breadwinner and male house-husband model to arise.

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.

Human reproduction is a basic economic activity in every society. It includes activities such as maternal care, childcare, old age provision, poor relief, healthcare, and labour protection. In pre-industrial times, human reproduction was typically a part of kin-based household economies, but since the onset of industrialization two new institutional solutions have developed: the male breadwinning system and the welfare state.

In 1989, when Germany became reunified after forty years of separation, no one could overlook the fact that East and West Germany differed greatly with regard to the position of women. The most striking difference of all seemed to lie in the rates of female employment: 91 per cent of all East German women under the age of 60 were counted as being employed, compared to only 55 per cent in West Germany.