Breadwinner Role

The Colonial Period and the Nineteenth Century

In colonial America, the family was the dominant unit of production. Although male heads of household were theoretically responsible for the economic and material well-being of their families, economic sustenance was assured through the labor of the entire family. In most cases, fathers and husbands were the sole property owners and controlled their wives' wages or money (if they had any). It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that men became exclusively accountable for the economic comfort of their families, and that women become excluded (in theory at least) from productive labor.

The ideal of the male breadwinner as the primary economic provider and reliable family man emerged during the market revolution of the early to mid-nineteenth century, as economic production ceased to occur within the home and increasingly became a male activity taking place in the public realm. Men, particularly those of the emerging middle class, now traveled to work, leaving their wives and children within the confines of the home. The division between male public realms and female private realms—what historians have called the “cult of domesticity”—mirrored divisions of responsibility between husbands and wives. Men were now responsible for earning enough money for the entire family, while wives oversaw household duties, child rearing, and consumption. Both publicly and privately—through success in the world of business and in providing for one's family—the role of primary breadwinner became a key marker of middle-class manhood. It also became a potential source of anxiety and self-doubt for men, for failing at business in the precarious boom-and-bust economy of antebellum America meant failing as a breadwinner, and thus as a man.

Many middle-class men and highly skilled workers adhered to (or attempted to adhere to) the ideal of the male breadwinner, but for most semiskilled and unskilled workers the ideal remained unattainable. Throughout the nineteenth century, most working-class families required the incomes of children and wives for at least part of the year in order to maintain even a low level of subsistence. Until after World War I, depressions, unemployment, and consistent job insecurity threatened skilled working men's positions as economic providers and household heads, and made semiskilled and unskilled men's adherence to the breadwinner norm seem increasingly untenable. But the ideal remained central to the aspirations of working-class men, strongly influencing the agendas of the emerging labor unions. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, United Mine Workers president John Mitchell argued that job insecurity and low wages not only undermined workers' independence, but also infantilized and emasculated male workers by forcing “full-grown men [to] stay home minding babies or mending stockings” while their wives and older children worked for the family wage (Mitchell, 26). Similarly, American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers insisted that men earn sufficient incomes to provide their families with comfort as well as sustenance, pointing out in an 1890 issue of the Louisville Courier Journal that a working man “wants to have … a pretty picture on the wall, or perhaps a piano or organ in his parlor,” as well as a well-dressed wife (Kaufman, 311).

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