Women throughout (American and English) history worked. The idea that in the past the sole responsibility of women was domestic labor and childrearing is largely inaccurate for the majority of women in these societies. Women were expected to do domestic labor like cooking and cleaning and raising children AND work to bring income to their family, this was true for the average woman, excluding the upper middle class/wealthy. If a woman’s husband owned a tavern or restaurant, she also cooked and kept bar and did the duties associated with the business. If a woman’s husband was a (small scale/subsistence/tenant) farmer, the woman did farm labor. Often a woman was expected to do labor related to her husband’s job.
Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.
My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.
This is why it makes me irate when women on the right say things like “feminism forced me to get a job instead of being allowed to stay home with my children” before feminism you would have had to tend house, raise your children and bring income to your husband. Now, at the very least, the money is hopefully your own. Women were always in the workforce, their work was not recognized.
Something fascinating I read about in Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore by Seth Rockman was how sexed wage inequality impacted household formation in US cities in the early republic era. Working class households could look a lot of different ways: parent(s) and child(ren), married or unmarried couple, siblings or cousins, group of friends, many-generational, etc. Working class people could use household formation as a strategy to make survival easier, by pooling resources, labor, etc.
But, of course, women were paid lower wages than men. This meant that it was difficult to form a household without a man, as women brought in less income relative to the amount of work they did. This ended up reinforcing the expectation that women bear the burden of domestic labor in addition to wage labor, coerced by their dependency upon the higher wages of the men in their household.
Even excluding the power of cultural expectation or deliberate exploitation on the part of men, a household of rational economic actors would, under those conditions, choose to shift the burden of domestic labor onto the women so the men could prioritize wage labor to maximize household income.
(Of course, much of this is broadly true throughout various periods, societies, and social classes, but this book laid out the facts of the relationship between wage inequality and domestic labor inequality very clearly IMO.)
But I think the relevant takeaway here is that the role of breadwinner is a privilege rather than a burden, not just because you get to feel empowered by it or even because it might let you control your household’s money, but because it gives you material power within your household (including the power to what household to be part of).
To those men that feel being the primary breadwinner is a burden rather than a privilege, I say this – your beef is with other men, not women. Men who use the role to control and oppress women are keeping you in the provider role, suppressing equal pay for women, restricting their reproductive freedom so they *must* stay home to bear and raise children.
amhrancas 