Evolution of the Modern American Family

By STEPHANIE COONTZ, professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit, nonpartisan association of family researchers and practitioners. She is a frequent op-ed contributor to The New York Times and other newspapers.

Many people believe that the problems facing women today are due to the breakdown of the “traditional” male breadwinner family. But the real problem facing women today—and increasingly, the problem facing men as well—is that the male breadwinner family was a short-lived historical anomaly that does not work as a model for 21st-century gender norms and social policy. In the mid-20th century, the United States codified its notions of what can be expected of a “normal” workforce on the basis of a family form that rested on an exceptional and temporary conjuncture of economic trends and gender arrangements.

For thousands of years and all across the world, families were productive units in which every single member—husbands, wives, and children alike—labored to produce the material necessities of life. Colonial Americans, for example, did not expect men to be the primary providers for their families. They recognized that families were equally dependent on the labor of men’s “yoke-mates,” as wives were called in those days. These co-provider families were by no means egalitarian, but one reason patriarchy was so strict was because men needed the authority to organize and discipline the household labor force, including overseeing the personal lives of all its members.¹

Only in the 19th century did Americans begin to think that men should devote themselves almost exclusively to paid work outside the home, while wives should handle domestic matters and kinship obligations. Yet even after this new ideal took hold, most families still required the earnings of the wife or the children to get by. It wasn’t until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father’s labor purchased the family’s provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.

The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands’ wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since.

The male breadwinner family of the postwar era was based on two distinctive developments. One was positive: an unprecedented increase in real wages for men. From 1950 to 1970, the average real earnings of American men from ages 25 to 64 increased by 50 percent, with the increases earned by less-educated and more-educated workers alike. In that era, unlike today, wages grew hand-in-hand with productivity.² This favorable economic climate enabled more men than ever before to support their families without a second income.

But the heyday of the male breadwinner family was also due to a negative feature of that era: the exclusion of women from this economic expansion, their subordination within marriage, and the growth of a new ideology that Betty Friedan famously labeled “The Feminine Mystique.”³

“Experts” insisted that it was abnormal for women to have any personal aspirations beyond becoming wives and mothers. When women did work, they were relegated to low-wage jobs and treated as a supplementary, part-time labor force who filled low-skill jobs before childbirth or after their children were in school. It was assumed they did not deserve or even desire raises, promotions, or job security, because first and foremost, they were homemakers, and that was all they really wanted out of life.⁴

The combination of men’s burgeoning job opportunities and women’s immersion in the feminine mystique meant that most men in that era received a substantial “patriarchal dividend,” according them preference over women at work and deference from women at home. In many cases, the material benefits of this male dividend did trickle down to men’s “dependents,” providing their wives with better homes and more comfortable lives than they had previously experienced—a luxury that was especially appreciated after the hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. But women’s economic dependence on men also drove many women to enter or remain in unhappy marriages, and it frustrated the growing number of women who resented their exclusion from the unprecedented economic, educational, and technological progress they saw around them.

The male breadwinner/female homemaker family, whatever its good and bad features, reigned supreme for only about 25 years and now is gone for good. In part, this is because during the late ‘60s and ‘70s, so many women successfully struggled to gain access to new educational and occupational opportunities. And it is also because business reneged on its side of the postwar wage bargain that had linked wages to productivity—instead demanding full-time or more hours and commitment from the male workforce while cutting wages and reducing job security.

As women became more educated, they married later and worked for longer portions of their lives. More wives entered the labor market—some by choice, some from necessity as their husbands’ wages stagnated. At the same time, men’s decreasing ability to earn a family wage, combined with women’s increasing freedom to leave relationships that were unequal or unfair, created growing numbers of single-mother families. The workforce lost its predominantly male character. Family caregiving obligations became more widely distributed, increasingly shared by both partners in two-earner families, but in single-parent families they were shouldered by the same person who was the primary earner.

A household headed by a single mother is twice as likely to be poor as a household headed by a single father.

Today, 70 percent of American children live in families where every adult in the household is in the labor force.⁵ Yet employers and government cling to work practices and policies designed for a labor force composed of full-time male workers who have someone else back at home taking care of family obligations.

Organizing business and government policies around this illusory norm is particularly hard on women and is one of the main reasons why the gender revolution has stalled. Women have made immense strides in upgrading their skills and entering new occupations. But women are still expected—and most women still expect—to make most of the adjustments needed to raise children or care for elderly parents. So, in the absence of family-friendly work policies and affordable quality child care that would allow couples to share work and family responsibilities equally, women are more likely than their male partners to quit or cut back on work to handle family obligations.

This has created what sociologists call a “motherhood penalty.” Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett reports that on average, a woman loses almost 20 percent of her lifetime earning power when she leaves the workforce for just a year to have and care for a child. If she spends three to four years away from work to raise her child, she loses a full 40 percent of her potential earnings.⁶

Combining motherhood with work is especially difficult for lower-income, poorly educated women, who are much more likely than college-educated women to have an out-of-wedlock birth and are more likely to divorce if they do marry, as Ann O’Leary details in her chapter. When a relationship ends and children are involved, the woman generally ends up as the residential parent, usually without adequate child support or affordable child care.

These mothers and their children are among the most disadvantaged Americans. A household headed by a single mother is twice as likely to be poor as a household headed by a single father.⁷ Despite the gains that other women in America have made, things have been getting worse for these women. From 1990 to 2004, families with incomes less than 50 percent of the federal poverty line—most of which are headed by unmarried mothers—experienced a 20 percent reduction in the total resources available to them.⁸

Some people claim that the solution to this problem is to promote a return to the male breadwinner marriages of the 1950s. But there is considerable evidence that unwed births and unstable relationships are more of a result than a cause of the impoverished conditions in which these women and their pool of potential partners live, as Kathryn Edin points out in her essay.⁹

For many working-class men, becoming the family breadwinner is now impossible. The median earnings of male high school graduates who work full time have declined by more than 25 percent since 1968, and the wages of full-time male workers who did not complete high school have dropped by almost 40 percent.¹⁰

Trying to shoehorn women whose expectations of equal treatment have been rising into marriages with men whose economic prospects have been falling is no solution to contemporary work and family dilemmas. Women are far less likely than in the past to put up with the kind of behavior that so often accompanies economic loss and chronic employment stress—such as drug or alcohol abuse and domestic violence—and we should not encourage or incentivize them to do so.¹¹

The bad news is that the punishing economic climate of the past 30 years has led to increased economic insecurity for the majority of men and women in America. Despite their gains relative to men, women—along with children—remain the most economically vulnerable members of society. The good news is that these trends create a convergence of interests between men and women. The same measures that will reduce the pay gap between women and men will provide more economic benefits for low-income men, as well as low-income women, and a more balanced life for all workers.

The first step toward achieving social and gender justice is to abandon the assumption that the ideal worker is a male breadwinner with a wife at home to take care of family obligations. Instead, we must design family-friendly work policies and social programs that put front and center all workers’ interests as caregivers as well as food providers—which has been the double-sided role of women in the past. This will help both women and men meet their work and family obligations without sacrificing either.

In reality, the motherhood penalty is actually a caregiving penalty. The major gender difference today is that employers assume all mothers will engage in caregiving and penalize them in advance, whether they ask for work-family accommodations or not. By contrast, they assume that all fathers will delegate caregiving to their wives and do not penalize them unless they violate those expectations and directly ask for work-family accommodations.

Just knowing that a woman is a mother leads employers to discriminate against her in hiring decisions. When researchers sent out fake job applications for women with identical qualifications, but included information in some résumés indicating the woman was a mother, employers were half as likely to call her back as they were the presumably childless woman.¹² Mothers with the same level of education, the same experience, and the same job type as their childless female counterparts are paid lower wages per hour, whether they work full- or part-time.¹³

Men are not automatically penalized when they become parents. In fact, they often get a de facto fatherhood bonus. But men who actually request family leave face a greater risk of being demoted or downsized than their male co-workers who do not ask. And, like their female counterparts, men whose résumés show they have ever quit work for family reasons incur a financial penalty compared to other employees.¹⁴

Nevertheless, whether out of desire or necessity, growing numbers of men are taking on significant child care and elder care responsibilities. This explains why today men report equal or higher levels of work-family conflict than women.¹⁵ Family-friendly work policies would reduce not only the gender gap but also the stress levels of all workers, male and female, who have caregiving obligations.

Similarly, comprehensive and affordable child care would increase gender equity by enabling mothers, married or unmarried, to work more regularly and earn more. In countries with minimal public child care for infants and toddlers, the motherhood penalty subtracts about 10 percent from a woman’s paycheck per child. That penalty falls to just 4.3 percent in countries with more expansive public child care programs.¹⁶ But again, reliable, affordable child care would be a boon to all parents, married or single, male or female.

It is time to discard the outdated assumption that only women are “real” parents and only men are “real” workers. This assumption once conferred economic privileges on men. But now it burdens more men than it benefits, disadvantages the majority of mothers who work for pay, makes family life more stressful, and drags down the whole economy. Between 1990 and 2010, the United States fell from 6th to 17th place in female labor participation among 22 affluent countries, with almost a third of the decline resulting from our failure to keep pace with other countries in initiating family-friendly work policies.¹⁷

In developing policies for the American worker, male or female, we should start not with the outmoded male breadwinner model, but with the model of today’s woman—someone who has extensive responsibilities to children, parents, and community, as well as to work. By designing family leave policies and child care systems and social programs to accommodate her needs—as the rest of the industrialized world already does¹⁸—we will help women and their families rise, and we will pull men up in the process.

Education is what can help low-wage women push back from the brink. It can be their ticket into the middle class. {BARBARA RIES}