Breadwinner model

The breadwinner model is a paradigm of family centered on a , "the member of a family who earns the money to support the others". In heterosexual relationships, the breadwinner is most often the male. The earner works outside the home to provide the family with income and benefits such as health insurance. The non-earner usually stays at home and takes care of children and the elderly. Since the 1950s, social scientists and feminist theorists have increasingly criticized the gendered division of work and care and the expectation that the breadwinner role should be fulfilled by men. Norwegian government policy has increasingly targeted men as fathers, as a tool of changing gender relations. In 2014 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 30.8% of heterosexual couples with children under 18 had a man as the sole breadwinner. 5.6% of families had a woman as the sole breadwinner. The percentage of families with female breadwinners has been declining since the end of the recession.

In Britain, the breadwinner model developed among the emerging middle-class towards the end of the industrial revolution in the mid-nineteenth-century. Prior to this, in low-income families, a subsistence wage was paid based upon the individual workers output, with all members of the family expected to contribute to the household upkeep.

There was another side to the transformation of wage relations in mid-19th-century Britain involving two closely related changes: first, a shift in the prevailing wage form, from a joint to an individual payment; and second, a shift in the predominant subsistence norm of a living wage, from a family group’s income to the ideal of an adult male-breadwinner wage. This is the notion that the wage earned by a husband ought to be sufficient to support his family without his wife and young children having to work for pay.

The increase in wages among skilled labourers and lower-middle-class workers allowed for a far larger number of families being able to support the entire family unit on one wage, and the breadwinner model became an attainable goal for a far wider proportion of society. Within this model, "The division of labour in parenting tasks can also be classified as ‘caring about'(breadwinning) and ‘caring for’ (nurturing) children."

In the United Kingdom, the emergence of the breadwinner norm coincided with and helped to facilitate the removal of children from the workforce. In 1821, approximately 49% of the nations workforce was under the age of 20. Throughout the century, multiple items of legislation were written in to law limiting the age at which a child could enter work and ensuring mandatory standards of education.

...
Wikipedia