THIS IS THE BOOK CHAPTER 9 THE FATE OF THE BREADWINNER/HOMEMAKER MARRIAGE While

THIS IS THE BOOK CHAPTER 9 THE FATE OF THE BREADWINNER/HOMEMAKER MARRIAGE
While in graduate school in the 1920s, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) would encounter Max Weber’s sociology. Parsons was so intrigued, so moved by Weber’s ideas, that Parsons contacted Marianne Weber—by now a widow—and asked permission to translate one of Max’s books into English.10 A champion of her husband’s intellectual legacy, she agreed. Parsons, however, had no interest in Max’s wife’s ideas. In fact, Parsons strongly disagreed with Marianne Weber’s belief that men and women shared the same “talents and abilities.” Instead, Parsons argued that men and women were “opposite” sexes: naturally different and with contrasting strengths and weaknesses.11 Accordingly, he argued that the breadwinner/homemaker marriage was a perfect balance between the masculine and feminine. This balance, he asserted, was essential for functional families and, more broadly, functional societies. Even in the 1950s, though, real life was failing to live up to this ideal. Only 40 percent of marriages fit the breadwinner/homemaker mold.12 Many White men were too poor to support a family alone, and men of color were largely denied a family wage. Poor women of all races continued to work, even as the ideology of separate spheres defined their femininity as insufficient and their families as unnatural. To Parsons, such families were dysfunctional. He regarded homosexuality, failure to marry, not having children, and divisions of labor that defied the separate spheres ideology as threats to individual happiness and social stability.13 One of his contemporaries, the sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wrote a widely publicized report for the U.S. government in which he argued that poverty among Black Americans was caused by their failure to adhere to the breadwinner/homemaker model (while downplaying interpersonal and institutional discrimination).14 Specifically, he blamed the “reversed roles of husband and wife,” suggesting that Black women were insufficiently subordinate to their husbands and Black men insufficiently dominant over their wives. Evidence suggests that Parsons and Moynihan were wrong about breadwinner/homemaker marriages. This family form was not functional; it was failing.15 Many housewives were bored and depressed. They were self-medicating with booze and sedatives known as “mother’s little helpers.”16 When The Feminine Mystique, a book about housewives’ unhappiness, was published in 1963, it spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.17 Their husbands were unhappy too. To remain single too long was to be suspected of homosexuality, and “family men” were more likely to be hired and given promotions. To satisfy social expectations, men took on the role of breadwinner young. It was a lot of pressure, and uncomfortable. Many men felt like a bank machine dispensing money to an unhappy wife. Responding to men’s unhappiness, a new magazine called Playboy launched in 1953. Its first issue was an attack on “gold-digger” women who married for money.18 The magazine’s founder, Hugh Hefner, fed men’s fantasies of being perpetually single. He was a millionaire by the end of the decade. In addition to being boring for women and stressful for men, the breadwinner/homemaker marriage of the 1950s required Americans to ascribe to a set of ideas related to gender and sexuality. For example, the marriage was premised on a gender binary, acknowledging only the presence of men and women. Thus, it wasn’t inclusive of people who are nonbinary or gender fluid. It was also heteronormative. It promoted heterosexuality as the only or preferred sexual identity, making other sexual desires invisible or casting them as inferior. The breadwinner/homemaker model was also mononormative. It promoted monogamy, or the requirement that spouses have sexual relations only with each other.19 Mononormativity erases other ways of forming sexual and romantic relationships. These include open relationships (ones in which partners agree that they are free to have sexual relations with other people) and polyamorous relationships (ones in which partners agree that they’re free to form relationships with others that are both sexual and romantic).Launched by Hugh Hefner in 1953, Playboy magazine fed men’s fantasies of a sexy, stress-free bachelor lifestyle. The success of the magazine revealed widespread unhappiness among men, who often carried the heavy burden of being their family’s sole breadwinner. Finally, the breadwinner/homemaker marriage was pro-natal. This model of marriage only reached full completion with the birth of children. Thus, it promoted childbearing and stigmatized childlessness. Children, in turn, heightened the stakes of marriage in specifically gendered ways. Children increased the likelihood that women would feel the need to focus even more intently on the home while increasing the pressure on men to be ever more successful at work. The breadwinner/homemaker marriage, then, didn’t just institutionalize a certain way of being married; it institutionalized the gender binary, monogamy, heterosexuality, and childrearing. None of this was entirely new in the 1950s. But the extreme rigidity of these norms in that decade and the expectation that everyone abide by them was new. The whole of society seemed to agree that everyone should fit themselves into a single mold. Politicians, employers, Hollywood producers, and sociologists agreed too. Many people chafed against these constraints, and those who were unable or unwilling to comply found themselves labeled as deviants. Tragically, Talcott Parsons’s own daughter was a victim of this rigid endorsement of the breadwinner/homemaker marriage. Anne Parsons turned twenty in 1950, the decade in which her father was at the height of his intellectual importance. She was a natural thinker who yearned to put her mind to good use. She almost married in college “for security’s sake” but couldn’t bring herself to do it. “The world seemed so much bigger than split-level houses,” she wrote, “and I thought I had better start off to see it.”20 She traveled internationally, pursued her studies, and became a social scientist in her own right. She was especially critical of the profession of psychotherapy, arguing that it was unresponsive to patient diversity. She loved her work but felt intense anguish over having failed to marry. She criticized herself for not being able to embrace domesticity.21 And at twenty-five, she figured she was too old. At that “ripe old age,” she wrote ruefully, “I found it was already too late: most of my contemporaries were already on the third child.” Meanwhile, her career was stifled by a lack of opportunities for women. When the feminist bestseller The Feminine Mystique was released in 1963, she wrote a desperate eight-page letter to its author, Betty Friedan. She felt, she wrote, “cast out” of both the workplace and the home. She confessed to feeling like crying much of the time. She concluded, in rushed and tortured prose: “no matter how I tried, couldn’t find any way out.” She wrote that letter to Friedan from a psychiatric hospital. Her doctors had diagnosed her as unable to “come to terms with [her] basic feminine instinct.” She increasingly lost hope. Anne Parsons would die by suicide in 1964. She was thirty-three years old. In her last letter to her parents, she reassured them: “it was my life that failed, not your lives.”22 Her biographer, the sociologist Winifred Brienes, wrote that Anne Parsons “was a prisoner in a culture in which she could not thrive.”23 And her story reminds us that the breadwinner/homemaker model hurt both people who were inside of it and those who were not. That’s one reason why the marriage model we call “traditional” today was so short-lived. In fact, if Anne Parsons had survived just a few more years, she would’ve been there to see it fall apart. By the early 1970s, American feminists had succeeded in removing gendered language from the marriage contract. It now assigned the same rights and responsibilities to both spouses. This would become the norm. Across much of the world today, in defiance of thousands of years of history, marriage is legally gender neutral. Gender-neutral marriage was a step toward institutionalizing partnership unions, a relationship model based on love and companionship between equals. The partnership model paved the way not only for gender-egalitarian relationships, but also legal same-sex marriages and ones in which one or both partners change their gender identity. Once the gendered roles of wife and husband were replaced with the idea of partners, it was no longer necessary for spouses to be any particular gender at all.24 The capitalist economy’s need for workers also contributed to the end of the breadwinner/homemaker marriage.25 During World War II, women of the middle classes flooded workplaces to fill jobs once restricted to men. Bans on hiring married women fell away. Then, in 1964—the same year that Anne Parsons died—the Civil Rights Act made sex discrimination in the workplace illegal. This didn’t end interpersonal discrimination like magic, but it helped ensure that women would begin to be treated more fairly in the workplace.26 During World War II, while legions of men fought on the front lines, women were recruited into jobs from which they’d previously been excluded. Here a woman assembles a B-52 bomber in a factory in California. By the 1980s, abandoning the breadwinner/homemaker marriage was a purely economic decision. Most families could no longer afford to leave an adult out of the workplace. The U.S. government was dismantling the New Deal and wages for the bottom 90 percent of Americans stopped growing. The family wage was a quaint blip in history by then. Women in all but the most economically elite households weren’t choosing to work; they had to. Today, only the richest and the poorest families are likely to leave one parent at home.27 The richest families do so because they can afford it; a parent stays home in nearly half of the wealthiest 5 percent of households.28 The poorest families do so because they have no other choice. The cost of childcare can easily exceed the entire take-home pay of a low-wage worker.29 It may seem like a privilege for a rich family to leave a parent at home, or a silver lining for people so poor that they have to, but these marriages are still among the least happy and most likely to end in divorce.30 Most Americans, instead, are in partnership unions in which both spouses work.31 Dual-earner households are now the most common kind. Even among married mixed-sex couples with kids at home, there are twice as many dual-earner partnership unions as there are breadwinner/homemaker marriages.32 These partnerships are not, however, free of gender. Not even when they involve two partners of the same sex. Before exploring the gender dynamics of work and family today, it’s helpful to introduce a language for talking about gender inequality.
The presentation will cover a topic from the book and a newspaper or news magazine article (not a journal article or a webpage from a website) found that relates to it. In the five-minute video presentation, the presenter will cover the following information:
The topic selected from the textbook, why the presenter chose it, and why it is interesting and important;
What specifically the author of our textbook says about the topic, in what chapter, why Wade brings it up, in what context, and what sociological point Wade is making;
A detailed summary of the article, discussing why it was written, the main points of the article, what the student learned from it, and how the article can be specifically related to the material in the Wade chapter;
The author of the article, the date of publication, and the name of the periodical in which it was published;
Anything else the presenter might like to add, including her personal opinion on the topic, Wade’s take on it, and what they learned from her assignment.