CHAPTER 5 Gendered Meanings of Unemployment

The History of Being the “Breadwinner” in Heterosexual American Couples

For millennia, everyone—adult men, adult women, and children—labored to sustain their families and communities. Mothers with young children tied them to their backs while they gathered water and wood or cultivated crops. If they could not bring their children with them, they left them in the care of family members. Certain tasks or specialties might be gender-typed, but women, including mothers of young children, were working, except in wealthy households.

In US farm families before the Industrial Revolution, women’s labor was essential to household subsistence. Some scholars argue that the idea that an adult man should be the family breadwinner did not emerge in the United States until about the 1830s.²¹ It was not until industrialization became widespread that a separation of spheres developed, with married men (along with unmarried youth, both male and female) going out to “work” for wages at factories and married women’s labor around the house no longer counting as “work”—although, typically, only nonimmigrant white men were paid well enough to maintain this division of labor.²² Even so, many women continued to earn money less visibly in the informal economy by, for example, taking in laundry or sewing, renting rooms to boarders, selling vegetables, or doing piecework at home for local industries.²³

Between 1890 and 1930 the growth of white-collar jobs in the United States sparked an 85 percent increase in women’s formal labor force participation.²⁴ Still, among married couples, men were expected to be the family providers. During the Great Depression, when unemployment rates rose to 25 percent by some measures,²⁵ the sociologist Mirra Komarovsky studied the effects of men’s unemployment on their relationships with their wives and children. Her research drew on interviews with white, nonimmigrant families in which the man had been the sole formal wage earner before he lost his job. Most had worked in skilled blue-collar jobs. Even though all the men in her study had been out of work for at least a year, some resisted their wife taking a paying job. Those husbands made statements like “I would rather starve than let my wife work,” or “I would rather turn on the gas and put an end to the whole family than let my wife support me.”²⁶

Why was it so important to these men that they be the sole breadwinner? Komarovsky assumes that controlling money gave a man authority over his wife and children. When he could no longer provide for them, they had no reason to defer to him. As Komarovsky puts it, some of the wives felt freer to express their grievances “now that the man holds no economic whip over her.” One of the husbands said, “Love flies out of the window when money goes.” However, beyond this power struggle, Komarovsky believes that men’s gender identities rest on providing for their family. She concludes that the unemployed family man “experiences a sense of deep frustration because in his own estimation he fails to fulfill what is the central duty of his life, the very touchstone of his manhood—the role of family provider.”²⁷

I question whether Komarovsky’s sweeping conclusions are supported by her evidence. She acknowledges that her team recorded examples of the husband losing status in only thirteen of the fifty-nine families studied.²⁸ Still, it is interesting that several of the unemployed Depression-era men made exaggerated statements of suicidal or murderous intent like “I would rather turn on the gas and put an end to the whole family than let my wife support me.’ ” That kind of hyperbolic wording, I have observed, marks statements that the speaker thinks are the common opinion in their opinion community.²⁹ It seems that these Depression-era men not only accepted their duty to be the sole family provider (not counting any informal income generated by their wives) but they also spoke as if they expected social support for feeling so strongly about this role. Yet, the very fact that they felt they had to resist their wife working outside the home indicates they were aware it was a real possibility.³⁰

Komarovsky conducted her research in 1935 and 1936. By 1940 one-quarter of working-age women were in the labor force.³¹ By the mid-1960s, dual-earner couples were more common in the United States than ones in which the husband was the only one earning an income.³² But just because both partners are working does not mean that each partner’s earnings are considered equally important. The sociologist Jean Potuchek draws an important distinction between working (having paid employment) and being the family breadwinner.

Relative earnings can affect who is considered the family breadwinner. In 1970 working wives contributed approximately 27 percent of their family’s income. At the time I conducted my research in 2011, wives’ earnings averaged 37 percent of the family’s income, which was still less than half.³³ However, Potuchek argues that the size of a paycheck is not what matters the most. Instead, she emphasizes two key criteria: (1) earning money to provide for the family rather than for personal spending, and (2) “the day-to-day obligation to earn money … a duty to work” so that “leaving the labor force (even temporarily) is not an option.”³⁴ Hers is an important analysis because it goes beyond the amount of men’s and women’s earnings to consider their meanings.

In study after study of US dual-income households in the 1970s and 1980s, Potuchek notices the same pattern: in most families, both the husband and the wife depicted the husband as the primary breadwinner, regardless of the relative size of their earnings. For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nicholas Townsend interviewed married men whose wives’ income was needed to help pay the bills. Nonetheless, he found that the men often downgraded their wives’ monetary contribution, saying that their wives worked for “extras” or “to add variety to their lives, for social contacts, or ‘to get away from the kids.’ ”³⁵ In other words, as the men described it, their wive’s work did not fit either of Potuchek’s two criteria for being a breadwinner because the wives were working for their own spending money and they did not have an obligation to work.

However, it was not just men who saw it that way. Potuchek cites studies of working women in dual-earner households who also did not consider themselves the family breadwinner. For example, in Ellen Rosen’s study of New England factory women, whose wages contributed 45 percent of their family’s income on average, women often offered “a strong assertion that it was her husband who really supported the family.” Many of the women said their husband was the breadwinner because his earnings covered the mortgage and monthly utility bills. In contrast, the women were only “helping” or working for “extras”—even though those “extras” turned out to be “gas, groceries, things for the children, or savings.”³⁶ Rosen’s findings show that for women to be considered breadwinners, it is not enough for their earnings to help support the household; they also have to be directed to the most highly valued family expenditures, which is often housing.

Potuchek also found that her second component of breadwinning—“the day-to-day obligation to earn money … a duty to work”—was commonly assumed to apply to men more than to women in the early 1980s. She cites a survey her students conducted of their peers at that time. In response to the question, “Assuming your spouse has a sufficient income, would you expect to work?” there was almost no difference between men and women. Nearly all the students expected to work in the future. However, in response to the question, “Assuming that you earn a sufficient income, would you expect your spouse to work?” there was a stark gender divide. Two-thirds of the male students said they would leave that choice to their spouse, but more than 80 percent of the female students said they would still expect their spouse to work.³⁷ At that time, same-sex marriage was not legal so the survey assumed heterosexual couples. In other words, the female students imagined a future in which their husband would work, but the male students were less likely to care whether their future wife was employed.

This breadwinning role for men had additional expectations. The men whom Townsend interviewed “measured their success, in terms of a package deal” that required being married, having children, holding a steady job, and owning a home.³⁸ Men had to achieve all four goals to live up to the hegemonic model of masculinity. Drawing on his own research and that of others, Townsend states, “Men who do not have jobs are frequently branded as unworthy, morally inferior, and failures as men,” a conclusion much like Komarovsky’s Depression-era study.³⁹ The difference between those eras is that Townsend’s interviewees were neotraditional primary breadwinners, not traditional sole breadwinners. They were not saying, “I would rather starve than let my wife work.” Still, they were defensively “doing cultural work” to interpret the division of labor in the household as conforming to the model of the male primary breadwinner.⁴⁰

Potuchek’s literature review and Townsend’s study give us a glimpse into the gendering of breadwinning in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Does that differ in the first few decades of the twenty-first century?

Beginning in the early 1990s, the United States has shifted to a post-Fordist economy. Automation, global competition, and attacks on unions have sharply reduced the number of factory jobs with good wages and benefits. In 2012, when I was finishing my first round of interviews, the real (inflation-adjusted) median household income in the United States was lower than it was seventeen years earlier.⁴¹ Given stagnating wages for most workers along with increasing consumption norms (see chapter 3), it is no longer possible for most men to earn enough to be the sole support for their family.⁴² Increasingly, a college degree is necessary for a good job, and women now outnumber men both as college graduates and as holders of postgraduate degrees.⁴³ Even though, on average, men’s wages are still higher than women’s at every educational level, wage trends have moved in different directions.⁴⁴ From 1979 to 2010 the inflation-adjusted wages of men without a college education fell, but the average wages of women, even those with only a high school education, rose.⁴⁵ Many men no longer anticipate being able to support a family with their income alone, and many young women are capable of supporting themselves alone or of contributing at least half of a household’s income.

To examine the impact of these social changes, I consider, in turn, dual-earner heterosexual couples, heterosexual couples in which the man was the sole provider, heterosexual couples in which the woman was the sole or primary provider, same-sex couples, and singles.⁴⁶ Finally, I discuss whether my unemployed participants felt they were living up to gender norms. Throughout, I indicate the distribution of the trends I describe among my interviewees. My participants are not a random sample of the unemployed, and I would never claim that the same percentages would be found in a larger, representative sample. Nonetheless, some of the patterns are intriguing.

Dual-Earner Couples

When I interviewed Fred Hernandez, he was in his early fifties, and he had had a hard life, including time in prison and a period of homelessness. One thing he was proud of, however, was having earned enough as a truck driver when he was in his mid-twenties to afford a large home with a pool. However, Fred did not take sole credit for earning the money needed to buy his home. Instead, he fully acknowledged, “I could have never done it without the help of my ex-wife,” who worked at a post office. He added, “She couldn’t have done it without my help either.” Fred’s recognition of the need for both incomes was typical among my participants.

Men who recognized the importance of a second income for meeting household expenses put pressure on their unemployed female partner to return to work, just as women expected their unemployed male partner to find another job. My participants’ living expenses, including some that could not be easily reduced such as their mortgage payments, had been undertaken with the expectation of two incomes. Their household budgets were fragile structures that would topple under pressure. Each member of the couple did not have to contribute equally—that was rare—but both incomes were needed. Whether it was the woman or the man who was unemployed in a couple, the still-employed partner seemed to be thinking, “I’m doing my part. You need to do yours.”

For example, Mary Brown had worked in an outreach program for disadvantaged youth until its funding was cut. On two occasions, Mary mentioned that she liked having more time with her twelve-year-old son while she was out of work. However, both times she quickly added that she could not just relax and enjoy that time, because she had to find another job as soon as possible. The pressure on her to find another job was clear when I asked how her husband was reacting to her being out of work. Mary replied,

Umm … He’s a little stressed, you know, because like I said, we just bought a house, and most of the burden is on him. […] He’s kind of a little stressed like, “Okay, have you found anything? What are you doing?” (laughs) You know. Because he’s kind of like feeling—you know he just tells me what’s going on in his job. There’s changes. There’s always changes at his job. So, he’s just, like, having—just making me cognizant of that so that I can kind of put a little fire under my buns.

Mary’s husband was a computer programmer working on grant-funded research projects at a university. Future grant funding was not assured, and he was nervous about their ability to continue paying all the bills without Mary’s income.

Pressure on the unemployed wife in a dual-earner couple was also clear when I interviewed Maria Carrera, a quality assurance supervisor for a consumer goods company. When her company began downsizing and let her go, she took a class on how to search for another job. She was happily occupied with learning how to write her resume and give the best response to typical job interview questions when her husband, an operations manager who continued to work for the same company, became impatient: it seemed to him that Maria was spending more time on learning how to search for a job than on finding another position. Maria reported, “He goes, ‘You have to find a job. You know that?’ ” He showed her the bills and how little money was left at the end of the month without her income. Maria was in her mid-fifties, and she had considered retiring. She did not mind working in quality assurance, but her job satisfaction lessened after she got a promotion that gave her new responsibilities, and she would have preferred to do something of service to the community. However, Maria’s husband brushed aside any talk of her retiring. Although Maria described her husband as “very supportive,” he did not see how she could stop working because they still needed her income, and she agreed. Rejuvenated after a year out of work, Maria found another job in quality assurance.

I noticed the same expectations among some younger dual-earner couples. When I first met Katarina Spelling, she was in her late twenties, and she had not held a full-time job in nearly a year after being laid off from her last position as a branch manager of a social services agency. She had a bachelor’s degree in communications, but her real passion was singing. However, she could not make a living as a singer. One month after being laid off, she married a man who had nearly $100,000 in student debt. Katarina added to their student debt when she took out more loans to pay for her master’s program. He had a job as a web programmer, but his income alone was not enough to pay their rent, student loan repayments, and other expenses. He convinced Katarina that she could be a singer during her off-hours while she worked at an unexciting but dependable job to help pay the bills, like the one she took as an assistant in an accounting office.

This expectation that both will work is, of course, completely unlike what Komarovsky described during the Depression. None of the unemployed men I interviewed said anything like, “I would rather starve than let my wife work.” Nor did any of the women report that their male partner resisted their working. More subtly, however, these findings also differ from those of researchers like Potuchek, Townsend, and Rosen who explored meanings of breadwinning from the late 1970s through the early 1990s: they found that both men and women portrayed the man’s income as essential for the family and the woman’s as inessential. By contrast, only a few of my participants (both male and female) represented their income as sufficient for their household and any earnings from their partner as paying only for unnecessary “extras.”

Before they lost their jobs, the women’s earnings might have been used for some personal spending as well. For example, Maria Carrera was raised by a mother who was an accountant and a feminist, so being independent was important to her: “I’m going to be independent again, because my mom’s like that.” Maria missed her independence because she felt that, without a paycheck, she should ask her husband for permission to shop for herself or her daughter or buy presents for relatives, even though he never demanded control over her spending. Maria was not extravagant, but she always looked fashionable when we got together. Yet, if she was not contributing an income, she did not feel right spending money on nonessential items.⁴⁷ Moreover, Maria had additional reasons for wanting to work again. She had convinced her husband that they should pay for their daughter’s college and graduate school education, which added to the pressure on her to find another job.

Although Potuchek’s first breadwinning criterion—earning money to provide for the family, rather than just for personal spending—was largely satisfied by the unemployed women in dual-earner couples, was the second one—“the day-to-day obligation to earn money … a duty to work” so that “leaving the labor force (even temporarily) is not an option”—fulfilled as well? Maria had considered retiring while her husband continued at his job. What about other unemployed women? I noticed in my participants’ life histories and in the decisions they made over the years I knew them that some women assumed that their male partner had a stronger obligation to keep working.⁴⁸

That assumption was clear when Linda McDaniel decided not to look for another job. Then in her fifties, Linda had been working as an executive assistant in the same construction company as her husband, who was second in command. Construction companies struggled during the Great Recession. When that business closed, both Linda and her husband lost their jobs. She said that was particularly difficult for him because “he’s concerned about being the breadwinner.” Nonetheless, Linda diligently searched for work and obtained a position as an executive assistant and then program manager for a local nonprofit organization. When I reinterviewed her two years later, she had completed a fulfilling year and a half of work before being laid off again because the organization’s grant funding ended. By that time, her husband’s income in his new job was more secure, but then their son’s wife left him. When we spoke, their son and his young children were about to move in with Linda and her husband. Even though Linda’s household income was not back to the level she and her husband had previously earned when they both worked for the construction company, Linda decided, with the agreement of her husband, to suspend her search for another job so she could be on hand to care for their grandchildren. She was also the one who assisted her elderly mother and her husband’s father, both of whom required increasing care. She commented, “My husband has always known that my priorities have always been the family versus the breadwinner. He gets to be the breadwinner.” She quickly added, “Not that we’re a traditional family, but I’ve always been really upfront with him, ‘Honey, I need to go do this.’ ”

Linda’s defensive comment, “Not that we’re a traditional family,” is interesting. She is college educated, and she knows that I am as well. She may suspect that college-educated professionals like me would look down on a “traditional” household in which the man is the sole income earner. Still, it seemed obvious to her that her husband should keep working while she stopped trying to find another job and looked after their grandchildren and aging parents. Why? Men can do family care work too—in fact, one of my male participants was happy to care for his granddaughter while he was unemployed. However, financially, it made more sense for Linda’s husband to keep working because his income had always been much higher than hers. Both Linda and her husband had been breadwinners by Potuchek’s first criterion, with both of their incomes supporting their household. However, when someone was needed for family care, he had the greater obligation to keep working, and she took on the tasks of supporting the older and younger generations. Furthermore, being the family breadwinner mattered more to Linda’s husband than to Linda, by her account.

Gender asymmetry in the obligation to keep working was also evident in the case of Lucy Guerrero. Lucy had worked for a courier company, first as a driver, which she enjoyed, and then in their HR department, which she found stressful. With the money she saved from her job, she was able to give her second husband money to open an auto repair shop. Then Lucy was dismissed from her job. Initially, her reaction was, “I was married and said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll take a well-deserved vacation.’ ” Her husband supported them for a while, but his auto repair shop failed to make money during the Great Recession, and they were no longer able to make payments on their condo. After two years of struggling, Lucy asked her husband to leave. He did not want to end the marriage, but she decided on New Year’s Eve, “I am not starting this year with this man.” Lucy gathered all his clothes and put them outside, and he had to leave. Claudia C., who interviewed Lucy, clarified that the problem in their relationship had not been Lucy’s job loss but rather her husband’s economic failure because “he doesn’t know how to do business.” There were other issues, including the fact that his mother was living with them and that he did not communicate well, but for Lucy, the main problem was his failure to support them:

LUCY: They were issues, but yes, the economy had a great effect because he never contributed, never gave—

CLAUDIA C.: [completing the thought] He never took responsibility.

LUCY: […] If we had maintained that economic income, nothing would have been lost. Nothing, nothing would have been lost.

CLAUDIA C.: You were the giver.

Both Claudia C. and Lucy assumed that it was acceptable for Lucy to take a “take a well-deserved vacation” from working and that her husband should have continued to provide for them. Lucy should not have had to be “the giver.”

It is also significant that Lucy’s husband did not decide to leave her because she was not earning an income; instead, she decided he needed to leave because he was not earning enough. As I explained earlier, some previous research has found that divorce rates are more strongly related to a man’s unemployment than to a woman’s being out of work.⁴⁹ It could be that the woman’s unemployment does not create as much financial hardship, assuming her earnings had been lower. Another possibility is that expectations about whether the man or the woman has the greater duty to provide for the household shape each partner’s response to the other’s reduced income. If there is a stronger social expectation that the man should keep working to provide for the family, then his unemployment is more disruptive of their identities and mutual expectations than is hers.

Consistent with the previous research, among the heterosexual couples in this study, the man’s unemployment or underemployment led to much more relationship strain than did the woman’s unemployment or underemployment. In seven of the twelve dual-earning couples in which the man was unemployed, he reported some strain or serious problems in their relationship caused by his reduced earnings. By contrast, only one of the eight women in a dual-earner couple (Jackie Gallardo) attributed relationship strain to her loss of work hours. That was a special case because her husband worked at the same company, and he had lost work hours as well. With both of their incomes drastically reduced, they could no longer afford their house payments, and the bank foreclosed on their mortgage. His frustration and anger, which led to him beating her on one occasion, could have been as much a reaction to his own reduced income as it was a reaction to hers. As she put it, “Once, he beat me—the stress of not being able to make the house payments, we were losing it.” That atypical case aside, the women did not report problems in their relationship because they were out of work. For example, although Maria Carrera’s husband urged her to find another job, she also observed, “He’s very supportive, I don’t have problems with him or anything.” By contrast, several of the unemployed men reported recriminations from their wife or other tensions in their relationship.

Charles Toppes, who had been a director of manufacturing for a furniture company with a salary of about $160,000, is an example of a man who reported relationship strain. His wife had not been working for many years, but when it looked likely that he would be laid off, she trained to become a medical technician and found a job in that field. When I met Charles, he had been out of work for a year and a half, and he and his wife had two teenagers. His wife was the money manager in their household, and she was all too aware that their expenses exceeded their income. In response to my question, “How has your wife been about all of this?” Charles replied, “It’s been very stressful. There’s a lot of stress in the family. She was going through some stress when she first went to work simply because of the new job, new career, and everything, although it’s what she wants to do.” He concluded, “It’s been a strain on all of us. It’s been a strain on the marriage; it’s been a strain on family life.” Charles also worried about the effect of his unemployment on his “legacy” as a father; that is, the kind of memories his teenage children would have of this period in their lives. Thinking especially of his fifteen-year-old daughter, he said, “It bothers me not being able to do these kinds of things because then my legacy is affected as her dad. You know, [imagining her thoughts] ‘When Dad had money, we were able to do this, but then Dad didn’t have money, so we had to stop. And we didn’t have the fun that we had.’ ”

The strain was even greater in households in which the husband was unemployed and the wife earned enough to be self-supporting.⁵⁰ Stephen Smith and his wife had both held high-level management positions in large companies; in fact, she had interviewed him for a job he held early in his career. Later, he moved to a different company so that they would not be vying for the same promotions. She stayed with the company where they met, and several career moves later, he became a senior director at a division of a Fortune 500 company in the leisure industry. Together, they earned more than $300,000 a year. In my first interview with Stephen, he stated that he was grateful that his wife’s income “gave me added breathing room. I didn’t have necessarily the same stresses that would be there had I been the only wage earner in the family.” In the next interview, however, he revealed his wife’s fury with him. Although they had saved enough money to complete $80,000 worth of home improvements after he lost his job, she berated him for the loss of the stock options that were supposed to pay for their children’s college education. When Stephen was let go during the Great Recession, he was forced to sell the stock options just as the market was tanking and after the stock had lost most of its value:

There isn’t more than probably a month or two that doesn’t go by especially in our current circumstances with paying tuition that [his wife] doesn’t remind me of that and tell me how aggravated she is. [recounting his wife’s comments] “How could you have possibly done it? I still don’t understand. It was your fault and you ruined [their son’s] education. You were supposed to do this. You were supposed to have that taken care of. You fell down. You didn’t accomplish it, and now we’re paying dearly by either using my retirement or our life savings that was never intended for that.”⁵¹

Moving to a less expensive home was not an option; that, he was certain, would lead to a divorce.

When I first met Stephen, it was three years after he had been let go. In his previous job, he was a senior director of a division with more than 10,000 employees and more than one billion dollars a year in sales. He had not been able to find another job at the same level. During the several years he was out of work, his wife asked that he not tell their friends that he was unemployed. She also punished him by not giving him spending money. He wanted to stay active and useful by working on the yard and pool, but she did not give him money for tools and supplies: “Since I’m no longer a wage earner, no longer contributing financially to our ongoing existence, I have a very difficult time trying to justify anything from an expense standpoint with my wife.” She would say, “’Well, if you think that’s such a good idea, then you go spend money on it. You go get your own money.’ ” Stephen was worried about how her obvious disdain would affect his standing in the eyes of their teenage son, whom he imagined thinking, “Do I listen to what Dad says or what Mom says? […] Mom is the one who bought me my new shoes. Mom is the one who said I could go skating.”

Stephen eventually found another job after he lowered his salary expectations and took a lower-paying position with a smaller company. When I met with him again, he reported that his wife was still not satisfied. His frustration was evident: “How do I turn around and answer the question, ‘Well, you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain?’ What end was that? My end of the bargain was to, come hell or high water, death, taxes, whatever, I was gonna write a check and hand you $200,000 a year every year between now and when I’m dead? Was that the bargain I didn’t hold up? I didn’t know I had a contract that said this was what I had to do.” Stephen was sure his wife would have left him but for the fact that California is a community property state and she did not want to be forced to share her pension, which was larger than his. Another unemployed interviewee’s wife, who earned a middle-class salary, told me she had the same reason for hesitating to divorce her unemployed husband, although she did eventually leave him.

In contrast, in five of the twelve dual-earning couples in which the man was unemployed, he reported no relationship problems as a result of his reduced income. Some men even described a stronger bond with their partner and children, as did some of the men who had been the sole income earners when they were employed.⁵²

Jorge Paiz, an immigrant from Guatemala, had been a well-paid construction worker before he was laid off in his early forties. He explained that when he was working all the time, he used to come home late. After losing his job, he was able to go for walks with his baby and to take his older children to sports practice while his wife Isela worked at her clerical job. Isela translated his comments: “He said that now he feels love. (laughs) Before, he said that working and bringing home food and whatever they need, that’s all I’m supposed to provide. And now he knows that the love of the kids is the best thing.” She added that he also helps with cleaning. Jorge interrupted to add proudly, “And cooking too. I cook.” Isela put him in his place, retorting, “Sometimes.” Still, it was clear that she was grateful for his help, and he felt that his role in the family had become deeper and richer.⁵³

Similarly, an unemployed IT worker who had worked the night shift was glad that losing his job gave him more time with his partner. Although more time together led to more arguments, he commented, “We are understanding each other better day by day.” Overall, he said, “It had brought us closer.”⁵⁴ Some of the unemployed women in dual-earning couples, like Mary Brown, also mentioned that a benefit of being out of work was having more time with their family. Interestingly, however, the women did not report this change in the same way as did Jorge Paiz did—as a major shift in their self-understanding. Quite likely, even when they were working, their roles in their families had never been limited to providing money.⁵⁵

Overall, a little more than half of my male participants in dual-earner couples experienced relationship troubles because they were unemployed. Strikingly, however, when the man was the sole income earner before he lost his job, the female life partner reacted very differently: all but one sole breadwinner reported strong support from their female life partner while they were out of work. In their stories we can see how the new dual-earner norm even shaped the relationships that on the outside looked like they followed older patterns of male breadwinning. My examples of women who were the primary breadwinners show even greater changes.

Sole Breadwinning Men and Primary Breadwinning Women

There were seven heterosexual men in my study who had been the sole breadwinner in their family before they were unemployed. Six of those seven reported that being out of work had not created much tension in their relationship and that their wife was sympathetic and encouraging. In addition, two women had been full-time homemakers and were just starting to look for a job because their husband was out of work. Neither disparaged her husband. Their examples raise the intriguing question of why these wives were so much more emotionally supportive than their counterparts in dual-earner couples.

Robert Milner, an unemployed supply chain strategist for a midsize company, did not report tensions in his relationship with his wife during the eighteen months he was out of work preceding our interviews. Without any prompting from me, he exclaimed, “She’s been amazing. […] My wife has been amazing through this whole thing.” He added, “I look at my wife every day and feel so blessed that I have her in my life.” Robert’s wife used to bring in a little income by working in a family member’s business, but about four years before I met him, that business closed, and nerve damage made it hard for her to take another job. Two years after that, Robert lost his job.

Robert, who was in his early fifties, completely accepted the “package deal” of male responsibilities that Townsend described: holding a steady job, marrying, having children, and owning a home. When I asked him what he was proud of in his life, he replied: “I’m proud of my family. I’m proud that I was able to marry a wonderful woman. Produced two beautiful kids. […] We’re coming up on our thirtieth year of marriage. We’ve been through some tough times economically. But I guess I’ve always hung in there. […] We got married. We bought the home. […] We have two kids. That whole—you know?” Yet Robert could not exactly boast of being able to hold a steady job. His current lengthy stint of unemployment was not his first. He used to work in aerospace, but after those companies downsized, he switched to health and beauty products. However, he could say that, despite the “tough times,” he had “always hung in there,” and he had been able to check off the rest of the boxes (successful marriage, children, home ownership) in what he framed as a culturally recognizable package: “That whole—you know?”

Robert was especially proud of his achievements as a husband and father because his own father had failed in those respects. His father had been a bartender, and his mother worked in bars as well, when she worked at all. Often, she did not work because she had an alcohol problem. His parents separated when he was young, and for a while, Robert and his brother were in foster care. Robert did not want to talk about his childhood, but after detailing his success in staying married, buying a home, and raising two beautiful children, he imagined himself saying to his father, “I did it the right way, Dad.”

Yet, as proud as Robert was of fulfilling his responsibilities as a father and husband, he sometimes wished his wife was still working. I always followed the “What things are you proud of in your life” question with “Is there anything you’re not so proud of?” At this point, Robert stopped sounding like Townsend’s interviewees who in the late 1980s and early 1990s denigrated their wife’s financial contributions. It was quite different with Robert Milner. Even though his income had been much greater than hers, he missed her earnings once she had to stop working. Although Robert wanted to be good provider, he resented being the sole income earner:

I got to a point where I was working so many hours, and coming home every weekend and doing the normal stuff—mowing the lawn. And after doing all the duties around the house and realizing that my weekend was gone—there was no time. There was no money for me to go do what I wanted to do [e.g., go fishing]. And for a while, I became very bitter. […] I guess, in some way, I blamed my wife. You know? Because she wasn’t working. I never told her that. But you know subconsciously, in some way, you think about that.

Robert berated himself for blaming his wife because he knew that her nerve damage prevented her from working; he concluded, “It’s probably the biggest thing I was not very proud of.” He portrayed his wife as his financial partner in other respects because “she makes dollars stretch.” She seemed to be the main money manager in the family. When I asked Robert what was the interest rate on their mortgage, he replied that his wife would know. It was immediately after that exchange that he volunteered the comments, “She’s been amazing. […] My wife has been amazing through this whole thing.”

Tony DeLuca, an unemployed vice president of HR for a large company, also spoke of his wife’s strong emotional support and money-management skills. When they were younger, she was a teacher, and in the early years of their marriage, they relied on her fringe benefits. However, by the time their children were born, his job provided a higher salary and better benefits than hers, and she quit her teaching job to stay home and raise their children—a decision, he made a point of stating, that was her choice, although he was happy to support it. Still, they figured that, if he were ever unemployed, she could easily find another job. That supposition was wrong. While he was out of work, she started looking for another teaching job, but because she had not worked for fifteen years, she found it nearly impossible to enter the teaching field. Still, like Robert Milner, Tony framed her as his financial partner: “She has saved more money in coupons—I’m not kidding. I think we bought a third of this house under coupon savings.” That is likely an exaggeration, but he seemed genuinely grateful for her skills in managing the household budget. He concluded, “Between the two of us we make a good combo” financially. Tony was also grateful for his wife’s emotional support. When I asked how she had reacted to his unemployment, he replied, “Oh, she’s such a trooper. She is wonderful. And she’s the one who kinda keeps me up. She’s the one who has to remind me it’s like, ‘Honey, you know we’re gonna be fine. Don’t worry. Don’t panic.’ ”

Robert’s exclamation, “My wife has been amazing through this whole thing,” and Tony’s grateful comment, “Oh, she’s such a trooper. She is wonderful,” reveal a different emotional dynamic than we saw among many of the dual-earner couples. I was particularly struck by Robert and Tony’s representation of their currently not-working wives as their financial partners because it differs from other male breadwinning models. For example, a description of unemployed working-class men in an economically depressed part of the United Kingdom in the 1990s said they were torn between their duty to support the needs of their family and their desire to spend their job seekers’ allowance socializing with other men at the pub. Several of those men said they provided money for the household only to appease “the missus” and avoid tension.⁵⁶ By contrast, most of my American participants, whether male or female, described consumption projects they shared with their partner, including the major expense of paying for a single-family home. Only one of the sole breadwinning men commented that his wife’s spending goals and his had been at odds, blaming her unreasonable desires (“my wife always wanted this, this, and that”), rather than his stints of unemployment, for their shaky finances and poor credit.

Although we might expect the sole breadwinning men to have the most rigid, traditional gender constructs, that was not the case. In each of those couples, their partner had either worked after they began their lives together or he had no problem with her working in the future. As we can see in Robert’s case, he even resented that she was no longer able to bring in an income. He partly excused himself for those ungenerous thoughts by saying, “You know, subconsciously, in some way, you think about that.” That wording suggests that Robert believed that his resentment at being the sole provider was normal: it was what anyone in his position would think.

Although I was not able to interview all my participants’ partners, I do have the perspectives of two women whose husbands had been the sole breadwinner before losing their job. Because I recruited anyone who was either unemployed or looking for work, a few participants had not been in the workforce recently but began looking for a job when their spouse was out of work. That was the situation of Theresa Allen and Paula Jackson, who had worked in the past but who in recent years had been full-time homemakers until each of their husbands lost his job. Although these women did not say much about what it meant for them to be out of the workforce, they had a lot to say about what it meant for their spouse to be unemployed.

Even in the privacy of the one-on-one interview, neither blamed nor disparaged her husband, although both were distressed by the downward mobility they experienced as a result of his job struggles. As we saw in the last chapter, Theresa Allen and her husband had to leave the home they owned and rent an apartment; then they had to move in with her mother and give away or euthanize their beloved pets. Still, Theresa was very understanding about her husband’s difficulty finding another job in his fifties: “He’s sending out resume after resume. He’s joined the folks out there in no-man’s-land that are sending out resumes and barely getting acknowledged.” Theresa knew how bad the job market was; she was unable to find a job as a waitress, her former occupation, because restaurants had cut their staff during the recession.

Similarly, although Paula Jackson had to move to a smaller house and give up her beloved Mercedes when her husband lost his high-level job in a financial services company (see chapter 3), I never heard her voice any resentment toward him. She was shocked when I said that some wives were angry that their husband was out of work. She declared, “I would never downgrade my husband because he lost a job,” adding, “If you make the money, you’re gonna get that back. But how are you gonna get love?”

Yet it was not smooth sailing for the relationships of all the sole breadwinning men. Jagat Bodhi, an unemployed telecommunications technician, was the one exception in experiencing some relationship strain. Like Robert Milner, he had not wanted to be the sole income earner for his family. In our first interview, he stated, “When I got married, I was counting on my wife to be working at the same time so we could both contribute.” His wife had been a manager in a financial institution until she had to leave work to care full-time for their daughter, who had serious medical problems. Jagat’s subsequent unemployment created additional stress in a situation that was already difficult for his wife. When we met later for a follow-up interview, after he had found another position, I asked how his being out of work had affected their relationship. He said, “Bills started mounting up. So, that creates extra stress. It’s very stressful. And the unemployment [benefit] only covers so much. And we have a pile of debt, so …” He added, “Especially when you have only one spouse working, the other spouse cannot contribute anything.” When I pressed him about how his wife had reacted to those stresses, he said, “She does have a temper, so, (laughs) so, it makes it very challenging for me.”

Jagat understood that his wife had to leave work to care for their special-needs daughter, but clearly the financial strain was greater than he had anticipated. Unlike the sole breadwinning husbands in Komarovsky’s study conducted during the Depression, Jagat and his wife began their marriage with the expectation that both would bring in salaries from managerial/professional jobs. The loss of his income combined with her need to leave work was a double load of financial setbacks. Those financial challenges, along with his wife’s sacrifice of her career aspirations to stay home with their daughter, probably all contributed to his wife’s unhappiness, as Jagat acknowledged, adding that he understood her occasional outbursts: “You’re under stress, you know, so that is expected.”

In sum, more than half of the dual-earner couples experienced some relationship strain or severe problems when the husband lost his job, but that was the case for only one of the nine households in which the man had been the primary breadwinner and then became unemployed (including the households of Theresa Allen and Paula Jackson). Nor did these male sole breadwinner couples in my research sound like the male sole breadwinners Komarovsky studied during the Depression who said, “Love flies out of the window when money goes.”⁵⁷ Why?

There are significant differences between American families in the 1930s and the 2010s. Although Komarovsky found some happy marriages, she also described some wives who had contempt for their husband and others who were “subordinate and resentful.”⁵⁸ They stayed in those relationships only because there were few jobs for women in which they could earn a living wage, and divorce and single motherhood were stigmatized. If women wanted children and if they also wanted to stay out of poverty, they had little choice but to marry and depend mostly or completely on their husband’s income. That did not mean, however, that they were happy about their limited possibilities, and their frustration could boil over when he stopped providing for the family.

By contrast, US women in the twenty-first century have more choices. Most of my male participants who were the sole breadwinners had wives who had worked in the past and who knew paid work was an option for them in the future. Until their husband’s recent unemployment, working outside the home was not necessary because he had earned a salary sufficient to support them and, in some cases, to support them very well. Among the heterosexual participants who had been in male sole-breadwinner households, the husbands’ highest income in the past had been between $50,000 and $80,000 a year for the bottom third to more than $250,000 a year for the top third. With greater options—and husbands whose average earnings had been much higher than those of the skilled working-class men who dominated Komarovsky’s earlier study, even accounting for inflation—perhaps the spouses in these households had fewer pent-up frustrations when the man lost his job. John Davis, one of the unemployed men in the top tier of earners, explained his wife’s reaction to his being out of work this way: “She’s waiting on me to turn from a frog into a prince again, I suppose.” When he was working in upper management, his annual income had been more than $500,000.

As mentioned earlier, I propose that because dual-income couples are the norm now, these sole income-earning men reap a “surplus credit” of gratitude from their partners for exceeding the norm by taking on the whole burden of providing income for the household. The men then have a gratitude credit reserve, of sorts, to draw on when they are out of work.

Couples did not have to adhere to a neotraditional division of household labor to be happy. The relationships in which the woman was the sole or primary breadwinner also seemed to hold up well after she lost her job, with one sad exception.

In 2011, wives were the sole breadwinner in just under 7 percent of US heterosexual married couple families.⁵⁹ Given the rarity of this arrangement, both nationally and among my participants, I broadened this category to look at the effects of unemployment on the relationships of women who were the primary, not only the sole, breadwinners: they not only earned most of the household income but also were acknowledged by both partners as the main pillar of household support, even if their spouse or partner also earned an income. Five women in my study had been the primary income earners before they lost their jobs. In addition, one of the men I interviewed was in a household in which his wife was the primary income earner even before he lost his job.⁶⁰

Most of the women who had been the primary breadwinners in the couple reported that their spouse was very emotionally supportive while they were unemployed. The appreciative manner in which each talked about her husband echoed the comments of the sole breadwinning men who described their wife being “a trooper” or “amazing.”

Caroline James and her husband met in an acting class. But while he continued with acting, script writing, artwork, and various business ventures in the arts, she took office jobs, learned about the HR field, and then moved up in the HR ranks at a multinational company. By the time she was in her forties, she was that company’s senior vice president of HR with a six-figure salary that let her husband continue the artistic work he loved, even though it did not produce a reliable income. Because he worked for himself, he was free to accompany Caroline when her promotion required a move out of state. I asked Caroline if they had considered him taking over as the primary breadwinner while she was out of work. Caroline said, “We debated it. We really debated it. It’s just, we, you know, if we’re honest with our skill sets and what we do and what we like to do, our temperaments, it just made more sense to continue this way.” When I asked how he had reacted to her unemployment, Caroline replied warmly, “He’s been super supportive. He’s been really great. I’ve had moments of freaking out, like, ‘How am I going to afford this?’ […] He’s really good at budgeting it out and just being really logical about it, and if he’s been worried or if he’s had moments, he’s hidden it from me, because he’s really been really, really good.” Caroline’s high-pressure job used to require extremely long workdays with few vacations. She took her time finding another job because “I was enjoying spending time with my husband and the dog and the cat.” Her year-long severance package and savings from her high salary helped a great deal, and they had no children. Four months after we met, she found another job, but then there was talk of possible layoffs at her new company. When we met again two years later, Caroline’s husband continued to help her cope. She commented gratefully, “He’s on my team, and he’s supportive, and [he] said, ‘We’ll make it work.’ ”

Unlike Caroline James, Lisa Rose’s husband had a steady income, but it was much lower than hers. Lisa Rose shared that when she was growing up in a traditional household in the 1960s and 1970s, “I never imagined that I would be working my entire life.” Instead, she imagined a life like her mother’s: “The way I was socialized, I thought I was going to get married, you know, probably out of high school or early in my twenties. I didn’t get married until I was thirty-five. I thought I was going to be driving the station wagon with four kids, but that didn’t happen.” By the time she and her husband married, they felt it was too late to have children. Lisa earned a master’s degree in public health, and she started working her way up into management-level positions in nonprofit organizations. Before Lisa was laid off, her salary was approximately twice her husband’s as a teacher in the public schools. As Lisa explained, “We relied on my income to make our lifestyle work.” So, with Lisa out of work for more than two years except for short-term, contract positions, she told me, “It got pretty scary pretty fast, like ‘Okay, do we have to sell the house? What are we gonna do?’ ” Still, when I asked how her husband was dealing with her unemployment, she laughed and said, “He’s been great. I feel badly for him because this has not been easy, I’m sure. And he’s kinda my defender in the sense that he always reminds me that it’s not entirely my fault.” Lisa appreciated him “making sure I’m okay and sometimes just letting me know when I’m being too overwrought. And he’s very funny, and so he helps make me laugh.” In my follow-up interview with Lisa, held after she began working at a new job, I asked how her unemployment had affected their relationship. Lisa replied, “Like most things that are very stressful or challenging, it can bring you closer. It definitely kind of does that for us.” Lisa explained that one of the things that had been challenging had been their role reversal. It had been easier for her during an earlier period in their relationship when he was having work problems and she was the emotionally supportive partner. It was harder for her to have the roles reversed, when she “wasn’t feeling as successful.” Still, she thought that working through that challenge, along with helping care for his mother while she was out of work, ultimately made their marriage stronger.

Thus, the general pattern I found is that, at present, when American couples agree on a division of labor by which one of them will bear the primary financial responsibility for the household, the more financially dependent spouse remains loving and supportive during the primary breadwinner’s unemployment. Unemployed primary breadwinning wives, like unemployed sole breadwinning husbands, may earn a surplus credit for exceeding the customary dual-earner arrangement. Like their male counterparts, these wives can draw on that credit when they are out of work.

However, unemployed sole breadwinners do not always have grateful partners, as we can see from the unusual example of Anastasia Tang. Her situation made me question some of the basic assumptions other researchers and I held about earning money and having power in relationships. Anastasia and her husband were both immigrants—he from northern India, she from Southeast Asia. Shortly after the birth of her second son, Anastasia lost her job as an HR manager in a midsize company. Then her husband declared that he was burnt out from working his demanding job as an accounting manager, so he quit, stayed home, and talked about starting his own business. His reasoning was like that of many women, such as Linda McDaniel, whose partner earned an income sufficient to support the family and who wanted to put more time into childcare. He pointed out that Anastasia had a master’s degree, while he did not have an advanced degree. He figured that she would find another job soon, and her earning potential was greater. Both Anastasia and her husband devoted time and money to their two little boys, who were three and four years old when I checked back in with Anastasia two years after we first met. The boys were in an expensive preschool that expected parent involvement, and they had many enriching activities outside of school. Because he did not have a job, Anastasia’s husband was available to help with those activities.

However, Anastasia’s husband was hardly egalitarian. It did not sound as if he had consulted Anastasia before he stopped working. As she put it, “He decided, ‘I don’t want to go back to work.’ ” When I first met Anastasia, she told me her husband was taking care of their toddlers. However, she also said that he should not be expected to take full charge of two energetic little boys because it is too “hectic” and “he doesn’t really have the patience”: that is why they kept their nanny. He criticized her for failing to find steady work, but HR management jobs are increasingly likely to be temporary contract positions rather than permanent employment as companies outsource those functions to save money.⁶¹ It was seven months before Anastasia found any job, and for three years her only jobs were short-term contracts lasting a few months. Her husband would also criticize her for not asking for a higher salary, but during the recession and slack labor market several years afterward, salary offers had dropped considerably.

When I asked Anastasia, “How would you say your husband’s been? Do you consider him supportive or helpful?” Anastasia replied, “Not been very supportive; that’s my feeling.” She added, “I feel like he is criticizing a lot. He’s very hard on me.” The lack of appreciation she received at home made her miss working more. She said that, even though she had not considered her job as central to her identity, “Now it’s like you don’t feel sometimes you’re needed or you’re interesting.”⁶² She worried about her marriage: “We’re supposed to celebrate our five-year anniversary this year. We’ve been together for a long time, but I don’t know how this is going to survive this whole thing—whether, you know, our marriage can survive.” She implied that ending the marriage would be his choice, not hers: “Economically, I know he’ll do very well regardless of whether I’m there or not.”

This was not the first time her husband had been critical or domineering. One of Anastasia’s New Year’s resolutions, before she had lost her job, had been to “find inner voice.” When I asked her to explain what she meant, she replied,

Being married to an Asian also sometimes is difficult because my husband is very traditional and wants me to do a lot of things. It’s sometimes hard to feel I was being heard. I have to be sometimes very subservient. I do all the cooking in the house. He does a lot more of the cleaning, which I hate. But sometimes he’s very dominant; he wants things to be done a certain way with the kids and all that. I feel like we both can have our own voices without canceling each other out or making each other feel we’re not worthy of each other. That’s been hard.

Two years later, Anastasia was out of work again after finishing another temporary job, and her husband was still not employed. When I asked whether she had found her inner voice, she said she had not—either in her jobs or with her husband. Even when she could find work, she was only on temporary contracts, and she could not make waves in the company. She told me that, at home, “When you don’t have a job, you really don’t have a say.” However, that only seemed to apply to her, not to her husband, who still had his dominant voice even though he was unemployed. During our interview, her husband called her at 1:00 P.M. because he had expected her home at noon. Anastasia said she had “learned to control her tongue” to “keep peace.”

Anastasia’s situation as a sole breadwinner with an unsupportive spouse, although rare among my participants, is important because it raises a fundamental question: What is the relation between income earning and exerting authority in intimate relationships? Komarovsky assumed earning income is essential for decision-making power within the household when she argued that the wife of an unemployed man would feel freer to express her grievances and get her way “now that the man holds no economic whip over her.”⁶³ My surplus credit explanation for supportive spouses of unemployed primary breadwinners, although different, is also transactional: unusual past financial support is repaid in present emotional support. Cultural variation helps us see that this transactional reasoning may apply to most couples in the United States, but it is not universal. Cultural norms about family roles matter as well. Anastasia’s husband had grown up in northern India, known for its classic patriarchal family structures.⁶⁴ Perhaps his temperament or experiences also contributed to his assumption that he should have the dominant voice in the household, whether he was contributing economically or not.

Studies of other immigrant groups reveal cultural variation in family dynamics. Rosen’s study of New England factory women found that among the Portuguese immigrants she spoke with, the men assumed that their authority rested on their traditional prerogatives. Like Anastasia Tang’s husband, they did not need to be the sole or primary family provider to have the dominant voice.⁶⁵ Victor Tan Chen’s study of the effects of unemployment on the relationships of well-paid blue-collar workers found that it was common for unemployment to precipitate the end of marriages in the United States, but that was much less common for the unemployed Canadians he interviewed. Chen gives several possible explanations, including the greater materialism of his US interviewees.⁶⁶ Cultural assumptions about relationships also affect their dynamics. In other words, people who share the cultural model that it is natural that “love flies out of the window when money goes” will act on that basis, but people with other assumptions may not, as we see next for same-sex couples.

Same-Sex Couples

Some neoclassical economists have theorized that relationships are strongest when they are specialized, with the member having the better labor market prospects being the sole or primary income earner while the other member focuses on care of the home and any children.⁶⁷ One sociologist tested this neoclassical economic theory by comparing same-sex couples and heterosexual couples, given previous findings that lesbian and gay couples “value equality in both earnings and housework.”⁶⁸ As she hypothesized, she found that among heterosexual couples, nearly equal earnings were correlated with a higher risk of a breakup, but the exact opposite occurred among same-sex couples: nearly equal earnings were correlated with a lower probability of breakups. She concluded that an efficient division of labor in the household does not entirely explain the strength of relationships; the values of the couple are also significant. Same-sex couples, who tend to value equal earnings, had stronger relationships when they achieved that goal.⁶⁹

Katherine Newman’s study of unemployed Americans in the mid-1980s also found that unemployment had different effects on households in the LGBTQ community: the unemployed gay professional men with whom she spoke were under less psychological and financial stress than those who were straight, in part because at that time they were less likely to have a dependent partner and because their “community does not pass judgment on its members by reference to occupational success.”⁷⁰ It would be interesting to see whether those generalizations still hold true today.

Only one of my participants was in a same-sex relationship when I conducted my research, but he presented an interesting variation on findings from previous research. Terrance West came from a working-class family, had an associate degree, and most recently had been a shipping and receiving clerk. At his last job, he had been harassed for his sexual orientation, and his irritation at the way he was treated probably led to him being fired. He was in his early forties and had been without work for more than two years when we met. His boyfriend “Sebastián” was in his mid-twenties at the time; he was also from a working-class family and also lacked a four-year college degree. When I first met Terrance, Sebastián was looking for work and hoping to take some college courses. With neither working, they could not afford their rent and lived with relatives.

Given their age difference, Terrance took primary responsibility to provide for their household: “I want to be able to take care of my family, even if it’s just me and [Sebastián] and our dog; I just want to be able to maintain my family unit.” Terrance was worried that his boyfriend would leave him for someone with more money: “There’s times where I’m, like, wondering why he’s even staying with me, ‘cause he’s struggling right alongside me. And then it scares me, too, because my cousin has this friend […] and he drives a real fancy Audi, and he’s living the fabulous life. And my guy sees that, and he’s like, ‘Wow, look at his car,’ ‘Wow, look at this, look at that.’ ” I asked Terrance whether he was scared that Sebastián would leave him for someone like that. Terrance replied, “Sometimes I think that. That, oh, yeah, he’s just gonna jump up one day and say, ‘You know what? I’m tired, and I have no fun. I’m gonna go have fun with this guy or that guy.’ And that worries me.”

Years later, Terrance finally obtained steady work, and his expectations about the division of responsibilities in their household changed. As Sebastián grew older, and with Terrance’s place in the relationship more secure because he was working, he became increasingly critical of his boyfriend’s disinclination to contribute to their household income. When I met Terrance, his income had never exceeded $46,000 a year. His income may be higher now that he has acquired more certifications and been promoted, but he is still struggling. Sebastián studied in a cooking school and took a job as a cook, but it did not last long. Terrance and I exchanged Facebook messages in which he complained that his guy still was not working. Terrance phrased that not in terms of an ideology of equality but rather of stark financial need: “Maybe he enjoys watching me work like crazy just to continue to fall behind on everything?” Terrance did not need Sebastián to contribute equally, but he wanted him to try to help out.

Further research is needed on the effects of unemployment on members of same-sex couples. Being the target of harassment at work may help explain the fact that men (and, to a lesser extent, women) in same-sex relationships have somewhat higher rates of unemployment than do married men and women in heterosexual couples.⁷¹ Further research is also needed to explore how socioeconomic class and relative ages affect breadwinning expectations in same-sex couples. Terrance’s felt responsibility to be a sole support for Sebastián when he was younger and the primary support for him later contradicts some scholars’ generalization, “Homosexual men do not feel an obligation to support their partners financially.”⁷² Still, Terrance West’s complaints about his partner’s unwillingness to contribute at all suggest that current economic pressures shape the relationships of both straight and gay couples.

Singles

The mix of continuity and change in gender norms that I found in couples affected the ways those who were single thought about the division of labor they wanted in a future relationship.

Most single women and men were alike in saying they had little interest in dating while they were out of work. There were several reasons why their long-term unemployment dampened their desire to seek a relationship. Chipper Goodman, the college graduate in his mid-twenties described in chapter 4 who had been unable to find a meaningful career, said he felt too unsettled to consider a serious relationship: “I don’t think I’m really in the spot to have a girlfriend, because I’m not financially stable, and I need to concentrate on my career and my life and finding out who I am or what I’m gonna do before I can share it with somebody else.” Others who were older and had been in an established career said that all the rejections they received while looking for another job for many months or years had hurt their self-confidence. Amber Washington, a professional woman in her early sixties, explained, “I’m not interested in love right now. No. I want a job. I want a job. That is what I want. Everything else I feel will fall in place once I have a job. I’ll feel better about myself, and I can start thinking about other things.” Pepper Hill, a professional woman in her late fifties, explained that the problem with looking for a romantic partner while you are job hunting is that it creates more occasions for others to reject you. She observed, “Mate hunting and job hunting are very similar.” In both cases, there is an initial interview where “they have to like you.” She found “it was too many places to put myself out vulnerably, to expose myself.”⁷³

In a sign of contemporary women’s potential for economic self-sufficiency, only one of the twenty-two single women we interviewed, Isabel Navarro, was letting a man support her out of economic necessity. Isabel was in her late fifties, a former worker in a health maintenance organization, and an esthetician (cosmetologist specializing in skin care). She had always been ambitious and hardworking, but discrimination against immigrants from Latin America, her parents’ recent deaths, and breaking her foot had taken away some of her options and energy. When Claudia C. asked her how she felt about no longer being financially independent, Isabel spoke of having to “swallow her pride” because “I’m not a hundred percent comfortable with it.” What made her uncomfortable was that her new relationship was far from ideal; she had compromised on what she wanted from a partner to receive greater financial security.

Most of the other single women rejected being financially supported by a man while they were unemployed. Some framed this as not wanting to be a “financial burden” or as wanting to be a “giver” in the relationship.

ReNé McKnight, in her thirties, faced overwhelming financial pressures as an unemployed single parent. Nonetheless, she was not looking for a man to support her daughter and her: “I don’t want a man to take care of me. I want to be able to give to a relationship [but] I can’t contribute anything right now.” I wondered why she said she could not contribute anything to a relationship, pointing out, “I mean, you’ve got yourself. You know?” She thought about it and replied, “I would hate for someone to think that I’m there for money. I guess that’s probably what it is. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to use them.” ReNé said she saw herself as a “giver,” not a user. Similarly, Celeste Rue ruled out looking for a relationship while she was out of work because “I would feel like someone’s burden.”

Still, the persistence of a cultural model in which a woman can be economically supported by her life partner without social stigma was always present in the background, coloring the women’s choices of future partners—although it also depended on the partners available in their socioeconomic class.

Currently, marriage rates are dropping steeply among all income levels, except the top 20 percent of income earners. One sociologist described marriage as “almost like a luxury good that’s attainable only by the people who have the highest resources in society.”⁷⁴ Among those who live with a partner but are not married, the most common explanation given for not marrying is that they are not yet financially ready.⁷⁵ Class differences are magnified in dating, given the current tendency in the United States toward “educational assortative mating”: marriage between those with similar educational backgrounds.⁷⁶ My college-educated, single-women participants likely only considered entering into a romantic relationship with someone who was also college educated, which would increase the odds that their partner could earn a good income. However, given their own college education, they could support themselves, which gave them options. By contrast, women who had not completed college typically considered a pool of potential partners who also had not finished college and often could not earn a good income. I found striking class differences among the unemployed single women participants when they discussed dating.

Many of the single women who had not completed college were reluctant to become romantically involved with a man. Several were divorced or separated and had psychological scars from previous relationships. For example, Ann Lopez did not want to remarry if the man was going to depend on her earnings again. Ann came from a working-class background, but she had built a financially secure life through her own efforts and with little help from her ex-husband. He had been a carpenter who “went up and down with jobs,” so she went to work to help support the family. As I explained in the last chapter, although she had only an associate degree and no special training, she learned to download inventory information from the computers of a large telecommunications company and later became a self-taught IT worker for them until they replaced their employees with workers from an outside contract firm. Nine years before she lost her job, her husband had left the family and refused to pay the child support he owed. On her own, Ann put her daughter through college, paid the mortgage on her home, and built a pension for her retirement, which she was required by California law to share with her ex-husband. She explained her wariness about getting involved with another man:

ANN: I’d love to meet Prince Charming. But that isn’t happening. And sometimes I figure I may end up alone forever. Which—I’d love to have the company. But it’s very difficult to find a man that can hold his [own]. Put it that way. I have a lot to offer. But I’m not gonna offer it without them meeting me halfway.

CLAUDIA: Do you mean financially or what?

ANN: Financially. I have a home that’s almost paid off. You know, I’ll be darned if I’m gonna have someone come live with me, and I’m gonna support them. I’m not gonna do that again. I’m not gonna do that.

When we returned to the subject in a later interview, Ann explained that the financial split with a future partner did not have to be equal, but she did not want to be a “sugar mama.” Ann felt that her ex-husband had taken advantage of her financially, and she was not interested in another relationship like that. Given the current difficulties that many men without a college education have in earning a good living, it was unlikely she would find a man with a background like hers who could earn as much as she had.

Krystal Murphy and Summer Carrington, sisters in their late fifties and early sixties, were also wary about romantic relationships. Their stories show the forces that have changed working-class families like theirs. Their father was one of those midcentury men who had stayed in an unfulfilling factory job because it was the best way he could provide for his family. As an adult, Krystal had put up with an ill-tempered husband who earned excellent wages working at the same steel mill as her father until it laid off most of its workforce during the wave of deindustrialization in the United States in the early 1980s. He refused to look for that kind of work again, which infuriated Krystal. Remembering their arguments about it upset her so much that she became teary:

When we were kids, my dad had three girls. He knew that there was nowhere else he was gonna get a job that supported us, kept a roof over our head, had hospitalization, had dental, had everything to cover the family. He hated that job every day he had to go there. He hated it. But he knew that that’s the best he could do for our family. I’m gonna cry. I’m sorry. I said to my husband once, cause he—it was right when Kaiser [the steel mill] was getting ready to close, and my dad knew people, and he said [to Krystal’s husband], “I can keep you on longer. You won’t be doing the same job, but we’ll get you another. You know there’s another way you can stay.” He [Krystal’s husband] said, “I don’t want to do it.” I got so angry. I rarely raised my voice around him because it incited him more. And I said, “Do you think this is what my father planned for his life? Do you think that this is what he wanted to do? The answer to that is no.”

Krystal’s husband never found another job that could support the family. Both he and Krystal had learning disabilities. She worked as a medical lab technician and later in clerical/administrative support positions, all of which paid poorly. They separated, and she was not interested in another relationship. She commented, “I’ve never felt the need to have a man in my life to be a person.”

Her sister Summer had an even more traumatic marital history. Her ex-husband had been a musician and drug dealer. After they divorced, he lived with a woman who stole Summer’s Social Security number, with the result that Summer lost her home and vehicles. Summer asked a friend of hers who was dating, “I gotta ask you a question. When you don’t really know anybody, how do you put your purse down and lay down next to him and go to sleep? I don’t trust anybody enough.”

By contrast, the professional and managerial single women I interviewed spoke as if they had many options. Given their own education and that of the men in their socioeconomic class, they had the choice of marrying someone who could support them both with his income, being part of a dual-earning couple with someone who had a similar income, being part of a dual-earning couple with a partner who earned less than they did, or remaining single and continuing to support themselves fairly comfortably once they found another job. They imagined multiple life choices for women like them and defined themselves in relation to that range of possibilities.

Elizabeth Montgomery had been a highly paid business-to-business furniture salesperson, but she had to buck traditional ideas of women’s roles, both in her marriage and at her last job. She believes her ex-husband divorced her because “I think he wanted, deep down inside […] someone who would stay home.” She commented, “So what he thought he wanted and what he wanted, I think, were two different things.” In other words, he thought he was happy to have a wife who had a successful career, but perhaps her business success was threatening to him. Shortly after leaving Elizabeth, he married a woman who did not work. When Elizabeth informed her boss that she was going through a divorce, she was forced to resign. To me and to a lawyer she consulted, this was a shocking example of gender discrimination. Would a man have been pushed out because he might be distracted by an impending divorce? Elizabeth decided not to fight her termination, and fortunately, she had substantial savings. As she looked to the future, she wanted another relationship and expected that possibly she would be the higher earner again. She explained, “I’m not expecting the guy to do well. I’m expecting me to do well. If he does well, that’s frosting on the cake.” She was proud that this made her “different” and “oddball” when it came to romantic relationships.

Unlike Elizabeth, Pepper Hill, who had held a high-level professional job at a nonprofit organization and had never married, was not looking for a romantic partner while she was out of work, even though she wanted one eventually. Right after making the comment I quoted earlier about her reluctance to be job hunting and mate hunting at the same time, she added, “Now, some people, when they weren’t working, that’s [marriage] what they go for; that’s their security.” Pepper recognized that getting married for greater economic security was an option for women in her class, but it was one that she rejected.

By contrast, two college-educated women entertained the idea of finding a romantic partner who would support them financially. Mona Childs had worked in marketing before she lost her job. She was in her mid-fifties but looked younger. I asked Mona, “Do you ever think to yourself, ‘Well, if I had some guy supporting me, then my money problems would be over’ ”? She thanked me for the question because it had been on her mind. Her money problems were not too severe because she had paid off her mortgage and had considerable savings. But the possibility appealed to her: “If I were to, let’s just say, find a man that I’m attracted to who has not been in a relationship for a long time [unlike two men who were interested in her but were in other relationships]—he’s not looking for another income, he would love to have someone take care of the house, to be there for him in the evening—that would be me.” Mona had been talking about such a scenario with a friend who was also having trouble making ends meet. She explained, “She’d like that, too. Because she’s in the same kind of boat for the most part, too. We wouldn’t mind being ‘the little missus’ and supporting somebody [in nonfinancial ways]. Do I think that if I were in that situation and not have to worry about money and everything like that, would I flourish again? Yeah.” Mona said that under those circumstances, she would still want to work, but not full time. The problem with dating while she was out of work, however, was that she did not feel good about herself: “I’ve had two guys tell me that they find me interesting. They like me; they’re attracted to me. But I’m not attracted to myself, and it’s because I’ve always been wrapped up with how I feel about myself based upon my job.” In this interesting blend of different gender models, Mona would be happy to be financially supported, but to feel attractive to a potential partner, she needed the self-esteem that she used to get from being successful at her job.⁷⁷

The other woman who considered being supported by a partner was Amber Washington. Amber is bisexual. She said she was not looking for love “unless it’s a sugar momma or a sugar daddy.” (I believe she meant a real romantic relationship with someone who could support her, not purely transactional “sugar dating.”)⁷⁸ In her last relationship, her female partner did support her until Amber became bored and looked for work. Amber’s sexual orientation did not alter the gender roles she had imbibed from popular culture and that she blamed for her “princess syndrome.” When I asked how she had imagined her life would go after she left college, she replied, “When I moved to California … I saw myself getting involved with the glamour life. I was gonna meet somebody who was gonna sweep myself off my feet, man or woman, and that I was just gonna have the life of a princess. That’s really what I was thinking.” She realized, however, that this was unrealistic: “The knight in shining armor—I have anger with the movies and the books that just kinda promote this. Every movie that you see that’s a romantic comedy, the guy always gets the girl, the girl always gets the guy. […] You know, and it’s like this is what girls are seeing and looking at and even in the books and it’s so … it’s a fantasy.” Amber said she still would enjoy being a princess, but she knew she could not pin her hopes on a Hollywood fairytale ending. Furthermore, like Mona, she could not think about dating until she had a job, which she needed to “feel better about myself.”

In sum, there was considerable variety in the way single women thought about potential relationships. Notice, however, that often their choices were still inflected by a neotraditional male primary breadwinner model. Even if they defined themselves in opposition to that model, it colored their decisions about relationships. For example, the cultural standing of that model kept ReNé from dating because she did not want a potential partner to think that “I’m there for money.” Others (such as Ann Lopez) believed that men should at least meet them “halfway” as breadwinners but did not see that as likely, given their marriage prospects. For still others—Mona Childs and Amber Washington—being financially supported was appealing, but they did not want to date when they lacked self-confidence because they were unemployed.

There were some exceptions. For example, Magenta Love, a hairdresser who had a bachelor’s degree, owned her own salon, and had taught college courses in cosmetology, wanted to find a “soulmate, love of my life.” She did not mention any financial threshold her soulmate would have to pass, nor did she proudly reject taking that into consideration. Single women like her, however, were less common among those we interviewed than those who spoke as if being financially supported was a live option, either as a trap or a haven. To reject the choice of depending on one’s partner presupposes that one has that option to reject.

Romantic options for the unemployed single male participants were much more limited. All the single men we interviewed had few financial reserves. To put it plainly, they were broke. By contrast, the unemployed men who had corporate severance packages and substantial savings to help tide them over while they were out of work were all married, further evidence of how marriage in the contemporary United States is shaped by class position.⁷⁹

None of the single men we interviewed said they considered finding a partner who would support them while they worked part time or pursued their avocations. Nor did any of them proudly reject that option, as did several of the women I interviewed, or require that a potential partner contribute at least half the household income, as Ann Lopez expected. To the extent that they mused about their romantic options—which was rare—they did not mention their potential mate’s paycheck at all.

To be fair, we did not raise the possibility of finding a partner who could pay the bills in our interviews with the single men, which reflects my own cultural assumption that this was not realistic. In retrospect, I wish we had asked them about this option; their answers would have been revealing. Still, I only asked a few of the women how they would feel about being supported by a partner; it was not a standard question. Most of the women’s commentary on this topic was offered spontaneously.

The men who were not already in an exclusive relationship and who discussed dating raised two problems: being expected to pay for expenses incurred on those dates and being rejected because they were unemployed. Chipper Goodman, who was in his mid-twenties, and Bob Roberts, a middle-aged man who was one of my pilot interviewees, both worried about being expected to pay for dates. Both are college educated. When Chipper responded to my question about how being unemployed had affected his social life, he said it meant not going out with his friends. He added that it was also a problem for dating, because dating normally means “you go have something to eat and a few drinks.” I do not know whether he could not afford to pick up the entire tab for the food and drinks, or he could not even afford to split the bill. Whichever scenario he imagined, he saw dating as unaffordable without a steady job.

Bob, who was older than Chipper, commented, “Honestly, I’ve kind of put dating on hold because dating takes money. I’m sure there’s plenty of things you could do for free, but even if you want to go to a park, you’re going to want to eat afterwards, and you know, as the guy, I kind of feel pressured to pay, so that’s $20 that I don’t have.” Even an inexpensive meal was beyond his means.

No single woman spoke of a cultural expectation that she should pay the entire bill for a date. When I searched for information on current dating etiquette, I found a dating website for single professionals that had surveyed 300,000 of its users about who should pay for the first date. Two-thirds of the men expected to pay for a first date, although just under half of the women thought the man should have to do so. However, even in that 2019 survey, only 5 percent of the women and 2 percent of the men thought that the woman should pick up the whole tab.⁸⁰

Social pressure to pay for the costs of a date are minor, however, compared to the larger problem some of the men faced of being rejected outright by women because they were out of work. Bob spoke about this at length: “I’ve actually had some women reject me because I’m unemployed. […] It’s difficult. It’s a big shot to my ego.”

An unemployed welder and burner who was another one of my pilot interviewees, Earl Apache Longwolf, bluntly assessed his dim prospects for finding a romantic partner. We were talking about his health, when, seemingly out of nowhere, he said, “One of my [work] partners, him and his wife asked me, ‘When you gonna get married?’ I said, ‘How can I get married? I can’t find a job. Ain’t no woman want no broke-ass man.’ ”⁸¹

Someone might look at Bob or Earl’s comments and see them as a way of blaming women for problems in their relationships. In fact, some of the single unemployed men we talked to were dating. Yet, Bob and Earl’s belief that no woman would be interested in a “broke-ass man” makes sense, given the continuing weight of the neotraditional male primary breadwinner model. That model also explains why not one of the single women we interviewed said that no man would be interested in her because she was unemployed.

Are my participants’ views typical? A 2014 Pew survey of never-married adults found that 46 percent of the men said that “a steady job” would be “very important” to them in choosing a spouse or partner. A potential mate’s earnings may be more important for a random sample of American men than this factor was for the unemployed single men in my study, who were too preoccupied with their own poor prospects in the marriage market to be picky about the job status of a potential partner. Still, it is striking that in the same survey 78 percent of the female respondents said that whether a potential spouse or partner holds a steady job would be “very important” for them, far more than the percentage of men for whom that mattered.⁸² The Pew survey results reinforce my finding that long-term unemployment makes it harder for both women and men to establish a committed relationship, but more so for heterosexual men, given the still-present gender asymmetry in Americans’ breadwinning expectations.

So far, I have focused on the way gender and class affect unemployed single women and men’s relationships with a potential partner. What about those who were parents? The single mothers in my study were under far more stress than anyone else, to the point that some contemplated ending their lives. Among unemployed single parents, women face a huge disadvantage because typically their prior earnings had been lower than those of men, and there is little state financial assistance for them.⁸³

ReNé McKnight, a single mother whose daughter was fourteen when we first met, described the challenge of having few emotional reserves left for her daughter, given her daily struggles to provide the bare necessities for them. ReNé had moved to California, where her daughter’s father was living, in the hope he would become more involved in her daughter’s life, but after she arrived, the job she had lined up fell through. She was willing to take any job but could find nothing—a common experience at that time. Because ReNé had voluntarily left her job in Texas and moved to another state, she was ineligible for unemployment compensation. As I explained in chapter 4, she had to provide for her daughter and herself on food stamps and a $492 monthly allotment from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, an amount so little it did not even cover the rent for the nearly uninhabitable guest house where they were living when I met her.

Two of the questions I asked everybody were, “What makes you feel proud about your life? Or, what would make you feel proud?” I followed up with, “Is there anything you don’t feel so proud about?” ReNé was proud of having earned her associate degree, which took a long time because she had to pay for it herself and complete it while working. When we met, she was nearly finished with her online bachelor’s degree, another source of pride. When I asked what she was not so proud of, she replied, “Not being able to financially support the way I think I should be supporting.” She said, “I had to ask my daughter, like, ‘Am I a good mom?’ ” I asked ReNé to explain how being out of work had affected her relationship with her daughter:

RENÉ: Being all sad and thinking about what’s due, what you don’t have, what you need, I’m not showing the love. Like I used to hug her and kiss her and [say] “I love you.” I haven’t been doing that lately.

CLAUDIA: You haven’t?

RENÉ: No.

CLAUDIA: Why?

RENÉ: I guess I’m caught up in all of the worries and stress. So yesterday after school I picked her up. I said, “Can I have a hug?” (small laugh) She’s like, “Of course.” So now I’m trying to actually tell myself to hug her ‘cause it doesn’t come naturally anymore.

ReNé’s financial struggles were so severe that she battled suicidal thoughts. Knowing she is responsible for her daughter kept her going: “Thoughts [of suicide] have come, but it’s like I’ve come too far to let go. And my daughter, she’s my only child. She’s my reason for living.”

Another single mother, Miriam Ramos, felt she could not be a good parent without the income she had received from her work as a hairdresser. Miriam had divorced her husband after she discovered he was cheating on her. She had two boys in elementary school when her work hours were cut drastically at her salon. Her van was constantly breaking down, so she started seeing clients at a salon closer to home. However, her new shop was a long distance from her old salon, so only some of her clients followed her to the new location. For several years, her income barely exceeded her expenses. She was overwhelmed with anxiety about money, along with other issues in her life. Two years after we had first met, her older son was about to go into eighth grade. He had some digestive problems, and Miriam wished she could seek treatment for him. Her worries, large and small, made her feel that any small thing would push her over the edge and make her want to end it all:

What all this is starting to feel like is something as tiny as, like, my nail would have broken at the wrong time, that I was just going to lose it. And that’s a scary feeling to have. So, I have children, and the guilt of even thinking something like that when you have children, people saying you’re so selfish when mothers do this, and they do that, how selfish of them. Sometimes you’re thinking it’s the best thing for your kids because you don’t want to burden them with you and how you’re feeling and everything you’re going through because you want so much for them. (crying) Yeah. At that moment, that’s what I was feeling. I want so much for my kids, and I’m not doing it for them.

Fortunately, Miriam, too, found the strength to go on.

Women’s disproportionate responsibility for childcare, which we saw during the pandemic, has meant that there are fewer men taking the major responsibility for raising their children. I interviewed only one male single parent, a divorced father of three boys. Tom Dunn said for many years he had worked nights in any low-level computer operator job he could find, so he could be home with his boys during the day. However, eventually he became an IT recruiter, earning over $70,000 a year until he got into a dispute with his boss and was laid off. The unemployment compensation Tom received for nearly two years was quite a bit less than he used to earn, but it was approximately four times the amount ReNé received in welfare. Thus, he had fewer financial worries than ReNé or Miriam had—at least, until his unemployment compensation ended and firms still were not hiring. Fortunately, by then, his three sons were in their late teens or early twenties, and Tom did not need to support them financially, although he continued to be very involved in their lives.

In sum, neotraditional gender roles disadvantage unemployed single men in the marriage market but help them as single parents, with the reverse for unemployed single women, who face crushing burdens if they are also trying to care for children.

Gender Identities and Work

A qualitative study like this one cannot offer a representative sample. What it can do, however, is reveal the complexities of people’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings. One such complexity concerns the way that not working is related to gender identities. The continuing obligation of men to be in the workforce affected the gender identities of some of the unemployed men we interviewed. Interestingly, even those who did not adhere to traditional gender ideologies or practice traditional gendered behaviors still connected work to masculinity.

Earlier I described Jorge Paiz, the construction worker who was proud of helping his wife with cleaning, cooking, and childcare while he was out of work. Jorge struck a different note when I asked whether he ever looked down on himself for not working. Without waiting for Isela to translate, Jorge replied, “Yes. All the time.” He continued in Spanish to explain his thoughts at greater length, and Isela translated: “When he sees the neighbors getting home in the afternoon coming from work. Sometimes he’s outside with the kids or doing something. And then they see him. When he sees them, like, for example on a Friday, you know they get paid on Friday. And he’s thinking, ‘Oh, he has his paycheck today.’ ”

In Jorge’s example there is a lot of male gazing, but it is men looking at other men. Jorge is imagining his male neighbors coming home and observing him outside with his children. Meanwhile, he is looking at his male neighbors, wishing that, like them, he was arriving home with a paycheck. He gives this example in response to my question of whether he ever looked down on himself for not working; it seems that, as much as he enjoyed spending more time with his children, his self-esteem is lower because he is not working. Although he does not say so, he may also imagine his male neighbor judging him to be less of a man.

Marcus Walker was clearer in connecting not working to being less of a man. When I met Marcus, he had turned his life around after periods of drug dependence and being in and out of prison for drug dealing. He said, “Since 2005, God has given me a car. He’s given me a beautiful wife.” His wife had a steady office job as an administrative assistant, while Marcus took a variety of manual labor jobs. Although they did not pay as well as his wife’s job, he had contributed financially to their household, and the arrangement seems to have been satisfactory to both. However, for more than a year during the slack labor market following the Great Recession, he had not been able to find any work. One problem was his prior felony conviction: as soon as he entered that information in an online job application, the computer ended his application. When I asked him in the first interview about the meaning or importance of work for him, he responded, “My wife would know she got a helpmate. (laughs) Helping bring in some cash to take care of some of these bills. That would be the most peacefulest thing. Then being able to take her out to dinner or—we don’t have the money like this. So now I have to cook at home in order—to make it romantically at home in order to keep some spice in our life, you know what I mean? Instead of being able to take her to a restaurant or take her to the movies.” Marcus agreed with the statement “Work is central to my identity” because “I need work in order to have money, in order to be able to pay bills, in order to be able to be the man that I’m supposed to be.” For Marcus, being “the man that I’m supposed to be” would mean contributing some income to the household to help pay the bills, even if he was not the primary breadwinner.

Jake Taylor also saw being unemployed as a potential threat to his masculinity. Jake was a twenty-two-year-old Air Force veteran who struggled to find work after he completed his tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and returned to the United States. Jake was engaged, and he said, “If my fiancée got pregnant or something, and it happened like that to where I had to take care of both of them, then I would feel pretty emasculated about it.” Jake also recounted the time he almost left his great-aunt’s home where he and his dad were living because she said to him, “ ‘Men have work, and you can’t even support yourself.’ ” Jake was incensed, seeing her remark as an insult to his manhood: “She basically told me the one thing anybody should not ever tell me [which] is that I’m not a man.” Interestingly, Jake eventually studied to become a nurse—a career that he worried his working-class father would denigrate (“I’m surprised he didn’t call me a wuss when I told him I was going to do nursing”). Apparently, Jake had no need to enact traditional gender roles entirely—except when it came to providing economically for a family.

Gay men could also connect being a provider to masculinity. Terrance West told me, “I feel less of a person and less of a man because I’m not working.” He continued, “Right now I don’t really feel very important to anything or anyone because of the fact I feel like I’m not contributing. It emasculates you.” Note he said he felt both “less of a person” and “less of a man.” Those are different ways of feeling diminished.

The four men who explicitly (Jake, Marcus, and Terrance) or implicitly (Jorge) felt diminished as men while unemployed did not have narrow constructs of masculinity. Terrance is gay; when we first met, he had a long, manicured nail on his index finger. Marcus did not mind earning less than his wife; he just wanted to contribute some income to the household. Jake chose a career in nursing, which is a stereotypically feminine occupation. Jorge enjoyed expanding his role as father and husband beyond being an income provider. Yet, however flexible their notions of masculinity, their gendered self-understandings could not easily accommodate being out of work.

Of the twenty-eight unemployed men we interviewed, only these four men indicated that not working was a challenge to their masculinity; it was not a typical comment.⁸⁴ However, that is four more than the number of women who suggested that not working was a challenge to their identity as women.

None of the women said or implied that their gender identity was affected by their unemployment. Instead, they talked about their diminished self-esteem. We saw that, for example, in Mona Child’s statement: “I’ve always been wrapped up with how I feel about myself based upon my job.” Even among the women who said that working either was, or had been, central to their identity, none added Terrance’s phrase and said she felt like less of a woman because she was not working. At present, US cultural models of womanhood are still not as closely associated with the duty to provide financially for the household as are cultural models of manhood. One small benefit of women’s typically lower wages and greater childcare burdens is that unemployment is less destabilizing to their gender identity and committed relationships—although it is harmful in all the other ways that affect women and men alike, as I explain in the rest of this book.

The Gendering of Work and Breadwinning in the Future

As we have seen, adults in the United States today do not face a choice between two options—either a “traditional” or an “equal” division of labor in the household. Instead, there have been many shifts over time in the division of household labor. On family farms until the mid-nineteenth century, every member helped support the family, although often at different tasks. After the Industrial Revolution, there arose a division of spheres among native-born whites, with married men more likely to leave the home to earn an income while women’s earnings were limited to informal jobs they could do at home. Some of these men opposed their wife working outside the home. In the mid- to late twentieth century, many married women worked outside the home, although often earning less than their husbands and not being acknowledged as providing income essential for the household. At the time of my study, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, married women commonly work outside the home, and among my participants their earnings were usually seen by their partner as important contributions to the household. Some of the married men I spoke with were unhappy when their wife was unable to contribute financially. Still, women continue to have greater childcare, eldercare, and housework responsibilities and a lesser obligation to work full time. This is a neotraditional dual-earner breadwinning model. With this history in mind, we can imagine a variety of possible future arrangements.

In the final chapter, I will discuss the implications of my research for work policies and the future of work. The experiences and self-understandings of the men and women who participated in this research suggest that both men and women want more flexibility. Many men want to share breadwinning responsibilities and want more time with their family or for their leisure activities. Many women, too, want options that will allow them to combine engaging in paid work, with time for self-care, care for others, and other interests.

These desires of many of my participants fit what the feminist scholar Nancy Fraser calls a “universal caregiver model.” She critiques the “universal-breadwinner model”—one in which women are encouraged and institutionally supported to work full time—because it gives too little attention and respect to care work. Instead, she proposes a model in which both men and women share breadwinning and caregiving, and jobs are designed to better accommodate that combination.⁸⁵

Before the pandemic, some scholars proposed that if companies permitted workers to have more flexible schedules and to work from home, that could help both women and men combine work responsibilities with family care. Indeed, those provisions have allowed more parents of young children to work when that would have been difficult otherwise. However, pre-pandemic research in Europe and the United States found that flexible work schedules and working from home did not have the same outcomes for women and men. Although gender ideologies, as well as an organization’s own values and policies, make a difference, in general women’s continuing greater childcare obligations have meant that either women were using flexible work time to increase their childcare responsibilities or that is what their employers expected them to do. Although the mothers were able to continue working along with caring for young children, their work was sometimes taken less seriously by their employers than that of fathers who asked to work from home or on a flexible schedule.⁸⁶ Flexible schedules and remote work need to be combined with a universal caregiving model.

As I discuss in the last chapter, a different shift is underway toward more nonstandard employment and self-employment for men and women alike—patterns that were more typical of US women’s work a century ago. Over time, it will be interesting to see whether these postindustrial changes lead to a more sustainable and equitable division of childcare and income-earning responsibilities in heterosexual couples and in what counts as breadwinning, including opportunities for both men and women to take breaks from working. Same-sex couples may also provide new examples for the future.

Still, work is not just an onerous responsibility or a way to earn money. Many of those with whom we spoke, both women and men, said at least one of their jobs had been an important source of meaning or was “fun.” In the next chapter I present what mattered to them in a specific occupation or job, as opposed to how they felt about working in general.