The Male Breadwinner Model Was Never Traditional

In their recent piece for Deseret News, Brad Wilcox and Maria Baer were correct to note that men without work, purpose, or family tend to flounder. Relying on data from the Institute for Family Studies’ recent report on demoralized young men, they argued that men who do not get married, have kids, and get a job see their lives as a failure. The article suggests that the answer is to return to the male breadwinner model, whose recovery we should engineer. 

Although Wilcox and Baer suggest otherwise, I argue that the breadwinner model is not traditional but was a radical invention that was little more than a century old at its peak. It carried within it the very pathologies that now afflict the dual-earner model that succeeded it. If we want to understand why men and women struggle to build genuine partnerships today, we need to go further back than the postwar golden age to really understand what the breadwinner model replaced.

Learning From Pittsburgh

As an example, my own city of Pittsburgh tends to be the tip of the spear for all major economic upheavals. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scots-Irish and German families poured into the region when the United States was still split into colonies, establishing subsistence operations across the river valleys and forested ridges. These were not hobby farms. Their primary purpose was survival. Families grew their own food, made their own clothes, built their own shelters. On these homesteads, work was highly and naturally gendered. Women’s labor moved outward from the hearth, men’s from the barnyard. However, this division should not be mistaken for the “separate spheres” that would come later. Men and women did not inhabit different worlds. They inhabited the same world, the household economy, and their different tasks were deeply interlocked.

Consider linen production: flax is extraordinarily difficult to process. The pulling of the plants and the initial retting required substantial physical strength which was men’s work. The spinning was women’s work. But the entire process was a family project oriented toward a single shared end: clothing the family. Neither contribution was meaningful in isolation. The philosopher Ivan Illich calls this arrangement ambiguous complementarity. The roles were not formally prescribed or legally enforced, but emerged from locally evolved custom, biological reality, and shared practical need. Both men and women had essential roles. They needed each other. They would not survive otherwise. Nearly 90% of American families in 1850 lived something like this corporate family model. This was the family model that existed before the breadwinner model. What undid it was industrialization.

To understand why men and women struggle to build genuine partnerships today, we need to go further back than the postwar golden age to what the breadwinner model replaced.

Starting in the 1850s, Pittsburgh rapidly industrialized, driven first by iron and textiles, then later by steel. Men left the home for twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. John Fitch’s study The Steelworkers describes one man telling him: “Home is just the place where I sleep and eat. I live in the mills.” This is the arrangement that Wilcox and Baer treat as a baseline. But it was, as Fitch’s subject inadvertently reveals, a relationship in which men and women shared a household but not a daily life. The male breadwinner model retained some semblance of gender complementarity. Each spouse had a prescribed and necessary role. However, unlike the more fluid interdependence of the frontier farm, these roles were now rigidly formalized.

Unfortunately, the domestic labor that sustained this arrangement, like cooking, cleaning, child care, and the overall management of family life, was performed entirely by women and valued at zero by the formal economy. Illich calls this shadow work: unpaid labor required to transform industrial goods into usable products. The work of men was measured, counted, and compensated. The work of women was not. This asymmetry encoded a cultural hierarchy where work outside the home was real work; work inside the home was not. When women entered the formal labor market generations later and asked to have their contributions recognized, they were not irrational. They were responding to a logic the breadwinner model had seeded.

This male breadwinner model was exceptionally fragile. When Homestead Works closed permanently in 1986, the breadwinner model in Pittsburgh collapsed with it at least symbolically. What rose in its place was the service economy. In Pittsburgh, women moved into the healthcare workforce en masse. In an ironic economic transformation, women were now being compensated for doing what they had always done for free: caring for people. But healthcare paid poorly without advanced credentials, and economic necessity often required both partners to work. Enter in the Pittsburgh-style dual wage-earner model.

The Dual-Earner Model

This is where the story turns again, and where I suspect Wilcox and Baer’s analysis risks misidentifying the problem. The dual-earner model was a natural continuation of the logic of the breadwinner model but dissolved even the formal interdependence between men and women that this model had preserved. The dual-earner model put women into direct economic competition with men for the first time. Both partners now perform similar functions in the formal economy and compete for status in the informal one. There is no longer a shared project. No common good to which each brings their irreplaceable contribution. Instead, there is only the management of two individual careers and the negotiation of who does the dishes.

This competition has a structural winner in the current economy, especially within working-class communities. As Western Pennsylvania moved from manufacturing to services, and from services to highly credentialed services, men found themselves increasingly disadvantaged. The skills that had defined masculine contribution such as physical strength, mechanical aptitude, the capacity to do dangerous and demanding industrial labor are no longer what the economy rewards. Women have outpaced men in educational credentialing and now dominate the service economy that replaced steel especially healthcare. Men are, in a very real sense, falling behind. 

This provides the growing sense, especially among young women, that men just aren’t that useful economically and are not worth the time or effort. The novelist Mariel Franklin captures the resulting bitterness in her novel Bonding in the words of a female Gen Z character: 

No one wants to state the obvious: that fewer and fewer of us are interested in doing the traditional family thing because most men aren't worth it anymore. Most of them are just as entitled as their fathers were, but they don't bring anything to the table.

Whether or not that judgment is fair, it is the lived perception of a generation of women navigating these conditions, and as Wilcox and Baer point out, men have gotten the message loud and clear.

As I see it, the problem is not, fundamentally, that men have lost the breadwinner role. It is that successive economic transformations have stripped the household of the productive and caretaking functions that once made men and women economically indispensable to each other. In a subsistence economy, husband and wife are largely bound together in a shared productive project that requires both of them. That structure is what was lost, first to industrialization, then to deindustrialization. 

The Third Oikos Solution

Instead of looking backward to the breadwinner model, the restoration of genuinely mutual economic partnership between men and women may come from looking forward. We are experiencing a technological revolution that has the potential to bring in what Michael Toscano and Jon Anoskos, writing in National Affairs, call a “Third Oikos.” The third oikos is the third economic revolution following agriculture and industrialization that offers high-speed internet, information technology, and smaller automated machines to make possible new forms of home production. 

In this third oikos, production can actually start returning to the household, woven into global supply chains and just-in-time market production. The back-office functions that once required several employees, including documentation, accounting, transcription, HR administration, can now be handled by generative AI, dramatically lowering the threshold for a family to go it alone without leaving their house and being employed by a corporation.

In a subsistence economy, husband and wife are largely bound together in a shared productive project that requires both of them.

Consider a couple that I know who has recently begun an experiment in what this might look like. The wife is a women’s health nurse practitioner who has grown deeply dismayed by the direction of corporate medicine, where the demands of profit and efficiency work against the slow, attentive focus that genuine women's healthcare requires. She walked away from that model to launch a small integrative primary care practice specializing in hormone dysregulation and women's health. The practice is intentionally intimate, built around unhurried visits and root-cause investigation. The administrative functions are handled entirely through a virtual practice platform, leaving her free to do the actual work of care. Telemedicine technologies allow most of the clinical work to be done from home and a small co-working space. Her husband, a writer, serves as communications director and handles marketing and the operational functions. 

This is genuinely a household project. It is radically different in form from the frontier farm but with real echoes of it. There, a husband and wife processed flax together: his strength for the retting, her skill at the wheel, neither contribution meaningful without the other. Here, the roles are not prescribed by biology or custom but by gift and vocation. She investigates, cares, and diagnoses. He writes, communicates, and organizes. The roles interlock. The good is shared.

Whether this model can spread beyond a fortunate few is an open question. Much of the Pittsburgh story I tell is a working-class story, but this particular husband and wife are clearly upper-middle class. Can the benefits of the third oikos economy be made available to ordinary American wage earners? That remains to be seen. But the model points toward something more promising than either the breadwinner or dual-earner arrangements, namely a marriage in which men and women are not simply in competition but are genuinely in it together. Each contributes meaningfully, neither diminished by the other.

Wilcox and Baer quote anthropologist Margaret Mead that every healthy nation must “define the male role satisfactorily enough.” She was right, but the definition perhaps should no longer be “breadwinner” but instead “indispensable partner in a shared project.” The frontier families of Western Pennsylvania understood this instinctively. The third oikos may give us the chance to revive it again.

Grant R. Martsolf  is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and co-author of the IFS report, Good Jobs, Strong Families.

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