Title: One Household, One Income: Challenges of the Sole Financial Provider - Financesonline.com
Headings: One Household, One Income: Challenges of the Sole Financial Provider
One Household, One Income: Challenges of the Sole Financial Provider
SOLE BREADWINNER: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT
THE RISE OF THE SOLE BREADWINNER
CHANGING GENDER EXPECTATIONS AND BREADWINNER ROLES
THE FALL: NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF BEING THE SOLE BREADWINNER
A. EFFECTS ON MARRIAGE
B. EFFECTS ON CHILDREN AND THE FAMILY
C. EFFECTS ON THE ECONOMY
D. EFFECTS ON THE PERSON
Read SURVIVAL TIPS FOR THE SOLE BREADWINNER to find even more useful tips!
By James Anthony

Content: For the skill and effort in production, the workers were paid wages used to buy the things they need in other markets. With “production for home” moving out of households, and shifting to “production for others” now done in factories, there emerged a distinction between home and work and women and men roles. During this time, women bore the traditional domestic responsibility while the men were relegated the special responsibility of being the “breadwinner,” bringing home the bread from the income he received from producing goods outside the home. It was this “special responsibility” of being the breadwinner that associated men in this role. CHANGING GENDER EXPECTATIONS AND BREADWINNER ROLES
While the father as man of the house is often the breadwinner, in today’s changing world, mothers can be the sole financial provider while the husband stays at home taking charge of domestic affairs. There are also instances too when a child of age and with job becomes the sole breadwinner, especially when parents are too old to work or are sickly. Sociologist Jessie Bernard has argued that the concept of breadwinning first emerged as a distinctive male responsibility in the United States in the 1830s and that, from then on until the late 1970s, a “good” provider or breadwinner was defined as a “man whose wife did not have to enter the labor force.” This was the idea although in reality even at that time, the husband’s income is supplemented by the wife or by the children from non-formal work that earns them payment. At the peak of industrialization, women’s incomes have also moved from the household into a more formal participation in the labor force. By the 1960s and 1970s, the contribution of women’s incomes were clearly reflected in the household (combined) income and in the 1980s, over half of families in the US have both husband and wife working.