Angst of a breadwinner wife

Angst of a breadwinner wife
- M.P.Dunleavey, New York Times (appeared in The Sunday Times, 11 Feb 2007)

"When my son was born last autumn, my husband and I had a plan. After a short maternity leave, I would continue to work, and he would quit his job to take care of the baby.
I didn't think of myself as becoming the breadwinner; I had always earned the higher income. The fact that my mate would have a job at home, just not a paying one for now, did not bother me.
The main hurdle, we assumed, would be figuring out how to afford the shift from two incomes to one. That has turned out to be the least of our problems. The real challenge is navigating the financial and emotional issues that you can't enter into a calculator or plug into a spreadsheet.
Like many women raised at the tail-end of feminism's first wave, I assumed that my spouse and I would enjoy a relationship based on equality. Equality is an overworked word, but to me it meant sharing the income, chores and child care.

So when my husband asked me the other day: "Did your concept of 'equality' ever include supporting the family?", I had to admit that my answer was no.
I wanted it to be yes. If men could provide for their wives and families, as they have been doing traditionally in many cultures, why should women not feel just fine about assuming that role themselves? Why didn't I?

To put it simply, because we are not there yet, says Professor Kathleen Gerson, co-author with Professor Jerry A. Jacobs of The Time Divide: Work, Family And Gender Inequality.
"We are all quite comfortable with the dual-earner household. It's become a cultural template," she says. "But for some reason we hit a roadblock when it comes to single-income households where the single earner is the woman."
According to Prof Gerson's reasearch, the number of households where the wife is the sole earner has jumped during the 1970-2000 from about 4.1 per cent to over 7 per cent, and is still growing. That does not include women who are the primary earners in their families.
A 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labour Statistics indicated that about a third of wives earned more than their husbands. And about 43 per cent of houshold income overall was earned by women, according to a 2003 study by the Families and Work Institute, a research group in New York.

This data doesn't begin to reveal the uncomfortable situation that breadwinner women are in: How to renegotiate expectations for everything from who manages the money to who does the laundry - when you're chief financial officer of the household.
When I say uncomfortable, I'm trying to be polite. The women I know in these shoes are seething - with uncertainty, resentment, anxiety and frustration. The patterns that seem "normal" when the husband is the breadwinner don't hold up when women earn most or even of all the income.

That is partly because "men have a sense of esteem, of identity that comes with being the provider", says Professor Barbara Risman o the University of Chicago's sociology department.
"Women don't get the same identity benefit - there's a sense that one has a double burden."

Take my own situation: I'm supprting the family economically - my husband is supprting us domestically. While I write, he cooks, cleans, shops and takes care of our son. It sounds like an idyllic 21st-century twist on the old "father knows best" scenario. Yet I alternate between pride in our arrangement - and terror that I'll be the breadwinner forever.

Does the fact that he's doing so-called women's work haveso little value in my eyes - or am I afraid of how others may view a man whose contribution can't be measured in dollars? Am I a Susie housewife wannabe because I sometimes pray my husband will decide to go to law school and earn a good living?

That sounds pretty - especially because, with deepest thanks to my husband, I'm earning a good living. But for many frustrated women, financial power hasn't created the balance they were hoping for, and they're still working what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild dubbed "the second shift".
As one breadwinner friend of mine puts it, quoting an old Enjoli perfume commercial about a woman whoe "can bring home the bacon/fry it up in a pan": "I didn't think I'd have to serve the bacon and clean the pan too."

And I didn't think I'd feel so guilty, or derelict in my womanly duties, when my husband is quick to comfort our fussy four-month-old - or remind me where we keep the muffin tin. Or that I'd feel so much chest-tightening pressure when I monitor our bills - or remind myself that if I don't sign us up for life insurance, nobody will. Beacause it's my job."