The Bread Had Better be Gluten Free at Least
July 9, 2015
If I didn’t abhor essays that begin with dictionary definitions, I would begin today’s post with this citation from the Urban Dictionary:[1]
breadwinner
The member of the household who isn’t a lazy son of a bitch; one who brings home the bacon.
Hey hoe, I’m the breadwinner…go scrub the toilet.
Pretty spot-on, don’t you think? Sure, yeah, officially the breadwinner is “the member of the family whose wages supply the livelihood,”[2] but in today’s pressure-cooker reality of economic disparity and gender iniquity,[3] let’s be honest about the received definition—the what-we-hear when someone accuses our spouses of being the breadwinner.
Bread-winningness strikes me as a rather passé idea, but it gained currency for me recently during coffee with a friend. We were both griping about the travails of working motherhood, as usual, and my friend had cause to exclaim, “I can’t just take time off work for childcare; I’m the breadwinner!” Suddenly, I was cleaved into two selves: the confident, empathic friend and the cynical slave to cultural influences.
This is what my idealized self heard:
Being a full-time, working-outside-the-home mom is hard.
Organizing high-quality, accessible, stable childcare is hard.
The expectations of our culture’s work ethic directly conflict—sometimes brutally conflict—with its expectations of motherhood.
And let’s not forget about the expectations that we nurture our marriages, voice our activism, and minimize our impact on the earth’s resources.
And this is what my paranoid self heard:
I make less than Husband, so I should automatically be the one to stay home when a kid is sick.
Since my salary is less, I should take on extra shares of the household chores.
As the non-breadwinner, my vote in family decisions should be prorated.
My job is just for fun.
My career is a joke.
I think it was the breadwinner that transmogrified my friend’s exclamation into an attack on my self-worth, that cleaved me in two. You might accuse me of overreacting, but check out the Urban Dictionary citation again. Breadwinner is divisive, yo.
But why is it divisive? Was it always divisive? Is it universally divisive or is it just me? I decided to do some research into the contemporary cultural significance of breadwinner. My methodology was this: Make some assumptions; Google those assumptions; pick sources that validate my assumptions. Et voila! I was RIGHT.
We know the drill: Back in the 50s, when everyone was white, suburban, and heterosexual, the head of the family (breadwinner) took his martinis in the office while the servant of the family (wife) took her martinis in the nursery. Breadwinners were male and respected, and God was pleased. Then some good things happened (Lincoln—I was referring to the 1850s by the way), and some bad things happened (Reagan), and gradually women came to represent nearly half the workforce—earning fifty cents on the dollar, naturally. Breadwinner, when applied to women, conveyed pity: Poor thing. Her husband died/walked out and now she’s the breadwinner.
Fast forward to our present era of inequality, wherein women earn seventy-five cents on the dollar and the U.S. is the only industrialized nation to not mandate paid maternity leave. Yay, progress! Despite that baloney, we still see women slogging through the mud-sucking pettiness of office politics, and occasionally, but with increasing frequency, those women earn a salary over and above that of their spouses, thus securing the breadwinner badge.
And suddenly breadwinner gains a third nuance: disdain. (Quick refresher, the other two nuances were respect and pity.) That is, disdain for the male half of a heterosexual relationship when applied to the female half. Is there any other word in our vernacular that, when applied to one person, subtly insults that person’s spouse?
What’s my point? Beats me—I’m just annoyed I have to work. But okay, here’s what I’m saying: Breadwinner has picked up some gender stereotypes on its travels and I think it does our gender a disservice if, any time we gain a foothold on Equality Mountain, we allow those old stereotypes to rain down on the climbers below us.
No, wait—that metaphor isn’t quite right. Let me try this: I don’t think we do anyone any favors by dredging up that old barnacle-encrusted breadwinner trophy and swinging it at the heads of the lower-wage earner.
Crap. That isn’t it, either. Okay, forget the metaphors. Let’s bring this back to the core issue: How I feel. I don’t earn as much as Husband does, but we would still be hosed if we lost my salary. When we’re faced with snags like a kid too sick to go to school, we don’t compare salaries to decide who stays home with the sickie. Rather, we assess who’s more likely to lose his/her job if he/she misses work today. Husband doesn’t outrank me—nor I, he—in any way.[4]
For me, feminism isn’t about Us versus Them. My reading of the core principle of feminism is this: We’re all in this together; let’s do whatever it takes to get the kids out of the house while mitigating damage to them, us, and the house. Go!
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=breadwinner. Accessed 7 July 2015.
[2] “Breadwinner.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breadwinner. Accessed 7 July 2015.
[3] No, I meant iniquity.
[4] Except maybe that he’s younger and I’m taller. Also, I suck at skiing and he…well, I was going to say he’s all thumbs at knitting, but I don’t know that he’s ever tried knitting. I bet he’d actually rock it. Upon further reflection, Husband may just surpass me in all pursuits. Except skepticism—I own skepticism. And I’m more punctual. But the point is this: None of these things factors in when deciding who stays home with a sick kid.