Breadwinner model

The breadwinner model is a paradigm of family centered on a breadwinner, "the member of a family who earns the money to support the others." Traditionally, the earner works outside the home to provide the family with income and benefits such as health insurance, while the non-earner stays at home and takes care of children and the elderly. The breadwinner model largely arose in western cultures after industrialization occurred. Before industrialization, all members of the household—including men, women, and children—contributed to the productivity of the household. Gender roles underwent a re-definition as a result of industrialization, with a split between public and private roles for men and women, which did not exist before industrialization. Since the 1950s, social scientists and feminist theorists such as Germaine Greer have increasingly criticized the gendered division of work and care and the expectation that the breadwinner role should be fulfilled by men. Norwegian government policy has increasingly targeted men as fathers, as a tool of changing gender relations. Recent years have seen a shift in gender norms for the breadwinner role in the U.S. A 2013 Pew Research study found that women were the sole or primary breadwinners in 40% of heterosexual relationships with children. In Britain, the breadwinner model developed among the emerging middle class towards the end of the industrial revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to this, in low-income families, a subsistence wage was paid on the basis of the individual worker's output, with all members of the family expected to contribute to the household upkeep. There was another side to the transformation of wage relations in mid-19th-century Britain involving two closely related changes: first, a shift in the prevailing wage form, from a joint to an individual payment; and second, a shift in the predominant subsistence norm of a living wage, from a family group's income to the ideal of an adult male-breadwinner wage.