The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: Implications for Work and Care

JANE LEWIS Downloaded from The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Implications for Work and Care at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 Modern welfare systems have always been constructed around the relationship between social provision and paid work; it is this that has in large measure distinguished them from needs-based and universal, but punitively deterrent, poor law systems. Governments have always been concerned about the conditions for providing welfare,1 that is, the nature of entitlements in the language of many policy analysts, but more a matter of conditionality in the mind of gov- ernment. There has been a long-standing firm conviction too that wages are the best form of welfare. In the United Kingdom, almost 100 years ago the Labour party fought for a legislative proposal called the Right to Work Bill more fiercely than it did for pensions, while it was not at all keen on the new idea of social insurance be- cause trade unions feared state intrusion into the territory of mutual- ity. What was at stake of course was the fight for the old-style labor contract, to which social insurance was successfully joined in all western European countries, and which is now under profound re- view (Supiot 1999). The settlement at the heart of the modern welfare state was that between capital and labor. But as feminists have long argued (Wilson 1977; Land 1980; Lewis 1992) and as the main- stream social policy and sociology literature (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1999; Crouch 1999) has recently begun to recognize, there was a second key settlement between men and women. Social Politics Summer 2001 6 2001 Oxford University Press Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 153 The old labor contract was designed first and foremost for the regularly employed male breadwinner, and provision had to be made for women. The gender settlement meant that those marginal to the labor market got cash cover via dependents' benefits. Alain Supiot (1999) has described the labor/capital settlement in terms of security traded for dependence. A similar set of arrangements can be said to have characterized the gender settlement. The male breadwinner Downloaded from model was based on a set of assumptions about male and female contributions at the household level: men having the primary respon- sibility to earn and women to care for the young and the old. Female dependence was inscribed in the model. The male breadwinner model built into the postwar settlement assumed regular and full http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ male employment and stable families in which women would be pro- vided for largely via their husbands' earnings and social contributions. A pure male breadwinner model never existed; women always engaged in the labor market. But there were historical periods in some countries and for some social classes for which the model more accu- rately described the social reality than others: for people of the mid- at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 dling sort in the United Kingdom and the United States in the late nineteenth century and large tracts of the middle and respectable working classes in the years following World War II in many western countries (Horrell and Humphries 1997; Janssens 1998; Land 1980; Lewis 1992). There has been an enormous behavioral change in the second half of the twentieth century, with increasing numbers of women entering the labor market. Indeed, this has become one point of convergence among European Union (EU) member states. Family change, which has resulted in family breakdown, more fluidity in intimate relationships, and a large increase in single-person households, has also contributed to the erosion of the male breadwinner model at the behavioral level. But, crucially, the male breadwinner model also worked at the level of prescription. Policy makers treated it as an "ought" in terms of relationships between men and women, and in many countries it served to underpin both social policies that assumed female dependence on a male wage and family law, which made the same assumptions about the marriage contract in terms of stability and the nature of the contribution made by men and women in families, seeking to enforce them through fault-based divorce (Weitzman 1985). These assumptions were particularly strong in some European countries, particularly the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and The Nether- lands. I am going to argue that in the United Kingdom and in The Neth- erlands there is evidence of a pendulum shift toward what might be 154 • Lewis termed an "adult-worker model family," whereby it is assumed that all adults are in the labor market. However, this shift in assumptions has outrun the social reality, for there is a gap between the "one- and-a-half earner" family that characterizes labor market behavior in the majority of European countries and the set of policy assumptions that increasingly tend to assume full individualization. The second part of the article examines the policy implications in more detail Downloaded from for the United Kingdom. An "adult-worker model" holds out more promise for women than the dependence inherent in the male breadwinner model. Given the trend toward the "individualization of the social" (Guillemard 1986; Ferge 1997), together with massive family change over the last http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ quarter century resulting in a large increase in lone-mother families in many northern and western European countries, women need more access to wages. In the second part of the article, I also suggest that much hinges on the way in which such a model is implemented. In particular, given that it is women who tend to work part-time, policies that recognize care work are crucial. Where these are absent, policies based on the new set of adult-worker assumptions are as at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 likely to fail to meet women's real needs as did the old male breadwinner model. From a Male Breadwinner to an Adult-Worker Model: Policy Assumptions and the Social Reality In the immediate postwar decades, the gendered division of work, paid and unpaid, was sufficiently in line with the male breadwinner model, certainly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, to give rise to a set of normative expectations about the roles of men and women within the family that underpinned social policies, for example, with respect to the lesser contributions and benefits paid by married women under the social insurance system, and that in turn rein- forced the model (see Figure 1). The change in both female labor market participation and, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the rapid change in family Male-breadwinner model family ~ Assumptions regarding the position of men as earners and . women as housewife/caregivers embodied in policies Figure 1. The male breadwinner model. Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 155 structure was bound to undermine the coherence of the relationships portrayed in Figure 1. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, research revealed the extent to which the male breadwinner system no longer described behavior for a significant proportion of families (Crompton 1999). But nor have families become fully indi- vidualized, with both partners engaged in full-time work and economically independent of one another. The male breadwinner model Downloaded from has eroded, but the social reality is still far from a family comprised of self-sufficient, autonomous individuals. While women's behavior has changed substantially with respect to paid work, they still per- form the bulk of unpaid care work. Men have changed much less with respect to the amount of either paid or unpaid work they do http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ (e.g., Gershuny, Godwin, and Jones 1994). The pattern of paid work between men and women in households is now much more difficult to predict, but patterns of unpaid work have not changed so much. In the case of the United Kingdom, the British General Household Survey shows that in 1975, 81 percent of men and 62 percent of women 16 to 64 years old were economically active; by 1996 this figure was 70 percent for both men and women (ONS 1998, Tables at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 5.8 and 5.9). Married women are as likely to be employed as non- married women. Increases have been similar in other strong male breadwinner countries. For example, in The Netherlands, the rate of increase in the net labor market participation of women has been more dramatic, from 29 percent of all adult women in 1975 to 51 percent in 1999. The comparable figures for men were 79 percent and 76 percent (Keuzekamp and Oudhof 2000).2 But in both countries short part-time working is very common for women. Almost a quarter of British women with children under ten worked fifteen or fewer hours per week in the late 1990s (Thair and Risdon 1999), and 24 percent of all female employees worked less than twenty hours a week (Rubery, Smith, and Fagan 1998). The vast majority of Dutch women work part-time—80 percent in 1994; 33 percent work less than twenty hours a week. The percentage of dual-earner families with two full-time workers actually decreased in The Netherlands, from 43 to 33 percent between 1990 and 1994 (Hooghiemstra 1997).3 With respect to family structure, the pace of change in the recent past for the United Kingdom has been greater than in regard to the labor market. The divorce rate increased threefold and the rate of unmarried motherhood fourfold in one generation.

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