Constructing Breadwinning-Mother Identities: Moral, Personal, and Political Positioning

Considerable changes have occurred in discourses and practices of work and family over the past decades. Even so, common wisdom in dominant U.S. popular culture remains that women more often than men would want to stay home to care for their children and forgo participation in the paid workforce. Particularly in white, middle- to upper-middle-class heterosexual marriage, women's identities often remain tightly coupled with mothering, while men's sense of self centers on earning the family wage. Yet the number of families with a primary earning mother and an at-home father increased 200 percent between 1994 and 2005 (U.S. Census Bureau 2006). Data indicate that of fathers married with children age fifteen and younger, .006 percent, or 142,000, are full-time caregivers with breadwinning wives. While some scholarly attention has been paid to dual-career and dual-earner wives who earn more income than husbands (Atkinson and Boles 1984; Bolak 1997; Brennan, Barnett, and Gareis 2001; Drago, Black, and Wooden 2005; Hood 1983, 1986; Stamp 1985; Potuchek 1997; Raley, Mattingly, and Bianchi 2006), we have only begun to explore the experiences of female breadwinners married to husbands who have chosen to drop out of the paid labor force or to remain at home caring for children following layoff, termination, or voluntary exit.

While the number of these so-called earnings-reversal couples remains small and their motivations, duration, and demographics vary (Drago, Black, and Wooden 2005; Winslow-Bowe 2006), no doubt their numbers are increasing. Layoffs resulting from recent economic downturns have purportedly increased the numbers of men at home caring for children for a period of time (Kershaw 2009). Within white, middle-class culture, in contrast to what occurs in many African American communities, where women often take on family breadwinning duties (Amott and Matthaei 2004; Winslow-Bowe 2006), female-breadwinner families are not prevalent. We might initially presume that these majority-culture nontraditional couples are enacting an innovative gendered work and family practice. These couples might operate without available gendered scripts (Ridgeway and Correll 2000) and, as such, have the potential to transform taken-for-granted sexual divisions of labor in marriage and organizational life. However, men and women performing sex-atypical work alone does not guarantee social change (Hochschild 1975; Reskin and Roos 1990) and it has been argued that only a small percentage of female-breadwinner families appear to be motivated by gender-equitable ideologies (Drago, Black, and Wooden 2005). Clearly, the lived experiences of female-breadwinner families require greater research attention.

As a means of contributing to our empirical knowledge about the lives of female breadwinners, in this study I investigate the following question: How do breadwinning mothers make sense of their identities as breadwinners in a culture in which they are expected to be the primary intensive caregiver? My goal is to provide a preliminary snapshot of the complicated processes of sense making as evidenced in the accounts of twenty breadwinning mothers. First, I briefly review existing research on female breadwinners and situate this study within feminist poststructuralism and discursive positioning theories. Then, I illustrate how participants construct a sense of identity through three positioning discourses: moral, personal, and political. This exploratory analysis then concludes with implications and directions for future research.

Female Breadwinning and Feminist Poststructuralism

A small but growing body of research explores female-breadwinner families. This work primarily centers on issues of persistence in women's breadwinning (Drago, Black, and Wooden 2005; Winslow-Bowe 2006), division of household labor effects (Brennan, Barnett, and Gareis 2001), marital discord and divorce (Heckert, Nowak, and Snyder 1998), and related marital power issues (Atkinson and Boles 1984; Gerson 1985; Hood 1986; Stamp 1985; Oppenheimer 1997; Potuchek 1997). Both temporary and persistent female-breadwinning families exist; the majority it is argued, are motivated by economic circumstances (Drago, Black, and Wooden 2005). We know that increases in a woman's marital earnings do not necessarily and neatly translate into greater relational power (Brines 1994; Bittman et al. 2003; Tichenor 2005). Women earning significantly more income than their husbands also report downplaying their financial contributions...