The new female breadwinner: discursively doing and undoing gender relations

ABSTRACT

Public discourse of late has drawn attention to increases in number of married women in the U.S. who serve as their families’ primary breadwinners. Contributing to these conversations, this study examines how breadwinning mothers (BWMs) reproduce, resist or challenge hegemonic gender relations through an analysis of different ways these women discursively position their identities and tasks as earners. Findings from a discourse analysis of interviews with 44 female breadwinners married to stay-at-home fathers are presented in relation to 5 aspects of conventional breadwinning that emerged across BWMs discourse: (a) breadwinning as career-primary, (b) breadwinning as obligation, (c) breadwinning suitability and personality, (d) breadwinning as relational power and (e) breadwinners as ideal workers. Practical applications of these findings are considered in relation to women’s work–life conflict, martial role negotiation, and workplace interactions and interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Breadwinning
• mothers
• discourse
• gender

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Lynn Turner and Helen Sterk for feedback on earlier drafts as well as Kathy Miller and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The history of women and men's roles as earners and caregivers is a raced and classed and classed in many ways; and continues to be in the U.S. For a history of these issues, see Boris and Lewis (2006).

2. While this study focuses on married female earners, scant attention has been paid to single mothers and single women without children economically supporting themselves except in the context of welfare (e.g. Abramovitz, 1996).

3. A synthetic approach to discourse analysis means recognizing the interplay between critical/macro and conversation analytic approaches to discourses analysis. Wetherell (1998) theorizes discourse as not overly deterministic of meaning or subjectivity while also recognizing that individuals' use of discourse in the local construction of meanings, identities and/or practices is not completely disconnected from culturally-available scripts, narratives and/or ideologies (Korobov, 2013). The notion of discursive positioning is one that lends itself to analyses of the production of identity through discourse (e.g. Korobov, 2013). I analyze fairly long passages of participant talk with intermittent interjection by the researcher. Certainly, research conversations are unique sites of interaction. Yet these texts are not rapid naturally occurring conversational data allowing for a more focused interactive turn-by-turn analysis (e.g. Harré & Langenhove, 1991; see also Korobov, 2013; Wetherell, 1998).

4. Proportions of discursive positioning by breadwinning aspect must be interpreted with caution. My analysis explores multiple passages of talk produced in conversations with each participant as well as, at times, shows multiple readings of the same passage. That is, positioning often is conflictual and tension filled; resisting gender hegemony at one level (i.e. in a marital relationship) can also be read as perpetuating traditional gender at another level (i.e. organizational assumptions). Yet I attempt to give readers a general sense of how often ways of discursive positioning occurred across these data; strategy prevalence was an entré into a closer analysis of discourse.

Additional information

Funding

This research was completed with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [grant number 74614-00] and PSC-CUNY.