Words by Soren van Loben Sels PZ ’28

Graphics by Izzy Young PZ ’28 and Genevieve O’Marah SC ’28

‘Men used to be the providers’, we hear it again and again. Whenever the subject of traditional gender roles is broached, this old trope is inevitably brought up, whether to condemn or to yearn for. But were they ever? The basic premise is rarely directly questioned, but it should be. Historically, men have never actually been ‘the providers’ by any reasonable definition, yet unreasonable ones have prevailed.

A more descriptive term bandied around alongside ‘provider’ is ‘breadwinner.’ Breadwinning was, at least, the prevailing manner of how men traditionally contributed to the familial economy in the Anglo-American tradition: first, by doing a large part of the labor of growing cereal crops, and, as time progressed, doing the wage and craft labor that produced cash to buy things like bread.

But we do not survive on bread alone. We need food cooked, households maintained, clothes made, children cared for and watched, and all the other tasks excluded from the patriarchal idea of ‘providing.’ Those tasks are the labor socially assigned to women and denigrated by men as a response. The modern cliché of the ‘homemaker’ may acknowledge a few of them –housecleaning, cooking, and childcare– but treats them as amenities less meaningful than the labor historically done by men. The trope ignores the productive labor of women who produced the vast majority of domestic goods in preindustrial households. Modern experiments have shown that before the invention of the spinning wheel, it would have taken around 2000 hours of work per year for a woman to clothe a family of six, and that’s to barely get by. Even when technology allowed women to produce fabric faster, they were made to produce more, with increasing amounts sold outside the home. 

Domestic work lacked the defined start and end times of the work of men. When night falls or a day of rest comes, you cannot till the fields, but there is no clocking out when textile production, childcare, and a thousand other tasks are done at all times of day. This unstructured labor is just as valuable and necessary to a household as structured labor is. Even in times of trouble, when men’s labor would appear more important, as food was the greatest priority, women’s labor remained just as crucial because the textiles they produced could be shifted to market for additional income.

When people imagine men as providers, they picture the myths we’ve told about the 1950s, mirages of I Love Lucy and old advertisements, but these were inaccurate depictions. They were highly skewed to portray an ideal that historically only the well-off and white could achieve. We do not hear the stories of the millions of women who did participate in the labor force and were restricted to worse-paying jobs than men. Even in an ‘ideal’ family, the idea that men provided more than women proves false. The work of cooking, cleaning, and childcare without the labor-saving devices we take for granted and much larger family sizes easily exceeds the forty-hour work weeks and paltry domestic tasks of the well-off man. That equation gets worse for women the further back in time you go. Women may have been prevented from earning the same amount of money as men, but in terms of raw labor, their share far exceeded the men’s. 

Further ignored from the typical narrative, male-dominated spaces for leisure, such as the bar and casino, undermined the ‘providing’ they could do. They encouraged endemic alcoholism and gambling addictions that ruined families by feeding on men’s power over household finances. Due to the exclusion of women from these spaces, men were mostly affected. For this reason, and to prevent domestic violence, the suffragettes allied themselves closely with the temperance movement. Though times have changed, the inertia of patriarchy still causes alcoholism and gambling addictions to prey on men disproportionately, undermining their ability to ‘provide’ for their families, contrary to the stereotype. The dysfunction caused by these addictions is typically borne by the women of the household, who are forced to work even harder to keep the family afloat and are prevented from escaping by economic discrimination, patriarchal social standards, and, in the past, the lack of no fault divorce.

As the new administration revives attacks on women’s rights, and ‘trad wives,’ who conveniently ignore how they provide for the family through social media income, try to convince women that they should give up their self-reliance, we must attack the myths that they base their lies on. This is one of them. Men aren’t providers. They never were. To want them to be providers ‘again’ is nonsense meant to sell old misogyny to a new generation.