My mistakes as a female breadwinner – and why we need to rethink this rising phenomenon
Female breadwinners are one of the fastest growing demographics in the UK, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, found Eliza Filby
I am the daughter of a female breadwinner and a stay-at-home dad. Unlike most of my generation, I saw this now rather more common dynamic modelled fairly successfully by my parents. My father was exemplary in elevating my mother’s successes, taking on much of the housework, earning sporadically when he could, while my mother impressively juggled it all – rushing to work, being present at school, coming back home in time for dinner. So why, when I found myself in the same situation, did I struggle so much?
Female breadwinners are now one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US and UK. In Britain, 30 per cent of women out-earn their male partners; in a quarter of households, women are the sole breadwinners. In the US, black female college graduates are the most likely of any female group to be the main earner in their household. The old model of the male breadwinner survives largely in the boardroom; for everyone else, dual-income households are the norm, and female primary earners are increasingly visible.
This is progress. A revolution within three generations. It should be celebrated. And yet, scratch the surface, and many female breadwinners confess to being feminist powerhouses in public but exhausted, resentful and frustrated in private. Women who ace it at work but often still carry the majority of the domestic load. Women who feel guilty for not being at home more with the kids. Women who shrink themselves to keep a partner’s ego intact. The statistics back this up: marriages where women earn more are still more likely to end in infidelity (by men) and divorce – though on the positive side, this link is weakening.
When I put a public call out on social media that I was writing this article, my private inbox flooded. Tellingly, all messages were private DMs indicative of the secrecy, shame and complex emotions that this issue raises in both men and women. Some messages spoke of resentment (“His driving license is the only thing he brings to the marriage.”) Others were despondent (“I’m carrying it all, and he doesn’t see it.”) Some felt empowered (“Unlike my mother, I’m not trapped. I literally hold the purse strings.”) In all this, there was a clear dividing line between those female breadwinners without children, who tended to speak of freedom and power, and those with children, who spoke of overwhelming pressure, financial constraints and guilt. Always the mother’s guilt.
In Melissa Hogenboom’s fascinating new book, Breadwinners, she teases out precisely why this is inevitable in a society where men are still judged by their earning power and women by their hold over the domestic scene. I read it and concluded we may have dismantled the breadwinner model, but our cultural expectations haven’t caught up. We know that our feminist mothers did a great job prepping and preparing daughters for this gender shake-up, but let’s be honest, they did less well in preparing their sons. If there was one common thread (apart from me) that linked the weird and wonderful collection of men I dated in my twenties, it is that they had all been poorly mothered (as well as poorly fathered) and frankly, many were still looking for mummy.
And yet, I’ll stop there and won’t indulge in that mental thread because, as women, we need to stop castigating men. And pointing out their flaws. And we also need to stop mothering them, too. And perhaps we also need to stop ‘mankeeping’, which is a new term coined by sociologists Angelica Ferrara and Dylan Vergara to explain the phenomenon of young women carrying the social, emotional and administrative load for their male partners.
Being a female breadwinner left me exhausted
Could it be that while female assertiveness has advanced us in the professional sphere, it hasn’t always helped us in the private sphere? Most young men I know are terrified of women. Emasculation in relationships is a real problem. We daughters of feminists were raised to fight for equality with men, but are we (let alone they) really comfortable when we outperform and out-earn them? I wasn’t. In 2023, when my husband lost his job, I stepped up as sole earner. Over the next 18 months, I said yes to everything in order to build my business (it had just been obliterated by Covid). I worked all hours, surrendered control over domestic decisions and travelled for work a lot (which is always more lonely than it is fun).
I was exhausted, put on weight and didn’t look after myself. It also changed our relationship. I began helicopter parenting my husband, acting in a way that I vowed I would never do to my kids. So determined was I to help him that I once stayed up all night writing a job presentation, even when he explicitly asked me not to and which he didn’t use. I expected a shower of gratitude and praise without realising that I wasn’t helping either him or the situation.
I count myself fortunate that my husband is extremely domesticated (thank you mother-in-law), has always done most of the cooking and crucially, we could also still afford substantive childcare support. But the real issue was my own chronic guilt at overworking and absence from the kids. This frequently boiled into vocal frustration at how ‘things weren’t being done right’ (in other words, how I would have done them). I would castigate him for buying the wrong food, criticise him for allowing the kids to watch too much TV, or not tidying to my standards. All the familiar stuff. I was obviously sympathetic to the fact that this was an extremely tough time for him, too; he’d suffered the first real setback in his professional life and was trying hard to find a new job that restored the professional status he’d always valued.
But all this concealed the real problem: I wanted to be home and felt forced, because of his circumstances, into a situation where I wasn’t. For women, we rarely say it, but the modern-day scenario of overwork can be a cage as much as the forced domesticity of yesteryear. More profoundly, it was a moment when my feminist independent streak directly clashed with the stark reality that I was in a partnership and something had to give. Wake-up call.
You may say that I am doing the female thing and internalising self-blame. Except I’m not blaming myself. I am extremely proud of being the primary breadwinner and how I muddled our family through this particular patch. But, in hindsight, I am also now able to admit that I don’t think I was particularly nice to my husband in the process. Instead, over time, I hardened into the ‘mummy martyr’ trope, which made me miserable, and surprise, surprise, did nothing for my marriage. Things certainly got better when I changed my tact and he started his own business, and not long after that, he was offered his dream job.
The economics of relationships
But here’s the bigger point: for 40 years, we were told economics didn’t matter in relationships. Hollywood romcoms told us it was about love, freedom, companionship. And of course it is. But money matters. More than ever. Women earn more, men less (except at the top). Parenting and housing both cost more. The male breadwinner has collapsed, not just in working-class homes but in middle-class ones, too. Out of hard work, talent, but also necessity, women have risen economically. But with expensive childcare, intensive parenting, the decline of community and relentless work schedules, men have had no choice but to increase their domestic contribution. And they have (even if this is a half-finished revolution). Millennial fathers change more nappies, push more prams and do more school runs than their dads, not because they’re more virtuous or love their kids more, but because family economics demands it. But if our generation of women finds themselves outperforming men or perpetually disappointed in men, I fear it is because both genders, and workplaces, and schools, and the media, and society at large haven’t really woken up to this new reality.
In response to my social post on this topic, I was also surprised by the number of male breadwinners who wrote to me, longing for their wives to work, but afraid to voice it. This is a subject that very few men and women talk about. And yet it’s the economic truth that lies behind all of this: living on one salary alone with kids is increasingly impossible. It is possible, of course, and many single-parents manage it, many women choose to go it alone, often seeing their male partners as a financial drain. It is undeniable that the economics of partnership and marriage have been upended.
Being a breadwinner today, whether male or female, is not what it was in the 1950s or the 1980s. Unless you earn extraordinarily well or have significant parental wealth, you will struggle to shoulder it alone. And that is a major reason why female breadwinners find themselves drowning. 21st-century couples have no choice but to drop the deeply gendered positioning around financial and domestic contributions. Both partners have to do both. 21st-century family life is too chaotic to play 20th-century status games. Too interdependent to see life through a zero-sum game between the genders. In this economic climate, women need men as much as men need women.
So why was my experience harder than my mother’s? Because life now is more expensive, more intense, more complex, more individualistic. Today, balance isn’t a nice-to-have, but a necessity for financial survival. In an economy that requires both partners to contribute financially and domestically, we must learn to share both burdens. But even this isn’t enough because the couples I know who are thriving don’t just rely on each other – they draw on wider networks of family, friends and, yes, paid help where possible. Breadwinning today – female or male – is no badge of honour on its own. The real measure of progress will be whether we can build relationships that match our economic reality: equal, flexible, interdependent and supported.
Dr Eliza Filby is a historian of generations and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Inheritocracy