The idea of a man as a “breadwinner” has been dismissed by some cultural elites as not just stale, but also harmful and unjust.
“We developed this expectation of ‘man as breadwinner’ very recently in our evolution. And it’s bad for everyone,” says BBC journalist Melissa Hogenboom, author of the forthcoming book “Breadwinners.”
“It is terrible for female equality. But it’s bad for men too. ... Their relationships, their children and their marriages — and for their mental health.”
Family historian Stephanie Coontz goes further, saying, “There is no such thing as the traditional male-breadwinner family. It was a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it’s over. We need to move on.”
But there is data that tells a different story. A sobering new report on young men in America makes it plain: Men without work, purpose or a family to provide for tend to flounder. And when men flounder, they don’t suffer alone. The women in their lives suffer. Their communities suffer. The wreckage is shared.
In other words, being a breadwinner is not the problem. But not having that privilege and responsibility might be.
The nation has already witnessed the devastating toll that deindustrialization has taken on men, their families and communities across middle America, in communities like Lordstown, Ohio, once a major hub of car manufacturing.
The Lordstown Assembly plant manufactured cars for General Motors for more than 50 years, employing up to 10,000 workers at its peak in the 1990s. Now the plant has become a sad metaphor: GM left Lordstown in 2019, laying off thousands. For years, the building sat empty and it’s now slated to become an AI data center, employing just a few hundred people.
According to researchers at the Economic Innovation Group, the disappearance of working-class jobs in communities like Lordstown in northeastern Ohio is one big reason that rates of violent crime, drug use, broken families, and childhood poverty in the region are higher than the national average. It’s a cautionary tale: When men aren’t working, society suffers.
The new report from the Institute for Family Studies, “America’s Demoralized Men,” shows that this problem of male unemployment and underemployment has spread beyond the deindustrialized heartland. In 1980, only 25% of young men (ages 18-29, not in school) were not working full time. Today, that number has risen to 33%.
The problem is even bigger than it seems.
That’s because young men still view work as a key indicator of their successful entrance into adulthood, and so it follows that their inability to find or hold down a full-time job would cause embarrassment or despair.
That’s what we found. A stunning 42% of respondents either somewhat or strongly agree that they are “failures.” This is especially true for young men who aren’t working at all.
Why are young men demoralized?
Media accounts tell some of these stories. NBC News, for example, interviewed Emanuel Barcenas, who at 25 thought by that time he’d be well into his career. Instead, even after applying to more than 900 jobs, he was unemployed and living at home. He didn’t even have enough money to date.
“I want to be an adult,” this Chicago-area young man told NBC News. “I need to lock in, I need to move forward, but right now, I’m just stunted. I’m trying my best, but I guess my best isn’t good enough.”
The tenor of Barcenas’ words tells us that out-of-work men don’t just suffer financially, but emotionally and socially. We already know that today’s men are between two and three times as likely as women to suffer “deaths of despair” — death by alcohol, drug use or suicide, and such deaths are more common among men who are unemployed or underemployed. And a lack of full-time work hinders yet other traditional markers of adulthood: dating and marriage.
This matters because most young men still want to get married. But fully 59% of our survey’s 18- to 29-year-old respondents are not married and not dating anyone seriously. Indeed, in a world where dating has become much more daunting and difficult, especially for men who are not working at decent-paying jobs, it’s getting harder for men to find their way to the altar.
Why being a breadwinner matters
All this matters because men are more likely to flourish when they see themselves as providers. Men do better when they feel needed — and being a reliable breadwinner makes them feel needed.
“Prior to getting married, I really didn’t have a care in the world,” said Doug Talbee of Ohio. But after marrying and having kids, his perspective changed: “I had to step up and think about something besides myself and start taking care of them,” adding, “It’s my responsibility to (work hard) once I took the vows of marriage.”
And, as Wilcox found when writing his book “Get Married,” it’s not just men who flourish when they see themselves as providers. The data tell us that wives are happier when they view their husbands as good providers.
Having a full-time job is also a traditional marker of being an adult — and many of today’s young men don’t consider themselves adults even after they’ve turned 21.
As the report says, “the feeling of having reached full adulthood is ... highly correlated with the old benchmarks: being married and a parent, working full time, and completing college or trade school. Hence, even among men ages 24-29, less than half (41%) report ‘definitely’ feeling like adults.”
Moreover, a majority of young men say that it is extremely or very important to be financially independent from their parents (81%) and to be able to provide for others (72%). Breadwinning matters — and makes a difference in how young men feel about themselves.
Good public policy can help
That’s why it’s crucial that public policy efforts aimed at easing the struggles of today’s young men — and protecting communities from the family and social pathologies that follow idle men — don’t unintentionally rob them of their ability to provide.
Too often, government assistance programs do just that: They disincentivize the achievements of work (and marriage) by pushing people off a “benefits cliff” when they achieve them.
Ohio Sen. Jon Husted recently introduced a bill meant to tackle that problem. The Upward Mobility Act would create a pilot program in five states that will pool welfare resources into one financial stream and then slowly taper benefits as recipients get married and find either higher-paying jobs or more hours of work.
Touting the bill recently, Husted shared an example of a young man attending a trade school in order to become a welder in Ohio. The young man was devastated to realize that if he got a full-time welding job once out of school, he’d be knocked off the food assistance program that was providing for him and his siblings. He might then be able to provide for himself, but his overall income, which supported more than one person, would decline. That’s the kind of system failure that leads to demoralization, even for men who are trying to do everything right.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead once memorably quipped that every healthy nation must “define the male role satisfactorily enough” — it must have a place and a purpose for its men. Those nations which don’t, she warned, are destined for trouble, because idle men make unstable communities.
Ohio’s Lordstown is one such cautionary tale. If other American communities want to avoid Lordstown’s fate, leaders will have to reckon with men’s need to work — not simply to have a job, but to have a job with a purpose, to be able to provide. America needs working men, and America’s men need and want to work. The government should do everything it can to foster a healthy marketplace for them — even when that means getting out of the way.