The lady bread-winner

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/01/2017 (3253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From the Dorothy Dix Letter Box, originally published June 24, 1933

Dear Miss Dix: My husband and I are very happy together; that is, we would be if it were not for the financial question. For the last six months he has not had steady employment and I was forced to go back to work. It is either do this or live with his parents or mine.

My work is not hard, but I have to be away from my baby girl, who is nine months old. Do you think I did right by going back to work and supporting the family? My husband does all the housework and cares for the baby. He also does all the public work that he can get to do.

My relatives think that my husband will never try to get steady work again because I have taken over the financial responsibility, but I know this is not true. He will be glad to work when he can get job.

Should I be thankful for being qualified to find a position or take my relatives’ viewpoint about it?

-The bread-winner

Answer: You should thank Heaven on your knees for having qualified yourself to be a real helpmeet to your husband in time of need, and you should add a special prayer for enlightenment of your narrow-minded and meddling relatives with their obsolete opinions.

Surely your father and mother cannot realize what a cruel thing they are doing in adding to your troubles by predicting that you will turn your husband into a parasite by becoming the bread-winner in this time of stress when the ordinary conditions of life have been upset.

It is hard enough on you to have to leave your little baby and go back to your job without their filling your mind with fears and suspicions. What do they want you to do? Turn quitter and leave your husband in the lurch when he strikes the hard sledding? Go and sponge on someone else for a living?

It seems to me that the course you have taken is infinitely more honorable and more sensible than either of these would be. You have gone to work to support your family. You are holding your home together. You are maintaining your independence and when this storm is over you are going to sail into sunny seas.

This depression has been a time that has tried men and women out and shown what they were made of and there is no one for whom I have greater respect and admiration than the young couples, like you and your husband, who have met the situation bravely and sanely.

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And that has not been an easy thing to do when the roles of husband and wife have been reversed and the wife has gone back, as she has in so many cases, into the office she left when she married, and the man has put on an apron and gone into the kitchen.

This has been particularly hard on the men, but I know of many professional men and men who were high salaried before the panic who are baking the bread while their wives earn the dough, and who are doing it cheerfully and humorously, and that takes grit and courage and the stuff of which real men are made.

And nobody need be afraid that these men, who are doing the very best they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves, will not go back to their jobs when they can get them again. They will never make the loafer husbands who sit back and wait for their wives to support them.

Every woman who is a real woman desires above all else to be a real help to her husband, a real mate, a real partner. If she can do this better by earning money outside of the home than by working in it, she should be proud and glad that she has the intelligence and skill to assist him in the most effectual way.

And, anyway, what she does is a matter between her and her husband, and her family should keep their fingers out of her pie.