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Editor's note: Join columnist MP Dunleavey and a group of women as they seek to strip away the myths around money, liberate themselves from debt and find financial sanity. Follow the ongoing quest of the Women in Red every other Wednesday in Dunleavey's column on MSN Money.
Every time you turn around it seems there's another rah-rah story about the rise of the "alpha earner" wife -- women who bring home most of the bacon while their husbands happily shuttle the kids to and from soccer practice.
I am just such an alpha female, apparently -- as are all of the married members of the Women in Red -- and I'm tired of the pep rally.
What gets left out of the Norman Rockwell portrait of the new nuclear family is a muddy little truth no one wants to discuss: It's not easy being the breadwinner, and many women are having a hard time in that role.
Despite knowing that the man they were choosing to marry was not likely to become the primary earner, some women secretly harbor the wish that their spouse would start bringing home the bucks and support them for a change.
That's a problem. While I can understand feeling ambivalent about being the primary earner, especially when kids enter the picture, women who nurture Cinderella dreams put themselves in a financially precarious position.
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The rise of the alpha earner
Take Anna. A hard-driving Washington, D.C., lobbyist who knew from the moment she met her struggling-actor husband that she always would be the breadwinner, she is still finding it hard to sort out her own expectations."The great thing about him is that he really doesn't care about money," says Anna, 42.
"On the flip side, the problem is that he doesn't care about money -- so I have to," she says. "That's a big burden."
It was a relief to hear Anna's unsparing take on what may no longer be a trend but a new world order.
It wasn't so long ago that my heart would race with pride and excitement when I heard upbeat statistics about women's earning prowess:
- According to a 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about a third of wives earn more than their husbands.
- According to a study by the Families and Work Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in New York, women overall bring in 43% of household incomes.
I'm over that now. As the mother of a nearly two-month-old son whose husband is leaving his job to take on most of the child care and prep for graduate school, the title "breadwinner" has come to feel an awful lot like "albatross."
"We're in a significant transition," says Ellen Galinsky, director of the Families and Work Institute, acknowledging the difficulties many women face. "Women increasingly define their roles as both emotional provider and economic provider."
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And yet it's hard to feel comfortable in that role when you're not sure what the rules are -- and neither is the person you're married to.
Where the girls are
I was surprised by how many women are grappling with this issue of role reversal and reversed expectations on the Women in Red message board.What seems to work within the traditional male-as-breadwinner model doesn't translate when the family relies more on the woman's income.
As one reader wrote: "If you were paying all the bills, and when you got home your husband had the house clean, dinner ready and the kids all dressed/sleeping/whatever, maybe you wouldn't feel so badly about being the breadwinner. When you have to financially support your household … but then come home and cook/clean/take care of the kids, then it becomes too much to handle."
Of course, not all women feel that way. Of the Women in Red who are married -- Anna, Beth, Stephanie and I -- all are or were the primary earners. (Read more about each of them in "Meet the Women in Red.") But each woman brings a very different attitude to her situation.
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