https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2012/10/03/male-decline-is-no-myth/feed/HotAir is the leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary covering the Biden administration, politics, media, culture, and current elections.en-usTue, 09 Jun 2026 03:53:01 -0400<![CDATA[We all agree that the number of female breadwinners leapt from only 4 percent in 1970 to nearly 30 percent in 2010. Coontz, however, discounts this gain by arguing that when we look at all married couples, not just dual-earner couples, the numbers look much weaker because some wives don’t work at all. This is a fair point. But if we are going to add on extra data samples, then I offer another, more relevant one: the growing number of single mothers. Trends in the United States do not point toward an explosion of full-time stay-at-home mothers but of single mothers who are, by default, for better or worse, often the main breadwinners of their families. We recently passed the threshold, for example, at which more than half of all births to mothers under 30 were to single mothers. I’m not sure this counts as feminist progress, but it does count as a profound shift in the traditional power dynamics of the American family. &#8230;]]>Wed, 03 Oct 2012 22:35:28 -0400<![CDATA[Erika Johnsen]]>https://hotair.com/headlines/2012/10/03/male-decline-is-no-myth-n96295