The market economy with its dynamic flexibility was key to those changes. Anti-discrimination legislation undoubtedly played a role in opening more doors to women; but one rarely recognized fact is that systematic sex discrimination in the workplace had also been partly the work of government. Historian Allan Carlson, a strong social conservative, has noted that the sole-breadwinner family of the 1950s was enabled by the efforts of progressive reformers and government-backed labor unions to institutionalize the idea that the male head of household should be paid enough to support a stay-at-home wife and children. The “family wage” rested on built-in, intentional discrimination against women; its decline, along with the loss of union power, partly accounts for the decline of high-paying traditionally male jobs where pay had been artificially inflated. This is a fact liberals fail to understand when they lament that the narrowing of the gender gap in pay is due partly to the drop in male earnings.

The Pew study’s findings on female breadwinners attest to the power of the market and to its elastic capacity to respond to changing circumstances. That is something conservatives should celebrate—and appreciate as a rebuttal to the left’s women-as-victims rhetoric.

And most conservatives do, despite attempts to tar them with the sexist brush. The day after the Lou Dobbs panels, Media Matters, the left-wing watchdog group, claimed that other Fox News hosts on the widely watched discussion show, The Five, had backed Erickson and agreed that the rise in female breadwinners was linked to society’s downfall. But that was pure spin: the negative commentary on The Five had to do with single motherhood.