The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment Upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families

by Mirra Komarovsky, Michael Kimmel SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Stony Brook U (Editor)

Overview

In The Unemployed Man and His Family, noted sociologist and feminist Mirra Komarovsky poses the question: what happens to the authority of the male head of the family when he fails as a provider? Between 1935 and 1936, Komarovsky interviewed 59 families in 1935-36 in which the male had been unemployed for at least a year. Interestingly, in many cases, the husband's struggle in the economic sphere did not offset the solidity and happiness of the marital relationship. But unemployment seems to have affected the men's sense of their own position as head of household and providers. For one thing, it undermined their sense of themselves as breadwinners. Most found it unbearably humiliating to accept relief. Perhaps her most important finding_which still resonates today_was that those men who thought of themselves exclusively as providers suffered far more than those who had developed alternative identities as father and husband.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780759107328
Publisher:	AltaMira Press
Publication date:	11/09/2004
Series:	Classics in Gender Studies , #9
Edition description:	Updated Edition
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Mirra Komarovsky was professor emeritus of sociology at Barnard College and Past-President of the American Sociological Association. Michael S. Kimmel teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Series Editor's Introduction	ix
	Introduction	xxix
I	The Families and the Interviews	1
II	The Breakdown of the Husband's Status	23
III	Predepression Husband-Wife Relations and their Effect upon the Status of the Unemployed Man	49
IV	Personality Changes of the Unemployed Husband and His Status	66
V	The Unemployed Father and the Young Child	84
VI	The Unemployed Father and the Adolescent Child	92
VII	Other Effects of Unemployment upon Family Life	116
	Appendix	134
	Composition of the Families	134
	Description of Discerning	135
	The Criteria of Authority Types	146
	Analysis of Duplicate Interviews	153
	Index	161
	Selected Bibliography	163