Guest post written by author Logan Steiner
Logan Steiner is a lawyer by day and a writer by baby bedtime. Her writing explores motherhood and the creative life—two things she once thought could never happily coexist. Logan also writes a Substack newsletter called The Motherhood Question. After graduating from Pomona College and Harvard Law School, Logan clerked for three federal judges, spent six years in Big Law, and served for three years as an Assistant United States Attorney. She now specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. Logan lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, and the cranky old man of the house, a Russian Blue cat named Taggart. After Anne is out now.
For a number of years as a litigator at a global law firm, I made more money than my husband. There aren’t many jobs for 20-somethings more lucrative (or more grueling). Fortunately, my mother-in-law is a successful litigator herself who taught my husband that couples should celebrate each other’s success—and that celebrating high-powered women takes nothing away from men. But his childhood was not the norm.
During my years in Big Law, I spoke with female colleagues about the antiquated expectation that men be the breadwinners in opposite-sex couples, which many of us saw as something to rebel against. Yet female colleagues whose husbands stayed home with children were still anomalies, and their husbands came up in conversation far more often than wives of male colleagues who stayed home.
Nor are male-breadwinner expectations in any way unique to the world of Big Law. As recently as 2018, the Census Bureau found that across all types of work, men and women tend to understate the degree to which women in the relationship out-earn their male partners in opposite-sex couples by underreporting her income and exaggerating his.
Our continuing discomfort with women out-earning their male partners doesn’t help us. Unlike with many other people in our lives, we are so associated with our partners that it seems natural for their success to be our success. Financial success in a couple is not a zero-sum game, after all. Financially, we benefit when our partners shine. But in a society that still praises women for their behavior and men for their financial success, a wife’s greater financial success can be a source of envy rather than pride.
It’s hard to imagine how intense the societal pressure on men to be breadwinners would have felt 100 years ago—let alone the strain it would have put on relatively small number of marriages back then in which wives out-earned their husbands.
As one particularly vivid example, the financial success and fame of Lucy Maud Montgomery (who went by Maud), the creator of one of our most enduring characters in Anne of Green Gables, took a significant toll on her marriage. Maud’s husband Reverend Ewan Macdonald came into Maud’s life defensive of his heritage from a lower-class Scottish clan. In the beginning, Maud couldn’t have predicted the impact Ewan’s insecurity would have on their relationship or on their lives more generally. When Ewan began his courtship of Maud in 1905, she was a little-known writer working on Anne of Green Gables. Twenty years later, she was one of Canada’s most recognized and celebrated public figures.
In the early years of their marriage, Maud’s success was not as direct of a threat. She followed Ewan’s career lead, moving from Prince Edward Island to mainland Canada. They had two young sons to occupy their collective attention.
But as Maud’s fame grew, so did Ewan’s resentment—resentment made worse by Ewan’s lack of success relative to his minister peers. His mental health declined at a time when a group of younger ministers were touring mainland Canada, inspiring his congregations with their visionary sermons. Not only would his success never compare to Maud’s, but it would not even compare to his own early expectations for himself. He became fixated on the belief that he was predestined to fail—a belief likely born not only of the pressure he put on himself but of societal expectations of men to own the family’s financial success. As a result, their relationship suffered.
It almost certainly would have been different had the roles been reversed. Very few women at the time would have been as threatened by a husband’s fame. Many would have rejoiced in it.
Fortunately for couples everywhere, recent research suggests that this gender difference may be diminishing. A series of studies by psychologists Heather Christina C. Hawkins, Tara L. Lesick, and Ethan Zell in 2021 concluded that men in opposite-sex couples find the success of their romantic partner less threatening today than in the past. Where a negative impact on men’s self-esteem from a partner’s success remains, it appears to be strongest in men who are more dissatisfied with their relationships.
It was likely true for Ewan that as his happiness in marriage decreased, his envy in Maud’s company increased in equal measure. But it also seems likely that societal norms expecting Ewan to be the main provider played a significant role.
There is likely room in every human heart for both joy and envy in the face of a romantic partner’s success. But as Maud and Ewan’s story shows, tired norms of men as breadwinners can crowd out the joy and ignite the envy in ways that create a downward spiral for a relationship.
Recent studies give reason for hope that these tired norms will be corrected in increasing measure over time—including as parents raise more children not only to believe that a partner’s success takes nothing away from their own, but to celebrate that success as the win-win that it is.
