Breadwinning Moms: The Other Piece to the At-Home Dad Puzzle

Much of the content on this blog site is generally geared towards dads. More specifically, a large segment of the audience are at-home-dads. My wife, the breadwinner in our family, always inquires about what other at-home dads are like - how did they land in the role, what did they do in their former careers, are they hands-on or laid back, neurotic about schedules, into sports, do they cook & do the laundry (unlike me). As interested as she is in other at-home-dads, she is also very curious about learning more about other breadwinning moms. Well, here is a great resource on an upcoming project on Breadwinning Moms by a guru who has already explored "our side of the story" in her previous work.

Andrea Doucet, is a Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. What has she done already? Her website states that "I have been researching and writing about changing mothering and fathering for nearly twenty years. I wrote my PhD thesis at Cambridge University on shared caregiving couples in Britain in the early 1990s and I authored a book on Canadian primary caregiving dads entitled Do Men Mother? (2006). It clearly touched on a 'hot topic'...When I finished writing Do Men Mother? I felt that I had only told one side of the story. While I did feature mothers’ perspectives in that book, I knew that there was so much more to explore. Specifically, I wanted to investigate the everyday experiences of female breadwinners as well as the policy, community, and relational supports that help or hinder these women."

Bread and Roses and the Kitchen Sink, is an online discussion forum for women who are, or were, the primary breadwinners for their families in Canada and the United States. This forum is a place for breadwinning mothers to share their experiences with one another, but it also serves as a site of research conducted by Sociologist Andrea Doucet's for an upcoming book on an intriguing set of issues around motherhood, paid and unpaid work, and earning.