Bringing Home the Bacon: Making Marriage Work When She Makes More Money

In the twenty-first century, successful, hardworking women fill the workplace, earn advanced degrees, and marry for love — pursuing their vision of "having it all." But for the millions of working women who outearn their husbands, their burgeoning economic power often creates a hidden, complicated, and unexpected backlash.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Breadwinning wives account for more than 35 percent of married working women, a number that's growing every day. Yet personal and societal attitudes and expectations have not kept pace with this dramatic evolution in the workplace. The clash between economic and everyday realities is wreaking havoc on marriages across the country, calling into question notions of power, equality, and even what it means to be a man or a woman. But very few people have talked openly about it — much less offered solutions to inevitable conflicts — until now.

Provocative, empowering, and practical, Bringing Home the Bacon gives a blueprint to the pioneers who are reshaping expectations of marriage. Tackling conflicts that lie at the heart of marriages in which women bring home the bigger paycheck, experienced couples therapist Harriet Pappenheim and award-winning journalist Ginny Graves offer insights gleaned from interviews with more than one hundred women and men (conducted especially for this book) and present a prescriptive portrait of couples struggling to restore support, desire, happiness, and a sense of partnership into marriages under pressure. Addressing such hot-button issues as housework, sex, financial decision-making, parenting, and the new role of stay-at-home-dads, Bringing Home the Bacon offers invaluable advice to couples at the forefront of this silent revolution.

Acoss the country, a quiet revolution is taking place: millions of married women now outearn their husbands. For many couples, this role shift comes at a high cost: marital strife that pushes numerous hot-button issues, from household responsiblitites to finance to sex. In this much-needed, unique book, experienced therapist Harriet Pappenheim and award-winning journalist Ginny Graves uncover the key issues that cause conflict in these relationshipships and offer targeted advice to help couples cope.

Harriet Pappenheim, L.C.S.W., has been in private practice in New York City since 1973. She is on the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health and the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center, and lectures frequently on a range of couples therapy issues. She is a member of the American Association of Marital and Family Therapists, and a former president of the Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society. She lives with her husband in New York City.