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The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment Upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families Revised Edition
Author(s): Mirra Komarovsky (Author), Michael Kimmel
- Publisher: AltaMira Press
- Publication Date: October 22, 2004
- Edition: Revised
- Language: English
- Print length: 186 pages
- ISBN-10: 0759107319
- ISBN-13: 9780759107311
Book Description
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.
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About the Author
Michael S. Kimmel is a well-known educator concerning gender issues. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals, including the New York Times Book Review, the Harvard Business Review, The Nation and Psychology Today, where he was a Contributing Editor and columnist on male-female relationships. His teaching examines men’s lives from a pro-feminist perspective. He is national spokesperson for the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) in the States.