| Sumario: | This article examines popular discourses about men, women and work in Australia during the early 1990s recession. The male breadwinner and the working mother have been the subject of much historical research, but less attention has been paid to the longevity of these gendered constructs in the early 1990s, a period in which economic reform and a prolonged recession reframed men's and women's relationships with work. Drawing on contemporary anonymised testimonies captured in social psychologist Hugh Mackay's quarterly reports, along with statistical and media sources, I argue that the recession reinvigorated a discourse of male breadwinner nostalgia.
|
|---|