Breadwinning families: work and income patterns in Sweden in the early twentieth century

This study investigates the income patterns of families in early twentieth-century Sweden, challenging the centrality given to men’s work and waged work in historiography. Using a Swedish household budget survey from 1913–1914, the article examines how families combined multiple income sources to make a living. Economic contributions by men, women, and children, emerging public provisions, and other miscellaneous incomes are included in the analysis of income patterns. Through cluster analysis, the study identifies five income patterns: (1) children’s contributions supplements, (2) the wife’s labor income supplements, (3) income from boarding and lodging supplements, (4) diverse small supplemental incomes, and (5) a dominant husband’s wage income with minute diversification. Further analysis reveals contextual factors related to a life-course mechanism and an opportunity structures mechanism that influenced incomes. The results show that although the husband’s wage was central for many families, alternative incomes were widespread. Even during early welfare institutionalization in Sweden, families relied much more heavily on the work of family members than on social security. Children’s contributions were particularly important as parents aged, and they substituted parents’ incomes in some gender-specific ways. Wives’ labor incomes and incomes from boarding and lodging were common but generally modest and stable across life stages and local contexts. The article challenges an extensive breadwinner–homemaker model, or indeed any singular and stylized idea of how families made a living, by demonstrating the multifaceted ways Swedish families generated income in a period of rapid economic and societal change.