For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the outdated notion of the male as the sole provider.
In 1968 anthropologists Richard Lee and Irvan Devore published Man the Hunter, an influential book that grew out of a symposium the authors had hosted about the ethnography of hunter-gatherers. Subtitled “The first intensive survey of a single, crucial stage of human development—man’s once universal hunting way of life,” Man the Hunter promoted the view that humans evolved in hunting-centric groups centered on men’s ability to acquire food for women and children. In it one contributor noted that hunting “gives men a distinctive and important subsistence role and was presumably the principal factor that created the nuclear family.”
from the perspective of mid-twentieth-century middle-class North America, the ideal of a nuclear family with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, made possible by postwar prosperity and an increased separation between the workplace and the home, found convenient support from a variety of apologists. Politicians and pastors argued that it represented an expression of ‘traditional family values’ tied up with stylized visions of patriotism and Christian virtue. Even secular academics supported many of the same conclusions about ‘traditional’ human family roles.