ABSTRACT
Prior to the 1970s, while the legal position of both married and unmarried mothers had gradually improved, the father ’s position ‘in’ the family remained unchanged. This was primarily because of the continued dominance, since the 19th century, of the breadwinner ideology, which constructed paternal subjectivities by reference to their capacity for paid employment and maternal subjectivities by reference to their ‘caring’ functions.25 Additionally, the breadwinner ideology has, until recently, tended to erase domestic violence from legal discourse on the family.26 The breadwinner ideology went largely unchallenged until the early 1970s, when a range of cultural and economic developments combined to render the construction of the father as economic provider increasingly problematic.27 These changes, which both led to and combined with legislation during the 1970s, improved the legal rights of married and unmarried mothers,28 which in turn led to an increasing fear of autonomous motherhood and threw into question the breadwinner ideology.29
