Explore how the outdated breadwinner myth is impacting South African men's mental health, as Sebastien Alexanderson reveals the truth behind this societal expectation and its economic implications.
What happens to a man's mind when the myth he built his identity around was always a lie? It’s Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month. South African men are facing a mental health crisis fuelled by an idealised provider myth that was never possible to begin with.
The idea of the male breadwinner is often treated as an ancient and natural arrangement. It is neither. Historians trace the term “breadwinner” to the early Victorian period, when industrialisation moved labour outside the home and, for a narrow slice of society, made the single male earner economically possible.
For most working-class households, then as now, this was never the reality. Women worked. Multiple incomes were common. Families survived through shared contribution, not one man’s wage.
Yet the notion had embedded itself so deeply in cultural expectations that by the late twentieth century, men across the Global South were measuring their worth against a standard that, even in its supposed golden era, most men never actually met.
