great chart
As part of his analysis of changing household structure in the United States, Steven Ruggles [pdf] argues (following Stephanie Coontz) that “the traditional family is not the Ozzie-and-Harriet male breadwinner family that briefly prevailed in the mid-twentieth century.”
What Ruggles refers to as the “corporate family” (families with self-employed married men, except for those with wives who had an occupation outside the family business, most of which had family farms) predominated for hundreds of years before.
The male breadwinner category (in which the husband worked outside the home and the wife had no occupation listed)—the kind of household celebrated most famously by Gary Becker (in his 1981 Treatise on the Family)—represented a majority of marriages for just five decades—from 1920 to 1960—reaching a peak of 57 percent in 1940.
Dual-earner families have now predominated for almost a half century. Over the past several decades, female-breadwinner families have emerged as…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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