head of household
head of householdThis term refers to the principal earner in any household but is often applied to the senior male in the role of husband and (perhaps) father. The practice of taking the senior adult male of a household as the ‘head’ has been much criticized—at least in most industrialized countries—for its implicit assumption of male primacy. For example, the literature on social class is characterized by a long-standing controversy about the appropriate unit of analysis, a debate which turns on the acceptability or otherwise of classifying a whole household, in class terms, according to the class position of its (usually male) head of household.
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