In general, I disagree. In many, many relationships, while the husband earns the money, the women gets final say in what&#x27;s spent where. While this isn&#x27;t the rule, it&#x27;s certainly not uncommon (and popular culture, IE sitcoms, movies, etc pretty much purely reinforce this).<p>You could say that the scenario where the husband holds tight to the purse strings and the woman only goes along with it because of fear or anxiety that the woman is forced to be infantilized. But I would guess this is sub 10% of marriages in the US.<p>On a separate note, I think a useful framework for looking at this is to think of the couple as one entity with two parts, rather than as two separate entities. If the entity is split, it&#x27;s definitely true that the one that can&#x27;t provide for itself is at a disadvantage, so it takes a lot of trust. But that&#x27;s also why there are divorce settlements that favor women that gave up working at some point.