I'll peruse those sites when I have time, but I believe that the way to test your theory is to look at couples where _women's_ wages are low (say in the bottom quintile) and see if men's wages exceed them.
Yes, race is tricky statistically but general observation would tell you that black men are terribly underpaid--black women are worse-paid, however. Black women make 89% what black men make (full-time year-round workers). As for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the racist oinker, the black matriarchy myth has been skewered by plenty enough black feminists so I don't feel I need to add anything. White men also claim they're terribly oppressed and beaten down by women in general and in particular working-class women bitches who are taking them to the cleaners in divorces, blah blah. It's no more borne out by the data than the claim that immigrants are 'taking our jobs.' (If we ever approached real divorce equity in this country they'd really have something to complain about.)
>On the average, gendered wage gaps still exist, but take a look at
>the following trend: "Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS)
>show that the proportion of dual-earner couples in which wives earned
>more than their husbands increased from 16 percent in 1981 to 23
>percent in 1996.3
This is progress, but it would be better if it weren't due to men's wages falling.
>The figures suggest the presence of a growing
>number of married couples in which traditional gender roles vis-à-vis
>labor market activity may be reversed -- that is, the wife is the
>primary earner and the husband is the secondary earner" (Anne E.
>Winkler, "Earnings of Husbands and Wives in Dual-Earner Families,"
>_Monthly Labor Review_ 121.4, April 1998,
><http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1998/04/art4exc.htm>). In one in five
>dual-earner families, the wife is the primary earner.
And in four of five they're not? But now we're eliminating the women who aren't earners at all--for married women with children under 6 it's around 40%, and they ain't all rich.
>In conclusion, I stand by my thesis that women's economic dependence
>on men is the least common among the poorest and the most common
>among the bourgeoisie in rich modern nations, because poor men whom
>poor women tend to encounter, sexually or otherwise, are the least
>capable of supporting dependents.
I still think your construction of dependency is unnecessarily strict. I don't disagree on the very poor--because as I said before, the issue is unemployment--so I suppose what we're debating is the huge middle ground where most women live. (IIRC the U.S. and Japan have a fairly high gendered wage gap among industrialized nations, with Australia the best with women making 91% of what men make.)
Jenny Brown