On the whole, if you mothered children in the pre-feminist era, and you didn't have a spouse... you and your children could starve. Because there was very little space carved out in our society for women to work. And under the cover of that asymmetry of power men got away with all sorts of abuses.
Yes, the family may have stuck together. And there was a defined and potentially socially responsible role for men in this context: provider and economic glue and source of authority for the family. But at what cost? Spousal and child abuse rates were sky high, though they may not have even been perceived as such at the time. They were just part of the normal authoritarian structure of the family.
Have young men suffered from the changes that have come along with women obtaining additional powers and the bonds of the nuclear family becoming less strong? Quite possibly. But we also have to accept that what was holding that together was also potentially toxic.
Put another way: In general -- over the last 200 years -- capitalist market relations have severed many traditional bonds and obligations. The primary obligation of an adult individual, in our liberal capitalist society, is as a wage labourer, an economic contributor. On the whole people "are" what they "do" (for $$).
The family structure has always been a mix of authoritarian bonds and genuine warmth, material obligations, etc. I think we're still figuring out what its new form will be. It may be that in our neo-liberal hyper-capitalist present society that there are contradictions here we cannot resolve.
Marx/Engels thought so, anyways, check out this paragraph from the Communist Manifesto:
"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. "