The End of Men and the Rise of Women (12 page)

I met Charles Gettys at the Wednesday night supper at First Baptist. For twenty-three years, Charles had risen up the ranks at the plant, becoming a manager in the dyeing and finishing department and second in charge of fabrics. Thanks to all those sweatshirts and uniforms, he’d sent three kids to college and built a beautiful house on the lake. Now all those words—“dyeing,” “finishing,” “textile training”—seemed part of an ancient world, like speaking Shakespearean English, saying “thou” or “thee” out loud at the family dinner table, he mused, and he thought to himself: “Here I am, out in the world, trying to be a typewriter salesman.” What rose over the ashes is what Gettys’s wife, Sarah Beth, calls the “new norm,” something people here only talk about if you push them, because it so disturbs the Southerners’ sense of themselves and the natural order.

“For years I was the major breadwinner, and this has flipped the family around,” Charles said. “Now she is the major breadwinner.” Charles and Sarah Beth, both in their fifties, make a point to attend the Wednesday night supper every week, although Sarah Beth is exceedingly busy with her work and volunteering. Sarah Beth started out as a nurse and over the years has moved up in the ranks, and she is now third in charge at Russell Medical Center, the award-winning local hospital. “Probably no one has had their wife move up the ladder as far as I’ve moved down,” he says. Sarah Beth spends her days in a corner office sandwiched between the CEO and the CFO of the hospital. She has a secretary and endless series of meetings. Her job sets the rhythms of the household, pays the student loans, and provides the health insurance. In her free time she is the ultimate town doer, teaching Sunday school and leading various civic groups. She has only so much patience for Charles’s brooding. “Build a bridge and get over it,” she tells him. “Don’t just sit and whine and carry on.”

Everywhere I went, couples were adjusting to the new domestic reality: the woman paying the mortgage, the woman driving to work every day, the woman leaving instructions on how to do the laundry. The townspeople referred to the ex-Russell men as three types: the “transients,” who drove as far as an hour to Montgomery for work and never made it home for dinner; the “domestics,” who idled at the house during the day hopefully, looking for work; and the “gophers,” who drove their wives to and from work, spending the hours in between hunting or fishing. “You’re gonna laugh at this,” Charles told me, “but it was harder on the men than the women. It seems like their skills were more, what’s the word, transferable?” The women from the mill got jobs working at the local doctors’ or attorneys’ offices, or in retail, or they went back to school to become nurses or
teachers. This came home to Charles one day when he called the unemployment office in nearby Opelika to ask when his benefits were due to run out. The voice on the phone sounded familiar to him, and after a few minutes he realized it was his old secretary. She transferred him to her supervisor, who turned out to be another woman who had worked for him. “I was born in the South, where the men take care of their women,” he said. “Suddenly, it’s us who are relying on the women. Suddenly, we got the women in control.” This year, Alexander City had its first female mayor.

The tornadoes of spring 2011 had mostly bypassed Alexander City and yet the place felt posttraumatic, as if a different kind of tornado had ripped out some deep roots and left people unsure how to rebuild or move forward. Wherever I went in town I met couples like the Gettyses, where the husband was stuck in place and the wife was moving ahead, yet no one would quite acknowledge the new reality. “What’s the expression? Smoke and mirrors,” said Rob Pridgen, a young friend of the Gettyses. “The wives are making more money and paying the bills, but the Southern man has to pretend he’s the one holding it all together.”

Rob lost his job a month after he started dating Connie, and as a result, for a year he would not ask her to marry him. They were both in their forties and each had already been married, and Rob knew right away he wanted to marry her, but without a job he could not bring himself to ask. Connie was a teacher making a steady salary, and Rob was struggling week to week, fixing computers for a friend. The whole situation was getting awkward, with neither of them having any idea what to call each other or what to tell people at church.

“He is absolutely the guy who says ‘I provide for my family. I’m the man of the house,’” said Connie.

“You’re saying that as if I’m the dictator. It’s not the whole sit-in-the-kitchen-with-your-apron thing. But the way I was brought up, it’s a man’s responsibility to take care of his family,” he says, then turns to me. “I don’t want to make the queen analogy, but my job is to make her the queen.”

“Honey, you know I would teach anyway.”

“But the point is, you shouldn’t have to.”

“It bothers him a lot,” Connie says to me.

“I pretty much internalize it. It’s like, if I can’t take care of her, then I’m not a man.”

At this point, Connie’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Abby, pipes in with her own new-generation perspective on this Southern code of chivalry, which sounds like so much Shakespearean nonsense to her, given how the boys she knew in high school actually behaved. “That’s so cute,” she says to Rob, “it’s gross.”

S
INCE 2000,
the manufacturing economy has lost almost six million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. But then that market crashed as well. During the same period, meanwhile, health and education have added about the same number of jobs. But those sectors continue to be heavily dominated by women, while the men concentrate themselves more than ever in the industries—construction, transportation, and utilities—that are fading away.

In the last decade, across eastern Alabama, the old mills have been snuffed out one after another—socks, tires, pulp, factories, poultry—leaving the economy in shambles. In Tallapoosa County,
which contains Alexander City, the unemployment rate at the time I did my reporting was nearly 14 percent—pretty standard for the region during the height of the recession.

“Even twenty years ago there were jobs available for the class of men with limited education and skills. These were pretty good jobs that could get you into the middle class,” says Joe Sumners, who runs the Economic & Community Development Institute at Auburn University. “But now those jobs are disappearing. If they want to work they have to be retrained, and that’s hard on a lot of people.” In 1967, 97 percent of American men with only a high school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. That same pattern shows up not just in the United States but in almost all rich nations as they’ve put the industrial age behind them. “Forty years ago, thirty years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”

Lately economists have begun to focus on this lack of wage opportunities for men as “the single most destructive social force of our era,” says Michael Greenstone, an MIT economist and former chief economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama.
New York Times
columnist David Brooks memorably defined this problem as “the missing fifth,” referring to the percentage of men—most of them without a college diploma—who are not getting up and going to work. In 1950, roughly one in twenty men of prime working age was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded. When asked by
The New York Times
what keeps him up at night, Larry
Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, zeroed in on the same phenomenon. “I worry for the medium and long term about where the jobs are going to come from for those with fewer skills. One in five men between twenty-five and fifty-four is not working, and a reasonable projection is that it will still be one in six after the economy recovers. . . . That has potentially vast social consequences.”

The change is especially noticeable in a small town like Alexander City, but it’s happening all over the country, from the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast, in big old industrial cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike. The men in the urban centers of the Rust Belt have been decimated by the decline of the American auto industry and the disappearance of unionized plants. The new suburbs of Nevada and Florida have been shelled out by the collapse of the housing industry. In the Spike TV show
Coal
, the miners of McDowell County, West Virginia, are romanticized as the last real men of America, holdouts from a time when America revered “hardworking men” who are “patriotic” as the producers often say. But this brand of macho exists only within the narrow span of the cameras. In
The Big Sort
, author Bill Bishop reveals the real McDowell County as part of a region rife with “civic dysfunction,” where many of the former miners have succumbed to OxyContin addiction, marriage rates are plummeting, and one out of every three children is born to one of the area’s many single mothers, who by default are left to stitch things together by working at Walmart or in service jobs around town.

In all these places, in fact, the women are stepping into the traditional “provider” role. MIT economist David Autor calls it the “last-one-holding-the-bag” theory. “When men start to flame out, women by necessity have to become self-sufficient, to take care of the kids. They don’t marry the men, who are just another mouth to feed.” In 2008, working-class women had a higher median income than the
men, says June Carbone, University of Missouri law professor and author of
Red Families v. Blue Families
. The women go to the local community colleges at far higher rates than men, to study nursing, cosmetology, or administrative skills. Very often they work at the local Walmart, often the sole source of steady jobs in town. If they have to, they pick up extra work babysitting, waitressing, or cleaning houses. In Alexander City, Leandra Denney’s husband got the call telling him he’d been fired from Russell at eight in the morning on January 2, 2009, and “it just broke him,” she recalled. Over the following year he became an OxyContin addict and a scary, unreliable husband, who might at any time pull a gun on her and her two children, and who stopped contributing anything to the household. How did she make ends meet for that year? “I cleaned houses,” she says. “I’m the kind of person, if I have to clean a toilet, I just put the Mr. Bubble in and make it work.”

This script has played out once before in American culture. Starting in the 1970s, black men began leaving factory jobs; by 1987 only 20 percent of black men worked in manufacturing. The men who lived in the inner cities had a hard time making the switch to service jobs or getting the education needed to move into other sectors. Over time, nuclear families fell apart, drug addiction shot up, and social institutions began to disintegrate, as William Julius Wilson chronicles in his 1996 book
When Work Disappears
. As a result, in the intervening two decades, the society has turned into a virtual matriarchy. In poorer communities women are raising children alone while one third of the men are in jail. In fact, one recent study found that African-American boys whose fathers are in jail have higher graduation rates than those whose fathers are around, suggesting that fathers have become a negative influence. African-American men and women have the greatest gender gap in college
graduation rates, and
Ebony
magazine often laments how difficult it is for a black woman to find a suitable man.

In 2010 I visited Kansas City to follow one of the court-sponsored men’s support groups that have sprung up throughout the Rust Belt and in other places where the postindustrial economy has turned traditional family roles upside down. Some groups help men cope with unemployment, and others help them reconnect with their alienated families. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone, too. Darren Henderson was making $33 an hour laying sheet metal until the real-estate crisis hit and he lost his job. Then he lost his duplex—“there’s my little piece of the American dream”—then his car. And then he fell behind on his child-support payments. “They make it like I’m just sitting around,” he said, “but I’m not.” As proof of his efforts, he took out a new commercial driver’s permit and a bartending license, and then threw them down on the ground like jokers for all the use they’d been. His daughter’s mother had a $50,000-a-year job and was getting her master’s degree in social work. He’d just signed up for food stamps, which is just about the only social welfare program a man can easily access. Recently she’d seen him waiting at the bus stop. “Looked me in the eye,” he recalled, “and just drove on by.”

Mustafaa El-Scari, a teacher and social worker, leads some of these groups in Kansas City. El-Scari has studied the sociology of men and boys set adrift, and he considers it his special gift to get them to open up and reflect on their new condition. The day I visited one of his classes, earlier this year, he was facing a particularly resistant crowd.