The End of Men and the Rise of Women (13 page)

None of the thirty or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school had come for voluntary adult enrichment.
Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. That week’s lesson, from a workbook called
Quenching the Father Thirst
, was supposed to involve writing a letter to a hypothetical estranged fourteen-year-old daughter named Crystal, whose father had left when she was a baby. But El-Scari had his own idea about how to get through to this barely awake, skeptical crew, and letters to Crystal had nothing to do with it.

Like some of them, he explained, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical “white picket fence”—one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. “Well, that check bounced a long time ago,” he says. “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”

The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about twenty to forty. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical. “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”

F
OR THE RISING GENERATION,
these upended gender dynamics have made marriage seem a lot less appealing. This is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages thirty to forty-four has more college-educated women than college-educated men. An increasing number of those women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages thirty to forty-four were married. In 2007, 60 percent were. The same year, among American women without a high school diploma, 43 percent were married. And yet, for all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made hardly any financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich.

The divorce statistics alone tell an incredible new story. In the 1970s, a divorced woman could expect to watch her income plummet by at least a quarter, while very few divorced men experienced a similar decline. This change in circumstances drove the plot line of many a pulp novel of the era, the wife struggling to hold it together as a part-time piano teacher and babysitter. Now, the percentage of men and women who see their incomes drop by a quarter is about the same. On the other end, the number of divorced women who see their income rise substantially has nearly doubled. In fact, a greater percentage of women than men see their income rise by at least 25 percent, giving a whole new perspective on who was whose ball and chain.

The changes have reached into unlikely places, scrambling the cultural map of America. Alabama is among the most socially conservative states in the country. The state has voted Republican in
every presidential election since 1964 except two, both times for native sons of the South—George Wallace and Jimmy Carter—and has one of the highest proportions of citizens who identify as evangelical Christians. Yet despite a steady increase in population, the percentage of households with married couples has declined from 57 percent in 1990 to 48 percent today. In 2008 the Census Bureau began publishing divorce rates, meaning the percentage of people in the state who got divorced in the last year. In each year since, Alabama has made the top of the list. In fact, the entire list has run counter to cultural stereotype, with Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Alabama at the top and New York, California, and Massachusetts close to the bottom. Last year, among the areas with the highest divorce rates in the nation were two small towns in Wayne County, Indiana.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage. The women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’” she said. “Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations. So they have the babies at nineteen or twenty, but they just don’t have the jobs to support them.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?

“Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just
annihilated in the recession of the nineties, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”

The situation today is not, as Edin likes to say, a “feminist nirvana.” After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past decade. A child born to an unmarried mother, once a stigma, is now the “new normal,”
The New York Times
reported in a 2012 front page story, as more than half of births to American women under thirty occurred outside marriage. Many of these single mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college. Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says sociologist Brad Wilcox.

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, the disappearance of work for men, or in the eyes of conservative critics such as Charles Murray, plain old moral decay. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are now more economically independent and thus able to set the terms for marriage—and usually they set them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. Or as Edin’s cowriter, the sociologist Maria Kefalas, puts it, “everyone watches
Oprah
”—or whatever the current
Oprah
equivalent is. “Everyone wants a big wedding, a soul mate, a best friend.” But among the men they know, they can’t find one.

Some small proof for this theory that women don’t marry because
they’re on top can be found in a recent study of Florida Lottery winners, called “Lucky in Life, Unlucky in Love?: The Effect of Random Income Shocks on Marriage and Divorce,” published in the
Journal of Human Resources
in 2011. Researchers discovered that women who recently won the lottery were significantly less likely to marry, whereas for men it made no difference. Women who had won relatively large prizes ($25,000–$50,000) in the Florida Lottery were 41 to 48 percent less likely to marry than women who won less than $1,000, suggesting that money does in fact affect women’s decisions.

It’s far from definitive, but the results do confirm a certain picture. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African-Americans: The mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.

These changes are not merely spreading around the fringes; they are fundamentally altering the core of American middle-class life, as Wilcox and his colleagues chronicle in a groundbreaking report called “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America.” Wilcox’s work concentrates on what he calls the “moderately educated middle,” meaning the 58 percent of Americans who do not have a college degree but are not high school dropouts, either, and might have some higher education. This is the class that used to strive upward and model itself on the upper classes. Now, in this vast swath of Middle America, “marriage, that iconic middle-class institution, is foundering,” writes Wilcox, and at an “astonishingly fast pace.”

By nearly every important social measure, Middle America is starting to look like high-school-dropout America. By the late 1990s, 37 percent of moderately educated women were divorcing or separating
within ten years of their first marriage, almost the same rate as among women who didn’t finish high school and more than three times that of college graduates. Middle America also caught up in rates of infidelity and number of sexual partners. By the late 2000s, nonmarital childbirths accounted for 44 percent of children born to moderately educated mothers and 6 percent of children born to highly educated mothers. Teenagers in Middle America are now less likely to say they would be embarrassed if they got pregnant, and less likely to have a strong desire to attend college.

The middle class still aspires to a happy soul-mate marriage, but increasingly their life experience is not matching up. From the 1970s to the 2000s, the percent of spouses who reported they were “very happy” in their marriages dropped among moderately educated Americans from 68 to 57 percent. Marriage, writes Wilcox, “is in danger of becoming a luxury good attainable only to those with the material and cultural means to grab hold of it.” As Kefalas puts it, “Stable marriage has become a class privilege in America, just like good school and access to health care and healthy foods.”

W
HEN
I
VISITED
Alexander City, the kids at the high school were high on a song by Jason Michael Carroll called “Where I’m From.” In it, the singer, dressed in jeans and boots, meets up with an Armani-clad businessman in first class. The businessman asks him “Son, where do you call home?” In pop country music, this is a cue to describe the American dream, the front pew of the church, the courthouse clock, a place:

But that place, where a “man’s word means everything,” no longer exists. In 2000, Maria Kefalas began doing fieldwork in a small rural town in Iowa. At that time she was still hearing about shotgun weddings, and ministers still refused to marry couples who had been living together. It was a town of classic “marriage naturalists,” who assumed without thinking much about it that life proceeded in a certain order: you got married, you had some babies, and at various points along the way you worked until you retired. If by some accident the pregnancy came before the marriage, you pretended like it hadn’t, and did your best to keep up appearances.

In 2007, with the recession in full swing, she returned to the town and found the landscape completely changed. She met kids in their teens who were having babies first, no marriage on the horizon and what’s more, they seemed unembarrassed about it. “They were more like the kids in North Philly,” she recalls. Over the course of the decade, they had essentially copied the professional classes and switched to “marriage planners,” who no longer assume marriage will just happen but consider it a distant goal to be earned at some distant point in the future after much waiting and planning. Only in their case, the future never really arrives. “I became increasingly convinced that as this twentieth-century industrial economy is breaking apart, marriage naturalists are disappearing. This whole cultural narrative—you get a job, you marry your sweetheart, you buy a house, you educate your children, you go to church—has been torn to shreds. Without the economic foundation, the script can’t support itself. And this is Iowa—the idyllic heart of white America!” A cultural chasm—which did not exist forty years ago and which was still relatively small twenty years ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top quarter or third of society.