The End of Men and the Rise of Women (15 page)

Shannon works a part-time shift at the Walmart so she can go to school and study nursing at the local community college in the late afternoon and evenings. To make the rest of the income they need, she works as an exotic dancer in Birmingham, where she can sometimes bring home $250 a night. Troy is not crazy about it because “she’s in there with doctors and lawyers who are making more money than me. Who are making
a lot
more money than me.” But even he can do the math: Right after Brandon was born, there was a spell when neither of them was working and he had to borrow $10 at a time from his mom, Shannon’s sister, and his two best friends to get through the week. For six months they were on welfare—“first one in my family,” he says. But $250 times three adds up to a box of diapers and groceries, with money to spare for a few Happy Meals and beer. The only downside is that Shannon is always too busy to do the grocery shopping, which means he has to decipher her handwriting on the shopping list, with no one to ask for help because at the supermarket he sees only “aisles and aisles of dudes.”

Most nights when Shannon is dancing he can distract himself by watching a game or having some beers with his buddies in town, but some nights the thoughts go spinning in his head. Troy’s favorite expression is “ain’t a man,” which he uses in several contradictory ways. Sometimes it’s a kind of boast—“Ain’t a man who wouldn’t want my lady, even if he’s gay,” he will say, and enumerate all the ways in which Shannon is “smokin’ hot.” Sometimes, though, the expression betrays his own humiliation: “Ain’t a man who would take that from his wife,” he says, recalling the time when, for three nights straight, Shannon came home at four in the morning, with no explanation. “Ain’t a man would do that” refers to night three, when he
waited up for Shannon to come home and then choked her until she passed out. “It was my darkest hour,” he says. To make it up to her, he bought her a choker with a really big silver heart to cover the bruise.

Troy likes to say they have a “
Jerry Springer
relationship,” by which he means they fight a lot, almost always about the same two subjects: sex and work. Troy complains that when they first met they were “doing it three times a day, and now it’s like, ‘I got a headache, my foot hurts, Brandon was up all night, I had a fight with my mom,’” he says. “I mean, come on, all the ducks have got to be lined up perfectly for it to happen. But it’s not like a NASA launch or anything. I mean, we’re just having sex!” Shannon complains that Troy never brings home a paycheck. But what really drives her crazy is when he brings home another piece of paper instead, a clipping from the newspaper mentioning this or that little operation opening up in one of the old Russell plant buildings. “Get over it,” she yells, because she knows he is living in his father’s memory of the great days of Russell, when they made jerseys for Bo Jackson or “The Refrigerator” Perry. “Troy. Seriously. Get over it.” She says it the way you would say it to someone still feeling a phantom limb.

Shannon is especially impatient with this line of wishful thinking at the moment because she is pregnant, although she hasn’t even told her mom yet and she’s not showing. She is sure it’s a girl; she wrote that in her journal, along with a name (Eliza) and a future she has spelled out in handwriting not all that changed from high school, where on the day Eliza herself graduates from Benjamin Russell High School, she finds out that she got into college—Auburn University, to be exact—and Eliza’s father (who in the story goes by the name Thomas, not Troy, for some reason) is the last one in the house to see the acceptance letter because he’s late coming home from work.

A
KID GROWING UP
in Alexander City, especially the kind of kid who wants nothing to do with hot, noisy plants and textiles and who wants another kind of life he or she might have seen on TV, dreams of going to Auburn, about a forty-five-minute drive southeast on 280. This is the way it’s always been, even before Russell closed, because in the limited geography of a teenager’s mind, Auburn is the closest place with a real movie theater and a mall. It has the university with a football team and kids from all over the world and a Gap on the main street off campus, and the way the kids talk about it makes it sound practically as exotic and glamorous as New York. Connie’s daughter, Abby, headed there straight after graduation, as do all the top graduates of Benjamin Russell High School.

Across eastern Alabama, Auburn is considered the one city that got it right, that avoided the pitfalls of the rest of the region, a place that carefully engineered its future so it would survive in the modern economy. All the surrounding counties have had unemployment rates in the double digits during the recession, and some have spiked as high as 18 percent. But Lee County, which contains Auburn and its sister city, Opelika, has weathered the recession and now has a modest unemployment rate of 6.4 percent, well below the national average.

What makes Auburn different? Part of the answer is obvious: The city has a thriving university, which has anchored its economy for nearly a hundred and fifty years. But the full answer is surprising—as surprising to the leaders of Auburn as it was to me, because it so thoroughly disrupts this Southern city’s sense of itself. Auburn has become the region’s one economic powerhouse by turning itself into a town dominated by women.

In 2010, market researcher James Chung stumbled on a data set that seemed to illuminate a whole new future America. He looked at two thousand metropolitan regions in the United States, covering 91 percent of the population. In 1,997 of them, the young women had a median income higher than the young men. This held true in big cities and smaller ones, richer and poorer. Chung’s findings made the cover of
Tim
e magazine, with Chung becoming an oracle for a fast-approaching gender upheaval. “These women haven’t just caught up with the guys,” he said. “In many cities they’re clocking them. We’ve known for a long time that women are graduating at higher rates than men, and the question was: Did that translate into greater economic power? Now we have our answer. This generation of women has adapted to the fundamental restructuring of the economy better than their male peers.”

In spring of 2011, I called Chung again and asked him if any of the regions stood out as having a particularly large disparity. “Yes,” he said. “Someplace called Auburn-Opelika.” Auburn-Opawhat? Yup, it turns out that the median income of the women there is about 140 percent of the median income of the men. This fact was hard to wrap my mind around. After all these years, we have located our feminist paradise in a small college town in the deep South, a place where the ratio of churches to people is still about one to twelve, and where the football team still makes the front of the local paper three days out of seven.

What does the modern-day Herland look like? It’s a town with much of the old Southern charm and very little of the old racist, sexist legacy. It has enough stately mansions lining the main streets to signal prosperity, and enough untamed wildness not to tip over into suburban. A herd of cattle graze near the latest research park. The town was on
U.S. News & World Report
’s 2009 list of top ten places
in the United States to live. The week I visited there were ribbon cuttings scheduled for a knitting store, a fitness center, a Weight Watchers, a women’s clothing boutique, a place called Paris Bakery Garden, and a Publix (“where shopping is a pleasure”), a grocery chain that bills itself as a regional competitor to Whole Foods. The local Chevy dealership tried to tempt people to a weekend sale with the promise of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. (What man would fall for that?) More important, Auburn was a perfect reflection of the modern, feminized economy: a combination of university, service, and government jobs, with a small share in manufacturing.

The typical Auburn woman is someone like Meghan McGowen, who works in the city’s female-dominated economic development department. McGowen was a leader in her sorority in college and took a tour of schools to decide on business school. She chose Auburn because she could walk to campus, and there was no crime. When she graduated she had offers from the top two accounting firms to work in Los Angeles, where she is from. But she turned them down to work here, because it’s a “better place to live.” She makes less money, but her standard of living is higher and the schools are amazing. Her three best girlfriends are a consultant, a lawyer, and an engineer, and they have all worked out deals where they can work remotely. They love this place, but they will never be homegrown Southern belles; they could be from anywhere; they are part of the army of upwardly mobile women in search of a good job and a better life, wherever they happen to find it.

Does any place still belong to the men? The manufacturing plants at least? I paid a visit to Briggs & Stratton, a plant that produces generators and small engines for lawn mowers and snowblowers.
The factory is only a few miles away from where
Norma Rae
was filmed, the movie that won Sally Field her memorable Academy Award for her portrayal of a union organizer in a textile factory. It’s not far from the workplace of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom an equal pay law is named. But the view from the ground gave an impression of a world Norma Rae could only have dreamed of.

I expected to find the last bastion of male dominance, where men with their sleeves rolled up barked orders over the loud machines. Instead I learned that the rules of the new women’s world held true even on the factory floor. Once rising up through the ranks meant getting in good with the plant manager. But managers are no longer called simply “managers” here; they are, in the lingo of the new feminized workplace, “team facilitators” and “coaches.” “I want them to think of themselves more as a mentor, where their job is to motivate the people on their team,” explains Cisco King, who is the plant’s human resources manager.

A few years ago King contracted with the local community college to hold classes at the plant from three to five
P.M.
, right after the shift. Instructors come in to teach electrical power or electrical applications or some other aspect of plant operations. “The people who do well here are the ones who are motivated to take advantage of these educational opportunities,” he explained. “They don’t just ask me about classes when there happens to be a position open,” he went on. “They take the classes whenever they are offered. This shows me they want to position themselves to move ahead of the pack.” Those people tend to be mostly women. Women like Monica Hodge, mother of two, who took a class on electrical applications because, as she explains, “I want to rise up one day.” Recently, the employee population tipped to 55 percent women, King told me.

A
UBURN’S SUCCESS SUGGESTS
something hopeful but also disorienting. For the towns around it that are still struggling, Auburn offers a model of future success that requires not looking backward and yearning for the old manufacturing age to come back, but instead embracing what has already begun to happen, turning themselves over fully to the new feminized economy.

And what about the men? How do they fit in to that kind of economy? In the last year or so manufacturing jobs around the country have bounced back and the men have been rushing to fill them. But this will only make up for a small percentage of the recently unemployed. Local community colleges have started to get very creative about how they prepare men for the new economy. In Opelika, the college is using 3-D simulation technology that feels like living inside a video game in order to keep the interest of the young men. The sign over the simulation lab does not say “use your hands” but “expand your mind.” Other colleges have begun to specialize in green technology or other fields of the future. And some at Opelika have started to run close studies on ways to make men feel less out of place in school and to set up a support system for them.

Success in the future will also involve some easing off on the old codes of manliness, which won’t come naturally to men in the South. But even in Alabama I could see that if only out of sheer necessity men were beginning to settle into new roles—picking up kids from school while their wives were at work—and enjoying it, even if they were not quite ready to admit it. Rob Pridgen spent long afternoons teaching his son how to ride a motorbike, and you could tell it was some solace.