by Hanna Rosin
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.”
SINCE 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.
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.”
FOR 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 so
ciologist 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.”
