by Hanna Rosin
Steven most definitely does not think of himself as conducting some new experiment in modern marriage or gender roles. If he read Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, he would laugh. When we were hanging out on the back deck one evening, Sarah, who has a master’s in theater history, tried to convince him that he was an example of “post-feminist masculinity.” His response: “I’m gonna call bullshit on that right now.” To Steven, who has a BS in electrical engineering, their arrangement seems as logical as a simple equation. In 2001 Steven was at a career dead end. He was working as a wireless engineer consulting with companies on where to place new towers, and then the market tanked. As a couple they needed to “diversify.” Sarah was thinking of getting her PhD in theater history, which seemed to him “an expensive way to end up as a barista.” They bred fancy cats for a while. Then Steven suggested she take the LSAT. She did so well that the school offered her a free ride. “I didn’t even know you could get a scholarship for law school,” he says.
After that things fell into place. It became clear that Sarah was a “great writer” and a “great talker” who could articulate nuanced ideas in a precise manner, says Steven. She aced law school and networked her way into great jobs. “Hey, if you want to win, you put your best batter on the plate,” he says. “I knew I wanted to marry someone who was smart, educated, self-motivated, and a hard worker. I got a massively talented wife who in certain areas bested me.” While she was in law school, Steven decided his goal was to have his wife earn $50,000 a year, but she was offered more than three times that. When I asked Steven if that made him feel bad or less of a man because she was feeding the family, he genuinely did not seem to grasp the logic behind my question: “I could have my wife stay at home and spend my money, or I could have my wife out and making some big money. Hmmm.”
So where does that leave Steven? In theory this setup is temporary, and Steven, now in his third year of law school, is just a few years behind his wife (although Sarah writes his outlines, sifts through his materials, and tells him what he absolutely has to read). After law school he wants to be a plaintiff’s attorney taking on corporations, because he likes the fight. “I have time to figure myself out. I don’t have to rush. Sarah’s got a good job, so I can go after jobs that pay less. I can do more of what I want. I don’t care if I make money. I don’t have to, because my wife is the one feeding the family.” If he graduates on time, he’ll be thirty-eight.
Just before six, Sarah walked in from work, sat down to take off her sneakers, and then got right back up again. It’s hard to describe what happened next without using cliché weather metaphors like “whirlwind” or “storm of activity.” Within minutes Xavier was up in his high chair, his butt now lathered in cream, eating blueberries. Strawberries appeared on the table to be cut for a pie, along with flour and butter. Where was the gelatin? Chopped meat came next, along with corn and some other vegetables, and a cold beer got to my hand. Procuring the beer was Steven’s job, but the rest of the time he sat on the stool and watched Sarah work. She made pie dough and set out a bowl of dried peas to distract Xavier. (“Use your words.”) The chopped meat got formed into burgers. “Steven, in a couple of minutes I’ll ask you to take these to the grill.” She set the table, bathed the baby, laid out the burgers, put together the pie. Did I mention she was seven and a half months pregnant? It seemed as if the rest of us had until that point only been lazily squatting in this house, and now the space reverted to its rightful owner who was whipping it back into shape.
Spending a few days with Steven and Sarah made me realize something about my own marriage. My hunch when I got engaged was correct: Over the years my husband and I have in fact split domestic life pretty equally. We both work, we both cook, we both take care of the children. Because of this I assumed that I had shed most of my attachment to traditional gender roles. But now I realize that I am much more deliberate and reactive than I thought. I would never not work, because that decision is loaded with feminist betrayal. I would never let my husband sit back and drink a beer while I was busy in the kitchen. And my husband would never stay home, because it would never occur to him. What I realized in Pittsburgh was that even our intimate relationships unfold in a cultural moment, and my moment was still not far enough removed from old feminist rage to divest these tiny domestic decisions of that kind of meaning.
Steven and Sarah make decisions on a much cleaner slate. They behave almost like corporate partners at a work retreat, taking stock of trends and proceeding from there. Sarah works because she has the “more ready skill set” to succeed as a lawyer, and Steven stays home because in this modern economy “testosterone has been marginalized.” Steven feels entitled to check out on evenings and weekends, and this makes Sarah “tired and sometimes angry.” But it also means X gets the best of all possible worlds because, as Sarah read in a study, a kid with a stay-at-home dad gets more total parenting hours because he gains the father’s time and retains almost all of the mother’s, and ends up with higher test scores. Make sense?
Steven and Sarah were both raised with the usual jumble of gender expectations. They both come from conservative Midwestern families with factory roots. Sarah considered herself evangelical in her young life, and at what she calls her “Jesus camp” she was taught that the Bible ordained a man to be the head of the household and the woman to be submissive. In graduate school she rebelled and wrote her thesis on something about the body and corset restrictions, she can’t remember exactly what. And that’s the point—these feminist constructs are distant memories. On her shelf I saw a book with “Womb” in the title, but it was hidden behind a notebook of recipes. The closest thing I saw to a feminist text was a Working Mother’s Guide to Life sitting in the bathroom, well thumbed through and marked up, with advice on, say, how to pump breast milk at a high-powered job.
Some days Sarah comes home from work and there is poop on the walls that Steven has not bothered to clean, and then she feels like nothing has changed since time immemorial. On those days Sarah realizes one truth about their situation: Steven stays home during the day, but in fact she is in charge of both realms. By deciding to work full-time she has not actually ceded the domestic space, but only doubled her load, although neither of them ever articulates that. This is one of the many ways in which the transition to a new era is not yet complete, in which couples with breadwinner wives hang on to old ways and habits that make the current setup unworkable. The women take on new roles with gusto, while the men take them on only reluctantly.
In fact, there is a reigning notion in the Andrews house that Steven is ultimately the one in charge, that if anything ever went wrong, Steven would stand between his family and disaster. The dynamic, as Sarah describes it, seems something like Charlie’s Angels, where Steven is Charlie and Sarah is doing his bidding. “I’m like the planner, and she executes,” Steven says. “Follow-through isn’t my strength.” Sarah puts it this way: “I almost get the sense of him sitting back and indulgently watching me tinker around in my universe and taking this or that over and him thinking, ‘Isn’t this cool? Isn’t she being so competent over there?’”
This may be a fiction they both perpetuate because women have not yet become accustomed to owning the power even when it is so obviously theirs. It may in fact be a new variation on “provider,” where men preserve the protector aspect of being the breadwinner even when they are not earning the money. Or it may be because the provider role did not just pass on to women, but passed into obsolescence. When men earned the money, women claimed alternate sources of power—sovereignty over the house or the school community or the couple’s social life—so it seems only fair to preserve that system now. Power is diffuse. Maybe that’s a satisfying enough explanation to save men from obsolescence and give them space to invent an entirely new way of being a happy, harmonious family in the age of female power. Or maybe not.
One early evening, just after Sarah came home from work and we were all talking, Xavier took off his diap
er and peed in the hallway for maybe the third time that day, which prompted this observation from Steven about the future: “All boys do is pee on things. Nothing good comes from being a man. Women bring good things to the world. I live longer if I have a wife. I have a better, healthier life.” He picked up the discarded diaper and dropped it in the sink, forgetting to spray. “I wanted a little Anne of Green Gables. Someone creative and good. I would love it if the next one is a little girl. Like my wife. A superstar.”
THE NEW AMERICAN MATRIARCHY
THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS A SEX CHANGE
Alexander City, Alabama—In the first days after the mill closed, Pastor Gerald Hallmark of the First Baptist Church was able to keep the prayer requests specific: Joe Moore got a pink slip today. Let’s pray that he finds new employment. Or, The Wallers have been called off to Atlanta. Let’s pray they find a new church home. But before long, the numbers got to be overwhelming. In a town of fifteen thousand, Russell Corporation, makers of premium athletic wear, employed nearly eight thousand people, and over the last eight years nearly all of them have lost their jobs. Keeping up with the details of the disaster was like “trying to wrap your hands around a tornado,” Hallmark said, so after a while, he just lumped the victims under one all-encompassing prayer. “We pray over those who have been released from employment,” he would say at the Wednesday night service. “May God open another door for you.”
The ones who left town the fastest to find new jobs were the plant managers who were also the “town doers,” as the pastor calls them—the deacons and Sunday school teachers and Little League coaches and Rotary Club chairs. Once upon a time, the patriarchy was not an abstract idea to fight over, but the central organizing principle of a respectable middle-class existence. In Alexander City, the patriarchy that made middle-class existence possible began with the Russell family, after whom many town institutions and main roads were named (Benjamin Russell High School, Russell Medical Center, Russell Road). In a tier just beneath them were the friends and relatives who served as the plant managers and also as the civic leaders. The only woman of note was an honorary matriarch named Big Mama, who lived on a mini-plantation with a rose trellis and pools and a house for each of her sons.
This patriarchy supported the kind of middle-class striving that is romanticized in pop country songs and political speeches. Like many thriving small towns, Alexander City provided a blueprint for the American dream that looked nothing like success in New York City or San Francisco. Here, a man with some textile training or engineering knowledge could make $70,000 or even $100,000, enough to afford a second house on the lake and his own boat. Here, a man could drive a Lexus SUV and still imagine himself to be the kind of American cowboy reflected in the Toby Keith song blasting on the radio: “Wearing my six-shooter, riding my pony on a cattle drive.” He could take his family on a vacation to Disneyland and come home to a church where, if he needed it, he would be prayed for by name. His kids meanwhile could enjoy shows by dance troupes imported by Big Mama, who loved to say, “New York City didn’t have nothing on us!”
But then, just before the start of the aughts, Russell got sucked into the tidal wave that was drowning American manufacturing. The company got sold to Berkshire Hathaway and moved many of the plants to Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Honduras, where uniform shirts could be made for $1 apiece. The American headquarters relocated to Atlanta because the new class of international executives and marketing aces (not to mention the new CEO’s wife) “did not relish the idea of living in the small town of Alexander City,” as the company history reads. The busiest office in Alexander City became the “placement service,” which gave advice to the newly fired. The town itself, meanwhile, went from being the unlikely home of a Fortune 500 company and proud maker of uniforms for every football and baseball star who ever made a commercial, to the latest victim of the end of the manufacturing age. “It’s like someone just turned the spigot off and we couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on,” said Mary Shockley, who works at Russell Medical Center. What dried up was a path to the middle class and all the familiar landmarks that went along with it.
I visited Alexander City in the aftermath, when the town was still trying to make sense of what had happened. The town was in the same situation as any number of American suburbs near Las Vegas or Houston or Fort Lauderdale, where the recession and the housing crisis had ripped the roots out of the middle class. But here the effect was concentrated and stark, and you could see more clearly what had been lost, and also what was rising up in its place. In the last decade or so, the broad middle swath of America has become unrecognizable, with a rapid decline in marriage and a rapid increase in divorce and single motherhood. The men destined to be breadwinners have lost their way, causing a sudden upending of the rules for sex, marriage, politics, religion, and the future aspirations of young people in places like Benjamin Russell High School. Even in the kind of rules that had always seemed unchangeable, like how two teenagers fall in love.
Sociologists have mostly described this change in the negative, as the hole where something familiar used to be: the sinking of the traditional middle class, the end of the stable white working class, the broken backbone of America, the void between the rich and the poor. But this description fails to take into account that the changes are affecting men and women very differently. In fact, the most distinctive change is probably the emergence of an American matriarchy, where the younger men especially are unmoored, and closer than at any other time in history to being obsolete—at least by most traditional measures of social utility. And the women are left picking up the pieces.
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,” C
harles 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.”