by Hanna Rosin
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.”
WHEN 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:
Where a man’s word means everything
Where moms and dads were high school flames
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.
The First Baptist Church in Alexander City is a thriving community, with packed pews every Wednesday and Sunday and events nearly every day of the week. But as with most evangelical churches, the changes in gender relations have forced a rethinking of a basic philosophy. As Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently asked, “What does it mean for large sectors of our society to become virtual matriarchies? How do we prepare the church to deal with such a world while maintaining Biblical models of manhood and womanhood?” Christians, he warned, “had better know that matters far more important than economics are at stake. These trends represent nothing less than a collapse of male responsibility, leadership, and expectations. The real issue here is not the end of men, but the disappearance of manhood.”
One day Pastor Hallmark from First Baptist saw a guy who used to be a plant manager selling shirts at J. C. Penney. The guy tried to avoid him, but Hallmark did his best to make him feel comfortable, by walking up and asking him how the new job was working out. Since then, Hallmark has had to make slight adjustments in the philosophy he’s been preaching for nearly thirty years. Instead of reminding the men that the Bible instructs them to be the head of the household, he tells them, “Your manhood shows in your reaction to hard times.”
Here and there, you can see the women making small adjustments themselves. Sarah Beth Gettys’s Sunday school class contains a group of ambitious senior girls headed to Auburn, one of whom says her biggest earthly temptation is likely to be “pursuing too many higher degrees,” and another the other girls in the class call “future president.” Gettys still understands that even dynamic women cannot be called to the pulpit, and she still teaches them that a man is head of the household, but these days, she has dropped the word “submissive” from her vocabulary and sneaks in lessons for the girls about how to negotiate better salaries and move up the corporate ladder.
For Connie Pridgen, the younger woman I met at church, her personal revelation came in a Bible study group. They were mulling over a passage in Proverbs that’s read in many evangelical wedding ceremonies. The passage describes the “wife of noble character,” who works with the wool and flax, brings the food from afar, who “gets up while it is still dark,” buys the field, plants a vineyard, turns a profit, and “her lamp does not go out at night.” Her husband, meanwhile, “is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.”
Connie reads the passage aloud to me, Rob, and Abby one spring Saturday while we are sitting around on the living room couch of the small lake house they rent. What has been dawning on her these last few months becomes obvious to all of us as she speaks. The wife is doing absolutely everything. And the husband?
“Sounds like he’s sitting around with his buddies shootin’ the breeze, talkin’ about the ball game and eatin’ potato chips,” says Rob, always one for a dose of bracing honesty.
Abby says the husband sounds “sketchy.” In fact, she says he sounds like the “sketchy” guys who hang around the Ruby Tuesday bar where she works on weekends and where half her fellow waitresses seem to be pregnant with the babies of said sketchy guys, “who may or may not be there the next day.”
Connie and Rob have both been through divorce, and she’s the one with the steady job. But to her, these upheavals still feel like bumps in the road. She grew up in the old order, and she knows the value of love and marriage. For Abby’s generation, however, raised in the wake of the economic turmoil and family breakdown, there is no more road.
CONNIE’S JUNIOR ENGLISH CLASS at Benjamin Russell High School files in after lunch, setting half-drained Sprites and Dr. Peppers at the edges of their desks, wiping potato chip salt off their fingers before opening the appointed text for the day. Today the class is finally finishing reading Romeo and Juliet, and most of the kids are delighted—far too delighted, as far as Connie is concerned—to be done with it. In years past her students had been entranced by the play, absorbed by the romance between the teens. “They were oooh so sappy,” she recalls. “‘Oooh, he loves her so much, he would die for her!’”—so much so that she had to include a warning about teen suicide. Connie has the proof of their infatuation in the romantic paintings and line drawings made by former students that now hang above the board in her classroom. One shows Romeo serenading Juliet from the balcony, another shows him draped forlornly over her tomb-bed, and a third shows Juliet winged like an angel rising to heaven.
This year she saved the play for the springtime, “when the sap rises and the high schoolers make goo-goo eyes at each other,” she says. But her students are unmoved. Not just unmoved: disgusted, mostly by Romeo’s “whiney lameness,” as they constantly tell her. Act 5, Scene 3: Romeo has already discovered Juliet’s body and is now returning to her tomb. He is distraught, mad with grief. He has just killed Paris, and it’s becoming clear that, so deep is his grief, he is determined to end his own life and make this a twin grave. Connie plays a recording she found on the web. “I will stay with thee and never from this palace of dim night depart again.” Romeo crawls into the tomb. He kisses Juliet, takes the poison, kisses her again. “Here’s to my love! O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.” On the tape, there is an audible sound of gulping as he swallows.
Someone throws her book across the room. This is Tanner Harris, a strawberry blonde who has failed to disguise her disgust over the last few weeks. “This is just the stupidest stuff,” she says. “I just think it’s pointless. And ridiculous.”
Connie has been teaching long enough to manage all opinions, even those verging on disrespect, so she teases out the conversation. “Well, isn’t it possible that when you’re in love, you don’t necessarily act rationally?” she asks.
“I think that’s just him,” says Tanner. “In my opinion, he’s just a little sissy boy and he’s not normal. Any other guy would just go get him another girl. He wouldn’t just kill himself over some girl. What’s the big deal? Find another one.”
“Well, does anyone think it’s romantic?” Connie asks, and elicits a resounding chorus of “Nooooo.”
“He’s just lame,” someone offers. “Yeah, and crazy.”
After a while Connie opens the discussion further, referring them back to journal entries the kids are writing about the play in relation to their own lives. “Okay, show of hands, how many of you plan to get married?” About fifteen out of the twenty-five raise their hands, and many more boys than girls. “How many of you think you’ll get married before you’re twenty-five?” About six of them raise their hands. “After thirty?” Four raise their hands, all girls. One of them is Gabby Humber, a tall blonde with dark roots in jeans and a heart choker, who looks like she would be the first to be snatched up.
“Well, I get tired of people very, very easily,” she says, by way of explanation. “Marriage is not for me.”
“But how will you support yourself?” someone asks.
“I will go to college and I will support myself,” she hisses. “I don’t need a man to support me.”
Connie has her own theories about why her students have suddenly soured on romance. In the years since Russell left, town life has lost its comforting routine of meet, marry, go to school, work at Russell, and somewhere in there have a few babies. For those left behind, life has turned a little more unpredictable and brittle, and these young people along with it. In five years, the percentage of students who get free and reduced lunch has shot up from 23 percent to 58 percent, the principal told me. More parents are stressed, or divorced, all of which has led them to believe that “marriage is disposable,” she says.
I asked Lou Ann Wagoner, the school superintendent, what had changed the most in the last few years, and she mentioned two things. For the first time, the white girls have taken to fighting. She says in the last two years, the atmosphere has gotten “almost Jerry Springer” with girls threatening to beat one another up—much more than boys do. She also mentioned the “rash of pregnancies” this year—twelve in the high school and a few more in the middle school, “even though we teach abstinence and everything.” Connie has noticed, too, that it’s not just the poorer African-American girls getting pregnant in high school anymore. Once they were the girls who were “more matriarchal, I guess you’d say, but now everyone is headed that way.”
In the week I visited, the hallway downstairs was festooned for school elections, with sparkly signs reading ROSIE FOR VP, LINDSEY FOR SECRETARY, ANNA LEE FOR PRESIDENT, PAIGE FOR SECRETARY, MARIE GRACE FOR TREASURER, KAYDEE FOR REPRESENTATIVE—and not a boy among them. Wagoner’s main goal is to prepare her graduates for college; these days the college talk starts in third grade, where they bring in successful graduates to tell their stories. But she can’t seem to get through to the boys. “They still think, ‘I don’t need an education. I’ll just work at Russell.’ Like it’s still here! We can’t seem to break that mentality.” The city pays for any child who wants to continue their education for two extra years at the community college. Wagoner was startled to discover that 65 percent of the students who take advantage of the program are women, and that the men tend to drop out after a year. “That number just jumped out at me,” Wagoner told me. “I’m not sure where the males go or what happens to them. I think they’re just not as motivated.”
A FEW YEARS AGO, Shannon was one of the girls who drew those sappy pictures for Connie’s class. She did it in colored pencil, making cheeks for Juliet with a color she remembers was called “rose red” and a gown she now admits was maybe a little too low cut. Juliet is lying on what looks like a soft bed, and she is smiling in her sleep. Romeo, who looks a little like Johnny Depp, stares at her with more adoration than despair. At the time she found a color copier in town and xeroxed the drawing to make a valentine card for her boyfriend, Troy. These days, if she is handing Troy a paper, it’s more likely to be a napkin to wipe his greasy hands after he’s been trying to fix the car again, or to wipe their son Brandon’s nose. The way Shannon sees it, she has “two babies at home, and I can’t decide which of them is more work.”
At eleven A.M. on a Wednesday morning, Shannon sees the cigarette smoke under the bedroom door, which means Troy is awake. Brandon, who is now three, has been up for four hours already and is starting to “tornado the house.” The three of them share a trailer just off County Road, about a mile from where the town’s block of federally subsidized units are hidden. At night, when Brandon’s asleep, the trailer feels just big enough, but when he’s crammed into one room and it’s too hot to go outside and she has to keep him quiet, the place is torture. “Tee-tee, Tee-tee!” he says, because he recognizes the smoke, too. Occasionally he calls Troy “Daddy,” but Shannon has tried to put an end to that, because she says he can’t be a daddy until he acts like one from “Monday to Sunday, and not just when he feels like it.”
Troy is “better than SpongeBob” at making Brandon laugh, and he’s good at calming Shannon down when it looks like she’s about to give someone a left hook at work. But he’s not so good at bringing home a paycheck. In the last month he’s worked exactly four days, helping a friend build a patio for a family in Auburn. Otherwise, he’s just spending their money on cigarettes and gas. A year ago he landed a job doing maintenance at Walmart, but he quit because, he says, his boss was a bitch who made him “spit and polish the doorknobs like she was some sergeant.” Troy cracks the door open so Brandon can come in and jump on him.
Troy is an emotional guy and always spilling his feelings—“like I’m half gay or something,” he jokes. He has both “Shannon” and “Brandon” tattooed on his right arm—his version of “till death do us part.” He always tells people he’s “married,” but by this he means that he is, for the moment, tied down to one lady, since he always follows that up with “married—in here” and points to his heart. The two of them have talked a lot about what a great party their wedding would be, and Shannon even went once to pick out a dress—a low-cut, lacy thing not unlike the one she drew for Juliet. But somehow a wedding never happens.
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 t
han 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.