by Hanna Rosin
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 Time 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.
AUBURN’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.
Shannon, for one, has tried at least to tackle the first step: banish denial that the world is just going to revert to the way it was. One day Shannon does not wait for Troy’s smoke signal but marches into the bedroom at ten A.M. and pulls him out of bed. “Come on,” she yells, “move it,” and lights the first cigarette of the day for him, to speed up the process. Downstairs, she puts Brandon in the backseat of the car, gets in the passenger seat, and without telling Troy exactly where they are going, directs him to the old plant. They have driven by the place hundreds of times but never stopped to really look and listen. At first Troy stops at every stop sign along the circular roads connecting the various buildings, but then he realizes no one is here, and so he zooms through the stop signs like he’s playing Need for Speed, his favorite arcade game.
From inside, the place looks like an abandoned village, with solid brick buildings connected by a small winding road. Plants these days are generic white boxes that could just as easily hold a Walmart as a Kia plant, but this factory has the feeling of a pioneer village from an earlier century. Right near the entrance to the complex is the Russell Afternoon Center for Creative Learning, which features a big painting of a circle of children holding hands, the universal symbol of peace and hope for the future. Brandon wants to stop at the playground, but the slides are covered in rust and the swings have long been pulled off.
Shannon makes Troy pull onto a patch of gravel overlooking a wide field, and they get out of the car. There are giant furnaces and generators around, but they are all idle. The loudest noise is the birds, some of whom have made nests among the signs and discarded shovels. Troy lights a cigarette and doesn’t say a word for a while. In the field is a truck trailer sunk into the earth. On its side is an enormous painting of a football player in full uniform running with the ball tucked in his hands, next to the words RUSSELL. THE EXPERIENCE SHOWS. The player is seconds from a touchdown, with no one on his tail. But over the years the tires have rooted themselves in the mud, and the picture has faded into a dull lavender, like an old snapshot from a small town boy’s high school glory years. Troy notices the picture at the same time Brandon does. It’s depressing, really, this big trailer stuck in the dirt, this mockery of imminent victory. But Troy doesn’t register that emotion. In a quick movement he adopts the stance of the player, yells “Hike!” in a loud voice that makes Shannon jump, throws his pack of cigarettes at her, and then tackles her onto the grass, where both of them fall, for the moment, laughing.
PHARM GIRLS
HOW WOMEN REMADE THE ECONOMY
Hannah Cooper’s house contains only one visible clue that Billy, her boyfriend of eleven years, lives here, too: a quartet of walleyes, once wild spawn of a Wisconsin lake and now mounted over the dining room table with their mouths shellacked into a permanent gape. (“I said okay, we can put them up, but only on one wall.”) Otherwise, Billy’s things are hidden away in rooms where Hannah is pretty sure visitors won’t see them. His beer posters and fishing equipment are laid out on the pool table in an unheated room off the garage. His hunting jackets and guns are in the basement, sharing space with several pairs of snowboarding boots (“Boy toys,” she says coolly). At the foot of the basement stairs sit two dozen or so buckets of paint in standard colors—white, basic white, eggshell—which he needs for his day job as a housepainter, and special rollers idle over the basement sink.
The rest of the house is a testimony to Hannah’s persistent attempts to swim upstream, away from her roots. A plush red sectional couch dominates the living room—she saved up the $3,000 it cost after seeing it in an interior design magazine because it looked to her “like New York.” Most days after school she sits on it and studies for her pharmacy school exams, playing the Classical Masterpieces music channel on the TV. “I read somewhere that classical music activates parts of your brain you don’t really use.” When Billy comes home she retreats to her study, which she asked him to paint a particular shade of sage. There, Hannah has built a fortress of self-improvement: neat stacks of her school textbooks and scientific papers and books from the library she wants to read (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) and books she thinks she ought to have read (Jane Austen, George Orwell) and books for future projects (about gardening and organic food). Above her desk in a gilded frame hangs her acceptance letter to pharmacy school, a reminder of the singular achievement that changed her life. Near it hangs her life motto, printed in a romantic font on a small piece of paper: “I Believe that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are but we are responsible for whom we become.”
I met Hannah in the winter of 2011 when I visited the University of Wisconsin pharmacy school in Madison, one of the nation’s top ten pharmacy schools, with a freshman class that is 62 percent women. Pharmacy is one of the many middle-class professions that have lately come to be dominated by women, and I wanted to see what this new generation of hungry female professionals was like. Hannah stood out at the pharmacotherapy lab I sat in on, where all the instructors and a majority of the students were women. The instructor was verbally testing the students on various chemotherapy drugs, and Hannah, with less arrogance than a sense of duty, immediately pointed out a mistake on one of the already approved answers—a mistake, the instructor pointed out, which would have led to a fatal dosage.
Like many of the women I met in the course of researching this book, Hannah did not see herself as a feminist trailblazer or a woman at the forefront of anything. She just saw herself as someone who noticed a bridge one day and crossed over it. More than anything, women like Hannah remind me of immigrants like my parents: They seem propelled by a demonic, mysterious force to keep moving forward even though they are nervous about what is ahead, and by moving forward together they permanently transformed the country. Hannah seemed determined and unstoppable and tried not to think too much about what would happen as all the women she knew kept swimming upstream and the men got caught in the eddies; when the men became the equivalent of the family left behind in the Old Country, beloved maybe, but inert and frustratingly stuck in the past.
Hannah now wears her hair in a wavy red bob. Her old eyebrow piercing is barely visible and her lower back tattoo is well hidden under the “business attire” the school requires the students to wear under their lab coats. But even without the lab coat, Hannah is barely recognizable to her old friends. One evening when I came back to visit, we ate dinner at the Caddy Shack, a bar Hannah’s mother owns in a nearby town. The bartender is an old schoolmate of Billy’s, and it took him a minute to figure out she was Billy’s girlfriend and to remember that she was in pharmacy school. “I know a girl who went there,” he offered. “And now she’s making in the six figures.” Hannah just smiled, clearly not wanting to discuss money in a crowded bar. “Me, I prefer the homegrown kind of medication,” he added. “Ginger brandy.”
Hannah and Billy met in high school and partied their way through their twenties, smoking pot, going to raves, working minimum-wage jobs. Since then,
both have mellowed, but in different directions. Billy learned how to paint houses from an ex-girlfriend’s father over a decade ago, and he is still doing that, although much less frequently now that jobs are drying up. After work, or if there is no work, he fishes with his buddies. “Every single day,” says Hannah. “He just doesn’t want anything more.” If his life is a straight line with dips representing spells of unemployment over the last couple of years, Hannah’s is a steady climb up. Hannah is calm and reserved and something of a homebody, but she has an internal drive that’s exhausting.
It started to take off for her one day when she was working as a technician at a pharmacy company, hourly work that requires minimal training and is basically a fancy title for “packer.” Hannah was shelving the drugs when an older woman who was a pharmacist came in to ask her a question.
“Where’s the Trileptal?” the woman asked.
“Oh, it’s under the oxcarbazepines,” Hannah answered, using the generic term for the type of drug. “And she just turned around and looked at me, astonished.”