By Charles Layton
I’ll tell you when I knew the jig was up. It was two years ago, when Hanna Rosin wrote that article in The Atlantic entitled “The End of Men.”
The article said that in 2010 women had become the majority of the American workforce for the first time in history. Most managers were now women. And three women were getting a college degree for every two men who got one, suggesting that, although women overall still earn less than men, that is apt to change. The average wife already contributes 42 percent of her family’s income — a bigger chunk than ever before.
Hanna Rosin’s article heralded an unprecedented role reversal in American life, and now she has expanded that article into a book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women. She attributes the rise of women in large part to the new service economy, which demands not physical strength but subtler traits many women possess in abundance — “social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus.”
The role reversal lags in the political sphere, due mainly to the endurance of incumbency. If you look down the road, though, you can guess who is going to run things once today’s male legislators get old and conk out. There are already 17 women in the U.S. Senate and 73 in the House of Representatives. Women are also a growing presence in state legislatures.
Last February Forbes asked the question: “Where in our society are women taking over?” And the answer they gave was: “Pretty much everywhere.” Girls get more A’s in school. Boys get more D’s and F’s. Half of all medical and law degrees are being earned by women. And here, for me, was the most telling statistic of all from the Forbes article: Three out of four American couples who use sex-selection services at fertility clinics are hoping to have a girl rather than a boy.
I should have seen this coming back in high school. The boys were the golden athletes and the girls were the worshipful cheerleaders, but that was superficial. The girls were the dominant sex; they actually ran the school. Boys bragged and slouched arrogantly about, but they could no more have organized a senior prom than they could fly. So now, while those bouncy cheerleaders construct the 21st century matriarchy, more and more of us macho heroes are unemployed, depressed and dependent on “breadwinner wives” for support and sustenance.
Guys, there’s not much demand for us. Look around right here in town. Look who runs the Ocean Grove Home Owners Association and the Historical Society of Ocean Grove and the Beautification Project and the HPC and Ocean Grove United. It’s women. Just like in my high school.
And Hanna Rosin’s landmark book is not like so many earlier feminist works. It is not a cry of protest but a declaration of victory.
Maybe all this helps explain why men seem more angry about life these days. When was the last time a frustrated, enraged woman entered a theater or a classroom and sprayed the place with bullets? Women don’t do that. Neither do they waste whole afternoons doping their brains with beer and TV football. They’re upstairs studying for law school exams. Preparing to take over.
Here’s Ray Charles with a musical tribute to Hanna Rosin:
Ken, Thank you. I am glad someone could get a word in edge wise.
Well, not to belabor, but I just opened up The Atlantic, October issue, and what did I find but a story on “How the new gender economics has more and more professional-class women looking at their mates and thinking; How long until I vote you off the island?”
It says nine of the 10 U.S. job industries with the most projected growth are women-dominated. It says in nearly 40 percent of American marriages the wives already earn more than their husbands. And other such stats.
But it also notes a 2009 Wharton School study concluding that despite their educational and financial advances, women are less happy than they used to be. Uh-oh. And it also says men who are financially dependent on their wives stray more often into infidelity. See how complicated this is getting? And the hell of it is, there’s no going back.
Charles is correct in pointing out that women are currently in charge of five major OG organizations, but that doesn’t mean that role reversal is necessarily occurring in all cases or that women have irreversibly obtained control of these groups.
The Historical Society was founded by a woman, and that group has had female presidents once or twice prior to the current president Gail Shaffer.
Similarly, Ocean Grove United has had female leadership since its founding.
The HPC has been run by men since its inception until the current leadership, but currently, 3 of the 9 members of HPC are men.
As for the Homeowner’s Association, there are still a few men in leadership positions, although the current president and vice president are women, and that would seem to be a striking change.
We also recently have seen a woman as president of the Chamber of Commerce.
It is interesting to note Ocean Grove’s heritage as a place where women, even in the 19th century, could own businesses and be leaders in the community. Also, the women’s movement and the temperance movement were led by women in Ocean Grove early in the 20th century.
All in all, it is impressive that women are currently the top officials in every one of these groups, and that is a good and unique characteristic of our community — something to be proud of. But, for the most part, it is what it is — good and talented people volunteering to help their town.
Paul: I should point out, in case it wasn’t clear, that I’m not asserting these things on my own, I’m attempting to paraphrase for you some of the writings of Hanna Rosin.
I believe she would answer you by explaining that if the old-style family gender roles were immediately and cleanly reversed, then there’d perhaps be no net loss of income nor need to pay for day care, house cleaning services, baby sitting etc. However, Rosin is saying, based on years of reporting, mind you, that this is rarely an instantaneous switch-around of the kind you describe. Increasingly, both husband and wife have jobs to start with. So when the husband loses his, it’s a genuine family crisis. And the guy often feels like he’s failing in his manly duty as a bread winner. It can be humiliating.
Men can have difficulty immediately just taking up the wife’s role after becoming unemployed. (I’m pretty sure I’d find that adjustment hard.) They continue to hope the plant will hire them back, or that they’ll find some other similar work and things will return to “normal.” It often takes time for the man to accept that he’ll have to learn a new line of work (not always easy) or that he’ll have to accept a job that pays much less than the one he’s lost. Such men spend a lot of time in denial and procrastination, Rosin says.
Her assertions are not empty theory, by the way. They are based on interviews with people in the above situations. I might add that I myself have known people in the above situations, and it’s a mistake to dismiss their problems as trivial or non-existent. And, frankly, going over all this with you now kind of makes me sorry I wrote something that treated the issue flippantly.
Charles: This is what you said: ….”full-time employed women are no longer as available to do work women have traditionally performed for free — cooking, cleaning, child care.”
I think your premise is wrong because women who have chosen to stay at home as part of a family dynamic would disagree that they work for free. The traditional family has a husband who works at a paying job and a wife who busts her chops at home (thus enabling him to go to a job.) They are both working as a team and therefore she needs to get credited for half of his income.
And if the rolls are reversed, the same principle holds true, so there is no need for the stay-at-home Dad to feel depressed, angry or dependent. You may be exaggerating the effect on men in this team-oriented new deal.
Our U.S. society is presently being run mainly by men….and not very successfully.
OK, seriously — According to Rosin, more men are adapting (reluctantly, often, but by necessity) to the role of stay-at-home dad while the women work. She also reports that since nurturing type jobs (care-givers, social workers, nurses) are on the increase while factory work is in decline, men are having to retrain, put aside macho stereotypes, swallow hard and accept big pay cuts in order to find work. She thinks humans are adaptable and that what you believe to be innate hard-wiring can actually change with changing circumstances. And that it will have to.
She notes, too, that full-time employed women are no longer as available to do work women have traditionally performed for free — cooking, cleaning, child care. So those things now either become low-paying jobs for hire or they get done by the staying-at-home-because-they-are-unemployed men.
Despite its provocative title, what Rosin’s book is really about is the interplay of gender roles and American society’s evolving work structure. She thinks these changes are happening fast, are revolutionary and are probably harder on men than they are on women — harder, certainly, for men to figure out and accept.
I should add that she feels we’ll eventually get through this transition and come out OK.
Charles: It may be necessary to have your tongue surgically removed from your cheek. At least I hope that you are kidding when you seem to say that women are superior to men. What you are actually describing is that women are finally having the opportunity to succeed in our society.
But that doesn’t mean that “the jig is up” or that women will soon “run things” in government. Nor does it mean that “guys, there’s not much demand for us.”
Are men really more “depressed,” “more angry” and “more dependent on women” than ever before? I doubt it. Roles may change somewhat, but evolutionary hard-wiring cannot be denied. A successful society requires that we acknowledge the differences, such as the “maternal instinct” that can clash with career goals for women. In medicine, we see large numbers of female doctors looking for special arrangements in order to be moms and docs at the same time.
Let’s face it, there has never been a successful society that was mainly run by women, nor have there been any in which men are the predominant caregivers for children. So perhaps you are having a premature elaboration.
Consider the old poem which says: “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie… When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing; wasn’t that a tasty dish to set before the king.”