The New Economy and Gender Roles

~ Laura

02matriarchy1-articleLargeHanna Rosin turns her new book into another magazine cover story. Reuse, Recycle! She looks at the impact of the new economy on gender roles. 

It's a very well written portrait of families in a town in Alabama that was devastated when Russell Athletics moved its factories out of the country. The men who worked at these factories or helped service the company in other ways were laid off. Their wives found work in the education, nursing, or public service and paid the mortgage, while the guys drank coffee at Burger King. The gender reversal has upended the traditional culture of the town. 

This article was badly in need of a conclusion. Wonderful description, but I don't know where Rosin was going with it. I wanted her to weigh in on the subject or offer some statistics to give us some perspective on the scope of the problem, if it really is a problem. 

Is it really a bad thing that men are doing the housework, instead of women? No. Why should I care if men are making less money than their wives? Perhaps men are having a hard time adjusting to the new economy. Are all men having this problem or just the old farts? I don't know, because Rosin didn't give any numbers. Is this problem confined to this one town or is it a nation-wide problem? Is it a problem for men in certain education/income brackets? Is this a new problem? We have family in rust-belt states and the steel mills closed a long time ago. 

I'm sure the good bits are in the book and they were cut out of the article to save space. I look forward to checking it out. 

 

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “The New Economy and Gender Roles”

  1. It’s also lacking in anything other than anecdotes. Has the number of female-headed households increased substantially over the past decade? A quick search suggests that there has been a steady rise in the number of female-headed households but that they still represent a small percentage (8 to 22%) of all households and that the group consists primarily of single moms.
    Nice story, but only as a peek into the lives of a few southern families not as illustrative of the End of Men.

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  2. I hate this kind of book and article, and as I think you are saying under your breath, the marketing devices are really obvious and transparent. I sometimes get taken in, but my real worry is that all authenticity is being lost, with marketing, and stylists, and personal branding. Oh, and we can add the braces, plastic surgery, hair straightening, . . . and the world will be filled with one peron (or maybe three).

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  3. ps: don’t know what you are looking for in sneakers, but, check out z@ppos– free returns, search function to look for Velcro.
    Merrill has a barefoot sneaker w/ Velcro as well as something they call the z strap or z lace.

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  5. My wife makes more than I do. Some years one and a half times, one year three times. That was a good year, we went to Switzerland that summer. We’re not stressed about it, particularly. I mean, I do have work, and I’m not handing out samples at Costco. I cook almost all the meals, we hire a house cleaner. My kids have a different model of what the mommy does and what the daddy does than either of us did, growing up.
    Factoid: in Thailand, civil service is a desired job. They hire through an examination system, as the US used to do before examinations failed to select the desired proportion of minorities. Result: civil service is about three quarters women. When you don’t need brawny guys to pull the hot tires out of the molds and hump them down to the warehouse, you don’t have the same need for men that you useta.

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  7. I had a hard time sympathizing with the men in the article since she started with the anecdote about how one of them told his wife to drop out of college and marry him right away because he wouldn’t wait. The other anecdote that stuck in my mind was when they described the meeting where teenage girls hold hands and talk about how they are princesses and how their husbands will be the head of the household. On the one hand, it made me think it was great for that culture to have those obnoxious men lose economic power while the women gained it. But I think it could have been written in a way that made me sympathetic, and so I’m sorry it didn’t have more hard data and fewer anecdotes.

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  8. I’m so used to thinking about/reading about men who grew up in a patriarchal culture – one, like in my family, that is outside the U.S.- that I sometimes forget that even in this Ergo-wearing Dad world we have men clinging to the government’s designation of “head of household”.
    I wonder about the future of the American male identity as we come to expect diaper-changing, kid-chaperoning, etc… from our new Dads. I think it opens the door to seeing work at home as being equal to other kinds of work.
    Also- speaking of marketing- there should be ways to encourage the household work of men. We could move away from the pink of kitchen products (dishwashing gloves, sponges, etc…) and develop Food Network shows about SAHDs and what they want to cook… My husband could watch hours of shows about grilling- why not put a kid-food friendly spin on them?

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