John Longenecker, a married father of three children, was a custom cabinetmaker in rural Pennsylvania when he suddenly found himself out of a job during the Great Recession.
Growing up in a working-class family that took great pride in their work, he endeavored to perfect his trade and said that he often toiled long hours. He had been a cabinetmaker for 18 years. With Father’s Day approaching, he told his local paper, the Sunday News, that “It’s going to be a bittersweet type of thing. I’m not feeling really proud right now.”
He’s not alone.
In 2000, the annual unemployment rate for high-school educated men was 3.4 percent. According to the latest employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, today it is 11.4 percent. By contrast, the unemployment rate today for college-educated men is 4.3 percent, and 8.8 percent for high-school educated women in the labor force. This means that unemployment is higher among all less-educated workers, but also that a rising share of working-class families are now being headed by female breadwinners.
Further, 75 percent of the job losses have been concentrated among men — the majority of which are among working-class men. All of this means that a sizable segment of working-class men are struggling with the effects of what some economists now call the “mancession.”
How is the family life of these unemployed fathers? Are they spending more time with their children, overseeing more of the household chores, and preparing dinner for the family when Mom comes home? Sociologist Christine Whelan, in an essay “A Feminist-Friendly Recession” published in the 2009 State of Our Unions report, predicts that current unemployment trends will foster more gender egalitarianism and greater marital happiness on the home front, as unemployed or underemployed men take up more child care and housework.
It’s possible. But it would be unwise to discount the deep sense of meaning and purpose that men have traditionally drawn from providing for their family. Indeed, my (Wilcox) own research indicates that husbands are significantly less happy in their marriages and more likely to contemplate divorce when their wives take the lead in breadwinning. Men today do not have difficulty with working wives, so long as their wives work about the same amount of time or less than they do.
But, according to the 2000 Survey of Marriage and Family Life, husbands do not like it when they are displaced as the primary breadwinner in their families. For instance, husbands in families with children at home are 61 percent less likely to report that they are “very happy” in their marriages when their wives work more hours than they do.
High rates of joblessness among working-class and poor men are likely to harm the quality and stability of married life among lower-income couples over the long term, as men’s economic contributions to their families become more marginal in working-class communities. Some men may embrace their new role at home and take up more child care and housework. But job loss and instability can be a big blow to a man’s sense of self-worth, can undercut his wife’s faith in him, and cause considerable financial stress for the couple. Men’s unemployment can lead to a vicious cycle of conflict, recrimination, and withdrawal that ends in divorce.
This latest economic blow comes at a time when the marriages of working-class Americans are already vulnerable. Over the past 30 years, there’s been a growing marriage divide between college-educated and less-educated Americans, a divide marked by dramatically higher rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births among those without college degrees compared to those with college degrees.
Consider the following: Since 1980, the divorce rate spiked by 6 percent among non-college-educated persons, while falling 30 percent among the college-educated. Among recent non-college-educated mothers, about 50 percent have had a child outside of marriage, compared to only 7 percent of recent college-educated mothers. The mancession threatens to strain this already fragile marriage culture and to further undermine the long-term health of marriage in working-class America.
What’s the solution? One of the biggest things we could do is to create a culture that affirms the great worth of fatherhood. Women are now more likely to give their husbands more marital slack if they play an active role in parenting — and men are also happier if they take a hands-on role in the home. As men’s economic contributions to the family become more attenuated in some homes, the culture should encourage them to invest more in their children and give them status for doing so.
The mancession has taken a devastating toll on the psyche of working-class men and threatens to exacerbate the growing marriage divide between the working-class and the middle/upper class. The integrity of families and communities all across America depends on us taking note of the deteriorating economic position of working-class men and taking action to reverse their declining fortunes.
W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. David Lapp is a research associate at the Institute for American Values.
