WHEN MEN WON'T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 19, 2011
© August 3, 2015
A generation ago, when
the Feminist Movement was in full swing, women came to view life through the
feminist prism. They campaigned for an Office of Gender Equity,
insisting there was a gender bias favoring men, especially with regard to
education. What now seems like ancient history, in 1970, it was then
observed:
· While boys get higher scores in mathematics,
girls get higher scores in reading and writing;
· Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely
to repeat a grade, while boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the
special education population;
· Two thirds of female high school graduates go on
to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates.
· Women were only 41 percent of all college
graduates.
Regarding graduate
education, in 1970:
· Women receive 40 percent of all master’s
degrees; today, two thirds of all master’s degree candidates and more than half
of all master’s degree holders are women;
· Women earned only 6 percent of all first
professional degrees; by 1991 that figure had increased to 39 percent, and now
hovers around 50 percent; then only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to
women; by 1991 that figure this was up to 39 percent, while today it is
pressing 50 percent.
· The medical degree earned by women between 1970
and 1991 jumped from 8 percent to 36 percent. By 1993, 42 percent of
first-year medical students were women; today more than half of all medical
students are women.
· In 1970, 5 percent of women earned law degrees;
by 1991, that figure was up to 40 percent, and today it is around 50 percent;
· In 1970, women earned 1 percent of dental
degrees compared with 32 percent in 1991, and today more than half first year
dental students are women, and more than 40 percent have earned dental degrees;
· Women today earn the majority of doctoral
degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.
The gender imbalance is
even more pronounced for African American and Hispanic women. In 1990,
fully 62 percent of all bachelor’s degrees to African Americans went to women,
while 55 percent of Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees were
women. In 1990, the white student imbalance was 53 percent to 47 percent
in favor of women. It is even more pronounced today.
BACKGROUND
On April 4, 2011, I
wrote an article in longhand on my observations on men who refused to work and
the women who support them. I wrote it while waiting for my daughter at
the eye clinic where she was operated on for a detached retina.
On May 11, 2011, David
Brooks, New York Times columnist, wrote a piece on the same
subject, not speaking from empirical data but economic statistics. Brooks
insisted in his piece that energy defines us, and that we are becoming less
energetic insofar as American males are concerned.
· In 1954, 96 percent of American men between the
ages of 25 and 54 were actively engaged in some kind of regular work.
Today, that number has slipped to 80 percent, whereas women, once only allowed
to enter the workforce in small numbers in menial tasks have steadily increased
in the last half-century.
· According to the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States now lags behind all
other G-7 nations in prime age men in the workforce. Brooks says,
“More American men lack
the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.”
Most startlingly,
however, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35 percent of
American males are without high school diplomas whereas only 10 percent of men
with college degrees are out of work.
Brooks becomes something
of an apologist for structural changes in the economy, which although relevant,
fails to get inside the fact that there are more idle men walking the streets
of the United States than at any time since the Great Depression.
Brooks sees the problem
in terms of economics when it seems clear to me it has been a natural
progression of the Feminist Movement as many American males feel emasculated by
the soaring prominence of women who have “forgotten their place.”
James Burke and Robert
Ornstein present an intriguing conceptual framework for this phenomenon in “The
Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture” (1995).
They argued that with each cultural change something is gained at the expense
of something lost never to be experienced again.
Half the world’s population is women. Yet, prior to WWII, they had been
given secondary and subjugated roles. It was evident ten-years after WWII
that American society wanted to put the genie back in the bottle, meaning
working women, as displayed sixty years ago in Good Housekeeping
Monthly (May 13, 1955):
“THE GOOD WIFE GUIDE!”
Has dinner ready, plans
ahead, even the night before to have a delicious meal on time for her husband’s
return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking of
him and are concerned about his needs.
Prepare yourself.
Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he comes home. Touch
up your make up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking.
Be a little gay and a
little more interesting for him.
Clear away the
clutter. Make one last trip around the house before he arrives.
Gather up schoolbooks,
toys and papers and run a dust cloth over the furniture.
Over the cooler months
of the year light a fire for him to unwind by.
Prepare the children.
See that they are clean, are not noisy, and eliminate all noise from vacuum
cleaners to dryers.
Be happy to see him.
Greet him with a warm
smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
Listen to him. You
may have dozens of important things to tell him, but this is not the
moment. Remember, his topics of interest are more important than yours.
Make the evening
his. Never complain if he comes home late, or goes out to dinner, or
other places of entertainment without you. Try to understand his stress.
Your goal is to make
your home a place of peace, order and tranquility.
Don’t greet him with
complaints and problems.
Don’t complain if he’s
late or stays out all night.
Make him
comfortable. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
Arrange his pillows and
offer to take his shoes off.
Don’t ask him about his
actions or question his judgments or integrity.
A good wife always knows
her place.
If this seems incredible
today, this was the actual wifely social menu for the happy home after WWII.
Good Housekeeping
Monthly presented this itemized
list with attractive smiling housewives decked out in stunning colors doing the
cooking, baking, housecleaning, washing and drying, and ironing as if this was
the ultimate joy to feminine fulfillment. Women, however, didn’t buy into
it from the get go.
One of my aunts was a
certified welder in a defense plant during the war, another aunt worked as a
tool and die lath operator, and still another aunt was a machinist. They
didn’t leave the workforce after WWII, but worked in their important jobs until
retirement.
Seventy years later
after the end of WWII in 1945, this fantasy retinue of selfless devotion is
still the obsession of some men, as 20 percent of them, ages 25 to 54, aren’t
working, or if working, not working full time, or in work they have been
trained. I know:
· An attorney with several degrees including a
doctor in jurisprudence who refuses to practice law full time, or when he does,
to give free services to friends. His family suffers for this indulgence,
forcing his wife to work as a freelance model driving fifty, sixty or more
miles for auditions while still being mother, housekeeper, cook, baker, and
taxi service for her children's after school activities. She is even
expected to pick up her husband’s dry cleaning.
· A father of two children sits at home strumming
his guitar when he is able bodied except for suffering the carpal tunnel syndrome,
a disorder acquired from overworking his hands performing the repetitive task
of strumming the guitar all day long. His wife cheerfully by default has
become the family breadwinner.
· A number of college graduates who have given up
the effort to find work while living with their parents at home, the wife or
girlfriend out busing tables in some restaurant or club.
Then there are women who
would like to be home spending time with their children when their husbands are
making a comfortable living for the family. But that is not good enough.
These husbands feel their wives should be bringing in money, too,
forgetting that being a wife and mother and housekeeper and family taxi service
is a full time non-paying job.
·
Another couple has four
preteen children in which the husband is a high school graduate and the wife a
college graduate. She is a dedicated mother feeling she cannot
afford to take on a full time teaching position at this time in her children's
lives. So, besides being a full-time mother, she substitute teaches and
cleans houses to make ends meet, while her husband refuses to leave a job that
is, at best, only a part-time position and never brings in much income.
Women described here are
treated in the manner of this 1955 Good Housekeeping Guide although
none of them were yet born. These husbands subscribe to the 1955 dictum,
“a good wife knows her place.”
What is not stated here,
but every reader familiar with men of this ilk knows, is that these men, simply
stated, are financial liabilities to their families. They bury their
sorrows in the neighborhood bar and smoke two or three packs of cigarettes a
day. Then they wonder why the family can never meet its financial
obligations at the end of the week.
THE
WALTER MITTY SYNDROME
Humorous James Thurber
wrote a short story in 1939, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which
touched the collective American psyche denoting the ineffectual male who spends
his time in heroic daydreams paying little attention to the real world.
Many of the men described above fit into the Walter Mitty Syndrome as
they live in the world of “what if”:
· Had I gotten the breaks I would have made
something of myself.
· Had I been born into a better situated family I
would be better off now.
· Had I gotten the breaks writing a song I might
have had a career.
· Had I married the right woman I would not have been
dragged down to this.
· Had I not had children I would not have had to
struggle.
· Had I gone into the military or the government
I’d be retired by now with a great pension.
Men who don’t work are
great daydreamers. This is consistent with Thurber’s short story. Walter
Mitty would spend his day in a deep state of daydreaming imagining
himself a fighter pilot during WWII, a world-class doctor, always someone far
removed from what he was.
It was why in that eye
clinic waiting for my daughter that I wrote this missive, which follows.
WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND
THE WOMEN WHO SUPPORT THEM
People in the 1970’s
watched their families disintegrate as women increasingly carried the economic
and emotional load.
Since then, women as
wives and mothers not only do most of the work, but they are a taxi service for
the demands of the family. They carry their children to and fro, go to
the grocery store, and dry cleaners for their husbands, and suffer the aggravations
as well as the joys of their children.
They are the silent
partners in the marital relationship, never in the know, until their husbands
need a signature on a second or third mortgage. Husbands make deals and
then tell their wives after the fact. It would never occur to these men
that they needed wifely counseling. They believe they are always in the
know, see no reason to consult their wives and share the risks they have taken,
and therefore often drive the family to ruin.
Husbands scheme and
daydream and find no need to consult their wives as they believe they possess
superior minds and information. They may have the information and good
enough minds, but it is doubtful superior intelligence.
In the 1950s, 80 percent of the top 10 percent high school graduates were
women. This was reversed during the same period for college. Now,
it is being reversed again as 80 percent of the top 10 percent college
graduates in this new century are women.
The nostalgia for the
way it was hangs on. Men have vision, women have insight. Yet,
women are often reduced to and treated as maids, housekeepers, nannies, chefs,
waiters, dishwashers, launderers and supervisors of the children, keeping order
and avoiding chaos with little allocated down time.
Again, in the 1950s, the
situation was essentially independent of socioeconomic status, education, or
social standing. Families with the advantage of affluence, education,
cultural enhancement, travel and social engagement were as likely as not to
display male dominating attributes.
The only time attention
was brought to this matter was when women were coming apart, or in failing
health, and therefore were forced to slow down or stop their demanding schedule
altogether. Women persevered, for the most part, in the most trying
circumstances.
How say you of this matter in the 21st century?
PRIDE ON THE LINE
Cultural bias would
imply that I am addressing the dregs of society. Not true. Men who
won’t work can be physicians in their forties who won’t practice medicine,
attorneys who won’t practice law, and carpenters who won’t apply their craft,
and yes, poorly educated men who have lost their safe jobs in automobile
manufacturer, chemical processing, oil refineries, or other previously safe
jobs for the unskilled and under educated. These workers refuse to suffer
the embarrassment of going back to night school or junior college to learn
twenty-first century skills.
These men could be
practicing teachers who fail to engage students who challenge their methods,
authority or the relevance of their knowledge; engineers unwilling to adjust to
the digital demands of the new engineering; and managers who refuse to acknowledge
and adapt to the power shift from position power to knowledge power now
primarily possessed by professional workers.
These men are caught in
a time warp in which their authority was once infallible whether they were
doctors, teachers, or managers. Seventy years ago, few had the gumption
to challenge their authority or views. Now, these men bask in nostalgic
pride with excuses for why they have given up and given out.
Men across society at
every socioeconomic level have been dropping off and dropping out of the
workforce because it has changed and they cannot cope with or adjust to the
change. What do they do?
Many become couch
potatoes. These men love to follow violent sports vicariously such as
professional wrestling, football and ice hockey. It gives them a buzz to
exercise their Walter Mitty fixation. They identify with
these combative warriors who sacrifice mind, body and sense for their
entertainment.
These same men spend a small fortune for season tickets and sports
paraphernalia often not having a budget to make ends meet. Still others spend
the little money they have gambling on professional sport teams they watch on
television.
The problem is that men
in general like to soar like birds and identify with those who successfully
break free of the herd by demonstrable athletic prowess while having trouble
seeing over their belt buckles for the protrusion of their stomachs.
Women like to feel the
soft earth under their feet and deal pragmatically with the possible and
probable without complaint.
Men applaud physical courage, and have since the times of ancient
Greece.
Women respect moral courage and confront life stoically with humility, not
pride.
That is why the educated housewife can find her way to cleaning houses while
her under educated husband mopes about complaining about everything while doing
nothing.
To be fair, some with
initiative read self-help books, attend self-help workshops or self-help
seminars and think they are engaged. They are not. They are fooling
themselves.
Self-help publishing is a post-WWII invention and $billion industry. It
has become something of a panacea as self-help books have little to do with
changing circumstances, and a lot to do with making authors rich as it plays a
hypnotic rhapsody on the reader’s delicate psyche.
Such men are suspended
in permanent adolescence daydreaming their way through life writing music,
strumming guitars, or doing anything that doesn't give off the scent of
work.
They are Walter Mittys to the tee, fantasizing for the quick
score, the perfect franchise, standing on acres of diamonds without a care in
the world, while their inherent disability receives scant attention. They
subconsciously spend their lives looking for answers in all the wrong places.
Others eat and drink
themselves to a state of permanent inertia. They deplete their limited
energy to the point that they couldn’t look for work if they wanted to.
They are casualties of Western civilization’s deification of men and
denigration of women over the centuries. The irony and paradox is that
this all starts with the nurturing practices of mothers.
Men born after the Good
Housekeeping 1955 Guide for the “good wife” are the spoiled brats of
our culture and their sponsors are their mothers. In a paradoxical and
counter dependent way, mothers continue to enslave their daughters to accountability
and liberate their sons from responsibility.
Yet, these same women
that are nursemaids to their husbands and children are often ridiculed rather
than appreciated. This is especially true when these women use their
limited free time to go back to school to better themselves while their men are
not so inclined. In my career, I’ve counseled hundreds of women who
suffered this paradoxical dilemma.
THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD, OR WHAT HAS BEEN LOST
The generation of the Great
Depression entered maturity in the 1950s and survived because they
were small in number with unlimited opportunity in a post-World War II
climate.
They had been schooled in scarcity, and learned to live with little. When
they came to maturity, they failed to teach these same lessons to their
children. Not only were these parents guilty of this, but teachers, the
religious, managers, and leaders as well.
An insouciant society developed without guidance or direction, and therefore
without wisdom.
The irony is that
children of the 1950s had more freedom, more creative license, but were well
acquainted with the Darwinism of the survival of the fittest.
It was a microclimate conducive to the development of leaders through pain and
struggle, a fluid environment with nothing written in concrete. Adults
and children alike were familiar with experimentation as they had no other
choice.
The generation of the
1950s, essentially the pre-television era, lived within their means, didn’t buy
expensive houses, or drive fancy cars, nor did they dress or attempt to mimic
the rich and famous, but lived within themselves, and they prospered.
The societal train,
however, went off the tracks in the 1960s.
Parents attempted to
save their children from the pain and struggle they had experienced, pampering
them to excess. One of the casualties was that school became a failed
factory and a combat war zone with little opportunity for education.
Young men of the 1960s
burned their draft cards, refused to serve their country, fled to Canada,
created chaos on college campuses, or retreated to Haight Asbury at Golden Gate
State Park in California to drift into a psychedelic high and hedonistic
lifestyle in defiance of the Protestant Work Ethic and the
American establishment.
This hippie generation
felt sexually repressed and looked for liberation in free love, but instead
gave birth to the United States of Anxiety. This spawned
the psychotherapy industry that is still with us. Instead of being a
palliative, psychotherapy became iatrogenic, the cure being worse than the
disease.
THE POWER OF DENIAL
People who came to
maturity in the 1950s, now parents, were not prepared for a world that had
caught up with the United States economically and technologically.
1950 style parents were
drunk with success, and had little time for child rearing. Their children were
allowed to their own devices and became essentially their own parents as their
parents were seldom home both working to keep up with the Jones.
Children forever have
invented their own play, but the world of 1960s was a very different world than
the 1930s, something most parents refused to acknowledge. It was a much
more dangerous place.
At the same time, the
inchoate power shift to women was underway. Men were being pushed aside
in leadership, scholarship and professional acumen, as women climbed the ladder
to be the majority in college, whatever their ethnicity or
profession.
Women have not been deterred by the fact they make only 75 percent as much as
men doing the same work.
Nor are women biased for
being treated as baby factories for they are working their way up the corporate
pyramid to the boardrooms and into the highest offices of government and
corporate society.
RIGHT
BRAIN, LEFT BRAIN
In this digital age, we
are finding the right brain, the so-called “feminine brain” is a powerful and
necessary complement to the left-brain, the so-called “masculine brain.”
The key to the problem
solving is not primarily aggressive action, but a more appropriate response to
chronic problems. Likewise, the key to economic health is no longer the
competitive verve, but the spirit of cooperation.
Although rational
cognitive thinking is still important, intuitive wisdom and the use of the
affect have come into prominence (see David Brook’s “The Social
Animal,” 2011), as the affect and intuitive is an important match to
the cognitive. In that same vein, analysis need not lead to paralysis if
suitable attention is given to synthesis.
No one has been more
energetic in exposing the limits to pure Socratic thinking, or linear logic
than Edward de Bono in such books as “Lateral Thinking” (1977)
and “Parallel Thinking” (1994).
Women are inclined to
problem solve conditionally when dealing with contradictory situations, which
are common to their daily experience.
Aware of their
biological clock, delayed gratification is programmed into the female psyche as
well as the genes. The necessary investment of time, patience and care
are familiar feminine territory. Stated another way, women have their
feet solidly on the ground while men prefer to soar to avoid the detritus of
normal everyday life.
The decline and fall of
men has been accelerated by making excuses in perpetuity why men won’t work,
won’t study, won’t get off their behinds and do something useful.
Unfortunately, exacerbating the problem, women still attempt to carry their men
as if they were dependent children at the age of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty,
or older.
Ergo, women can be
accused of complicating the picture. By carrying their men who refuse to
work, absorbing physical, mental, and emotional abuse, they are acting as if
the punishment is deserved. It doesn't take a crystal ball to imagine if
the situation were reversed that men would walk out. That is still something
that seldom happens with women.
WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH MEN WHO WON’T WORK?
The short answer is for
women to tell their men to get off their behinds and look for work or get
lost!
If this sound like tough
love, so be it. Everyone has interests even those currently stuck.
One of the problems is that few men follow their bliss but instead chase the
buck doing what pays the most invariably landing in something that has little
appeal to them. Women have been locked into a comparable prison for
centuries, but continue to thrive despite repressed bitterness.
Men are not made of such
firm substance as women. That is my conclusion. I know a number of
men in their fifties who have the maturity of a ten-year-old. How should
they deal with this?
Interest may be kindled
in volunteering at school, church or in a community project, or around some
favorite activity such as music, sports, or some other social arena. In
this age, men could find a way of making a living at home surfing the Internet.
It would help, too, if
they would give up cigarettes and booze or tickets to sporting events
especially when they can’t afford these pacifiers.
At the very least, they
could become house husband. They could be cleaning the house, painting,
doing the grocery shopping, going to the cleaners, doing the laundry, taking
the kids to and from school, and to youth events. The shoe is now on the
other foot, and remember, the person who has the coin has the power.
These men often keep
their women out of the loop as to how they spend their money. Now, they
can experience a little of their own medicine.
Here is the rub.
I’ve talked to countless women who never had a clue as to how their husbands
spent the family income, never understood why they had to sign papers without
prior conversations on the investment, or a second or third mortgage on their
house, never were asked if they would like to go to this or that event, but
assumed they would go to satisfy their husband’s commitment without question or
protest.
Now, these men who won’t
work and are not bringing in the bacon still have wives who feel obliged to get
permission from them to do this or that with their hard earned money, something
they never experienced when their men were making the majority of the coin.
Moreover, women are
reluctant to take legal action against deadbeat husbands and fathers, blaming
themselves for the anxiety in the family. Deadbeat dads are good at being
abusive of their wives the mothers of their children.
Eventually, given the
stress and strain of carrying these men, given the unlikely chance anything
will ever change, these women have to decide whether they would be better off
without these men.
There are many families
who have gone through more than one generation of deadbeat dads, men who would
work only for premium wages or not at all, men who were alcoholics and abused
their wives and children psychologically if not physically, and women who were
willing to put up with this nonsense because they knew no other.
In the last quarter
century, the plush jobs in the automotive and steel industry have
evaporated. Generation after generation of workers with high school
diplomas or less were conditioned to make $50,000 to $75,000 a year in
unskilled jobs, and to retire with pensions of $40,000 with full medical
benefits. The boilerplate for this workforce still exists but the jobs do
not.
Then there are men who
soared during the booming 1990s, and have suffered major setbacks, finding
themselves in deep financial trouble, unable to cope much less work. They
need help but they are unwilling to seek counseling. Many are educated in
law, medicine, engineering and education. They are the walking wounded
that are part of this problem and need help not criticism.
The world of the Big
Easy, be it Detroit or Gary or Seattle, or New Orleans, or somewhere else
is gone. We are a declining nation in a world that has not only caught up
with us but is passing us. We cannot complain our way back to prominence
by denying this reality.
I’ve known engineers
making six-figure incomes who were let go when high tech companies
downsized. Some started new businesses using their skills, many waited
for the upturn to return. They are still waiting.
I know of one engineer
who was given a quarter million dollar separation package from IBM, and went
through it in two years. He has never had a stable income since. I
would like to think this an isolated case, but I don’t think so.
Men who won’t work are
not a mirage. It is indicative of our times and a profile too
familiar. We are aghast that unemployment hovers around 9 percent, when I
think it is closer to 18 percent, when you take in part-time workers, and
workers no longer looking for work.
Economists write books
with economic solutions when I see the problem basically a behavioral and
psychological one.
These are not bad men
who won’t work. These are men who need help. I’m not sure we have
the tools to do that job. The psychological and psychiatric professions
are mainly explanatory factories. They present an interesting vocabulary
to identity maladies and an equally interesting vocabulary of remedies.
Nothing changes. The solution will evade discovery if the problem
is not definitive identified in useful operational terms.
For wont of being
misunderstood, I would suggest the problem is mainly a spiritual issue that has
little to do with mechanistic algorithms and paradigms. It is the soul of
society that is sick.
We have lost our moral
compass and our way. We need help to crawl out of the ditch of despair
and take quiet inventory of where we are, how we got there, and where we want
to go.
