Missing Men Give Lie To Fatuous Careerism

When I was growing up, there were a pair of female radio talk show hosts named Miki and Teddi who were liberals and doctrinaire feminists. One of them stated their opinions about women and the work force: “We think every woman should have a career just as every man should have a career.” They also believed that financially depending on someone else, like a husband, was “absolutely degrading.”

Part of the problem with this formulation is that every man does NOT have a “career.” Many men have JOBS. They work as store clerks, factory laborers, garbage collectors, telemarketers, coal miners, janitors, waiters, and the like. Some of them experience their work as sheer drudgery.

There was a strong tendency in the early days of the 1970s feminist movement to glorify paid work and downgrade housewifery. To be fair, Gloria Steinem called being a housewife “a dignified and important job.” However, the attitude espoused by talk show hosts Miki and Teddi was often prominent.

Arianna Huffington pointed out that the tendency to glamorize careers came from what she called women’s liberationists’ “lop-sided view of the world” because of the work many of them did. They were often academics, journalists, and artists. Their work was creative and intellectually stimulating – which could not be said for much of the work done by both women and men. As Huffington wryly noted, “There’s nothing glamorous about being a file clerk, even at Ms. magazine.”

Women often work at jobs that are tedious and dispiriting; men often work at jobs that are tedious, dispiriting, and physically dangerous.

What’s more, SOME men don’t even have jobs! The labor market can be brutal, firing employees as well as downsizing and laying them off. Some men are unable to get and keep jobs due to personality and physical problems. Some men get burned so badly by the precariousness of the labor market that they become wary of it.

More men are falling into this latter category. Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt wrote an article called “Men Not Working, And Not Wanting Just Any Job” focusing on men who are neither working for pay nor actively seeking employment. According to their piece, “About 13 percent of American men” in the 30-55 year old age group are not working or looking for work, “up from 5 percent in the late 1960s.”

Rarely are they men who simply decided work was hard and chucked it. They are also unlikely to be drawn from the ranks of academics, journalists, and artists. Often they are blue-collar workers who put in many solid years of working only to find the rug pulled out from under them when their companies downsized. Some were white-collar workers who also found themselves downsized out of a paycheck.

They may be stuck with bitter memories of labor market uncertainty. Alan Beggerow was, “Laid off as a steelworker at 48,” then briefly taught math at a community college. When that stint ended, he could not find a job he considered appropriate. He will not accept any job because of bad experiences when he worked in a warehouse. He was frustrated and humiliated by “the frequent furloughs, the uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and 50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return.”

Like most men missing from the labor market, Beggerow has not become a househusband although unlike most, he is married. Roughly 60% of men out of the labor market are not wed, possibly because few women wish to support men. While Miki and Teddi thought it “absolutely degrading” to depend financially on a spouse, the truth is that this is a special privilege and still largely a women’s privilege.

Beggerow sleeps more than he used to, about nine hours or more, and spends much of his time reading biographies, practicing his piano, and writing. He hopes that the latter may pay off someday and an obliging publisher bring him back into the paid labor market. In the meantime, he and his wife scrape by on his wife’s disability (she was injured in a car crash), his pension money, and their savings.

It is not a good life and those who say that Beggerow and others like him ought to just take any job they can get may have a point. However, today’s men missing from the labor market give the lie to the false promises of careerism. Paid work by people of either sex is often anything but fulfilling and may be frustratingly insecure.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 3:28 am and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 7 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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