How men’s unemployment is palpably present in the family, and why it doesn’t “undo” gender
One crisp fall evening, I met up with Laura Jansson, a 42-year old, at the train station near her home. It was about five-thirty in the evening and Laura had taken the train in from the city where she worked as a radio producer. Laura left New York City, where she spent most of her 20s and 30s, once she married her husband, Robert a 49-year old public relations manager. But Laura still retains her New York style. She was dressed
fashionably in a figure-hugging black turtleneck tucked into a knee-length black leather skirt. This was set off with slim heeled black leather boots. Her shoulder-length blond hair is artfully colored with low-lights and high-lights. Several silver necklaces of varying lengths sparkle at her neck. She has a take charge manner. The Janssons, both in their 40s, have been married for five years. Until seven months ago, Robert worked as a public relations manager at a company he had been with for a year, and commanded a six figure salary in his position.
These past seven months have been trying for the Janssons. Robert Jansson’s
unemployment, like that most of the unemployed men I interviewed, has been a central
experience for him and his marriage. This means thatRobert, and to an even greater extent his wife Laura, perceive it as a problem that needs to be rectified. Their daily interactions are focused on helping Robert regain appropriate paid employment. Their household is organized so as to enable Robert to rectify this problem. Robert’s
does and talks about. During this time, as other studies have shown (Raley et al. 2012; Chesley, 2011; Deutsch and Saxon, 1998), the Jansson’s could have renegotiated their marriage to minimize the importance of Robert’s paid employment. as I show below, the Janssons and other families of unemployed men instead amped up on the monetary and non-monetary importance of men’s paid employment. Instead of undoing gender (Deutsch, 2007; Risman, 2009) this redid gender.
The Janssons
Today, Laura and I are waiting at the train station for the Jansson’s two young children and the babysitter to pick us up. The Jansson’s house is a short ten-minute walk from the train station, but it’s a treat for Laura’s four-year old daughter, Tessa, and Taylor, two- year old son to pick up their mother. The babysitter looks after the two children from nine in the morning until five in the evening each weekday. Once the babysitter and the
children arrive, Laura launches into asking the children about their day, peppering her questions to the kids, with questions for the babysitter. When we reach their home, hearing the car pull up in their sloping driveway, Robert comes out of their home and onto the driveway to greet Laura and the two kids. Unlike Laura’s alert eyes, Robert has soft, round blue eyes that take a while to take in their surroundings – he shares this softness with his son Taylor. Robert is dressed in jeans and a polo-neck, his silver hair cropped close to his head, and receding from his forehead. While Laura gives a feeling of efficiency and briskness, Robert gives a feeling of slowness and softness – like someone who is in no particular hurry. He kisses Laura hello. Noticing the questions she asks the kids, particularly Tessa, about their day, he too mildly turns to look at the children,
asking “Oh yeah what’d you guys do?” Laura knows not to ask Robert what the kids had done during the day. He wouldn’t know.
At nine in the morning on each weekday, Robert goes down to his basement, remaining there until four in the evening, only coming up for lunch, tea, and snacks. He spends his time job-searching: going through online listings on sites such as Indeed.com, on Linkedin, as well as checking out specific companies that he thinks he would like to work in. He follows up on job leads, talks to recruiters, calls up acquaintances to set up networking coffee meetings. At times he researches skills development courses, signing up for them if one of them piques his interest. During the weekday, he comes upstairs only intermittently: to eat a quick lunch, or make himself a cup of tea. Laura and Robert have told the kids that “daddy goes to work downstairs.” They have also additionally told them that Robert must not be disturbed during his work. At four in the evening, Robert drives to a nearby college campus to take an hour long walk on a trail-path marked out with shaved wood chips, returning just in time to welcome back the kids who are dropped off by the babysitter at about five in the evening.
Robert had not particularly enjoyed his job, largely because he didn’t think he fit in with the culture and the other employees. For Robert, who once had aspirations to be an academic, his educational degrees and his intellectual pursuits are important to him. Yet, at this company, as he describes, “even in the corporate office it’s maybe 50- 50…college educated.” He goes on to elaborate on why this made working at his previous position less enjoyable:
My wife calls me a snob, but it’s just a different experience when you’re interacting with people [whose] interests are completely different. So it
was just a bad cultural fit. I had nothing to talk to people about… So when you go home at night…if I’m watching television, I might be watching the Big Bang Theory, something like that. They’re not watching the Big Bang Theory. They’re watching Outdoor Network and they’re watching, you know, Hot Rod, whatever… So it just felt like a fish out of water. So it wasn’t a good cultural fit. So I didn’t have a lot of friends at work.
Despite Robert’s lackluster experience at this previous job as well as his equanimity in accepting his layoff, the Janssons have prioritized Robert’s job-search. Ever since Robert’s unemployment seven months ago, the Janssons have not substantially deviated from how they organize their days. Neither have they extensively redistributed the household chores amongst Laura and Robert during this time. Laura, a radio producer, still has her job, where she earns a comparable amount to the salary Robert had
commanded. Both Laura and Robert explain that their two-year old is incredibly attached to Robert since Robert has been unemployed for a significant part of Taylor’s young life which has enabled the father and son to bond.
Despite Robert’s continuing unemployment, the Janssons continue to live a comfortably upper-middle class life. The street leading to the Jansson’s three-bedroom home leads straight from the train station which links this affluent neighborhood to the city. It’s easy to discern that this is a wealthy neighborhood when you spot the
individuals who get off from the train in the evenings: tired men in suits holding
briefcases and iPads, often with their suit jacket folded and slung on their arms. Women wear silk shells over pencil skirts or under pant suits. Their heels are glossy, their hair immaculately arranged, and there’s often a discreet spark of a flashing diamond as they
move their hands. At the train stop, there is a group of high end shops catering to this neighborhoods clientele: a Lilly Pulitzer store, a specialty stationery store, a high-end makeup and beauty products store are just a few of the shops here. The Jansson’s home is in the middle of a small, quiet and tidy street. The street is bordered with picturesque yet sturdy stone houses. There are no picket fences here, and instead the front garden of each house ends at the pavement that creates a buffer between the private gardens and the sidewalk. On weekday afternoons, you can spot a trundling yellow high school bus as it drops off teens who live in this neighborhoods.
Masculinity and unemployment
This chapter aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about unemployment and masculinity (Pugh, 2016; Lane, 2011; Chesley, 2011; Gough and Killewald, 2011; Bitman et al., 2003). In the first piece of a larger argument, I show that because unemployment continues to be framed as a problem for men, in their persistent and culturally mandated roles as economic providers, for unemployed men, staying at home is an uneasy experience. Men feel, and are frequently made to feel by their wives, as
trespassers in the domestic space of the home. Wives worry that men might get much too comfortable staying at home, while men try to prove to their wives, as well as to others, that they are trying had to find work and leave this domestic space.
The second piece of this chapter explains how, because finding a job is seen as men’s priority when unemployed, the division of labor does not undergo a drastic or enduring shift. While unemployed men do contribute more to household chores than they did prior to unemployment, they do not take ownership of domestic chores. At times, this can become an area of negotiation and even resentment amongst spouses. In this chapter,
I use my observations of the Jansson and Smith families, as well as narratives of unemployed men and their wives, to explain what being unemployed, staying at home while job-searching, negotiating household responsibilities and balancing ideals of masculinity during this chaotic and painful time are like for unemployed men and their wives.
Trespassers in their own homes
Unemployed men feel uneasy at home during the work-week, as though they do not belong there and are trespassing into this sphere. Doug Easton is a soft-spoken man in his early 50s. He has neatly parted and combed brown hair. Two years ago, Doug lost his job as a financial expert at a large corporation. He had been with the corporation for over 25 years. Still looking for a job two years later, Doug nevertheless continues to dress in carefully ironed business casuals – khakis with tucked-in Oxford shirts in understated colors and patterns. He wore a checkered pattern in light blue for our interview. He explains that for his wife Alice, a big concern when Doug first lost his job was
Having me around the house all day. It’s very difficult for her because for 16 years [she] had the house to herself. With nobody asking her where she was going or when she’d be home or anything like that, so. Which was a big adjustment for her.
Alice, Doug’s wife of 18 years, is a chirpy brunette in her late 40s who works at a women’s not-for-profit organization. She started off as a volunteer five years ago, and has since then steadily transitioned into a paying position, taking on more and more responsibility in the recent years. Alice usually works from home, going into the office a
couple of times a week. On average Alice works about 30 hours a week, although the number can go up to 50 or 60 hours a week during busy periods. Her $30,000 a year income from this position, and no benefits, means that she commands only a fifth of the salary Doug had commanded when he was employed. In the Easton’s home Doug is seen as the primary breadwinner. Like Doug, Alice too explains how having Doug at home, which she sees as her space during the weekdays, was disconcerting. She laughs, “I think having anybody around you 24/7 is too much!” Alice elaborates on this:
He would ask me: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘What are you doing?’ That level of accountability or just being tracked was not something I was used to. I tried to explain it to him that I've heard other people who have gone through unemployment situations say that’s one of the hardest things - is having your spouse home all day, every day.
It was disconcerting for Alice to have Doug home all the time. To counter what she called this “too much togetherness” Alice ended up moving her home office. Earlier her home office had been adjacent to the kitchen and living room, where Doug often came in to get a drink, or work on his laptop on the kitchen table. Soon after Doug lost his job, Alice moved her office to the second floor - to literally create more space between them. Doug acknowledges the anomaly of his presence at home. He accepts that it is, naturally, difficult for his wife: “Well, we’ve learned to kind of, you know, stay out of each other’s way. Or I try and stay out of her way.” The onus falls on Doug, as an oddity in the home during the work-week, to not disturb Alice’s daily rhythm.
For unemployed men and their wives, who sometimes work from home, but who are all certainly used to having husbands with full and busy careers, the change to a
husband who is now at home for a significant part of the day is a struggle. Alice mentions that she feels she had to explain her daily routine to Doug, which was exasperating enough for her that she sought to create a physical distance by rearranging her home.
Men’s presence at home during the work-week is framed by men and their wives as a temporary problem which needs quick remedying. It is seen unequivocally as an unnatural occurrence. Emily Bader, an office manager, is married to Brian, who worked in the technology field but got laid off four months ago from a job he had held for five years. With her curly shoulder length strawberry blond hair, Emily is a gregarious, at
time flamboyant, straight-talker who minces no words as she describes the problem of
Brian’s unemployment and the consequent increase in the time he spends at home: “I hate that he’s home all the time. No man, I’m sorry to generalize, no man needs to be home all day. It’s not good for them.” Emily frames Brian’s being at home as a problem because, in her view, men belong outside the home. Emily implicitly refers to deep, culturally ingrained conceptions of gender which frame the home as the space for women, and the outside, public world, as the space for men. Emily reiterates that it’s “just too much, too much him being home. He needs to get out of the house.”
Because Brian is not used to being home, he ends up interfering with the daily routine that Emily and their two teenage sons have established, by trying to carve out a space for himself. Emily explains that Brian has taken to micro-managing things about the family’s routine to which he was earlier oblivious and which is irritating to Emily and their sons: “He micro-manages things that are just insane…Like the cereal that my son’s eating. Like I asked [Brian] to get [cereal] puffs…And he micro-managed whether I should really have puffs or not.”
Like Alice Easton earlier, Emily experiences Brian’s presence in the home as both intrusive and unsettling. She is clear on how this should be resolved: “Yeah, like ugh! He needs a job. He needs to get busy. He’s trying to keep busy with silly stuff.” Like Doug, Brian also acknowledges how his being at home has upset the family’s normal routine, and how they are trying to minimize the impact of this change. Emily used to work many hours of the week from the home, but has now started going into the office more. Brian says:
But what she does is: she has an office she can go to, so she'll go to the office and work instead of at home…I prefer that. I mean, I prefer not to be with her around the clock. I mean that's too much. And I really don't have another place to go. I could I guess go other places if I really had to. Brian adds that in his view the fact that Emily works more from the office now is good for her productivity:
But it's funny, she goes to the office and she comes home and says, ‘Oh, I got so much done because I didn't have all the distractions.’ And so I could see where she's actually getting used to it, liking it. It's a plus for her in a way.
The notion that unemployed men cramp their wives’, indeed their families’, style was a common complaint by most wives in my sample. Like Emily, Maeve Gura is annoyed at her husband Nate’s constant presence in the house, which she sees as disrupting the family’s “well-oiled machinery.” In their late forties, Maeve and Nate were college sweethearts who met in her freshman year and his sophomore year, getting married soon after college. Nate worked his way up the corporate ladder, last working as the regional
vice president of a multinational corporation in a large American city. Two years ago he lost this job that netted him close to $300,000 a year, depending on bonuses. Maeve works 20-30 hours a week as a receptionist a local business, bringing in just enough each week for the grocery bill for their family of six: the two parents and their four children ranging from ages eight to seventeen. For the Guras, Nate’s job has been the unequivocal bread-and-butter. Nate clearly exemplified adherence to a “work devotion” schema
(Blair-Loy, 2003) defined as seeing his career as an emotion- and time- absorbing calling. For Maeve the shift from Nate’s employment to unemployment was staggering because “[The kids’] were so used to he goes to work… So for him, I think, that was