‘All the Men Here Are Either on Drugs or Unemployed’

Men were once the primary breadwinners in areas like Ross County, where they worked good manufacturing jobs and came home at the end of the day to wives like Kemper-Hermann, who sometimes worked, but sometimes stayed home. But today in Ross County, manufacturing jobs have been outsourced or automated, and men have more time on their hands and less income to support their families. Some have turned to alcohol or drugs to fill their time—Ross County is one of the areas of Ohio hit hardest by the opioid epidemic—and are dying early of drug overdoses or other health problems. Others are just spending more and more time watching TV and playing video games. Women like Kemper-Hermann are left to raise children, work full-time jobs, and generally pick up the pieces of a region ravaged by the opioid epidemic and the decline of manufacturing.

In a 2010 cover story in this magazine, Hanna Rosin predicted “The End of Men,” arguing that a post-industrial society, in which manual-labor jobs are disappearing and those requiring nurturing and communication skills are growing, is more suited to women than to men. At the time that Rosin was writing, women held more than half of managerial and professional jobs in the country, and their share was growing in fields like medicine and law. They earned nearly 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the country, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 42 percent of all MBAs. Women, she wrote, would soon be in the position that men once were: running more companies, supporting families, and sometimes, deciding not to seek a partner and going it alone.

Recent data is bearing out Rosin’s predictions. But this role reversal is often not a positive one. For many women, going it alone has meant poverty and loneliness, not empowerment. “Sometimes, it hits me, that this is really happening,” Kemper-Hermann told me. “I have to remind myself that this is my life now.”

Places like Ross County that have been hit by manufacturing declines are the leading edge of the future Rosin describes. Joblessness makes men less desirable partners, theorizes the MIT economist David Autor, who investigated why marriage rates are declining in areas that have seen high shares of manufacturing job losses. In addition, there are just fewer men now in these places, which include much of the Midwest. Autor’s research shows that as men join the military, go to jail, or leave the area in search of work, women are outnumbering men. “The number of high-quality men whom you would want to marry is declining,” Autor told me in February.

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