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

Women say that the decline of men is obvious in Chillicothe, this small town in Ross County, where I encountered men waiting outside a rehab clinic and standing in line at the unemployment office. “All the men here are either on drugs or unemployed,” a bartender named Brittany told me, exaggerating a bit (she didn’t want to give her last name). Two of her friends, fellow waitresses at the Chillicothe institution Jerry’s Pizza, told me that they were raising their kids alone after one of their partners had gone to jail and the other had cheated. “It’s very hard to find a good man here,” Catherine Ratliff, 43, said. “We have to fend for ourselves.” Ratliff, a trim blond with a long braid, told me she was trying to raise her children to be “strong and independent” and not depend on men for anything. “You just have to be single and strong,” she said. Another Jerry’s server, Pamela Moore, 41, moved to town recently from Florida, and said she had noticed the difference in the competency of men between the two locations. “They’re all on dope or they’re dying up here,” she said.

I visited a rehab center in Piketon, Ohio, where men share tiny rooms with single beds and giant televisions while they try to break their addictions. Many, including Kevin Haywood, 49, say they know what their addiction has done to their wives. Unlike many men who are addicted to drugs, Haywood was able to hold down a job while he abused pills like Xanax, opioids, and cocaine. But while he made thousands of dollars a week in construction, he’d only come home with $500 or so because he spent the rest on drugs. He wasn’t a supportive partner during this time. He helped raise the kids, he said, but his wife had to do everything else. “She paid all the bills, she worked, she took care of stuff,” he told me. Haywood says his wife isn’t the only woman his addiction affected—his mother is in the hospital with heart problems he says were exacerbated by his past behavior. But it’s his wife who kept his family running for the decades he was on drugs. Even now, he said, “I should be taking care of my manly duties, but I’m up here trying to fix myself and my wife is down there dealing with the outside world, taking care of all the stuff that I should be doing.”

This rise of women and decline of men that I saw in Ohio is playing out among a largely white population. Everyone I met at the rehab facility and the other people I spoke to for this article was white. The African American community, where high rates of incarceration and low rates of employment among men have led to many women raising families by themselves, has faced similar challenges for a long time. In 2015, around two-thirds of black children were being raised in single-parent households, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, compared to one-fourth of white children. “Non-college white America looks very much like did black America did 20 or 30 years ago,” Autor told me.

Indeed, the decline of men is not affecting all parts of the white community; highly educated workers, both men and women, are doing just fine economically. According to the Economic Policy Institute, white men in the top 20 percent of income-earners are actually working 4 percent more than they did in 1979; men in the bottom two income quintiles are working fewer hours than they did in 1979. (Women in all income quintiles are working more.) These educated workers are clustered in big cities, where good jobs are relatively abundant. In the areas where there are shrinking opportunities for people without a college education, men are dropping out of the workforce and women are left to carry them or live without them.

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