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earned $30,000 working the early morning shift as a forklift driver, loading and unloading bags of cement in Crockett, California—a two-hour barge trip across the bay from San Francisco. At home in his study, he relaxed in a large chair, his guitar hanging on the wall behind him. As with other men and women I interviewed, I thought I could always tell a little something by how and where a person satT Ray was in his study, where we wouldn’t be disturbed. He had changed out of his work clothes, and was dressed now in a blue silk shirt and slacks. Maybe he had dressed up a bit for the interview. For the six years of their marriage, Ray and his wife, Anita, had lived in a modest tract home with Ruby, Anitas pensive ten-year-old daughter by a previous marriage, and their son, Eric, a bright, mischievous boy of two. A third child was on the way. Ray enjoyed talking about peoples motives; in playful respect, his coworkers at the plant called him ‘shrink-man.” He was looking forward to this interview; perhaps, he confided, it would help him understand his stormy marriage.
The two small tables on either side of the sofa in the Judsons’ small suburban home were loaded to the edge with family photographs, magazines, and knickknacks. The living-room walls were covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix album covers, which Ray had recently nailed up, Anita had objected to, and whose fate now hung undecided. The television flickered and chattered on at low
volume—as if to add background excitement, like the tropical aquariums and fireplaces in wealthier living rooms.
If the Steins are more typical of two-job couples in the upper middle class, the Judsons tell us more about those in the solid working class. The lower on the class ladder, the less stable marriage becomes, but divorce has increased in every social class. And so many couples may come to live with the hidden dynamic I found in the Judsons’ marriage—the unsettling effect of being prepared to leave, “just in case,” while carrying on married life as if everything were fine.
Ray earned $13.50 an hour, while Anita earned $8.00 an hour at a full-time job typing address labels into a computer for a billing agency. This wage difference was typical of working American men and women in the 1980s, but it had a personal importance for Ray. Anita, a short, stocky woman who dressed for our interview in jeans and a bright green T-shirt, wore a friendly but somewhat anxious smile. She lit her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and put the matter this way: “Ray isn’t the antifeminist type. But he has to let you know Tm the man of the house.’ Ego is real important to him. He’s got to be respected as a husband and a man. He says, ‘I pay the house note [the mortgage]. I work hard every day.’ And I always stick in CI work hard too, you know.’ ”
When Ray talked about “being a man,” the topic soon came around to money, and when he talked about money, the topic often moved to being the “man of the house,” the boss. More than Evan Holt, Peter Tanagawa, or Seth Stein—all of whom earned more—Ray talked about money as a passport to manhood, and at home it was a passport to leisure.
Ray liked to grill steaks outside on the portable barbecue. He played with Eric when he felt like it—“an hour or so, most evenings,” he said—and he did things like fixing the bathroom shower head when he “had time.” That was his share of the second shift, a share that did not go unchallenged.
The links in Ray’s mind between money, manhood, and leisure were precarious ones, because they bound Ray’s identity to the
fluctuations of an unpredictable marketplace. So long as the price of the bags of cement hauled by his barge company remained high, Rays company, his job, and his sense of manhood were secure. But if the price of cement fell sharply, it could threaten not only his job but his notion of manhood. Given the history of black people in America, equating money with manhood was doubly dangerous. It was already an exceptional bit of luck that Ray had landed a stable union job that paid $30,000 a year. Now he was pinning his relation to the woman he loved on a tiny opening in the economic system. How long would the company prosper? How long before it automated?
The same relation between money and gender identity in no way applied to Anita. She did not base her womanhood on earnings. This was not because she earned less, but because despite the fact that many women in her family worked, there was not the equivalent historical tie between money and womanhood. Money could give her more power but it couldn’t make her more “feminine.” She could not, like Ray, convert money into an exemption from the work at home, because she didn’t earn as much as Ray, and because (as with Jessica) her money didn’t carry cultural weight. She was “culturally poorer” because she was a woman.
Perhaps Ray’s childhood gave earning power several meanings for him. For one thing, his father never held a steady job and had no authority in his family; the two seemed to him to be negatively equated. When Ray was two years old, his father left him in the care of his mother; when he was four, his mother moved away, and left him in the care of his aunt, a kind but strict and highly religious woman, who raised him along with the last two of her own seven children. After going to live with his aunt, he did not see his mother regularly until fifteen years later. Ray did not remember his father, and he felt he had taken this loss in stride. But when his mother left, he remembers missing her for a very long time. If the emotional drive behind a gender ideology has roots in childhood, then perhaps this loss of his mother offers a clue to what might lie behind his insistence that the first shift come first for him, and the second shift come first for his wife. Important people can leave unless you find powerful ways of keeping them with you. Perhaps by focusing on what he had that she needed—his salary—he could hold enough power over Anita to keep her from leaving too. Something about Anitas skittishness, her feistiness, did remind him of his mother, he said, and something of her motherliness reminded him of his aunt. Ray was a “transitional” man, then, but unlike many other such men, he openly used money to bolster his ideology, and certain past losses added emotional fuel to it.