Abstract
In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair.
Keywords
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the growing “despair” of white working-class Americans, chronicling their increasing sense of cultural marginalization, detachment from mainstream institutions, and falling rates of economic mobility (Case and Deaton 2017; Cherlin 2014; Gest 2016; Putnam 2015). Rising mortality rates for whites with a high school degree or less, as Case and Deaton (2017, 2020) argue, reflect “the failure of life to turn out as expected” (Case and Deaton 2017, 434) and the “loss of the structures that give life a meaning” (Case and Deaton 2017, 430), leading working-class white people to turn to opioids, alcohol, suicide, and food. Their provocative thesis provides a jumping-off point to investigate the narratives that working-class white people construct to cope with social disintegration and economic distress.
The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed a social compact between labor and business, as American worldwide dominance in manufacturing, trade barriers and tariffs on foreign competition, and strong unions allowed working-class white men to experience continuously rising wages (Cherlin 2014). Scholars have documented how industrial white working-class men found dignity in wage earning, racial superiority, and control of their wives’ sexuality (Roediger 1999). As the neoliberal turn from the 1970s onward has weakened this social compact, many working-class white men now feel that they have been demoted from the center of the country’s priorities to the fringes (Gest 2016), leading them to express hostility and resentment toward Black and Hispanic men, women, immigrants, and the poor (Hochschild 2016). White women’s experiences, meanwhile, have been less prominent in discussions of working-class white Americans’ coping strategies, particularly in the ways in which gender interacts with whiteness amid falling economic prospects.
For white women, membership in the social compact was historically filtered through their husbands and fathers (Kerber 1998). Restricted access to higher education, good jobs, and birth control made dependence on white working-class men unavoidable, leading white women to enter into a “patriarchal bargain” that traded control over their bodies and lives for security and social inclusion. This patriarchal bargain defined white normative femininity as a private, seemingly natural performance of marriage, child rearing, and household management (Kandiyoti 1988). White women, in turn, could harness their femininity to leverage the power of white men and the institutions that these men control[led] as their “own muscle” (Blow 2020). Access to these separate, gendered spheres for white families was made possible by the exclusion of people of color from employment protections and social welfare benefits (Fox 2012). However, as this patriarchal bargain, and the normative gender order it overlays, slips away, we would expect white women to develop new strategies for creating a secure, fulfilling life, with the potential to challenge the class, gender, and racial injustices built into previous subjectivities.
Accordingly, in this article, we draw on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a coal mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania to examine how working-class white women manage the widespread social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform white normative femininity. The women in our sample give voice to intensive suffering within their own families, including financial instability, physical and emotional abuse, family dissolution, infidelity, and the loss of their children. They struggle to come to terms with what feel like shameful failures—having children outside of marriage, being cheated on by their boyfriends and husbands, enduring violence and addiction for the sake of a nuclear family, and depending on government assistance in the absence of a male provider.
We find that women rely on three narrative strategies for incorporating gender disruptions into their biographies: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth, dispelling shame and striving for equality, and enduring suffering. These strategies allow them to confront challenges that stem from the upset of normative gender arrangements, including starting over in new relationships, learning to survive alone, or staying alive for the purpose of keeping custody of their children. We argue that the kinds of narratives that white working-class women tell about their lives could hold important consequences not only for their own well-being, but also for the maintenance or subversion of hierarchies of class, race, and gender.
Theoretical Framework
Narrative and Identity
The stories that people tell about their lives can serve to accomplish crucial things for their sense of well-being, such as providing hope, explaining failures and setbacks, and making life feel worth living (Bruner 1991; Somers 1994). The uncertainty of postindustrial life often requires people to grapple with “narrative wreckage”—disruptions that threaten people’s ability to maintain their narrative of the self (Lea 2015). Stories can help people make sense of difficult emotions and experiences, particularly when “life has not turned out as you wanted” (Frank 1995, 63), enabling them to “dra[w] maps and fin[d] new destinations” that bring new direction and meaning to their lives (Frank 2010, 53).
Our cultural contexts provide particular narratives that allow us to articulate who we are and what is possible for us, which in turn can also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and division (McAdams 2001). In Western societies, women have been historically denied access to narratives that grant them autonomy and control over their lives (Heilbrun 1997). This narrative access is crucial to our examination of well-being and despair because narratives can have real consequences for people’s lives when people act as if they are real (Frye 2017). For example, stories that hinge on redemption and self-growth—learning from past failures, or “good triumphing over bad” (McLean 2008)—seem to foster resilience, whereas stories that emphasize chaos and lack of control promote vulnerability, futility, and impotence (Gold 2007).
Gender and Coping
There is an established tradition of studying the narratives employed by working-class people to cope with disappointment, disruption, and failure. In the early 1970s, Sennett and Cobb (1972, 58) underscored the “hidden injuries of class” endured by working-class white men: “the feeling of not getting anywhere despite one’s efforts, the feeling of vulnerability in contrasting oneself to others at a higher social level, the buried sense of inadequacy that one resents oneself for feeling.” Rubin’s (1976) study of working-class family life uncovered hidden, shameful “worlds of pain”—stymied class mobility, grueling financial strain, emotionally distant relationships, suffocating gender constrictions, violence, and alcoholism. Komarovsky’s (1964) examination of working-class marriages in the 1960s similarly revealed how husbands and wives lived lives of dashed expectations in which they denied their own childhood pain, coped with their lack of fulfillment in work and love with stoic respectability, and quietly winnowed down their expectations of a good life.
These studies also suggest that clearly delineated expectations of gender, while often the source of suffering, paradoxically provided a set of tools and scripts that allowed the industrial white working class to at least partially transform the negative, painful emotions of working-class life into a redemptive narrative of the self. White men were able to build a sense of pride, usefulness, and solidarity with other white men that was founded on masculine toughness, material provision, and superiority over women and racial minorities (Halle 1987). In the domestic sphere, Rubin (1976, 56) found that marriage symbolized “a major route to independent adult status and the privileges that accompany it” for men and women. Komarovsky (1964, 343) concluded that staying married despite disappointments and suffering lent a kind of “underlying satisfaction” to “men and women who fe[lt] that they ha[d] fulfilled honorably their basic roles of provider, mate and parent.”
In the coalfields of Appalachia today, gendered self-identities have remained strongly linked to industrial times when women depended on men’s wages and were “responsible for the unpaid labor of managing households and family care” (Maggard 1999, 186). The disassembling of these gendered arrangements has forced men and women to “reconstitute long-held understandings of their relationships to work, home, and the local social world” (Miewald and McCann 2004, 1047). We extend this line of research into the reconstitution of gender by looking more closely at what happens when older narrative strategies for anchoring the self, managing painful feelings, and organizing one’s life trajectory become less accessible for white women. This loss may present the opportunity for a reauthoring of the stories that propel them through their lives, but also may leave them vulnerable as they cannot fall back on older routes to self-worth and well-being.
Asymmetries and Inequalities
The legacy of the strict gendered division of labor in the coal fields of Appalachia, as Miewald and McCann (2004) found, has created tensions for men who no longer have a primary place in the economy yet are unwilling to take on household and caring work. White working-class men have historically been viewed as the “legendary heroes of class struggle” (Maggard 1999, 185), with “class” itself understood as an identity largely belonging to men (Bettie 2003). Accordingly, a great deal of research has focused on how white men cope with the disappearance of industrial working-class life. Scholars have found that some white men reauthor their lives by projecting aggression and anger outward onto women and racial minorities (Gest 2016). In their study of poor and working-class white men in the 1990s, for instance, Fine et al. (1997) documented the lives of young men who blamed feminism, affirmative action, and gay and lesbian social movements (rather than automation and outsourcing) for their own economic decline. Ideals of masculinity that “prescribe male dominance in intimate relationships and families” have been linked to rising domestic violence when men, especially unemployed and underemployed men, feel threatened by women’s paid employment (Renzetti and Larkin 2009, 3). Indeed, Cervantes and Sherman (2019, 22) found that intimate partner violence was experienced as a “normal and expected component of adult intimate unions” for low-income women living in a declining rural community.
Yet we cannot assume that these narrative processes are symmetrical for working-class white women. While masculinity for white men could compensate for their demeaning class position, relieving the physical and emotional injuries of class, it often came at women’s expense in the form of lower wages, lack of bodily autonomy, restricted opportunities, and violence. Recent research has shown that some working-class women prefer egalitarian relationships or independence from men, especially when men cannot solely provide for the family yet refuse to share caretaking duties (Maggard 1999; Sherman 2017). Bell and Braun (2010) found that women in a former coal mining community creatively extended the ideology of feminine caring to environmental activism, breaking the long-held separate spheres ideology that restricted women’s access to the public sphere.
We build on these findings to explore what different strategies do for these women in terms of reimagining gendered identities and forging a worthy life in times of economic and social instability. In a moment of national uprising against racial injustice, understanding how white women understand their relationship to the social world—how they sustain or remake hierarchies of race, gender, and class—also has important implications for social change.
Methods
This research consists of 37 in-depth, semistructured interviews with white working-class women in the Pennsylvania coal region. We recruited participants from two counties of the coal region, which we collectively refer to as “Coal Brook” in order to protect participants’ anonymity. Coal Brook reached its peak at the height of the coal economy in the early 1900s, collapsed during the Great Depression, and then experienced a brief revival during World War II (Keil and Keil 2015). Subsequent deindustrialization has left the region one of the most economically troubled in all of Pennsylvania (Keil and Keil 2015). Coal Brook has historically been an overwhelmingly white area, but recent years have seen an influx of racial minorities in search of safer neighborhoods and affordable housing, drawing backlash from residents whose families have lived in the region for generations (Silva 2019). Despite strong roots in union membership and the Democratic Party, politicians who advocate anti-collectivist, anti-welfare policies have gained widespread support over the last several decades (Keil and Keil 2015).
We define “working class” as having less than a four-year college degree and/or working in a job that does not require a college degree. We were informed by previous literature that identifies a four-year college degree as the major divide, in terms of economic stability and health, between the working class and middle class (Cherlin 2014). We intentionally blur the line between working class and poor, because these groups increasingly share more instability and scarcity with each other than with their professional middle-class counterparts (Lareau and Conley 2008). We included one respondent from a working-class family who earned a bachelor’s degree from a regional college but is working as a hotel maid and had no knowledge about how to find a professional job. We also included one respondent who had a GED and was working as a health aide, but reported that she was working on a master’s degree from an online, for-profit college.
The interviews were conducted over the course of about two years, from 2015 through 2017, as part of Silva’s larger book project about working-class politics (Silva 2019). To recruit participants, we went to local sporting events, town forums, libraries, bus stations, parks, volunteer fire stations, bars, police stations, service workplaces, local for-profit colleges and community colleges, and temporary employment agencies. Interviewees agreed to participate in a study about the “political beliefs, life experiences, and family histories of residents of Central Pennsylvania” and were offered $40 for their time. Our participants, all of whom were given pseudonyms, are between the ages of 18 and 60 years, with a mean age of 33. The interviews lasted about two hours and were conducted primarily in subjects’ homes.
During the in-depth interviews, we shaped the discussions around women’s family history, their work and relationship histories, their views on politics, and their visions of the future. The interview guide explicitly addressed the upcoming 2016 presidential election, opinions of the two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, views of related political topics including immigration, refugees, national debt, social welfare programs, and visions of what it meant to participants to be a wife, mother, and woman. Previous published research from these interviews demonstrated that the vast majority of participants expressed distrust in politicians and did not believe that voting could improve their lives; on the contrary, women focused inward on their own personal stories of pain in their intimate lives (Silva 2019). Many women expressed that the interviews were like “therapy” for them, attesting to sharing parts of their lives that they had never told anyone before.
We took an abductive approach to data collection, sensitizing ourselves to concepts and ideas from relevant sociological literature before going into the field, but also remaining attuned to surprising findings that emerged over the course of the study (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). Our analysis of narrative strategies and outcomes for gender and well-being comes out of a process where we examined each narrative closely to pull out the kinds of troubles women described; how they managed to live through these troubles; how they used these troubles to bring into being who they were and how they defined themselves as worthy people; and how they saw the future.
Following Deterding and Waters (2018), as we began to analyze our data, we started with broad themes that reflected the questions asked in our interview guide. We read each transcript line by line, extracting words and phrases that were used to describe the specific experiences and feelings that participants narrated as central to their sense of self. Understanding identity as something that women accomplish through narrative, rather than simply who they are (including the possibility that they do not narrate gender as women, or heterosexual women, at all) further focused our attention on the ongoing deployment of gendered meanings onto their lived experiences. We attempted to trace what such deployments accomplished for women in terms of managing disruption and pain, documenting the storied resources that these women drew upon to reassemble their lives when normative femininity could not be taken for granted. As we analyzed the data, we wrote one- to two-page memos where we fleshed out themes that seemed to appear in multiple women’s transcripts. These themes included violence, welfare dependence, addiction, marriage and motherhood, and ideas about morality and worthiness. Taking an abductive approach, we then applied these emergent themes as a lens to examine all of the transcripts (Timmermans and Tavory 2012), allowing us to see these women’s narratives as strategies for coping with disruption in their lives. In the following section, we present our analysis of three different kinds of strategies that work for women in different points of transition and interruption.
Findings
Only six women in the sample seemed unconcerned with partners and children at this time. Two were among the youngest in the sample (21 and 23 years old), and were focused on getting a job, being able to afford an apartment with their boyfriends, and becoming financially independent, while the other four women were in stable marriages or engagements that granted them access to normative femininity. All six of these women were openly critical of other people in their neighborhoods who were on public assistance or had children with different fathers, indicating that they believed their communities had lost their moral foundation.
Most women in the sample (31 of 37), in contrast, share how their intimate lives have been disrupted by economic insecurity, family instability, and violence. They lament men’s inability to find work, stay faithful, or remain sober, derailing their own ability to perform normative femininity and leading them to confront alternative ways of defining their lives and envisioning their futures. Lasting memories of abuse at the hands of their fathers, boyfriends, and husbands, and their own struggles to create a safe life for themselves and their children, form the bedrock of their self-narratives. Addiction to drugs and alcohol, whether one’s own or a family member’s, also dominated the stories women told about their lives. Others spoke of the persistent battle to pay their bills in the absence of a male provider.
Here we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption and pain: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering (Table 1). Some women engaged in multiple narrative strategies as they shared the stories of their complicated lives, patching together ways to explain the suffering they have experienced and creating a vision for the future. Most of the women (n = 22) used only one strategy, while eight women used two strategies and one deployed all three. Through these strategies, women strengthen, rework, and reject normative femininity in different ways.
Characteristics of the Sample
NOTE: HS = high school; GED = General Educational Development; LPN = licensed practical nurse; EP = embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; DS = dispelling shame and striving for equality; ES = enduring suffering; N/A = not available.
Stay-at-home mom refers to women who have voluntarily left the labor market to care for their children; unemployed refers to women who are temporarily not employed by the labor market.
Women who have a GED (vs. HS diploma) and continued their education.
Embracing Pain as an Opportunity for Self-Growth
One strategy that emerged in the narratives of 11 women was framing pain as an opportunity: an explanation for past failure, a way to “stay grounded,” and a protective armor against future vulnerability. Suffering, described in rich, intimate detail and with raw emotion, was depicted as a quest through which women who had experienced breakdown and upheaval rediscovered their strength. These women’s stories were characterized by a spiritual element of rebirth through loss that allows them, paradoxically, to revive their search for fairy-tale femininity even in the aftermath of catastrophic narrative wreckage. This narrative strategy may also, as these women recount, protect them against unhealthy coping mechanisms such as using heroin.
Shelly, for example, is a 30-year-old white woman who lost her child in a custody battle with her ex-husband because of her heroin addiction. She describes, “He couldn’t handle it. He needed perfect.” Shelly grew up in a trailer with her mother, her stepfather, Curtis, and four siblings. Curtis began sexually abusing Shelly when she was four. Shelly escaped as soon as she turned 18: “I drove off and I never spoke to my mom again.” When Shelly and her husband met, she explains, “he swept me off my fucking feet” and “my whole body had this tingly feeling and I’m like, I want to have babies.” After they got married, Shelly was a “housewife” who had “everything”—her husband, who had a good job on an Army base, bought a condominium and a car, and gave her a “weekly allowance” for shoes and handbags. Soon, she says, “I gave him a child.”
Shelly describes her “marriage falling apart” because of her husband’s infidelity: “When you’re a wife and you know your husband’s cheating, it’s kind of terrible. You kinda feel like your whole life you want to be the princess, you want to be the one that is their one and only and you realize you’re not.” To make matters worse, six years after she left home, “I got a phone call saying Mom died. That is when I spiraled into my addiction, that’s when I didn’t care anymore. . . . I ripped my whole life apart, because I didn’t know how to cope with what I did.” Her husband divorced her upon discovering her heroin addiction and threatened to have her arrested if she came near their child. Shelly reflects on her current state of dislocation: “It’s kinda a cataclysmic time, leaving one home for what the hell I’m doing next. Kinda the mantra of my life. I’m scared, you go from being a housewife all these years to floating around feeling like you’re unwanted.”
Shelly manages her difficult feelings by creating a story of self-growth through discomfort: There’s a doctor on YouTube, he was talking about how he’d seen a magazine and the article was “How Do Lobsters Grow?” And it says that lobsters are soft mushy creatures that live inside a tough rigid shell. And what happens when the lobster starts to grow, the shell doesn’t expand, the lobster does, so the lobster starts to swell and starts to feel tight, starts to feel uncomfortable, starts to feel under stress. . . . If lobsters had doctors, they would never grow, because the moment the lobster would start to feel uncomfortable, the lobster would go to the doctor, prescribe it this, prescribe it that, and the lobster would never experience what true growth is. So the trigger for growth in a lobster is feeling uncomfortable, so what is the difference between people?
Shelly asserts, “The best system for growth in life is stress.” She also believes that experiencing suffering, rather than blunting it, is crucial to remaining sober and not, in her words above, hurting herself: “I didn’t take medicine to get off of the drug, I didn’t take anything to get off the drug. I sat my happy little ass in that bedroom and I sweated it out, and I suffered it out, I stressed it out. Because I am not ever going to feel that way again.”
Shelly rejects religious notions of suffering that rest on an afterlife and focuses on self-growth in this life: “I can’t picture myself going to an all happy place ’cause if there is an all happy place where people are all happy, why aren’t they that way on Earth? I think we are who we are and just learn to better our souls.” She has set a new goal of opening a tattoo parlor, “wip[ing] out the bad tattoo artists and bring[ing] good art to the area”: “I want to let people understand that it’s okay to have standards,” to stop “expecting other people to fix them because it’s not, that’s not the way change happens. It is the way change happens, but not positive change.”
Shelly is now beginning a relationship with a new man, still holding out hope for the possibility of achieving normative femininity once again: He’s unlike anything I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so cliché . . . do you ever wish for certain aspects of a person and then you get them and it’s so strange? Like have you been reading my diary? . . . I want to be the dainty pretty girl, I want to feel small, I want to feel protected, I want somebody to ask me where I went. I want somebody to know how long I was there. I want somebody to chase after me.
Despite the suffering Shelly has endured at the hands of men throughout her life, framing pain as an opportunity for growth allows her to keep starting over. Her narrative also enables her to continue to see traditionally feminine virtues such as fragility and passivity, as well as traditionally masculine traits such as aggressiveness and control, as desirable rather than harmful.
Aimee, 32, dropped out of high school and got her GED when she was eight months pregnant with her son. While she describes her children’s father as “a very good dad,” and “a solid man,” it was nonetheless “real violent between us.” She dismisses the severity of the violence between them, refusing to cast herself as a victim—“like those girls who walk around like a victim, like I’m not a victim, I just lost that fight. Because I totally was the one that probably started 95 percent of them.” After they broke up, Aimee moved on to a new boyfriend, Charles. She says wistfully, “I remember being here on our first date and having our first kiss and it was like magic.” Because Charles made “good money” driving a truck at a landfill, he “didn’t want me to work. He didn’t wanna share me with the world at all, he’d rather lose me to it than share me with it.” Aimee tried to be a step-parent to his children from a previous marriage while also trying to “avoid doing things” that would set him off: “I wouldn’t just do things because of the sigh I would hear the next day or the silent treatment.” Charles ended their relationship when it became clear that his children’s hostility toward her was only getting worse. She explains, “I was so financially caught, like wrapped up in it. I can’t ever do that again, ever. ’Cause when he left, it’s like, I was left with nothing.”
Now, unemployed and living with her mother, Aimee reflects, “I’m on my awakening, I feel my spiritual awakening. I’ve just been on this journey by myself. I’m whole all by myself, a lot of people aren’t.” Aimee references death and rebirth, explaining, “I feel like every time I’m here as a woman it’s hard for me, it’s always messy. When I come as a man, I feel like I make an impact, whether I be Hitler, or I don’t know, Martin Luther King. But when I’m a female in this journey, it’s always messy.” Her imagined past renders masculinity as deeply impactful while linking femininity to duress. She staunchly refuses to see a mental health professional, stating, “I am my therapist.” She “absolutely” does not want to take medication for her constant feeling of “being uncomfortable in my own skin—No, I need to feel it, and live it and get over it, whatever it is, you know what I mean?”
The narrative of pain as an opportunity for growth frames suffering as a generative, necessary component of feminine personal development (“wholeness”), perhaps allowing women to continually start over in the aftermath of disruption and chaos. This narrative strategy allows women to continue to privilege and strive for normative femininity, despite their previous and ongoing suffering. Like Shelly, Aimee rejects victimhood and is excited about a new relationship with a man who is also able to be a provider. Although she hasn’t felt sparks for him like “they say on TV,” she describes their bond as “definitely a soul connection.” Aimee expresses ambivalence over his tattoo of her name that he got after a week of dating and that he is her “mother’s age,” but she appreciates that he is “very financially stable.” She trails off: “So I’m like in a transition, yeah. Waiting to see what happens, so.”
Dispelling Shame and Striving for Equality
Another narrative strategy unfolded as self-empowerment and emancipation from shame for 14 women. Although this narrative does not valorize suffering for its growth potential, it allows women to dispel shame for their inability to perform normative femininity. Through narratives of self-empowerment, women in the throes of relationship dissolution fill the void of unachieved gender expectations with the realization that they can protect their children and survive on their own. The shift from feeling ashamed to feeling independent can lead to increased compassion for others as well as a willingness to question previously accepted systems of inequality. Women who told these narratives identified sources of support such as peer recovery groups, counselors from social services, and self-help books.
Lucy, 33, struggled for years to keep her nuclear family together despite her husband’s amphetamine-induced abuse. Lucy has a child from a previous relationship that did not lead to marriage and met her current husband while using drugs and alcohol to cope with her inability to realize her “dream” family life: My dream was to . . . the only thing I ever saw was my parents. Being a housewife, that was my thing. I wanted to stay home, take care of kids, be a mom, and have my husband go to work. Well, that didn’t happen so I just partied more. I went out to bars, I drank. I met him at a party and we did drugs together. And I guess that I was medicating.
Lucy is now sober, and her husband is in a mandatory in-patient drug rehabilitation program for five months.
Although she praises her mother for being able to keep their nuclear family together, Lucy insists that she will not allow a man to treat her the way her father treated her mother: “I’m learning now . . . you’re treated how you teach somebody to treat you.” Lucy recalls how she used to pray for her husband to cheat on her with another woman, since “the only way in our faith, is if a person is unfaithful, that’s when you can get a divorce. And you know I prayed, and I said please show me that he’s unfaithful so I can just get a divorce.” When Lucy contracted a sexually transmitted disease from her husband, she realized that “God answered my prayer” but she “still couldn’t do it.” At that point, “I didn’t wanna live anymore. I’ve never ever had a plan for suicide or ever wanted to commit suicide because it’s against everything, religiously, I believe. I just wanted God to take me out of life.” Lucy has slowly recovered by seeing a counselor and reading self-help books including Codependency No More and All You Need Is Jesus and a Good Pair of Jeans. She insists: “God does not want you to be abused or treated in a way that is unacceptable, for any spouse. You can’t treat another person this way.” She has reconstructed an identity based on independence and strength as a woman, realizing, “I’ve been a single mom this, almost the entire time we’ve been married. I’ve been financially taking care of us almost the entire time we’ve been married. The only reason I haven’t divorced him yet is I didn’t have money.”
Lucy acknowledges that her hardships have made her “more open-minded” and “much more aware” of others’ suffering. She describes a pivotal moment when she reclaimed her dignity by refusing to be treated “like trash” at the welfare office: I brought this lady from Women in Transition with me, and she said “Listen . . . she cannot treat you like trash. You’re not trash.” And she kinda like talked me up and I thought, “You know, you’re right. I’m going through a really hard time right now.” I’m really hard on myself and I forget all this crap that I’m going through. So yeah, I went in and I wasn’t rude, but I was very assertive and I told her that I will not allow—I said, “I will not allow you to treat me like trash.” I said, “This needs to stop.” I’m starting to get a backbone for myself, even though I’m in a really crappy situation.
She acknowledges, “I’m really thankful that I’m learning, and I’m learning that I was extremely judgmental too and that it’s not okay.”
Bree, a 34-year-old waitress, chronicles her missing teeth and a broken back that never fully healed after her ex-husband bent her backwards over their child’s crib in a fit of rage: “I have to take twenty minutes to roll onto my side to put a foot on the floor to stand up. It’s bad.” Bree talks about her willingness to live with constant abuse in order to provide a nuclear family for her children: “In my world, since my father wasn’t around, you’d better get married. I didn’t want him [my son] to not have a father in the home with the same last name. I wanted that, because I didn’t have that, but his father was horrible.” At one point, “after my son was born, a couple of months later I got pregnant, and, of course, I wanted to have my baby. My ex-husband literally said, ‘Either you get rid of it or I’m going to.’” Despite being raised in a conservative household, she explains, “He would have hurt me, and God knows what would have happened, and he would have left. I wouldn’t have had a husband or a father for my son, and I went and had that [an abortion] done.” She elaborates, “It was the most horrible time of my entire life, but for women who don’t have a choice, like I felt I didn’t, I understand that.” For a long time, Bree decided to stay (“stick it out”) in the relationship no matter how horrible it was: “I think I was already in that state of mind, that for my children I’ll stick it out. No one ever really taught me how to be a real woman. I think I was already in that state of mind, not that I think that it’s okay, but that for my children I’ll stick it. I’ll stick it. I’m a Lifetime movie.”
Bree tells a transformative narrative of learning to prize the strength it takes to leave a bad relationship, defining a “real woman” as brave and independent: “a strong woman doesn’t let a man get away with that shit.” Although her exes cannot be depended on to send money or supplies for her children, she states proudly, “I own my car and everything in this house. There’s no Rent-A-Center stuff . . . and they never go without.”
Like Lucy, Bree harnesses this newfound strength to challenge unequal, yet previously taken-for-granted, configurations of class, gender, and race inequality. In addition to gaining sympathy for women who have abortions, she observes, “Everybody is connected in a circle here. You step out of that circle, you’re out. People are afraid to step out of that circle here.” When she started dating a black man in town a few months ago, she found that even the most subtle displays of affection at the restaurant where she waitresses would garner open threats of violence from “the good old boys.” She says with disgust: “I work in the bar with old men that say [n-word] 20 times a day.” She adds, “My dad said they used to burn crosses on lawns in this town.” When her boyfriend was arrested for a charge she believes is “bogus,” she took the risk of speaking out against police corruption: I used to be real close with the cops in this town. They come by here and give me the dirtiest looks. What happened to the rapport we had? Just because of this man that was in my life that is being accused of something, because I’m going to bring down some shit on their head if they do the wrong thing here. I’m not going to have a choice. I would not feel right about myself to let them sit back and lynch this boy.
Women who leverage their emancipation from shame as they strive for equality experience a realization that they are able to care for themselves and for their children. Like Lucy, Bree chronicles a moment where she speaks out against established hierarchies and demands fairness. Bree proudly refuses to live in fear of stepping outside of the circle. This decision does not come easily— “emotionally, I am a mess,” she says—but her story of finding her independence may help her leave behind violent and controlling men and find new ways to bring purpose to her life.
Enduring Suffering
While the narratives we have examined so far serve to turn suffering into a positive experience and to achieve autonomy and self-worth, we also heard stories of disruption and chaos that left women feeling out of control, vulnerable, trapped, and hopeless. These 16 women describe being in the throes of chaos—unable to gain control over the steady, unrelenting attacks that accompany their every attempt to get married, find a father for their children, and have a brief reprieve from fear. They describe debilitating depression and anxiety, turning to drugs, food, cigarettes, and digital games to endure their pain, and isolating themselves in futile attempts to protect themselves from the outside world. While suffering in these stories does not lead to positive change, some women frame their ability to endure pain, however precariously, as a sign of accomplishment. Discounting the suffering of others, often by reworking gestures of feminine respectability they perform on their own, allows some women to lay claim to a fleeting sense of honor.
Jessie, 33, holds a GED and reports taking classes for an online social work master’s degree. She is currently in the midst of a divorce and has six children. She recounts being victimized from early childhood onward: “I was raped by my mom’s first husband. My mom knew it, never reported it. . . . My mom did not take care of us. I had severe lice to where my Gram had to take me to the emergency room nine times to be treated for it.” Her first husband “ended up cheating on me with a girl who was twenty years older than him” and “beat the crap out of me” and her son: “and he beat my oldest son, and then they tried to say I did it, so I lost my son thirty days to them, and then thirty days to my grandmother until everything was settled, and it came back that I didn’t abuse my son.” Because he was “drawing money from my bank account,” she describes, she was arrested for writing bad checks and put on probation. Jessie then moved in with her grandmother and started dating another man, who “hit the back of my car with his car, rammed me pretty hard” when they broke up.
Looking for a fresh start, Jessie then “started dating another guy. He wasn’t physically abusive. He was mentally, emotionally abusive, real possessive, real jealous.” She finally “just couldn’t take it no more with his controlling and all that, so I threw him out, and even though I was on probation, I was like, you know what? I need a drink. So I brought a six-pack of beer home, and about 1 o’clock in the morning my probation officer is sitting at my house, so I went to jail for four months.” When she was released, she met her current husband, an undocumented migrant worker who “was a complete opposite of what I’ve always been around. He put his name on my son’s birth certificate.” Aside from giving her child a stable father, this man also was a good provider: “We were really good. He cheated on me a couple of times, but he was always a sole provider. He always made sure we had stable housing. All the bills were paid.” Yet he recently told her he wants a divorce: “His insecurities build up. He’ll sit there and say, ‘You just don’t love me anymore.’ I’ll just sit there and play a game on my phone or something, just go into complete survival mode.” Jessie adds, “There’s so many things that I have to work on with my PTSD to prevent anxiety attacks. I’m on Ativan for anxiety if I need it. I try not to take it, and I have tried Trazodone if I can’t sleep, but I try not to depend on that. I’ve always did everything on my own, and I just recently got them, because I started needing help.” She says contemplatively, “There’s days where I wake up and I’m like, why did I wake up today? What’s my purpose today? Why did I wake up? And then I look at my kids, and I’m like, that’s why. If it weren’t for my kids, I honestly think I probably would have committed suicide.”
This sense of fatalism and hopelessness is echoed by Mary Ann Wilson, a factory worker, and her adult daughter, Vivian, who both speak nostalgically about the way love and marriage “used to be.” As they confront addiction, divorce, incarceration, and abuse in their own relationships, Vivian imagines that “old school” relationships were “just different. You loved each other. Once you were committed to your relationship, that was it. You made that work. And nowadays it’s not like that. If it don’t work, you just move on and go, and I think that’s why everything’s just a mess the way it is now.” Vivian explains, “most of the men around here, they don’t work. They’re all alcoholics. They have nothing going for them. They choose not to better themselves.” Her ex-husband was “very, very abusive” and is currently addicted to heroin. While Vivian has three children, she has retained custody only of her oldest son since going to prison for alcohol-related crimes: “It’s really rough. This is probably the roughest it’s been. We’re really in a crappy situation. When I went to jail, I just wasn’t stable enough to take all the kids. I was all stressed out. I was starting to miss work, because I was getting sick from my nerves. I lost everything, everything that I had.”
Vivian does not believe in a better future: “I think there might have been, at one time, but I think that’s gone. It came and went before we even got to see it.” When Mary Ann urges Vivian to stay hopeful—“Life’s like a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you’re here, sometimes you’re down there”—Vivian replies drily, “Well, our tram’s at the bottom. Our tram is stuck at the bottom.” They both smoke, even though Mary Ann’s boyfriend just died of lung cancer: “It’s so hard. It is very hard . . . unless you’re a smoker, you don’t realize how difficult it really is. It’s like your everyday living. It’s part of your life, routine. Especially when you’re stressed out.”
Vivian is unable to get a job, which she suspects is because of her criminal record. When asked about how she spends her time, she describes, “I put applications in, clean, cook. I mean, I’m kind of limited. Decorate. I just house-cleaned.” She finds other feminine ways to prove her worth and distinguish herself from other women who are irresponsible and less worthy: I know a lady that has six kids, never worked a day in her life, gets welfare for every single one of them; owns her home. You have fake boobs, fake hair, fake nails. I can pay thirty-five cents for a can of vegetables, and then I’ll go over across town to the meat market, and I get hamburger, chicken, and I just separate it all and freeze it for meals for the month.
For Vivian, suffering and disruption are not harnessed into positive stories of growth or empowerment. She seems to create a glimmer of self-worth by performing a whittled down version of normative femininity—frugally planning meals to feed her family—and holding herself above one of the most stigmatized feminine icons, the welfare queen. While some women may combine their enduring suffering with more self-empowered narratives to provide a glimpse of hope for the future, other women seem likely to continue to anchor their story of the self in hopelessness. Magnifying their suffering allows these women to craft a self-image of worthiness in the face of despair.
Discussion and Conclusions
This is a study of what happens when white working-class women’s access to the rituals and practices of normative femininity—which they define as being married to a man who is a provider and bearing and raising his children—becomes unavailable or undesirable. By focusing on white working-class women specifically, we trace how these women navigate the contradictions and tensions of gender, class, and race in the postindustrial era.
One narrative strategy that emerged in our data hinges on defining one’s uniqueness and wholeness as a positive consequence of the suffering they have endured. Although the pain in these narratives was largely the result of violence, possessiveness, and infidelity perpetrated by men, we can see in the stories of both Shelly and Aimee that their refusal to be a victim downplays the pain they have experienced and even turns men’s controlling behavior into a desirable trait. This story of continually starting over may offer a sense of hope and resilience that allows women to continue to search for normative gender arrangements even in the aftermath of cataclysmic loss. This narrative of self-empowerment helps women create an identity that is purposeful and meaningful by foregrounding their own autonomy and embracing a philosophy of growth through suffering. While staking a claim to one’s pain may provide an avenue for feeling accomplished and protect women from losing their gendered identity, it also emphasizes self-healing and self-reliance, perhaps stymieing activities geared toward collective action.
An alternative narrative strategy unfolds through the gradual realization that “real women” do not need to rely on men’s provision, or raising one’s children within marriage, to be a worthy, accomplished person. This narrative strategy of dispelling shame allows women to work through deep ambivalence about whether they should tolerate infidelity, abuse, or other destructive behaviors as a trade-off for a nuclear family. Both Bree and Lucy document their long battles to convince themselves that it is not shameful to leave their marriages, that they themselves can provide for their children, and that they can refuse to be treated like “trash.” This narrative of learning to be independent and to challenge the conventions they were raised on seems to lend itself to newfound compassion and connection for others, especially stigmatized others.
Women who tell stories of positive self-growth through pain and learning to be independent often reference earlier times in their lives when drugs, cigarettes, shopping, food, or other forms of escape dominated their lives. For the women currently in the throes of chaos, such as Jessie or Vivian, there is no upswing in their narratives of enduring suffering that allows them to envision a better future, leaving them exceedingly vulnerable. We watch these women turn to coping mechanisms such as alcohol, tobacco, drug use, or overeating to endure. They admit to seeing little reason to live for tomorrow, aside from their children, who are on the verge of being taken away.
That numerous women indicated that the interview was the first time they were ever revealing their painful pasts suggests that there may be structural barriers such as lack of access to mental health care, distrust of social institutions such as criminal justice or medicine, or other barriers that prevent them from discussing their feelings of shame or failure with close friends and family members. Because Coal Brook is in a distressed area, there may be fewer resources for residents to seek mental health treatment, as well as social norms that prohibit community members from intervening in dangerous or unhealthy situations.
Case and Deaton’s (2020) research “unexpectedly positioned working-class Whites as the new face of disadvantage,” drawing criticism for ignoring the “long histories of deprivation and high rates of mortality” of other racial/ethnic minority groups (Brown and Tucker-Seeley 2018, 124). However, as Brown and Tucker-Seeley (2018, 126) argue, the focus on the rising number of deaths of despair among working-class white Americans could also provide an opportunity to “better understand the complex interaction among distressing social contexts, coping strategies/behaviors, and the social construction of White race.” In this article, we have attempted to uncover white working-class women’s strategies for coping with economic and social decline, making the interplay between whiteness, femininity, and social class visible in this process.
It is important to note that these interviews were conducted in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Uncertainties and tensions surrounding the family, and especially the expectations of women and men within it, likely played a role in Trump’s successful “Make America Great Again” campaign. Four years later, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and national, ongoing protests in support of Black Lives Matter, it is possible that working-class white women have continued to reckon with the meanings of race, gender, and social class in their own lives and in the political arena. Even as the women in this article tended to reject political engagement and focus on their own daily struggles, there are instances where they link their personal pain to political issues, suggesting that there is the possibility of collective action. Going forward, it is urgent that future research continues to examine how race and place shape strategies of coping and trajectories of health among ethnic and racial minority groups.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note:
This research was funded by an ASA/NSF Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline grant and Bucknell University. We would like to acknowledge Simone Polillo, Rin Reczek, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Natasha Quadlin, Dana Haynie, Eric Schoon, Nico Pinchak, Jasmine Whiteside, and Jake Tarrence for their feedback on this manuscript.
Kait Smeraldo Schell is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include gender, family, trauma, and narrative.
Jennifer M. Silva is Assistant Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. She is the author of We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013).