Her Shattered Dream

The faces of the unemployed beamed into our living rooms and etched into our mind's eye are often wearing hard hats and have neglected beards. That is to say, they are men. We know that they are having to bear the grief that comes from the loss of income, change in identity, and deterioration of hope. But the grief and psychic rearrangement that result from unemployment are not the exclusive domain of men.

There are other faces, less often shown: faces of the wives and children of the provider who can no longer provide, and faces of working women, married and single, whose own pink slip has meant much more than the loss of "pin money." In many ways their experience of unemployment is similar to that of men, their grief shared. In other ways it is unique to women.

Clara, a coal miner's wife, remembers vividly the day her husband was laid off:

It was a day to remember, I'll tell ya. I kept telling him, "I heard these rumors. They're gonna close the mine."

He says, "Never! They keep sayin' there's 10 years left, there's 20 years left."

I says, "Mick, there's rumors."

He says, "Don't believe them."

So [when] it came across the news, I went hysterical. Y'know, you figure you go from like $100 a day to--what was it then--$182 a week on unemployment. I panicked. The whole bottom drops out.

When "the bottom drops out," the wives in working-class families go through their own experience of grief. But their loss is different; their disillusionment is related to the illusion attached to growing up female in America.

The old values, which gave definition to relationships and meaning to labor, have worked so well for so long in the "All-American" industrial cities such as Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They have been values held in common by both men and women. But the American Dream, with its promise and recipe for success, is premised on separate role expectations for women and men.

The material content of the dream has always been the same--a nice home, new car every few years, modest vacations, education for the children, and hope for a little more of all of it for the next generation. And yet the means of achieving these goals were quite different for men and women.

For men the American Dream was something to strive for, work toward, make happen. For women it was something to be enjoyed. Young men were raised with the understanding that their hard work would secure the dream. The Protestant work ethic was passed on from father to son. Women, however, knew that their labor, whether at home or on the job, would have very little effect on their dream becoming a reality. As traditionally understood, the American Dream is therefore a derivative dream for women, contingent on the actions of another.

Women have minimal control over the realization of that vision. In the mythology and traditional gender roles surrounding the American Dream, women factor into the equation at only two points: first, in their initial judgment when choosing a man, and then in their continuing ability to give him emotional support. If the American Dream for men is about self-determination, for women it is about dependency. A certain alienation is therefore written into a woman's dream and her work, if with invisible ink.

BORN OUT OF THE Industrial Revolution, gender roles have been clear for many decades. While men participated in the production of goods, women worked at home, reproducing the social order. For there to be a house, there must be a housekeeper. To have children of the dream, there must be an at-home mother. For a man to be able to bear eight to 10 hours a day in the mill or "eating dirt" in the mines, there must be a hot meal, easy chair, and an understanding woman at home waiting for him. Together they would keep the system going and their lives in balance.

When the dream is working out, it usually goes unquestioned. Men and women play their parts and enjoy the anticipated results. But unemployment dismantles the dream for a wife as it does for her husband when his job is eliminated. The immediate loss of financial security and a system of meaning is the first dimension of their shared experience of grief.

When it looks as if the bank might foreclose on the mortgage and the house will be lost; when a woman who never thought she would "have to work" must find a job waitressing or cleaning someone else's house; when a wife must drastically cut back on necessities and cut out "extras" for her family; when a salary check is replaced by an unemployment check and then a welfare check, women experience a deep sense of betrayal. They feel betrayed by a tradition and a system that had promised much and whose prescriptions they had trustfully followed.

For women who have been financially dependent, the unemployment of the men who supported them has a scatter-shot psychological effect. No area of her life is left untouched by the crisis. Nothing looks quite the same in her life or in the world. Initial questions such as, "When will Bethlehem Steel call him back?" later become: "What does it now mean to be an American? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to believe in God?"

These questions should have been asked earlier, but for most working-class Americans, they are only pushed to the surface by the pain of a work crisis. The ultimate bankruptcy of a dream built on individualism, sexism, and acquisitive materialism remains hidden and is only revealed in suffering.

Mary Duranko chose to express her frustration and hope for change through organizing the Wives Action Committee for Unemployed Steelworkers in Johnstown. She described her response to some of her critics:

They'll say we're a radical group. Like my place is at home. But yet they're the same ones that told me when I was young, you know, buy a home and settle down and take responsibility. Well, okay, we did that. But now welfare owns my home. I can't have an insurance policy. I'm not allowed to have a funeral plot. I'm not allowed to have any of those things. So where's the responsibility? Who's right--them or me?

"They" had told Mary about the American Dream and its attendant work ethic. "They" had misguided and betrayed her, and now "they" were criticizing her for speaking out of her pain.

Who is this faceless "they" who let Mary down, as well as many other working people? Sometimes it is the media, big business, or the unions, sometimes it is the government or the culture that transmits the promises. But it is difficult to sustain such anger at the generic "they." Eventually the betrayal becomes focused on the one who was supposed to deliver the dream--the husband. Mary commented:

You know what it was like for me to have to go into welfare? I went into welfare, I hated my husband for two weeks. I hated him. I was gonna leave him. I was gonna take the kids and leave. To me, this [welfare] was unheard of. I mean, I came from a family where you paid your bills. There was 11 of us. We didn't have it easy, but we still made it.

Anger toward men, as providers of the bread and providers of the dream, was almost universally expressed by wives of unemployed and underemployed miners and steelworkers in and around Johnstown. This is not to say that the wives were not understanding and sympathetic toward the men, who themselves were depressed and angry. However, there was a need to blame someone, to have some enfleshment of the obstacle to the realization of one's dream. Thus, their anger toward their husbands was precipitated not so much by what the men had done or not done, but by what they had come to represent.

IN THAT FIRST dimension of grief over a dream lost, of asking how and why, of realizing the contingency of one's well-being, the bulk of the wives' emotional and physical energy still goes into the family. Paradoxically, she knows that when the dream dissolves, through her husband's or her own job loss or reduction, she will probably end up working harder.

For married or even single women, a suddenly marginal family income means piecing together a patchwork schedule of low-paying part-time jobs--those most accessible to women--in addition to responsibilities at home. This is quite different from the experience of unemployed men whose major battles are not with the stress of overwork, but rather with the anxiety of boredom.

The married woman is painfully aware that the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and holding together the family is still hers, although the tools and resources of her trade have changed. If jobs are unavailable, she must turn to charity and welfare, the two most offensive symbols to those women who believed in the American Dream. For most of the families interviewed, it was the women who went out in search of material assistance. In their own shame and depression, the men just refused to go.

If there was a trace of one's American Dream left before, it is dashed when the unemployment benefits run out and a family must go on welfare. To stand in a welfare line for the first time is to grieve. Participants in a Wives Action Committee discussion explained:

You can't better yourself if you're on welfare. You have to stay where you are, in a hole. See, they tell you to go get a job. But they want you to take a peanut job. They want you to take a job that you still have to depend on them....

Everybody that says that welfare ain't that bad, well tell them to live on it for a while....

[At the welfare office] you feel like you're going and you're taking from them. That's how they make you feel, that you're taking their bread and butter outta their mouths. Then they ask you all these questions.... They really downgrade you.

As women see their dreams eroding, as they transfer their dependence to the faceless provider of state welfare, the wives of unemployed workers move into a second dimension of grief. They become aware of their utter vulnerability, their dependency, not just on their husbands but on forces outside their purview and beyond their control. Realizing their future will be determined by entities like "the politicians," "the union bosses," and, more realistically, the board members of multinational corporations, their eyes see beyond their immediate grief. They confront, for the first time, their own powerlessness.

Their alienation from the system goes one level deeper than that of their husbands. Through unemployment they are not only denied participation in the economic world, but they also realize that no real participation had ever been allowed. The second dimension of grief for the wives is not the loss of power, but the loss of illusion. When the grief surfaces, it does so as a deep rage to which the women are unaccustomed.

The Wives Action Committee regularly demonstrated at the gates of Bethlehem Steel and took bus loads of women to lobby in Washington. Mary Duranko herself became a well-known spokesperson for the families of unemployed steelworkers. Her eloquent and graphic expressions of frustration often made her audiences uncomfortable, mainly because she dared to "tell the truth." As she says, "I am gonna say exactly what I feel and the way I see it. They [the media] do not want everybody to know how bad Johnstown really is."

AS HER DREAMS and her worldview are lost, there is a third dimension of grief for the wife of the unemployed or underemployed worker. With the change not only in the family finances, but also in her husband's own perception of himself, the wife's self-identity becomes the arena for loss and grief. Since much of the female identity has been formed in relation to that of the working man, that, too, is now open to question.

Ever since women were "liberated" from the factories to the sphere of full-time domestic labor, wives inherited unambiguous gender roles in the ordering of everyday life. However, traditional women in the deteriorating industrial cities of North America are now experiencing a confusion and grief about themselves that is perpetrated not by "women's lib" but by their husbands' unemployment and underemployment.

One laid-off steelworker's wife talked about how her marriage had changed: "I don't feel like I'm my husband's wife. I mean, right now I lost that closeness....He's not feelin' like a man anymore, so I feel less than a woman."

During a personal employment crisis, impotence is not uncommon among men. With greatly reduced earning power, they feel they can no longer fulfill the traditional male role. This can trigger confusion for the woman about her own sexual identity. As a result, at the time in their lives when sexual intimacy could be a source of communication, support, and healing, it is often the focus of even further personal pain and alienation in a relationship.

As part of the upheaval in one's sexual identity during this time, for many women there is a change in perception from seeing their husbands as partners in building the dream to being children in need of their care. The woman quoted above described this change:

In those three years [of her husband's unemployment]...! learned to love him as my own children, because that's the way I looked after him, as a child. And basically that's my feelings toward him. If he got hurt, I'd be there to bandage it. Sleep with him? Forget it....He became your child. And that's how you see him now. You do not see him as a man.

Her husband had been called back to the mill and was again supporting the family financially. But the change in the sexual arrangement had gone on for too long. What had begun as a temporary economic hardship had permanently altered their lives at the most basic level--their perceptions of themselves and of each other as husband and wife. Six months after the interview, they filed for divorce.

ANOTHER COMPONENT of the sexual identity of women indigenous to the American Dream is that of emotional caretaker of the family. It is her role to dry the tears, bandage the scraped elbows, and patch the wounds. This one-sided responsibility continues in the employment crisis. But often wives cannot break through the silence into which their husbands recede. His mute suffering frustrates her attempt to share in his grief and only multiplies her own.

Sandy finally left her unemployed husband. Both of them were in pain, but he could not find a language for it, and she could no longer tolerate the silence. She said:

He just didn't realize just how bad I was taking it, and he wouldn't talk about it. He never sat down with me and discussed anything. How the bills was fallin' behind, he never knew that. He never looked at the mail. He never looked at the checkbook.

[When I tried to talk to him ] he would just get up and walk out. He didn't want to hear about it. He didn't want to talk to me. I think he realized what was going on, but he just didn't want to face it.

This illustrates an important distinction in the way that men and women experience the grief of a work crisis--in their capacity or willingness to let grief find expression. The disappointment, disillusionment, and confusion carried by the husbands often get no closer to being verbalized than a lump in the throat.

Men can spend hours discussing the external realities of the situation--union politics, management promises, rumors, and second-guesses of the future economy--but their background taught them no language for the devastation of a work-oriented identity. It was not considered necessary. As long as they worked hard and followed the rules, they would never feel like a failure, much less need to talk about it.

Women, on the other hand, are taught a vocabulary of internal realities. On the whole, the women in Johnstown were able to speak much more readily to us about psychological pain, anxiety, love, depression, sexuality, conflict, and even suicide. Their need to articulate the turmoil boiling inside them contrasts sharply with their husbands' silence. Kim lamented to her friend Mary Louise:

When you're down and out, they [the husbands] say things is gonna get better. Well, when are they gonna get better?

You're depressed, you're crying, all that stuff, and he says, "Well, what are you cryin' about? There's nothin' to cry about. "He don't know how I feel.

And Mary Louise responded, "He's probably cryin' too, but he just don't let it out."

The affective perceptions and language of the women had been part of their socialization as females. They had been given social permission to cry out and express their pain.

While their husbands found that their own network had been lost as part of the high cost of unemployment, the housewives' social circle remained intact, allowing them to find support during the boom and bust of the economy. Their socializing was affected somewhat by their husbands' unemployment; tighter budgets preempted shopping trips or lunches out. Nevertheless, the women stayed in touch, providing each other with an important emotional outlet and functioning as peer therapists, as each helped the other survive poverty, their husbands' depression, and their own broken dreams.

THOUGH DEALING with the loss of their dream, a new awareness of their powerlessness, and conflicts in their sexual identities, grief was not paralyzing for these women. Through their natural resources of language and a social network, they discovered that grief could be mobilizing.

The Wives Action Committee is certainly one manifestation of this possibility. There were about 25 women and a few men at the first meeting. Within a few months, it was not unusual for more than 200 folks to attend the monthly meetings. But there was an interesting and unexpected development as women took leadership and expanded their vision of their work sphere. President Mary Duranko spoke of it:

We started it We never anticipated the men, y 'know, participating in it. It was basically going to be just for the wives to get together and get their anger out.

Well we got shocked when we seen the men! And now, it's one-to-one, I would say. And what's really great about it is the husband and wife both come together. She is so happy that he is taking it out up there [at the meetings] and not at her at home. And that means a great deal.

The male and female members of the Wives Action Committee have seen their old gender roles fall by the wayside in their organization. In the process they have found a new partnership, based on a shared and vocal grief and the acquisition of new skills.

For example, it was the men, the former steelworkers, who donned aprons and prepared a turkey dinner for 800 families of unemployed workers at Christmas time. Women organized the event, negotiated food and toy donations, and emceed the program. This partnership represents a changing understanding of work by both women and men.

When the culturally accepted symbol of validation, the paycheck, is removed or greatly reduced, a working man must find other sources of dignity. He must walk in his wife's shoes, sharing in her labor at home, and justify to himself the meaning of work that is not rewarded monetarily.

Nancy's husband was laid off from the steel mills for three years. Their family, too, dealt with the silencing effect of unemployment, her husband's depression, and increased tensions in a family that most often described itself as "close." Yet she also recognized the leveling effect that an economic crisis can have between men and women:

I think we understand each other a little bit better. He realizes that housework is a big bug for me....I think I can understand his feeling better and maybe put myself in his position and think what it would be like to go and look for a job and [have] somebody tell you, "You're too old," or "We're not taking applications." ...Generally, I just think we maybe respect each other more.

BUT WHAT OF THOSE women who are employed themselves? When they lose their jobs, how different is their experience from that of the unemployed men and their wives who worked at home?

Rose's experience as principal breadwinner has led her from dream to nightmare. She is a 30-year-old, divorced mother of two children who was laid off from her steel mill job in September 1979. Five years before she had begun work at the mill in order to support her family. "My husband was always on SIP [Social Insurance Program]. He was a drug addict. So then I went to the mills. He liked it. I paid all the bills."

Rose, an attractive and obviously fit woman, had to prove herself to the men in order to gain their respect and to be able to work the more difficult, but higher-paying, jobs. She worked as a "heater," an arduous task that involves working with heavy machinery and in constant exposure to high temperatures.

Rose was obviously proud of her work. After finishing an eight-hour shift, she would go to a second part-time job in a department store. "I was a worker: a mother, a housekeeper, a worker." She felt good about herself in those days, but not now.

In the past five years of unemployment, her marriage broke up, unemployment benefits ran out, and she now receives welfare. She has been frustrated in her attempts to find even part-time, minimum-wage work:

I was goin' down to unemployment every week, and I got yelled at by the guy behind the counter. Told me I had no business comin' down every week...

He said, "If you don't know nobody, you're not gonna get a job." He said, "You're wastin' your time comin' down here."

Rose has now been unemployed for as long as she was working in the mill. For the five years of her career as a heater at Bethlehem Steel, she earned more than $16,000 a year--plus her part-time wages--a modest income for a family of three, just inching them into the middle class. Since she has been on welfare, Rose's family receives approximately $5,600 a year, including food stamps. Her family used to eat out in restaurants occasionally. Last year they had to eat their pet rabbit.

Rose has stopped thinking of herself as productive and independent and has started seeing herself as part of the new dependent poor. She feels trapped and powerless in her new self-identity.

For women such as Rose, the American Dream was not mediated through the employment of another. She has shared the satisfaction of her male counterparts of having work rewarded and validated through fair wages, the ability to support a family, and the possibility of dreaming even bigger dreams for their children growing up in the "Land of Opportunity." But now Rose despairs that those dreams and satisfactions are irretrievably lost in the trap of welfare and the cycle of poverty. She said:

I think it's worse for women. It affects you more. Like me. I have cousins that worked in the mills. Now their wives are out working, and they 're staying home babysitting. I don't have nobody to sit and watch my kids. It's harder for me, even if I would get a job....There's no way out of this rut.

In spite of her skills and motivation to work, Rose probably is stuck for a long while. Recent research has shown that women are unemployed for longer periods of time and are re-employed at even greater wage cuts than are unemployed men.

Part of the problem for women seeking jobs is that they simply have fewer options. If they were fortunate enough to have made wages comparable to their male counterparts, their expectations were unrealistically raised. Upon re-entering the job market, they find themselves herded into the "ghettos" of "women's work." Most end up in those 20 job categories (out of the Department of Labor's list of 427) that are primarily in the service sector. These jobs consistently offer lower wages, fewer benefits, and decreased job security.

THE ANXIETY AND feelings of insecurity that are created by unemployment and underemployment are more persistent in those most vulnerable in today's job market--that is, women and minorities. They come to believe that the fleeting security they had when they were fully employed was but an anomaly. They cannot expect to be fully employed in their "productive years" in the way that white males have come to have that expectation.

The employment crisis hits women hard. Whether they worked at home or were in the job market themselves, they had breathed deeply of the American Dream, only to have the wind knocked out of them. They have been left reeling and confused. As the painful inequalities of "women's work," paid and unpaid, bear in upon them, these women begin to learn the realities of being female and in the working class.

As we move toward the 21st century, the projections for women in the workplace are not good. More and more young single women are supporting children. More and more women are joining the workforce out of necessity, now constituting the fastest growing group in the ranks of the employed and the unemployed.

The gap between the wages of women and men persists and, in many cases, is widening despite "protective" legislation. The jobs that are being created in our country are at the top and bottom of wage and skill continuums, leaving a shrinking supply of middle-level jobs. Unsurprisingly, women are represented disproportionately at the bottom. The feminization of poverty is picking up momentum.

But we are also moving into the future with the precious gift of the wisdom gleaned from the experience of women like Clara and Mary and Rose. The suffering of these newly poor--these women who have seen freedom of choice gradually or cataclysmically taken from them--is the rawest of data we should carry into the future to be shaped.

There is much to be learned from those women victimized by the economic crisis about the value of domestic work, the gift of community, the language of suffering, and the possibilities for a new partnership with men in a just economy. Those who have moved beyond confusion have come too far in their thinking to ever go back to an innocent trust in the old dream again. But are we, as a culture and an economy, ready to hear what their experience can teach us about our understanding of work, the inequities of our relationships, and the way we do business?

Donna Day-Lower was a Presbyterian minister teaching at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia when this article appeared. This article was adapted from her book Modern Work and Human Meaning, co-written with John Raines (The Westminster Press, March 1986).