their insurance,” observed a Chattanooga student studying to be a mortgage broker.^175
Trump won among white working-class women by 28 percentage points; if Clinton had
won even 50% of their votes, she would have won the election.^176
What working-class women see is that blue-collar jobs with good pay are heavily
gendered as male; men ensure they remain so through severe sexual harassment of
women who try to enter.^177 It can be porn on the walls, or a disgusting photoshopped
picture in your locker. Co-workers may refuse to train you, or loosen a screw so that
using a tool can maim you.^178 Not surprising, then, that most working-class white women
don’t aspire to “men’s work.” Instead, they invest more of their identity in family in a
very gendered way. Arlie Hochschild summarized their feelings: “‘I may not be the boss
here, but I have another life where I am’... ‘I may be subordinate here, but I express
myself fully at home.’”^179
The poor quality of child care adds to the allure of stay-at-home motherhood. “For most
working-class families... child care often is patched together in ways that leave parents
anxious and children in jeopardy,” noted a 1994 study that described a family in which
the oldest—age nine—was home alone after school. This mother said wistfully she
wanted to quit but couldn’t, because they needed the money.^180
The problem has only gotten worse since 1994. Remember tag teaming from Chapter 3,
where mom works one shift and dad works a different one? Here’s a typical scenario,
from a family with children ages 9, 2-1/2, and 18 months, where dad is a day laborer, the
mom a janitor. “By the time Manuel comes home from work, I have left for work,” said
Flor. “When I get home around 11:30 p.m., Manuel is asleep. The next morning at 5:00
a.m. when Manuel leaves for work, I am asleep. It doesn’t give us much time together.”
For many working-class families, having mothers in the workforce represents not gender
equality but stress and disruption. Tag-team parents divorce at three to six times the
national rate.^181
For working-class whites, and Latinos like Manuel and Flor, the breadwinner-homemaker
family looks pretty good, not just for practical reasons but also for symbolic ones.
The notion that women belong at home while men went out to work emerged in the
nineteenth century;^182 from the beginning, it was a key way that elites distinguished
themselves from the working class. A man’s ability to support his family signaled his
status. Having a stay-at-home wife became something the working class aspired to. In the
second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. working class attained the breadwinner-
- Is the Working Class Just Sexist?