Honey, can I have money for a new razor?

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
--Colossians 3:18

In Alabama, many residents rely on the literal words of Scripture to guide their lives and to shape their views of society.  An article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine analyzes the lives of several families in Alexander City, Alabama, revealing how difficult in today's world it's become for the husband to assert his traditional leadership of the family unit.   Wives are becoming the breadwinners.  "Welcome to the new middle-class matriarchy," the author asserts.

I grew up in a small town dominated by several large timber and aluminum based industrial mills.  Men worked at tough, dirty jobs, paid their union dues, and received decent paychecks.  Wives generally -- although not always -- stayed at home, taking care of the house and the kids.  (My own mother worked in what would now be called "data processing," from the time I was 11 or 12.  Her being employed was not considered freakish.  It was, however, atypical.)

Now, those factory and mill jobs are gone.  Unemployment is high.  I haven't kept in touch with my home town, so I don't know the employment statistics.  I suspect, however, that most of the work now available is in the clerical, retail, health care, and education fields.  As the NYT article observes, these are not considered "manly" areas of employment.  And in the South, in particular, a man's ability to be "manly," to be the strong face his family presents to the world, remains critically important.

The men in Alexander City now find themselves floundering around, trying to find jobs in which they can use the skills they learned working for the large textile mill that was once the town's major employer.  The women, on the other hand, have developed new skills and found new kinds of jobs.  Women are being flexible and climbing the economic ladder; the men are unemployed and stagnating.

The NYT article attempts to find reasons for this disparity between the sexes.  One significant factor is that the textile mill had been highly patriarchal.  Men, unlike female employees, were made to feel part of a family, of a structure that provided them a place in the universe; women, handling more mundane clerical tasks, saw their work merely as jobs.  Men, therefore, feel today like children abandoned by their parents.

In addition, Alabama men don't -- according to the article -- consider the jobs most available in the new economy -- in schools, retail stores, hospitals -- to be jobs suitable for "real men."

But I think there's something else going on, something that I don't understand and that needs more research.  The article mentions in passing that among Alexander City teenagers, it's the girls who seem to display ambition and focus.

Around Alex City, she said it seemed that it was the girls who were full of energy and eager to see the world.  Her own brother, Alex, who was 17, seemed to want to stay in town forever and raise his family here.  But Abby was enrolled in Southern Union State Community College, attending on a show-choir scholarship.  Her plan was to go there for a year, as many girls in Alex City do, to save money, and then head to Auburn University.

Perhaps this disparity derives from the teenagers' observations of their parents' lives.  But there have been a number of articles recently about American teens in general -- kids not necessarily influenced by the same blue collar malaise experienced in Alexander City.  In general, it seems to be the girls who have the greater drive to get ahead, to go to college, to get advanced degrees, and to fight their way up the corporate ladder or establish themselves in the professions.  The boys, on the other hand, would rather hang out together with their high school friends, play computer games, and enjoy addictive substances.

An unfair generalization, to be sure.  I can walk across campus any day and observe thousands of male students who clearly defy this stereotype.  But most stereotypes have some basis in fact.  Fifty-eight percent of college undergrads are now female; 47 percent of law school students are women (up from virtually zero 40 years ago), as are 49 percent of medical students.  Even in engineering -- that most macho of the major professions -- 18 percent of the students are female, a percentage that keeps rising.

In a way this is cause for self-congratulation, the disappearance of gender bias from our society.  But the rapid entry of women into formerly male occupations -- in just one generation -- suggests more than a natural result from the collapse of barriers.  To me, at least, it suggests that women are progressing much more quickly than men in adapting to fundamental changes in our economy, that they are showing greater energy and initiative in pursuing the more cerebral and less physical occupations that will provide the job opportunities of the future.  We may, in fact, be seeing something that St. Paul could not in his worst nightmares have envisioned -- development of a matriarchal society.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose.  But it would be good to understand better why.