The Tolls of Uncertainty

"Nearly one hundred years after the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange's indelible photographs remain vivid in our collective memory as the face of unemployment. Her portraits showed down and out men waiting in breadlines and the desperation of families living through the trauma of job loss. Though evocative, however, these pictures don't look much like today's unemployed. Instead of male laborers in breadlines or relief camps, today we see men and women in equal numbers, manual laborers and high-flying executives, high school graduates alongside those with college degrees. The one truth about unemployment held constant between then and now is the anxiety and disquiet Lange captioned, "The Toll of Uncertainty." Ten years ago, we had our own devastating recession, during which one out of every six workers reported a job loss. The lesson we carried from it into the following decade was that all workers are at heightened risk for job loss and its accompanying uncertainty. Although media outlets dubbed the Great Recession of 2007-2009 a "man-cession" because men's job losses were double women's at first, women experienced greater job loss after the so-called "conclusion" of the recession and recovered jobs at a slower rate than men. Women also appeared to face greater economic consequences of job loss: they were more likely than men to experience hunger and deprivation. These trends bring us to the first puzzle at the heart of this book: do women and men experience job loss and its effects differently? Using in-depth interviews from 100 people from rural and urban counties in Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske investigates how men and women of different classes lose jobs, experience the economic and social ramifications of their unemployment in their own lives and their family life, and begin to search for work again. She argues that many of ways we have thought about unemployment are either incomplete (like the breadline) or just plain wrong"--