White working-class people in struggling Rust Belt communities have gotten a great deal of media attention in a partisan context in recent years. But their responses to structural challenges and personal traumas are often not immediately partisan, sociologists Kait Smeraldo Schell and Jennifer Silva show, using interviews with thirty-seven women in a former coal-mining town in Pennsylvania.
While men lost stable jobs and the accompanying status during decades of deindustrialization, women in these communities suffered enormously. The women in this study experienced “financial instability, physical and emotional abuse, family dissolution, infidelity, and the loss of their children,” as well as addiction. This challenged their understanding of themselves within a normative model of femininity in which white women gained stability and access to institutions through marriage to white men.
These women didn’t look to politicians or political action to change their circumstances. While some described the world in politicized terms—for example, criticizing other women in their communities for relying on public assistance—they understood their own struggles in individual terms, using “narratives as strategies for coping with disruption in their lives.”
Three narrative strategies emerged in the interviews, the researchers write, with women “embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering.” Eleven women expected that the strength developed through pain would help them build better lives. But those better lives might once again involve financial dependence on a man despite the catastrophic effects of previous romantic relationships.
One thirty-two-year-old woman experienced violence in one relationship. She had also been “left with nothing” when another boyfriend wouldn’t allow her to work and then ended their relationship.
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“I’m on my awakening, I feel my spiritual awakening,” she told the researchers. “I’ve just been on this journey by myself. I’m whole all by myself, a lot of people aren’t.” But she was also looking to a new relationship to provide financial stability.
Dispelling shame and striving for equality was a strategy used by fourteen women. Some recounted how they shifted their understanding of strength from enduring abuse to leaving their partners.
One woman, who felt that her faith required her to stay with her husband despite infidelity and abuse, ultimately concluded, “God does not want you to be abused or treated in a way that is unacceptable, for any spouse.” The same woman went on to stand up for herself at the welfare office, telling a caseworker, “I will not allow you to treat me like trash.”
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Finally, for sixteen women, there was no redemption narrative except for the one derived by simply enduring suffering. Unlike those who saw growth through pain or dispelled shame, these women didn’t have hope for a better future. To the extent they offered any positive vision of their lives, it was about their sheer ability to survive, to refuse victimhood.
These women’s experiences are founded on many structural factors: gender norms, deindustrialization, and stigmas around receiving public assistance or mental health care. But understanding how they make sense of their lives is an important piece of understanding the interplay of race, class, and gender in US society.
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