Charles started out at Avondale Mills, in Pell City, Ala., hauling 80-pound rolls of cotton as a teenager; Avondale paid for him to attend nearby Auburn University to study textiles and engineering. He eventually moved to Russell, and for 23 years, Charles rose up the ranks at the plant, becoming a manager in the dyeing-and-finishing department and later head of national sales for the fabrics division. He sent three children to college and built a much-admired house on the lake. Even now, he carries the air of a comfortable patriarch; he is trim, with white hair and clear blue eyes. At church he looks as if he is about to go golfing, in khakis and a button-down shirt. He is usually self-deprecating, so he doesn’t quite put it this way, but it’s clear that he experienced his time at Russell as his glory days, when as the head of sales, he took trips to New York and stayed at the company’s Midtown apartment and saw Broadway plays and ate delicious rolls that don’t quite compare with the crumbly corn bread served at church suppers.

About 10 years ago Charles said he began to feel as if “I was on a horse that wasn’t going to make it. So do you just push the horse and hope for the best or get off?” Russell was no longer the place he had known. The company was hiring more women in managerial jobs, and while he had no problem with that in general, he said that some of these women hadn’t started out hauling cotton as he had and didn’t know the business from the ground up. But the company felt pressure to hire them, Charles told me, “to keep up with the times.” Russell was also shutting down plants, and Charles knew his position couldn’t last much longer. At one point he was offered a job running one of Russell’s local plants, but he declined. He was 45 at the time, young enough, he thought, to start over.

Unlike Patsy Prater, Sarah Beth has always worked. “If I had to sit at home, I would lose my mind,” she told me one morning as we talked in her office. Sarah Beth started as a nurse on the third shift at what was then just a small-town hospital. To the family, her salary was “fun money.” She would use it to shop for herself and, if the children complained about her working overtime, she would give them a choice: she could work less or pay for a family ski vacation.

As the hospital grew, Sarah Beth rose steadily up the ranks. In 2003, when Charles finally decided to quit, Sarah Beth had already been promoted into management, so he thought she could support them until he found his footing. Charles was always pretty handy, so he considered starting a construction company, even though he had never run a business. Working with trucks and piles of wood was a “humbling experience,” especially after having been a head of national sales. He said that he knew he would be competing with men who were in the business a long time or with younger men who once worked for him. When he had his broody moments, Sarah Beth said she would tell him: “Build a bridge and get over it. Don’t just sit and whine and carry on.” He finally started the business in 2004 and for a time it was “mildly successful,” but then the housing crisis hit in 2008 and construction work largely dried up.

Sarah Beth, meanwhile, was moving up the institutional ladder the way Charles once had, advancing from nurse manager of the medical-surgical unit to vice president in charge of patient services. She now spends her days in an office sandwiched between the chief executive and the chief financial officer of the hospital. She has a secretary and an endless series of meetings and conferences across the country. Her salary is now the money that the family relies on to pay the mortgage and the basic household expenses. One Wednesday evening I was tiptoeing my way toward asking Charles how he felt about his wife’s achievements — nervous that I might wound his pride — when he said: “I know what you’re asking. How does it feel to go from being the major breadwinner to the secondary breadwinner?”

He told me: “It used to bug me, but now I’ve gotten used to it.” What helped was realizing that he wasn’t alone in this upside down world he was living in. Shortly after he left Russell, Charles called the unemployment office in Montgomery to ask a question. The voice on the phone sounded familiar, and after a few minutes he realized he was talking to a woman who had worked with him at Russell. She transferred him to her supervisor, who turned out to be another woman who had worked with him. “You’re gonna laugh at this,” Charles told me, “but it was harder on the men than the women. It seems like their skills were more, what’s the word, transferable? I was born in the South, where the men take care of their women. Suddenly, it’s us who are relying on the women. Suddenly, we got the women in control.”