Hanna Rosin's new book, "The End of Men," published earlier this month by Riverhead Books, has drawn significant attention for its provocative title and chapters on middle- and lower-class white America—where many women are replacing their husbands as the primary breadwinners and shaking up the conservative Christian notion of "head of the household."

Contrary to the book's title, Ms. Rosin's chapters based on interviews in Silicon Valley, Yale and an un-named Ivy league business school portray an upper-class world where women are gaining ground but men are not obsolete. Yet any decidedly positive message to be gained from this is quashed by the effects of the true "end of men" in regions of the country where off-shoring of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and massive blue-collar layoffs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have hit male-dominated industries the hardest, triggering a dramatic shift to matriarchal societies not unlike that of black communities in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Wall Street Journal discussed these issues with Ms. Rosin in a lengthy interview, an edited transcript of which is below.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Your book lays out how women are dominating America's workplaces and colleges. They've earned 60 percent of the nation's bachelor's degrees and don't occupy blue-collar industries that have been damaged by the economic crisis. Yet the phrase you use repeatedly isn't "women's liberation," but rather "ambiguous independence."

HANNA ROSIN: This [book] is not a feminist manifesto at all. That's something people misunderstand. It's not unambiguously cheerleading. I think some things about it are really great and some are not that great. It just "is." I'm just marking a moment in human development.

WSJ: You have a chapter on women at the top of the workforce pyramid--the CEOs and the executives. You place a huge emphasis on Silicon Valley's strategies for ensuring its female talent can balance children and work, including those of Marissa Mayer for her Google employees. The book went to press before Ms. Mayer moved to Yahoo from Google and announced her pregnancy. What would you have written about the media and public reaction to the appointment of a pregnant CEO?

HANNA ROSIN: Realistically, we're in a transition moment where people are uncomfortable with women in power and--without articulating it--think there are impassable difficulties with a woman having this job. So there's this great silence surrounding it. This model of a woman who was hired while visibly pregnant and speaks about not wanting to take maternity leave struck me as really good, because I think it's just unrealistic to say, "It's all completely fine, anyone would hire a CEO who is visibly pregnant." That's just not true--yet. We need to air these things, to normalize the idea that someone could get hired to such an important job: to be the CEO while actually pregnant, as opposed to 'just' having children.

WSJ: You write about how elite career women wield this incredible leverage: At Google, former executive Sukhinder Singh Cassidy negotiated with then-CEO Eric Schmidt to have her nanny and daughter travel international business class with her, for example. But in your chapter on middle America, you recall seeing a single mother falling asleep in an elevator while taking night classes after work. Is "the end of men" more negative for the lower-middle class?

HANNA ROSIN: It's always better for women at the top. They always have more choices, because they have more money. The issues for women at the top is that they keep taking on new roles without shedding old roles. [The Silicon Valley model shows] the only way for women to be that incredibly ambitious and still be somewhat of a presence in their children's lives is to create a situation of flexibility. But it is very exhausting. They're less serious [issues] than the set of issues in the middle class and below, which is that men are largely dropping out of the picture. The problem with the middle on down is that people aren't getting married anymore, and men are truly moving into obsolescence in terms of their role in the family unit. The women are less vulnerable and dependent on men [but] they're doing everything. It's better than being trapped in an abusive relationship, but it's not great. That's what I meant by "ambiguous independence."

WSJ: Silicon Valley is a newer West Coast world of elite professionals compared to the old school territory of East Coast business schools and Wall Street trading floors. When the women you interviewed on Wall Street and at an unnamed Ivy League B-School heard raunchy jokes or men swapping sex stories before morning meetings, their response was "not to call in the lawyers" or even ignore it, but to join in. What motivated them and how did it help their careers?

HANNA ROSIN: There's actually a lot of theater and bravado about it. We're in a raunchy moment for movies, too. We've had a lot of trash-talking raunchy women in movies. I got the feeling that these women were doing it to prove a point more than because it came completely naturally or was what they wanted to do. It was a way of showing that they could compete on that turf, not be intimidated, but that among themselves it's not how they would talk. They would do it in the public theater to prove that they could be as aggressive as men; that the men couldn't shut them out of any meeting or room by trash talking and making them uncomfortable.

WSJ: But you wrote that the women still hit a wall: they could use this bravado to earn respect, but if they acted too aggressively, especially when in positions of power or conflict, they risked being branded as "bitches." In arguing that women find "meeting the stereotype halfway" to be the best negotiating tactic, it seems you're concluding women can get the power men have, but have to work harder to avoid ruffling feathers.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes, it's incredibly annoying! We had an era where "Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office" (a 2004 book by Lois P. Frankel). Why couldn't we have stayed in that world? But it turns out...we're not ready for that phase. It is a capitulation, but I like to think of it as a transition moment. I'm trying to put the best spin on it here, but since it's about putting your needs in line with the needs of the company, it's not so offensive to me and it might be something women can pull off naturally and not feel like they're betraying themselves.

WSJ: Moving down the social ladder to the solidly middle class, you reported on Alexander City, Alabama, where Russell Corporation, an athletic wear producer, once employed half the town. This is where readers begin to see the "end of men." The former factory workers and younger generation of men are unemployed, while their wives—many also former factory workers—have adapted to new jobs and become the breadwinners. How did they reconcile that with their conservative Christianity?

HANNA ROSIN: The women in their 40s and 50s had grown up expecting the men to be the heads of the households in the very traditional way that that is defined--meaning the man is the breadwinner. But now that these women are finding themselves to be the breadwinners, they're trying to reconcile this with what they believed all their lives. I could see them trying to rework the definition of "head of household" so they could preserve it, but so it had a different meaning. I asked them "What does it mean for him to be the head of the household if he's not making more money?" What they've done in Alabama is disconnect the term "head of the household" with "breadwinner." He's still the spiritual head of the household, he's the head of the household if there's an emergency. That's what I hear a lot now is that the man is a kind of domestic superhero-protector. If there's a fire, or an apocalypse in some cases, then you'd understand what men are for.

WSJ: And the younger conservative girls?

HANNA ROSIN: When I was in Alabama, I went to high school girls' Sunday school classes and they would hold hands, walk in a circle and say, "The man is the head of the household. He will treat me like a princess." That's what they were saying, these 19-year-old girls. It would come to discussion time and these two things I remember so clearly: the teacher was asking them, "You're going off to college, what's going to be your greatest earthly temptation?" and you're expecting some frank talk about the hookup culture here but a girl would say "My greatest earthly temptation is going to be my tendency to want to earn too many degrees."…These younger girls can parrot the Biblical line, but they're living a totally different existence. So who knows what's going to happen ten years down the road when they're actually married and actually making more money than their husbands? Will they totally lose their faith? Probably not. They'll just reconcile in a more explicit way.

WSJ: In describing factors that go into women choosing to have hookups in college rather than relationships, you don't discuss religion as a mitigating factor: a woman avoiding a hook up, not because it isn't socially acceptable, but simply because she views it as immoral. Why didn't you explore that?

HANNA ROSIN: I don't know. That's a good question. I actually didn't think about it.

WSJ: Your subtitle is "And the Rise of Women." But it could as easily have been "And the Rise of Permanent Boyhood." Not at Yale, but at the state schools and community colleges you described, female students outnumber male students, and one woman at the University of Missouri-Kansas City described her fiancé as being in this immature state of perpetually changing majors and horsing around. But she made no mention of not marrying him…

HANNA ROSIN: These women were talking about their future husbands like they were another child in the house. That they would have to give them a pass in life, hold their hand, take them to the development office. These were sorority girls. I was just picking your straightforward UMKC girl in the cafeteria. So it was surprising to hear them talk about boys that way. In that particular demographic in a state school like that, what you're getting is a lot of women who are the first generation in their family going to college.

...This is where you get the most divergence between men and women. Not at the top and not at the bottom, but in that middle space. Women are climbing up and men not so much. The boys around them aren't doing as well in school, they're much more likely to drop out…There's this defeatist attitude. The way one guy put it in my book was that "Our team is losing."

WSJ: As empowering as it is, in a way, to see women "doing everything" and succeeding, does the "end of men" have the power to destabilize societies in the poorer and middle-classes?

HANNA ROSIN: That's what we've already seen with urban black America. When William Julius Wilson wrote the book "When Work Disappears" [in 1996], he was describing a world in which the urban, manufacturing economy collapses, people loose their jobs and basically the civil society comes apart. We've already been down this road, and I think it would be safe to say that the inner-city, African-American culture is a matriarchy. In the sense that social welfare flows to mothers, mothers get housing vouchers…In a sense, that's our first American matriarchy we've been working through the past forty years. You have a Latino version of that now, a white version of that now. So yes, it does have the potential to destabilize society as we've already seen happen once. Part of my hope here is that people open their eyes to that and put a stop to it.