The Miss America contest is ... the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for...: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, b...ourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seei...ng the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the mid...dle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Antifashion, a recurrent theme in the history of dress, was probably first taken up as a sign of status by the nobility, perhaps o...riginally out of necessity. Impoverished, threadbare noblemen could take pride in their lack of style while middle-class upstarts were deeply considering the cut of their coats. This strain in aristocratic style persists. The essential presumptuousness of fashion--its constant pushiness, its middle-class mobility--is one of the things that make people hate and fear it, especially very radical and conservative people. The constant dress-reform movements of the nineteenth century in England and America were attempts, in different modes, to resist and even to abolish fashion.... If elaborate fashion was the outward sign of bourgeois prosperity, antifashion had to be invented as a necessary means of indicating objections to existing social, economic, and sexual standards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is the world's policeman, all right--a big, dumb, mick flatfoot in the middle of the one thing cops dread most, a "domesti...c disturbance."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My name is Frankenstein, I'll admit. But it's a large family, you know, remarkable since the middle ages for productivity. There a...re offshoots everywhere. Even in America, I'm told.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of civilization.... It is but a few years since Bouchette decla...red that the country ten leagues north of the British capital of North America was as little known as the middle of Africa. Thus the citadel under my feet, and all historical associations, were swept away again by an influence from the wilds and from Nature, as if the beholder had read her history,--an influence which, like the Great River itself, flowed from the Arctic fastnesses and Western forests with irresistible tide over all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, betwe...en the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »