What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor ...daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner's job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts--especially texts by black women. A working-class Jew...ish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them serio...usly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency--indeed, 1992 wa...s the Year of the White Middle Class Woman--but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels abo...ut a bad man turned good by a tractor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reac...hed out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as... well as badly dressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wearing overalls on weekdays, painting somebody else's house to earn money? You're working class. Wearing overalls at weekends, pa...inting your own house to save money? You're middle class.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 »
Nothing in medieval dress distinguished the child from the adult. In the seventeenth century, however, the child, or at least the ...child of quality, whether noble or middle-class, ceased to be dressed like the grown-up. This is the essential point: henceforth he had an outfit reserved for his age group, which set him apart from the adults. These can be seen from the first glance at any of the numerous child portraits painted at the beginning of the seventeenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »