Surely Marx didn't speak of the "middle class" in a way that Ruth Cowan does:
***** [F]or the purposes of this initial study, deliberately limited myself to one kind of technological change affecting one aspect of family life in only one of the many social classes of families that might have been considered. What happened, I asked, to middleclass American women when the implements with which they did their everyday household work changed? Did the technological change in household appliances have any effect upon the structure of American households, or upon the ideologies that governed the behavior of American women, or upon the functions that families needed to perform? Middleclass American women were defined as actual or potential readers of the betterquality women's magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and McCall's." Nonfictional material (articles and advertisements) in those magazines was used as a partial indicator of some of the technological and social changes that were occurring. (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," available at <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/r_uth.html>) *****
For Marx, the middle class = the bourgeoisie. For Cowan, "middleclass American women were defined as actual or potential readers of the betterquality women's magazines, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and McCall's"!!! As Carrol noted, "it does not hold the same connotation (Mill's use) for almost any two writers or readers," and Marx's usage differs sharply from how the term gets used variously in American common sense.
Yoshie