From the issue dated January 25, 2002
POINT OF VIEW
Why Academics Don't Study the Lower Middle Class By RITA FELSKI
We need new ways of talking about class. The common belief that everyone in America is middle class makes no sense in a country that boasts some of the largest income disparities in the Western world. The Marxist model of class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, still popular among some academics, simply fails to come to grips with how people experience and make sense of class.
In the United States, class identities and affiliations cannot be divided up so neatly. People of modest means aspire to an upper-middle-class lifestyle; wealthy professionals feel virtuous by eating the food of Tuscan peasants. Millionaires shop at Wal-Mart. Poverty-stricken adjuncts brim with education and erudition. Everyone shops at the Gap. In short, we see what looks like a postmodern jumbling of the signs of class. Yet what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb once called the "hidden injuries of class" may be more entrenched than ever.
For expatriate British people such as myself, the American language of class can be especially hard to decipher. Once, soon after I had arrived in this country, a student who had dropped by my office mentioned that she came from a middle-class background. Having grown up in a country with a very different way of talking about class, I took this to mean that her parents were members of the haute bourgeoisie, lolling about in overstuffed armchairs while their wage slaves toiled on the factory floor. In fact, by describing herself as middle class, she was telling me that she came from modest circumstances. I thought that she was confessing her privilege, while actually she was emphasizing her ordinariness.
I found myself having to learn a new language of class. This was not a matter of learning new words, of remembering to say "gas" instead of "petrol" or "hard candy" instead of "boiled sweet." Rather, what seemed to be words I already knew turned out to mean something very different. "Middle class," for example, teems with contradictions. It is supposed to conjure up an image of the average working person or family struggling to get by. Yet the category also seems to include pretty much everybody except Donald Trump and Bill Gates. By describing themselves as middle class, poor people can persuade themselves that they have made it. By doing the same, rich people can convince themselves that they are not especially privileged. "Middle class" is a strange term in American life. It simultaneously conveys success and modesty, achievement and ordinariness. It seems specific yet is infinitely elastic.
That elasticity was brought home to me when a journalist called to discuss my book on the lower middle class, which he confessed he hadn't read. (He was half right: I hadn't written such a book, and he hadn't read it.) We talked for a while about why the lower middle class is so often ignored by marketers as well as scholars. As we chatted away, it gradually dawned on me that we were not on the same wavelength. When I asked my interviewer to clarify whom he was talking about, he told me that by "lower middle class" he meant the "working poor." I was taken aback. In that case, I asked him, what were the differences between the working class and the lower middle class? There weren't any, he assured me, but the term "working class" was now "obsolete."
I find a similar resistance to the "w" term among my students. Highly savvy about issues of gender and race, able to expound fluently on the latest ideas in anti-essentialist feminism and postcolonial hybridity, they often flounder and fumble when faced with the most basic class categories. For example, in one recent seminar, we discussed the new interest of 19th-century writers in describing the lives of working-class people. My students could barely utter the phrase "working class." Their lips seemed unable to form those two words. Were they unfamiliar with the term? Or did they perceive it as negatively charged and hence politically incorrect? Sometimes, they would simply replace "working class" with "middle class," a substitution that made no sense in the context of the period we were talking about. Or there would be a perceptible pause as they cast about for an appropriate term and finally came up with "lower class." To their ears, that phrase was somehow more acceptable, although I winced every time I heard it. Unlike some of my students, I do not believe that everyone in America is middle class. At the same time, much of what passes as class analysis among academics strikes me as formulaic and unimaginative. There has been a lot of talk lately in literary and cultural studies about the need to return to class. Race and gender have become hot topics in recent years, and as a result, the argument goes, class has been placed on the back burner, treated in only the most token and perfunctory ways. Scholars are being urged to start thinking more seriously about economic resources, the distribution of wealth, class privilege, and class disenfranchisement.
I have some sympathy with that argument. But it is striking that class, in those debates, usually means the working class, the only class that is deemed worthy of serious consideration. Apart from a handful of sociologists, no one pays any attention to the very different experiences, attitudes, and economic resources within the middle class itself. Often the middle class is simply assumed, in some vague way, to stand for elitism, luxury, and privilege. If the American media like to airbrush away class difference by portraying everyone as middle class, left-wing academics often exaggerate class difference by conjuring up images of heroic workers being crushed under the boot of a rapacious bourgeoisie. Not only is such a picture misleading, but it makes it difficult to gain any real sense of the many gradations and nuances of how people live, feel, and breathe class distinctions.
I recently wrote a paper on the lower middle class. It is a topic that interests me for a number of reasons. First of all, it is the class that intellectuals love to hate, that is blamed for everything from bad taste to the rise of Hitler. Ridiculed by conservatives as vulgar and déclassé, attacked by progressives as hidebound and reactionary, the lower middle class can do nothing right. I soon realized that there was a strong and persistent animus toward the lower middle class throughout the history of modern thought. That animus stretches all the way from Marx and Engels's complaint that the petit bourgeoisie are reactionary, because they try to roll back the wheel of history, to smirking references to suburban clerks and shopgirls in the works of writers such as Eliot, Woolf, and Forster, to the routine use of "petit bourgeois" as the ultimate put-down when I was in graduate school. Why, I wondered, do intellectuals hate the lower middle class so much?
A second reason for my interest, I confess, is my own lower-middle-class origins. Having traded up to an upper-middle-class lifestyle as a university professor, I sometimes feel that I have landed on a strange planet. I can testify that there are vast differences of culture, attitude, and, yes, money within the middle class. In fact, the culture of class among faculty members at elite American universities sometimes strikes me as more homogeneous than at the Cambridge of my student years, which did leave room for the occasional eccentric, misfit, or scholarship boy (more rarely, alas, the scholarship girl). Or perhaps Americans are just much better at blending in, covering over their class origins, sloughing off the skins of past selves. In any case, I became ever more interested in pondering the tensions, hostilities, and misunderstandings between the lower and upper middle classes.
Of course, the lower middle class is not a clear-cut category. What does it include? Shop owners? Bank clerks? Office workers? Secretarial staff members? Technicians? Teachers? Different people draw the boundary in different places. But sociologists often argue that the lower middle class, defined as skilled and semi-skilled white-collar workers, is the largest class sector in American life. Those people usually see themselves, and are seen by others, as middle class. But they have less money, education, and status than the doctors, lawyers, and upper-level managers who make up what is often called the professional-managerial class.
When I was growing up in England, in the 1960s, it was easy enough to tell which neighborhoods were lower middle class. They were the ones with modest homes that exuded an aura of respectability, hard work, cleanliness, and profound suspicion of anything even remotely eccentric or avant-garde. Nowadays, lower-middle-class culture is much less cohesive than it used to be. But what defines the lower middle class is its in-between status. Its members see themselves as being a cut above the working class, as striving to better themselves and to work their way up. Yet those aspirations are often mocked by those higher up the social ladder, who like to look down at the lower middle class's lack of culture and sophistication.
I have received some fascinating responses to my paper on the lower middle class from people who said they knew exactly what I was talking about. Evidently, the paper hit a nerve. Academics from lower-middle-class backgrounds wrote to me about working in an environment where not just their colleagues but their students have more money than they do. They described their feelings of shame about their origins, their inability to join in casual workplace conversations about expensive restaurants and trips abroad.
They talked eloquently about their sense of awkwardness and dislocation. In a country that flaunts public disclosure of every kind of dysfunctionality, the last taboo is admitting that you don't have much money. The lack of a public language of class renders certain lives and experiences invisible. I suspect that the lower middle class will never be a fashionable identity. In the humanities nowadays, the language of subversion and transgression is all the rage; everyone, it seems, wants to be aligned with the margins, to bask in the reflected glow of outlaws, outsiders, and the oppressed. The lower middle class is too mainstream and respectable, its values too mundane. Most of its members worry about keeping their heads above water rather than subverting the system. And yet the lower middle class is vital to understanding the beliefs, values, and experiences of ordinary individuals. It has much to tell us about how class is lived in contemporary America.
Rita Felski is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book is Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York University Press, 2000).