kelley at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
>
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> IME, it's that most of the working class guys I've known grew up in
> single-mom homes. They saw their mothers struggle _and_ invariably had to
> help out around the house.
As in the case of psychoanalysis,* this raises a topic that apparently cannot be fruitfully discussed on a maillist, but also as in the case of psychoanalysis I think it worthwhile to occasionally post a memo to the existence of a debate.
The working class constitutes somewhere between 85% & 90% of the population. In so far as there are variations in culture within the population there are nearly the same variations of culture within the working class. Hence comments on "culture" _or_ on "personal experience" are intrinsically counter-productive from a progressive viewpoint, since the tendency of such comments is to divide the working class against itself in theory and hence contribute to its fragmentation in practice.
Unless Kelley knows a large number of big bourgeoisie and petty producers, I would be surprised if most the people she knows (and here "people" and "working class," given the "unless," are synonyms) come from families with single moms.
That said, Kelley's remark (if it were applied to a _sector_ of the working class rather than "working class guys") probably points to the experience of many people, and NOT just those who came from families of "single moms." Since my father (because of TB) was unable to work during the years I was growing up, I come from a two-parent family in which the income came from the mother not the father, and in which (when he was not in the San) my father did a lot of cooking and cleaning. (He was a skilled cook, having earned his way through two years of college cooking in a restaurant.)
Carrol
*The reference is to a thread on the Pen-l list.