when I was growing up, every woman in my life tried to teach me that I should look for a man who had a decent job and who didn't sit on a barstool all night. don't look for love or romance because, well, they were what my aunt called them: drive-by romancers who got a thrill out of the chase, but as the wasband said when I asked why we never went out anymore, "that's because I gotcha." :)
a good job for the women in my life meant these men obtained lower-middle strata jobs (solid factory work (in an anti-union town), ass mgr at a fast food restaurant, auto mechanics, etc.).
In her study of the "second shift" of housework women do, Arlie Hochschild showed how both men and women assessed their position in the war over housework. Women knew that, while they might bring a great job and salary to the table, that their chances in the marriage market were dim -- or they thought they knew that. So, they put up with more stuff than they otherwise might. And they knew it. Men, similarly, believed that they had more power in the respect. This study was done in the 80s and I think things have changed a bit, but it does show that people make these kinds of assessments in their lives.
Similarly, but in contrast to working strate upbring, the poor white women and women of color in by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas's _Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage_ make the _choice_ to have children as single mothers. Contrary to popular belief, it's not because they can't find marriage partners. It's that they want only the best in a marriage partner, unwilling to trade their independence for a man who has cheated on them, hit them, does drugs, doesn't want a stable family life, drinks too much, etc. they uphold the isntitution of marriage in its most ideal form. (Which is also what the young men in _Ain't No Makin' It_ do. The kids who stick their nose tot he grindstone, the young black men, do so because they utterly believe in the American Dream. They believe that if they work hard, they can get out of the projects. This belief, Jay MacLeod shoes, is undergirded by their beliefs about affirmative action, gains in the civil rights movement, and their hope and desire that racism is eroding in American life. The poor white kids have no such belief in that dream and, consequently, do not study hard, make fun of schooling and people who take it seriously, drop out of high school and definitely have no interest in college.
The contrast between what I was told and what these women end up believing has a lot to do with the fact that they have a social support system that working strat whites do not. That social support system was most famously studied by Carol Stack in _all Our Kin_ where she showed how poor and working strat blacks created a social support system to sustain one another under conditions of poverty and economic hardship. .e.g, if you made good somehow or if you won some smallamount of money, your relatives would expect your to help them. The idea is that you help others and if you're in need, they will help you down the road. As Stack explained, if you adhere to the normative expectations of the community, you often can't "make it" because you end up giving everyone money, letting them stay at your house stressing out your life, etc. (A friend did a study of black women in graduate school and found the same: the stresses on their life were partly due to family members who would constantly tug at them as they tried to climb the ladder of success.)
Anyway, the short of it is, and not that Andy was doing this, but as an answer to Matthias who thinks I'm a dumbass, clearly :). These are examples of how you cannot extricate socioeconomic status from race from gender from ethnicity from sexuality from disability from everything else ( Which is what Michaels insists on -- precisely because his theory makes no room for analyses such as this. These "cultural" differences are distractions for him and, not onlyl that, thnking in terms of culture is exported to class and it's completely inappropriate to do so because then you end up supporting neoliberalism. voila!
shag