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faryewing's review
2.0
Read, up to a point, and abandoned to return to library as it was overdue. "Real" review later, perhaps.
bootman's review
5.0
Barbara Ehrenreich continues to be one of my favorite authors of all time. The way she’s able to write about the economic divides and class struggles in the United States is just pure perfection. Once again, I’m absolutely blown away that a book this old is so relevant and the fact that we’ve learned nothing over the decades. This book primarily focuses on the widening wealth gap but within the middle class.
I’m usually not a fan of learning about history, but Ehrenreich managed to keep me engaged and she discussed the differences between the baby boomers, hippies, yuppies and what happened with various groups during different decades. It made sense with how collect education changed, how women joining the work force changed things, how different bills changed things and much more.
I highly recommend this book as well as everything else Barbara has written. I still have more of her books to read, and I’m going to start another one soon.
I’m usually not a fan of learning about history, but Ehrenreich managed to keep me engaged and she discussed the differences between the baby boomers, hippies, yuppies and what happened with various groups during different decades. It made sense with how collect education changed, how women joining the work force changed things, how different bills changed things and much more.
I highly recommend this book as well as everything else Barbara has written. I still have more of her books to read, and I’m going to start another one soon.
nick_jenkins's review
Ehrenreich shifts her analysis and her judgment of the professional middle class around depending on the political point she wishes to make.
The most significant oscillation is over whether the professional middle class is or is not an elite. At times--when she wishes to emphasize the structural and self-imposed barriers that the pmc places between itself and the working class--she stresses not just their elitism or snobbery but their actual power and the ways they use it to control and often pester the working class and the poor. And when she argues that, in the wake of the "discovery" of the working class in the late 1960s, the pmc began to think of itself as disconnected and different from the majority of "Middle Americans," she reads this straightforwardly as the pmc reimagining itself as an elite.
Yet on the other hand, she scoffs at neoconservatives' "New Class" theory, which is not very different in import. Ehrenreich allows that the pmc may have more altruistic intentions (or at least is less conniving and coordinated than the conspiracist New Class theory asserts), and she is (reasonably) skeptical that the pmc/New Class is in any way hostile to capitalism. In other words, she sees the pmc not as an "adversary culture" but as important enough to and embedded enough within capitalism to have a substantial base of power that can give it the quality of an elite. (Interestingly, however, she does speculate that the pmc might split into two, with one slice ascending to something close to ruling class status and the majority sinking into expendable white-collar drudgery.)
The reason for this oscillation, I think, is that Ehrenreich inhabits the point of view of both the working class and the pmc at different points throughout the book. At some moments, she speaks forthrightly as a member of the pmc, but at other moments, she is explaining to the reader (presumed to also be a member of the pmc) how the working class views the pmc--in other words, she is speaking for the working class, channeling their point of view. The shifts from one point of view to the other are not always well marked, and in some instances Ehrenreich also takes an objective tone to describing and evaluating the pmc that puts her outside of any class in particular. For instance, when she critiques the pmc for its consumerism, she clearly is not speaking as someone who feels pulled in the same direction, who can deliver firsthand testimony. Yet that critique of the pmc's consumption habits is not really coming out of the working class either.
This unsteadiness of tone and Ehrenreich's frequent simplifications of the history of the professional middle class's formation made the book a frustrating and inconsistent read for me. There is much to draw on--especially so for a 30-year-old book!--but also much to question and to try to sharpen analytically and conceptually. Throughout the book, the pmc remains far less solid a category than other concepts Ehrenreich deploys much more confidently--liberalism, neoconservatism, yuppies, the student movement, even the working class. At the end of the book, the pmc still seems more like a mood or a mindset than a social category, leaving much work to be done to make the term historically more useful.
The most significant oscillation is over whether the professional middle class is or is not an elite. At times--when she wishes to emphasize the structural and self-imposed barriers that the pmc places between itself and the working class--she stresses not just their elitism or snobbery but their actual power and the ways they use it to control and often pester the working class and the poor. And when she argues that, in the wake of the "discovery" of the working class in the late 1960s, the pmc began to think of itself as disconnected and different from the majority of "Middle Americans," she reads this straightforwardly as the pmc reimagining itself as an elite.
Yet on the other hand, she scoffs at neoconservatives' "New Class" theory, which is not very different in import. Ehrenreich allows that the pmc may have more altruistic intentions (or at least is less conniving and coordinated than the conspiracist New Class theory asserts), and she is (reasonably) skeptical that the pmc/New Class is in any way hostile to capitalism. In other words, she sees the pmc not as an "adversary culture" but as important enough to and embedded enough within capitalism to have a substantial base of power that can give it the quality of an elite. (Interestingly, however, she does speculate that the pmc might split into two, with one slice ascending to something close to ruling class status and the majority sinking into expendable white-collar drudgery.)
The reason for this oscillation, I think, is that Ehrenreich inhabits the point of view of both the working class and the pmc at different points throughout the book. At some moments, she speaks forthrightly as a member of the pmc, but at other moments, she is explaining to the reader (presumed to also be a member of the pmc) how the working class views the pmc--in other words, she is speaking for the working class, channeling their point of view. The shifts from one point of view to the other are not always well marked, and in some instances Ehrenreich also takes an objective tone to describing and evaluating the pmc that puts her outside of any class in particular. For instance, when she critiques the pmc for its consumerism, she clearly is not speaking as someone who feels pulled in the same direction, who can deliver firsthand testimony. Yet that critique of the pmc's consumption habits is not really coming out of the working class either.
This unsteadiness of tone and Ehrenreich's frequent simplifications of the history of the professional middle class's formation made the book a frustrating and inconsistent read for me. There is much to draw on--especially so for a 30-year-old book!--but also much to question and to try to sharpen analytically and conceptually. Throughout the book, the pmc remains far less solid a category than other concepts Ehrenreich deploys much more confidently--liberalism, neoconservatism, yuppies, the student movement, even the working class. At the end of the book, the pmc still seems more like a mood or a mindset than a social category, leaving much work to be done to make the term historically more useful.