Abstract
Sennett and Cobb (The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, p. 186) said that “no matter how much he [the working-class individual] knows ‘the system is rotten,’ he has to fight a doubt about himself first to be able unreservedly to fight the world.” Some individuals from my old neighborhood have experienced upward social mobility, while others have not. Some have lived “hard” lives, others have lived “settled” lives. Indeed, some former residents talk about how moving away from the area helped them in their pursuit of the middle-class American Dream. Several of the factors that can account for my own career path from a low-level production assistant in a printing factory to a tenured professor at Queens College (CUNY) will be discussed. In my previous research on social class, I found a tendency for some members of the working class to respond to an assault on their dignity by lashing out at middle-class, white-collar, college-educated workers. Their anger was misdirected; that anger did not improve their station. Today, I argue, those feelings seemed to have spread into another arena—the political. We have been hearing much lately about angry white working-class males (and I would add there also are a significant number of angry white women from the working class) spewing venom at the changing demographics and the lack of well-paying jobs in America, and turning toward certain political candidates such as Donald Trump. Their anger is still misdirected.Worlds of Pain?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsBibliography
Bettie, Julie. 2003. Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. Oakland: University of California Press.
Boylorn, Robin M., and Mark P. Orbe. 2014. Critical Auto-Ethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. San Francisco: Left Coast Press.
Brekhaus, Wayne. 1998. A Sociology of the Unmarked: Redirecting Our Focus. Sociolgical Theory 16(1): 34–51.
Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. 2015. Rising Morbidity and Mortality Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(49): 15078–15083.
Cherlin, Andrew J. 2014. Labor’s Love Lost. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendrin, and Laurence F. Katz. 2016. The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiments. American Economic Review 106(4): 855–902.
Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were. New York: Basic Books.
Donnellan, M. Brent, Kali H. Trzesniewski, Richard W. Robins, Terry E. Moffitt, and Avshalom Caspi. 2005. Low Self-Esteem Is Related to Aggression, Anti-Social Behavior and Delinquency. Psychological Science 16(4): 328–335.
Faludi, Susan. 1999. Stiffed. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Feldman, Kenneth A., and Theodore M. Newcomb. 1969. The Impact of College on Students. Piscataway: Transactional Publishers.
Flynn, Gerald. 2014. Is East New York the Next Bushwick? Gothamist, July 22.
Gaines, Donna. 1998. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead-End Kids. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gest, Justin. 2016. The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gorman, Thomas J. 1998a. Paths to Success: The Meaning of Schooling to Working-Class and Middle-Class Parents. Educational Foundations 12(3): 35–54.
———. 1998b. Social Class and Parental Attitudes Education: Resistance and Conformity to Schooling in the Family. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 27(1): 10–44.
Gould, Elise. 2012. U.S. Lags Behind Peer Countries in Mobility. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
Halle, David. 1984. America’s Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Howell, Joseph T. 1973. Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue-Collar Families. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Hunter, Albert. 1974. Symbolic Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Robert P. 2016. The End of White Christian America. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kelly, Barbara, ed. 1990. Long Island: The Suburban Experience. Interlaken: Heart of the Lakes Publishing.
Kenny, Lorraine Delia. 2000. Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Kimmel, Michael. 2013. Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books.
Kluger, Jeffrey. 2011. The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. New York: Riverhead Books.
Lamont, Michele. 2000. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Lareau, Annette. 1989. Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education. New York: The Falmer Press.
———. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pasek, John, Jon A. Kronsnick, Trevor Tompson, Tobias H. Stark, and B. Keith Payne. 2014. Attitiudes Towards Blacks in the Obama Era: Changing Distributions and Impacts on Job Approval and Electoral Choice, 2008–2012. Public Opinion Quarterly 78: 276–302.
Peterson, Richard R. 1996. A Reevaluation of the Consequences of Divorce. American Sociological Review 61(3): 528–536.
Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
———. 2016. Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few. New York: Vintage.
Rose, Joel. 2013. Does Crime Drop When Immigrants Move In? All Things Considered. NPR.
Rubin, Lilian. 1976. Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1994. Families on the Faultline: America’s Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race and Ethnicity. New York: Harper.
Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silver, Nate. 2016. The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support. FiveThirtyEight.
Steedman, Carolyn Kay. 1986. A Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Steglitz, Joseph E. 2013. The Price of Inequality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Suttles, Gerald. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tea, Michelle, ed. 2003. Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Emeryville: Seal Press.
Vance, J.D. 2016. Hilbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture. New York: Harper.
Willis, Paul. 1981. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. Aldershot: Gower.
Wynne, Edward. 1977. Growing Up Suburban. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gorman, T.J. (2017). Conclusion: Hard and Settled Living and The Development of Angry (And Not So Angry) White Working-Class Men and Women. In: Growing up Working Class. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58898-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58898-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58897-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58898-8
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)