Ehrenreich believes the rise of professionalism was, and remains, perhaps the greatest of all generators of middle-class insecurity. The creation of “the professions” was designed as much to keep people out as to let them in, with each generation forced to fight for admission to the club. Unlike the truly wealthy who could guarantee that their children would also be wealthy, a lawyer could not guarantee that his or her child would be a lawyer, or even wind up a member of the professional class. Through professionalization, Ehrenreich points out, the middle class sought to gain purchase in an increasingly uncertain world. But they soon learned that the barriers erected to exclude intruders from other classes also stood in the way of the youth of the middle class. The barriers ensured that only the hardworking and the self-denying would make it — and not even all of them.
Here is the whole review of Fear of Falling. I have always wanted to read this book and have not. Today I will acquire it, trying the library first and after that, amazon.com.
I have just finished rereading Mário de Andrade’s avant-garde novel Macunaíma, technically for work reasons. I read the English translation because that is what I will be teaching. This made the reading experience exotic, like a vacation. The novel is brilliant.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Hmm. As always, you provide food for thought. My grandfather was a middle class professional, a graduate of Cornell and an accountant who had a secure civil service job. My husband’s grandfathers were both middle class professionals, one a college professor and the other a high school teacher. They were educated in the land grant colleges. Any man who was a college graduate and white was guaranteed middle class standing and did not have to struggle.
I remember telling the highly privileged– I would say upper class– uncle of my husband some home truths about the college where he had been the dean of students for 30 years. He did not believe me; since he had had such an easy time getting a doctorate and a pleasant, prestigious job, and eventually even a library named after him, how could others be having all those troubles? It must be their fault!
I can’t emphasize enough how little effort these men had to make in order to live well, have property and subservient wives and children: they took their privileges for granted.
Hattie talks sense. Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Oxford and Cambridge, the various Cabinets, high ranking civil servants, senior armed service officers, High Court Judges, and the like, testify to the perpetuation of middle class privilege in the UK rather than insecurity. Insecurity is a feature of working class existence, even now.
According to Ehrenreich the logic of capitalism just keeps marching on, it seems. I don’t get a deeper message from the link you provided than that.
And/but there are all those characters freaking out over money in Austen; there’s Charles Bovary in Madame Bovary and Dr. Lydgate in Middlemarch, and then everyone in P.G.’s Miau, all of whom fear falling, some for good reason. And when in the 70’s or so (?) they started letting minorities and women into the professions in larger numbers, it was never with that assurance.
Exactly. So the insecurity is very familiar to us. We are not surprised at how difficult it is to get our due. Or shouldn’t be. The professional privileges we dream of were never extended to more than a few in the past.
Jennifer: Ehrenreich is no-nonsense, pragmatic, very American and a westerner. If what she says doesn’t seem new, keep in mind that she was among the first to say a lot of the things she does. She is becoming historical, like a lot of second wave feminists.
I’m feeling pretty historical myself, these days.
interesting reading today…
in watching the middle class shrink in america and comparing it to the basically nonexisitant middle class in south america – there at first seems no comparison
our shrink caused by consumerism debt and theirs by lack of resources
but as i think on this – the oil peak’s decline will create a vast lack of resources in this americas – making the gap between wealthy and poor even wider
and in the end – both middle classes will be gone
***
Azg – yes, quite!!! It is why I am less shocked than some of my friends to find we are poorer than our parents, or than we “should” be given our educations … figuring out that we were started on the route to Latin Americanization in the late 1970’s was my most astute insight ever, I should have been in the right field to publish that then … !!! –Z
I’m halfway through The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy by Allan Johnson and so far, consider it one of the most important books I’ve ever read. It’s now ensconced in my top ten favorite sociology books list, my top ten books of the past hundred years list, and a heavy contender for “find of 2008” (a private distinction that can go to anything I discover in a given year, but it’s ONLY January 13th, so such an early “nomination” is highly unusual). I’m telling everybody (and wouldn’t even have read it, of course, if I hadn’t assigned it for a gender class I’m teaching this semester — a serendipity I’m quite pleased about just now, obviously).
OK, everybody hear that? Read Allan Johnson, the Gender Knot. Widely available.
I read The Gender Knot as an undergraduate many many moons ago and found it a changing experience. I am glad to see that it is still making the rounds.
Also, if you can, please purchase the Ehrenreich used. She tends to write from a point of privilege and is frequently offensive in that way that a certain type of white-liberal so often is…. I cringe when I think about putting even the most meager of risiduals in her pocket.
Hi SV! Actually she does not bother me the way many sorts of people she writes about in Fear of Falling!