Life in the Working Class Family

In the 1992 introduction to the 1972 book, Rubin focuses on the fact that the intervening twenty years have brought little in the way of socioeconomic justice to this class: "Our inability to deal realistically with the question of class has remained relatively unchanged" (xv). Rubin's clear intent with this book is precisely to paint a realistic portrait of this class so that it might be treated more fairly in the future. As it is, this treatment is growing worse rather than better. Rubin writes that we have lost innocence in those twenty years and can no longer fool ourselves into believing that "anything [is] possible" (xxxviii). Although there has been some democratization of the working-class family, it is nevertheless "true that life in the working-class family is, in many ways, more precarious now [1992] than it was then [1972], especially at the economic level" (xxxviii).

Rubin portrays working-class childhood as one of general sufferin

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e nurturant as well as nurtured, to be reflective and introspective." Working-class boys, on the other hand, are raised to keep their feelings inside, to be strong, not to cry: "The working-class boys seemed more emotionally controlled--more like miniature men--than those in the middle-class families" (126). Of course, this is not only a sad situation, but is also ironic, because working-class boys, in general, have more negative emotional residue than middle-class boys due to their more deprived socioeconomic circumstances. Nevertheless, they are taught, most often by their fathers, to keep their feelings inside, creating an unhealthy psychological and emotional reality. With respect to the differences between the childhoods of working-class and middle-class girls, Rubin writes, for example, that while girls of both classes have fantasies about being married, the middle-class girls also had "some sense of striving for their own development" (40). For working-class girls, the dream of childhood is a yearning for marriage in which those girls played a much more passive role. Middle-class girls included the dream of college, which would in turn delay marriage, while working-class girls focused almost exclusively on the salvation en
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Approximate Word count = 1424
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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