11. Between the late 1960s and the 1990s, the U.S. experienced a major shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Yet during this economic change, as Frances FitzGerald and Barbara Ehrenreich both suggest, socioeconomic or "class" issues became much less important than cultural clashes over "values." Discuss.
As the relative prosperity of America's white middle class became entrenched after World War II, attention to survival was replaced by attention to what comes down to the quality of life. Ehrenreich's discussion of the transformation of American priorities in the decades after World War II leads to an inference that the overall improvement in the socioeconomic condition of the U.S. more or less enabled those not confined to poverty and survival issues to engage in culture clash over values, and that the most important result was a wholesale transformation of the way individual men were likely to view their social roles and social options. FitzGerald's discussion of the behavior of several specific subgroups during the same general period illustrates a range of effects that acting on these various options had.
Ehrenreich's basic argument is that the "breadwinner ethic" and all the social values it entailed collapsed into a male revolt against family responsibility and assertion of "fun morality" (43), at least for men. Social values attached to nonconformity with traditional expectations, whether as male revolt against responsibility or female revolt against the feminine mystique, overtook the underlying fact that women's economic dependence on men never completely changed. The practical result for women, who as a group earn less than men (who as a group earn less than might be required to support a family), is that they are more economically insecure than ever and that there exists in the culture no moral reinforcement of "the notion of long-term emotional responsibility [of men] toward women" (Ehrenreich 181). Tr...