The Power of the Past:Class, Marriage, and Intimate Experiences with Inequality.

Class;Marriage;Culture;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology

Streib, JessiMartin, Karin A. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Class;    Marriage;    Culture;    Sociology;    Social Sciences;    Sociology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/98046/jessis_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Class separates people and in doing so it separates their resources. Yet, class schisms can be crossed and resources can be carried over class boundaries. By drawing upon interviews with 64 college-educated individuals who married a partner raised in a different class – ;;different-origin marriages” for short – and 20 college-educated individuals who married a partner who shared their class upbringing, this research makes four arguments about what happens when those raised in different classes share their lives. First, I show that, despite what other theories suggest, those raised in different classes appealed to each other because of their different dispositions, not despite of them. Second, I enter the debate about how much you can ;;take the class out of the person after taking the person out of the class.” Different-origin marriages offer a unique window into this debate, as the upwardly mobile partner’s marriage, education, and neighborhood completely immerse them in middle-class culture. Despite such immersion, upwardly mobile partners did not fully assimilate nor did those raised in the middle-class absorb their partners’ views. Third, I discover that upwardly-mobile and stable middle-class partners’ sensibilities are socially organized around a new binary opposition: self-management for the stable middle-class and a purposefully laissez-faire approach for the upwardly mobile. Fourth, I argue that while individuals could have pieced together how their different sensibilities were related to their different classed upbringings, they did not. Class deeply shaped their marriages, but usually did so without being detected. These findings have two main implications. First, cultural resources were not laterally transferable from one adult to another; the cultural resources of one family member are not shared by all. Second, many policy prescriptions assume that cultural osmosis occurs – that is, sustained contact with the middle-class will lead others to soak up their ways of thinking. This did not occur for those who spent, on average, over four thousand days living with their respected partners. It may therefore be unlikely to occur in shorter and less intimate relationships.