The author of this book makes a claim based on fairly convincing research that is not just fascinating, but revolutionary, flying in the face of conventional wisdom and undermining a basic tenet of American mythology: that it is a classless society. Or, if not necessarily classless, it is a society in which class is not only equitable with economic status but entirely synonymous. In other words, America has long been held up as a dreamland in which the old aristocratic divisions of class in place at birth was dismantled. Thus, the divisions of class in the country are drawn entirely along monetary lines and those who make the leap from being poor to middle class or from middle class to the upper echelon of the rich make appropriate changes in lifestyle and social conditioning with that movement. This, the author argues, is simply not true.
For the purposes of simplicity, class here is strictly separate into blue-collar and white-collar environments in which one grows up. The focus of the text, as the title implies, is exclusively on how the divergence between these classes impact a marriage between spouses raised in opposing classes. To begin with, research indicates a distinctive divergence between the way those raised in these two separate classes approach life on a fundamental basis. The blue-collar environment fosters a less rigid, less organized lifestyle resistant to management of not just money, but emotions. The opposite holds true for those raised in white-collar environments. The marriages created out the unions of these opposites is found to be based—perhaps not surprisingly—on the oldest dictum in romance: opposites attract. The blue-collar spouse is looking for the stability that the well-managed white-collar spouse naturally adopts while the uptight white-collar spouse often raised in an emotionally distant family seeks out the impulsivity and carefree emotional joyride that comes naturally to the laissez-faire approach to life manifested by those raised in blue-collar environments.
What is revolutionary here is the finding of what occurs over the course of these cross-class marriages. The ideological mythos of America strongly suggests that the blue-collar spouse who is elevated into a middle-class environment through marriage will be quick to adopt the white-collar approach to life because they have, in effect, risen to a new class, American style. If wealth rather than birth is the origination point of classes in America, then it stands to reason that whether one is working-class or blue-collar or just plain poor then they will adopt the attitudes of the white-collar class upon becoming a member of it. That is the basic underlying foundation behind the idea of America being a “classless” society which actually means that it is merely as society in which movement between classes has much greater fluidity than old-style European classes.
The research behind the book almost completely invalidates this assumption. Rather than altering their basic approach to daily living as a result of acquiring more wealth—or, in the opposite case—having to adopt a lower economic standard of living through marriage—everything remains the same. Those raised in blue-collar environments who were emotionally impulsive and more carefree with financial management remain just as much that way even as their financial status improves while those white-collar propensity for management and organization and a more controlled and measure approach emotional decision-making retain that lifestyle philosophy whether finances improve, worsen, or remain unchanged.
Part of the reason that the European aristocratic approach to class division was able to remain ingrained for so long was because of a kind of social brainwashing. Generations of a family being told even by their own parents to be mindful of “their place” had the effect of quashing change and rebellion before it could even begin. The author is essentially suggesting that a much less restrictive version of the same thing does exist in American, after all, despite all claims to being a classless society.
