Class markers
One of the cool things about St Blog's is being able to read what other people's reviews of about books that you were thinking about reading someday. Today Lee Ann saved me a trip to the library by posting her thoughts on Paul Fussell's Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through the American Status System. Well, I still may read it...someday.
I guess I am very thoroughly a child of the middle class, and not the upper middle class, either. A few years ago I read an article about how clothing functioned as a class marker. According to the author, big hair and tight flashy outfits were the plumage of the lower classes. You could spot rich women by their soft, flowing outfits that didn't seem to speak to any function. And middle class women tended to have specific clothes for specific occasions -- "work clothes", "good casual", "casual casual", "dressy casual", "grubbies", etc.
I just about fell off my chair laughing when I read that last part, because the Great Chain of Being of Clothing was something that was drilled into me from the time I was little and is something I'm trying to get my husband to comprehend (to no avail....) When I was little, there were church clothes, school clothes, good play clothes, and grubbies. Now my categories are roughly super-dressy, dressy, nice casual, everyday casual, and grubbies. My husband's categories seem to be neckties and everything else.
I guess some other status markers are vacations (I've never been skiing, for example, or abroad) and education (I was taught that the supreme goal of education was a college diploma.) I would suspect that there are cultural aspects to class in our society that could be completely different from one's economic class, but do they stay different? And the funniest thing about this is how little agreement there is about who's in what class. I always thought I was middle class, but Fussell might think that some of my habits mark me as a Prole. And I was amused when a D.C. City Councilwoman put me squarely in the working class when she was (rightly) decrying the lack of affordable housing in D.C. for "people in the working class, like police officers and nurses." By that reckoning, huge sections of the white-collar federal workforce are also working class. Did she have them in mind as well when she was thinking about "the working class"? And does that mean that all those lawyers and lobbyists are not really working?
This is fun to think about (in small doses) because people-watching is fun and so is satire, but when it degenerates into snobbery it's not funny any more.
