I want to talk to someone about this but it’s in a part of MDC where visitors can’t go. This may not make much sense without context of the thread (about cleaning house).
I am going to try to explain what *I* mean when I say that this is a class issue. I cannot go back and respond to people because I have a very limited amount of time at the computer where I can actually type and I find this new forum system to be kind of nightmarish to navigate for quoting/moving around. I don’t have time to look up these numbers because I have a sick husband whining at me because he has to hold the fussy baby and a toddler screaming at me because I don’t want to sit and watch her play in her room.
Class is a very complex issue. It is not solely tied to any one variable and of course people within a given ‘class’ are going to differ dramatically. I say this is a class issue because the idea that having a clean house is about character is very much a middle class idea. “Well anyone can do it!” Well there’s a good ol’ Puritan worth ethic! If you aren’t accomplishing as much as me then it’s because you are lazy! No. It’s because different people have different priorities and different abilities.
If you think back to Victorian novels, like anything by Austen, there is pretty much invariably the impoverished female relatives. Often they were complete beneficiaries of charity and nevertheless… they were not treated like members of the servant class or working class. They were genteel still. For another more modern one (sorry international people I really don’t have examples from your countries because I don’t live there) think about, “You might be a redneck if…” You probably came up with a good dozen different examples of redneck mannerisms, right? Guess what! Being a redneck is not actually tied to the amount of money you have. I am very much a redneck. It’s one of those things where I am supposed to apologize and feel bad and be kind of denigrating about myself because I have so many of those behaviors. They are mocked up one side and down the other. By pretty much freakin everyone. Based on the rather informal polls that come up here every so often I am most likely in the top 2% based on income (uhm, all my husband–not me) and yet I can bet that many of you would walk into my house and assume poor white trash live here.
Let me explain why! 😀 {tangent: I am far more light-hearted about all of this than I sound. I have been thinking about this topic extensively for years. I am–for no rational reason–completely obsessed with class issues. I think this is great fun to talk about and I don’t think badly of people on pretty much any side of this issue. Most of my responses are short because I just don’t have time to type extensively. Which I do right now and I’m taking advantage of. YAY!}
So I come from a background of extreme poverty in my childhood but neither of my parents grew up poor. They were both from fairly comfortable backgrounds. My mom was so poor as an adult because she got screwed in the divorce and she had no job skills after being a SAHM for 15 years. My husband comes from family money going back generations. His family pretty much owned his home town. So we are about as far apart on this spectrum as we can be. I spent a lot of my childhood living with extended family and friends, most of whom were pretty unabashedly redneck. My mother, however, has always been a social climber (said with great love) so she had a lot of middle class habits.
Middle class behaviors/attitudes include a lot of things like, “You should care what people think of you.” “It doesn’t matter if anyone actually comes over today your house should be neat and tidy.” “You should never have anyone in your house if it is less than a certain level of clean.” There are about a billion other assumptions in that. Calling it middle class is somewhat mis-leading. It makes people think it is about finances when it really really isn’t. It’s more about attitude. (Not a good or bad attitude in and of itself.) I would like to say now in capital letters so that when I am quoted later and told I hate all people who have these values I DON’T THINK ANY OF THESE VALUES ARE IN AND OF THEMSELVES BAD. I THINK IT IS A PERFECTLY VALID WAY TO LIVE AND IT’S JIM-DANDY FINE FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO FOLLOW THEM. ahem.
I was raised primarily by two women, my mother and my mother’s sister. I could do a long and complex analysis of why they turned out differently but I’m not going to bother. My mom is very middle class (even though she is destitute and living on charity at this point) and my aunt is very redneck. For a long list of reasons not worth detailing I like my aunt and I don’t like my mother. Of course this means I have strong feelings about the dichotomy between their behaviors. 🙂 I never really had words for this until I met my husband though because he added a perspective I didn’t have.
People who are very rich or unabashedly poor tend to care less what other people think of them. That isn’t where they get their self esteem/self image. (By and large. Of course these are generalities and people differ.) People who are somewhere in the middle or who aspire to being more in the middle (think ‘deserving poor’) care a LOT about what other people think of them.
I have to make another disclaimer for the international folks: I have no idea if it works this way in other countries.
That would be why I think that housework, how you feel about it, and how you judge other people for doing it or not doing it is a class issue. Most people tend to prefer being around people who are roughly of their ‘class’. It feels more comfortable. (See: Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum) That’s not wrong. It really and truly isn’t wrong that people feel more comfortable around people who are more like them. One more time, before I am accused of slamming people I DON’T THINK IT IS BAD THAT PEOPLE WANT TO HAVE FRIENDS WHO SHARE THEIR VALUES AND FEEL MORE LIKE THEM. I have a hard time with how people respond to feeling that way. It’s ok to have those feelings and it’s even ok to act on them. It’s a delicate dance to follow those feelings *and* be respectful of people who are outside your value system. I’m not going to claim I’m perfect.
And most people are not a perfect blend of any given class. Despite my fervent defense of folks who don’t maintain a clean house I have panic attacks if my house drops below a certain level of cleanliness. I had a mom who would make me stay up all night doing it again and again till I got it right because You Have To Impress The Neighbors. Even though no one will ever know that you cleaned the toilet with a toothbrush. But I idealize the redneck sense of savoir faire about things will get done when you get to them or they won’t get done and that’s alright too. I’m working on it.
I may be the only one who can come out of an argument like this pretty determined to feel more cheerful about doing less cleaning. 🙂
My favorite taken on this (greater) issue is the concept of strictly business. Middle class people (generalizing here) often feel no compunction about screwing someone over because it’s “nothing personal, you understand- strictly business.” The poor and the wealthy, on the other hand, take everything personally- You need a job? Hang on, I know a guy who’s working for this dude who’s hiring. You want to make a an important business connection? You know, the guy you want will be at this party, tomorrow night, I can get you an invitation. You’d never hear that out of the mouth of a middle-class business person, but god knows the poor and the rich have no such illusions! It’s ALL personal.
That’s an awesome point! 😀 I’m totally into networking!
Interesting point, though I’d say that there’s a certain amount of small town/big city dynamic in play too. While I’m not going to hold myself up as an example of normal, I automatically start out by thinking of personal contacts for things because I grew up in a small town, and that’s how everything worked. You all knew each other, so of course everything was personal, regardless of social class. Watching someone from the city come in and take over the job my Dad had been doing for years was interesting because the new guy’s “just business” approach made for a lot of problems Dad had avoided by getting to know people outside of the business relationship.
from Debs
question~ don’t know if this is relevant to the debate
are differentiating between sanitary and tidy?
because I am ok with most clothes, books, papers and other such “dry” things laying around (though it does make me feel bad).
but i am a lot less okay with food type things laying around for extended time (um….. more than a day or two). (this used to bother me when the aussie boy would “help” me leave the house earlier for an extended trip by putting a dirty dish in the sink. augh. not. helping.)
and i consider myself middle class, or perhaps upper middle :-/
feeling a bit incoherent. 😀 back to work.
Re: from Debs
I’ll be fair and balanced because there is an MDCer who might chime in. *wave*
Yes there is a difference. The problem is, where is the line? Who decides?
Things will get done when you get to them or they won’t get done and that’s alright too.
I think I am going to say this over and over to myself. It is generally how I operate…but there is all this guilt raining down from elsewhere! I moved into the suburbs out here, and I hate the quiet, quiet judging. Folks were really friendly our first year, and then it just dropped off. I think maybe they aren’t happy with how we keep the yard (Especially considering the fact that one of them called in a complaint to the city because they didn’t think we were mowing often enough). I’ve had such a yearning for either city or country, but I’ve been confused about ‘why’, exactly, since the suburbs here has much more of a semi rural feel compared to where I grew up.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition. Both of my parents grew up poor in trailer parks and whatnot, but then after meeting in bible college and getting married they are now solidly middle or upper middle class (I’ve never been entirely clear on the distinction). They value certain ways of living from poverty, but overall I think they fit your description of ‘aspiring’ to a higher class, whether they see it or not. My dad in particular has a lot of bitterness about his childhood, I know there was a lot of abuse but it was all hush-hush, while my mom had to grow up kind of fast since her mom was dying and her dad was a drunk :o/.
I remember a particularly surreal moment in high school when my mother didn’t want to go into Walmart with us because my brother had blue sunglasses or something, not because she cared herself, but because she was afraid of what the “neighbors” would think. It really is a very different way of thinking.
*wave* Actually, I’m glad you’ve pulled your reply out because it is interesting and I would’ve lost it in the thread-mire over at MDC.
I think it’s less that a particular class of people are concerned with appearances and more that people who want to be a different (“higher”) class than they are will be more concerned with appearances.
(Fictional reference alert!) For instance, in the Terry Pratchett books, one of the characters is thinking about growing up and how in his neighborhood they might not have had food to put on the table, but by god they had soap and a brush to scrub that table, and white stone to do the front steps, and polish for the door handle. Because not doing so would be to admit that you were poor, while “keeping up appearances”, meant you were better than “those people”.
In real life, I’ve spent the past few years living in working class to lower middle class neighborhoods, and they seem, for the most part, to be far more concerned with how their children appear to other people than the middle class people I know. (Of course, the middle class people are all AP families, so the whole crunchy as organic granola thing might be a big factor.)
This is an old(ish) post, but I’m really interested in it, as I wonder about this (the cleanliness, mostly) a lot. My parents are solidly middle class and tidy but not too uptight. I, on the other hand, seem to be completely incapable of keeping house in a reasonable way…like, usually somewhere on the incredibly untidy to disgusting continuum. I am really not sure why this is. Maybe I am lazy, as I am physically capable of cleaning my house, I just can’t ever seem to get to it…and yet, I’m capable of putting in significant effort to other things in my life. In part, I’m sure it is just a question of priorities. Like, I like to have fun with my kids and husband, and when I get some free time to myself I’m usually desperate to read and make art and so on…but also sometimes I’m really ashamed of my house. My husband’s parents, who are upper middle class plus, have really given us a hard time about it, too, and I feel like somehow the brunt of that falls on me as the stay at home parent.
I’m curious and somewhat unsure of how class actually figures into this, if at all. We’re poor these days, if you’re talking about actual finances, but not so poor that I can’t stay home with the kids. I’m not sure why so many stay at home parents (mostly middle class) seem so much more able to keep up with things than I am. I did grow up in West Virginia and most of my friends were really poor, so I think there might be some cultural factors, in that I generally felt very comfortable in messy homes as a kid, especially since in families too poor to hire “help”, the messier homes often seemed to be the ones where the moms had interests outside of housekeeping. Hmmm.
I’m also not sure how this plays into things, but I do find that in my community at least, there is significant anxiety about what people would think about the state of our homes and how they would judge our kids’ appearances which has to do with fear of CPS etc… I’m sure that’s impacted by the overlap of poverty with, um, “alternative” parenting practices to some extent, but I rarely hear middle class attachment parents expressing those concerns.