CHAPTER 9
Is the Working Class Just Sexist?
IN THE 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton and her surrogates hammered
again and again on the idea that breaking the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”^172 would be
an historic achievement. Her planned victory celebration was even going to be held in a
building with a massive glass ceiling and would feature confetti that looked like shattered
glass, reinforcing that central campaign metaphor.
It was a class-clueless metaphor.
Shattering the glass ceiling means giving privileged women access to the high-level jobs
now held almost exclusively by privileged men. And for many professional women, it’s a
meaningful dream—which is why so many of those women felt completely gutted by
Clinton’s loss. In her they saw a woman who, like themselves, had been forced to walk
the likability/competence tightrope, who had often put her husband’s career ahead of her
own needs, and who, over and over again, had been held to a vastly higher standard than
less qualified men. Watching her shatter that ceiling was a dream that mattered deeply to
them. Indeed, a key message of the election, drowned out by all the attention to class
(including by me) after the 2016 election, is that the glass ceiling is more shatter-resistant
than most of us thought.
But can you explain why a white working-class audience—male or female—should care
about it? They don’t. It’s not that the working class is more sexist. It’s that gender, and
gender equality, mean something different in the working-class context. Working-class
women would never get near the C-suite even if they were men.
Many working-class women have the same kinds of pink-collar jobs their mothers did,
but their husbands don’t have the blue-collar jobs their fathers did. As a result, their
families are in precarious shape economically. It is in these women’s self-interest, and
their families’ self-interest, to get those blue-collar jobs back. The Tea Party women
Hochschild met in Louisiana (virtually all of them employed or retired from jobs) based
their politics on “their role as wives and mothers—and they wanted to be wives to high-
earning men and to enjoy the luxury, as one woman put it, of being a homemaker.”^173
Their focus was not on gender equality. A woman from the Appalachian section of Ohio
said that she was voting to save her boyfriend’s job.^174 “If I turned down every candidate
who objectified women,” a nurse observed tartly, “I’d vote for no one.” “I have so many
friends whose health care costs have doubled and are having to get extra jobs just to pay
- Is the Working Class Just Sexist?