housewife ideal for two brief generations. By the twenty-first century, a new generation
of workers had lost the ability to sustain the ideal they had seen their parents and
grandparents achieve.^183 Small wonder many felt bereft.
Among whites, the breadwinner role unites men, but stay-at-home motherhood divides
women. For working-class white women, becoming a homemaker signals a rise in status,
not only for herself but for her entire family. But for PME women, becoming a stay-at-
home mother entails a fall in status, from investment banker to “just a homemaker.” The
diminished value of caregiving in the elite is best dramatized by stay-at-home moms’
painful loss of status. In a milieu where social honor stems chiefly from work devotion,
telling people you are “just a housewife” can lead them literally to turn tail and flee at
cocktail parties. Perhaps the best example is when a former New York Times reporter,
after she quit to care for her baby, was asked, “Didn’t you used to be Ann
Crittenden?”^184
Note that on this issue, African-American families have always been quite different.
Many fewer were granted entry into the separate spheres ideal, and it held less allure.
Black men have for so long been barred by racism from good jobs that many black
people—both women and men—associate motherhood with both caregiving and
earning.^185
What all this means for politics is that gender does not necessarily bind women together
across social class—although it can. Women share some experiences across class lines,
chief among them sexual harassment. But professional-class women cannot assume a
sisterhood with working-class women. If elite women want to create that sisterhood, they
will have to create a coalition around shared interests. If the Clinton campaign had spent
more time talking about Trump’s sexual assaults and less time talking about the glass
ceiling, they would have been far better off.
Other dynamics also weakened the appeal of Clinton’s gender equality theme among
white working-class women. As mentioned previously, Hochschild was initially mystified
by a Louisiana woman who loved Rush Limbaugh, specifically because of his “criticism
of ‘femi-nazis,’ you know, feminists, women who want to be equal with men.”^186
Hochschild gradually realized that this woman saw Limbaugh as protecting her red-state
honor against blue-state belittlement. It’s the same effect we saw with respect to race:
Progressives have inadvertently made sexism into a way of expressing class anger. The
dismissive charge of “political correctness” is a weapon forged against progressives on
the anvil of their own snobbery.
- Is the Working Class Just Sexist?