and upper class." Formerly liberals had worried about the decline of popular participation in politics. Now they began to wonder whether "apathy" might not be a blessing in disguise, if it reduced the danger that "status-ridden" people desperately seeking "social approval," as Adorno called them, would find political outlets for their "pent-up social fury."

The voluminous literature on the authoritarian family registered the shift in liberals' opinion of the American worker. Sociologists had argued for some time that a new ethic of sexual and generational egalitarianism was destroying the "traditional concept of the family," according to which the "father is head of the house, the mother is entrusted with the care ... of the children, and ... children owe their parents honor" and obedience. After the Second World War, they began to politicize the family by arguing that an "autocratic form of family organization," in the words of the president of the National Conference on Family Relations, "can never prepare children for the new democratic social order." Not until the I950s, however, did it occur to liberal sociologists to identify the "traditional" family as a working-class institution. Earlier studies had noted with approval that working-class parents were more casual about child rearing than their upper-middle-class counterparts. Upper-middle‐ class discipline was often criticized as rigid and repressive. Allison Davis and Robert Havighurst noted in 1946 that it produced "orderly, conscientious, responsible, and tame" adults. In 1954, Eleanor Maccoby and Patricia Gibbs challenged this older view with evidence that middle-class parents were permissive about many things and "somewhat warmer and more demonstrative" in their relations with their children. Four years later, Urie Bronfenbrenner could describe as the "most consistent finding" of child-rearing studies that working-class parents typically resorted to physical punishment, whereas middle-class parents relied on "reasoning, isolation, and ... 'love-oriented' techniques of discipline." By 1971, another review of research indicated that these contrasts now dominated the sociological literature on child rearing. "Middle-class parents tend to be more controlling and supportive of their children than lower-class parents and ... are less likely to use physical punishment."

In a remarkably short period of time, the middle-class family, once repressively puritanical, had become warm and loving, while the image of working-class domesticity shifted from carefree spontaneity to rigidly authoritarian discipline. As Talcott Parsons noted in 1964, recent re

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