the very rich but paid no attention to working people, except to make Archie Bunker a symbol of lower-middle-class ignorance and bigotry. It is no wonder that working people became increasingly "angry," as Lillian Rubin noted in her study of Oakland, "at the university students and their supporters—a privileged minority who cavalierly dismiss and devalue a way of life these working-class people have struggled so hard to achieve." Nor should it have been surprising that the construction workers interviewed by LeMasters felt "isolated and forgotten." It was a measure of the distance between social classes, papered over by the myth of working-class affluence and "embourgeoisement," that LeMasters found himself "surprised at the depth and extent of the suspicion and distrust the blue-collar workers have of the white-collar middle and upper classes." Ignored by the mass media, condescended to by opinion makers and social critics, deserted by the politicians who once represented their interests, these men believed that the "people who got the money" ran things and that they themselves had nothing to say about the course of public events.

From the wrong side of the tracks, the dominant culture looked quite different from the way it looked from the inside. Its concern for creativity and self-expression looked self-indulgent. Its concern for the quality of human life seemed to imply a belief that life has to be carefully hoarded and preserved, protected from danger and risk, prolonged as long as possible. Its permissive style of child rearing and marital negotiation conveyed weakness more than sympathetic understanding, a desire to avoid confrontations that might release angry emotions. Its eagerness to criticize everything seemed to bespeak a refusal to accept any constraints on human freedom, an attitude doubly objectionable in those who enjoyed so much freedom to begin with. The habit of criticism, from a lower‐ middle-class point of view, appeared to invite people to be endlessly demanding of life, to expect more of life than anyone had a right to expect.

A white Catholic housekeeper from Somerville, Massachusetts, interviewed by Robert Coles in the mid-seventies, took an unflattering but highly revealing view of Cambridge, where she cleaned for a professional family. The woman she worked for was "crazy," she thought, to enter the job market when she had no visible need of extra income. She reported that her employers spent much of the day weighing themselves, worrying about being "depressed," trying on new clothes, and "looking in one

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