Chapter 8 - Marriage And The Open-Class System

In 1956, a young Philadelphia girl who had gained some prominence in the movies was married to a young man, hereditary prince in the smallest principality in Europe. The popular interest and the publicity given to it in the established news media of this country exceeded that accorded to the marriages of the children of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and to the weddings of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland, combined. Only the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough in the late nineteenth century compared in the publicity given to it. Yet the American people, we are constantly told, do not approve of class distinction, and especially not on the basis of mere birth and hereditary titles.

We have our own personal and permanent evidence of this inconsistent American attitude. The senior author was once asked to squire for a brief period a charming young lady, member of the royal family of a small but honored country, who was visiting in the United States. Let it be recorded for posterity that he will carry for the rest of his life the scars of heels dug into his feet by seemingly well-bred persons in their eagerness to get as close as possible to the exalted personage.

But we proudly insist that we do obeisance to no titles, we object to any evidences of class privileges, and we even deny the very existence of social classes of any moment in our own society.

The whole subject of social class is a touchy one. "Nothing stirs us to such a frenzy of shame-faced excitement," wrote Philip Toynbee in the London Observer some time ago, "as a public issue which involves class distinctions." Similarly, few subjects are more difficult to discuss. One important reason for this is that what we say and how we act in regard to social class are often so far apart from each other. Also, there is usually an appreciable difference between what people will say publicly and privately about social class. This would seem to explain why social class has always been the subject, as Evelyn Waugh puts it, of "feverish but private debate." Man's egoistic drive to be important, the human tendency to make comparisons, and the consoling ability to rationalize combine to make clear thinking in this area very difficult indeed.

The American people are particularly insistent that whatever social classes and distinctions may exist, there is to be nothing rigid about them. Our social class system is to be kept open, i.e., free for anyone, and we mean anyone, to go to the top or any place on the way there. Our class system is to be open, and to be kept open. This is virtually a fetish of the people in this country, and probably is the reason for the wide publicity that is given to those who do acquire high social rank. They have made it, so possibly can you.

This open-class system is the complement to individualism, giving to all the green light to achieve a higher social status. Each feeds and intensifies the effects and importance of the other. In combination they throw light on many of our domestic failures. It is the purpose of the present chapter to show how the open-class system operates, with particular reference to the field of family relations.

Our Class Attitudes, Like Individualism, Are the Product of Our Experience as a Nation

Here again, as in the case of individualism, we need to realize that our attitude toward social classes is deeply ingrained in us as a people because it too is the product of our history. Earlier as colonists, and later as immigrants, our ancestors were in rebellion against Old World institutions and practices. Their very coming here indicated that they were looking forward, and upward, and hence would scarcely be disposed to favor the organized restrictions of their earlier experience. Nor were the conditions of frontier life, first in the receding West and more recently in the urban industrial wilderness of our cities, of a kind in which historic forms of class distinctions would prevail or even seem in place. Moreover, the democratic experiment to which the new nation was dedicated, and its flowering political creed, found no place for titles and symbols of societies otherwise conceived. True, occasional efforts were made in the early days to develop and confer titles, and to fix officially one's place in the scheme of things, by combining power with social status. Thus, in the Colony of Connecticut, a Standing Order which assigned every man a defined place remained as late as 1820. On the whole, however, the American Revolution involved the abolition of all titles of rank, vested property rights were separated from political rights, and hereditary succession to office was prohibited. The whole democratic dogma and tradition were against such practices.

Somewhat later, in the course of the nineteenth century, the term class came to be applied to the subnormal, the poverty stricken, the criminal, the illiterate, and so forth, so that the very word carried with it overtones of opprobrium. Later still, toward the turn of the last century, one began to hear much about the "picturesque rascality" of the moneyed Titans, an exploiting class of modern robber barons who preyed upon the "masses." In fact, as one follows the history of the usage of the term class in this country, one sees repeated applications of the term to some undesirable element in the population, apart from the great mass of respectable and hardworking people. Class as a word has suffered for years from the company that it kept. Pronounced with a broad a, it still is designed to provoke a smile, mostly of derision. The popular viewpoint has been to emphasize the common elements in American society, and to deny or depreciate the existence or importance of all separating barriers.

The Reality of Class—in Nature

Idealism and history aside, what of the realities of life, of all life? Are class differences natural or unnatural among living things? Actually, one finds differences, comparisons, and classifications of all kinds everywhere. To classify is more than human, it is a process characteristic of all forms of life. And to classify is to think in terms of classes.

Let us look at some of the supporting evidence, beginning below the human level. A tremendous variety of animals inhabit the earth. Their range extends into the waters below its surface. In 1953, when Monsieur Picard descended two miles below the surface of the sea, he found forms of life that far down. Estimates of the number of kinds of animal life range from one to two million. Ever since the time of Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, scientists have been at work classifying these into species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla. Specialists in at least eighteen different sciences are devoting themselves to this task, using the available data as to structure, physiology, embryology, distribution, function, and presumed relationships.

Each form of life seems to have its own organized society in turn, with the inevitable class distinctions. Beasts, birds, insects, and even fish form their own social cliques and classes. Fish are particularly strict in adhering to proper social order and protocol. Studies by T. Schjelderup-Ebbe, a Norwegian scholar, of some fifty species of birds, led him to conclude that social stratification, with the domination of some and the submission of others, was basic to all forms of life. One spectacular illustration of this, which can easily be seen, is in the "pecking order" among animals. This order revolves around who may and who may not peck whom. Such a pecking order has been found among birds, pigeons, chickens, and various other forms of life, and is commonly accepted as evidence of an existing social class system among these animals. Curiously, too, these studies show that the pecking order differs from roles of leadership. Thus, the leader of a group in forage or conflict with another group is often a different animal from the top in the pecking order.

Moreover, in animal society each member has his work to do. Bee society, for example, is highly organized. In fact, a bee city is one of the most socialized and tightly organized societies known. There is the structure of the bee city, with its precisely laid-out streets; its cells, with their perfect hexagonal shape and one-one-thousandth-of-an-inch-thick walls; and its perfect air-conditioning system. Within the bee society are the Queen Bee, the workers, the drones, the nurses, the wax makers, the princesses, the sentries, the water carriers, the fanners, and the masons, to say nothing of the distinctions within each of these groups. Similar are the marvels of social stratification and specialization in ant society, or among the less welcome termites who, according to our zoologist friends, have the most highly developed caste and class system in the world.

The Reality of Class—in Society

Turning now to the human scene, what aspect of life is not classified and stratified? Consider the obvious facts in our occupational life. There is, to begin with, the classification of occupations included in the United States Census Bureau reports on occupations, ranging from professional and proprietary jobs through clerical, skilled, semiskilled to unskilled workers, ending with the servant class. Next, a number of opinion polls have been made showing that various occupations are socially rated, and that their prestige is quite distinct from their financial remuneration. Likewise, the attitudes of children toward the occupations of their parents show clearly that what they consider of major importance is the social prestige of the occupation. These range from feelings of pride to respect, to tolerance, and then to varying degrees of shame.*

Each occupational group or working unit is stratified in turn. The example of a university faculty comes to mind. There are the teaching assistants, at the base of the triangle, then come the instructors, the assistant professors, the associate professors, the full professors, and the name or endowed professors. Along with these are the administrative officers, who work for the faculty at some institutions, with the faculty at others, and for whom the faculty works at still others.

Or there is the case of the church, with its system of orders, clergy, administrators, and dignitaries. The Roman Catholic church, with its long history of development and its tradition of organization, offers an excellent illustration of stratification throughout its entire structure. Or one could cite the organizational framework of a large corporation, from the Chairman of the Board through many stages to the proverbial office boy. Or there is the individual plant or shop, like a particular hospital, editorial

* For the completed study, see James H. S. Bossard, Parent and Child (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), chap. xi.

office, factory, construction gang, and the like, each with its own respective levels of rights, responsibilities, duties, and prestige in the working and directing order.

Particularly striking in this connection is the literature on the Utopias that men have dreamed. From the time of Plato on, many idealists have constructed and recorded for posterity their ideas of a perfect society. Beginning with an assumption of perfect equality in a cooperative Eden, they proceed, each of them without exception, to delineate a social order replete with specialized functions and responsibilities, neatly arranged, even if not openly stressed, in an order of prestige and importance. Social classes even in the Utopias!

The fact of the matter is that we humans are all the time making comparisons and classifying each other, especially in the areas of our own activity and usually on the basis of our own particular interest. We do this even in the sciences which study human behavior. The psychologists classify us on the basis of intelligence and other traits which they have identified and measured. The economists, preoccupied with money, construct a human pyramid on the basis of wealth and income. The psychiatrists, utilizing their insights and terms, identify us as extroverts, introverts, neurotics, psychopaths, and so forth—each group with its own appropriate subdivisions. In fact, one of the unhappy results of the psychiatric insights which many people have obtained in recent years has been their use to such a large extent to classify, and depreciate, other persons, instead of being utilized for self-understanding. Or one might go on to speak of other groups of persons who, preoccupied with racial, national origin, linguistic, and religious differences, have made the corresponding classifications of people on the bases of their particular interests.

We have written at some length about how universal the facts of difference, comparison, classification, and stratification throughout the world of living things really are. Small wonder, then, that people in their everyday social life make classes and think in terms of them. Recently sociologists have tried to combine these differences between people into a broad concept, involving a way of life, which could be studied scientifically, to show how such social classes are determined, on what bases, and how they operate to influence their respective members.

How Are Social Classes Identified?

What people are particularly interested in is how social classes are described, and on what basis persons are assigned to one or the other.

First, how many social classes are there, and how are they described? Through the years, people have usually spoken of an upper, middle, and lower class, and such a three-part classification is the backbone of most systems which present-day sociologists use. Perhaps the most widely used of these is that of Professor W. Lloyd Warner, of the University of Chicago, who refers to the upper-upper, the lower-upper, the upper-middle, the lower-middle, the upper-lower, and the lower-lower. Other students have spoken now of more, then of fewer, than six. Obviously their number, by any definition, would vary on the basis of the size and nature of the community. Thus a relatively simple agricultural community might have but two classes while a sprawling metropolitan area would have all of Warner's six classes and numerous subdivisions in each.

But the ways in which social classes are identified and the criteria used are of more importance than their number in any one place. Two methods of identification are commonly used by sociologists. One is the rating that people give to each other on the basis of their participation in the social life of the community. The other uses selected concrete social facts to determine a person's social status. Those used by Professor Warner in his studies include occupation, source of income, house type, and dwelling or residential area. The Kinsey studies of sexual behavior used occupation, father's occupation, and educational level as the bases of social classes. Various other criteria might be used.

It will be noticed that these references to criteria have made no mention of family, birth, or the hereditary factor. This is a significant omission because it indicates a social change that is revolutionary in character. For centuries, class status was determined largely at birth, by one's family status, as exemplified by the established nobility, with hereditary titles and estates. This meant, of course, that one's status was relatively stable. Not only were the lines sharply drawn, but they were firmly fixed. But now, when birth and family lose their importance in this respect, the way is opened for people to fix social status on the basis of the things they most value. Moreover, these are things they can achieve through their own efforts. This in turn opens the ranks to all, at least theoretically. It means an open-, as opposed to a closed-, class system.

Out of this welter—of the many differences between the American people, the human tendency to compare and classify, the rejection of hereditary bases of classification, the historic tradition that there are no social classes in this country, and the contradictory insistence that the ranks of higher class status must be open to all—there arises the American attitude toward social class. It is a curious mixture of idealism, compromise, naiveté, and realism. Not that its paradoxical nature seems to bother us, for a nation, like an individual, can take recourse to the mental practice of dissociation. As used by the psychiatrists, this word means the separation of conflicting ideas and beliefs into logic-tight compartments in the mind, so as to keep them apart and unrelated in our conscious thoughts.

Dissociation is what we practice as a people in regard to social classes. The chief compartments of our attitudes follow: (1) All Americans are free and equal. (2) The individual is very important, and has the right to be different (his right). (3) We do not believe in social classes. (4) In this classless society, most of us are middle class (the Fortune and Gallup polls showed more than four out of every five people listing themselves as middle class). (5) Ours is an open-class system in which each person has the right to raise his class standing as much as he can. (6) It is natural and desirable that people strive to do so.

Features of the Open-Class System

What does this open-class system mean for family life? This is our concern here. Unfortunately, this is largely an unexplored field, chiefly because it requires a degree of self-analysis and honesty with one's self that is none too plentiful. Certain resulting processes and patterns of behavior, however, seem clear, and these will now be considered.

We must begin by underscoring the American drive to get ahead, as well as its uniqueness among the peoples of the world. Throughout their history, the people of the United States have been on the up. This has been particularly true in the economic sense. Each generation has aimed to live better than the preceding ones, and so largely and consistently has this been true that we have come to accept it as somewhat inevitable. That the children will rise above the station of their parents is a commonplace in American life. So frequently does it happen that one might call it a national characteristic.

More than a half-century ago, this national characteristic was identified, in a pithy little volume entitled Letters from a Chinese Official, in these words:

To remain in the position in which you were born you consider a disgrace; a man, to be a man, must venture, struggle, compete, and win. To this characteristic of your society is to be attributed, no doubt, its immense activity, and its success in all material arts. But to this, also, is due the features that most strike a Chinaman—its unrest, its confusion, its lack of morality.

In most other countries the chances of moving up are so much smaller that the cases where it does happen do not become a national pattern. Economic and social lines are much more fixed. Children tend to follow the occupations of their parents much more so than in this country, where it is considered almost a lack of initiative to do so. The pervasive aspects of the difference between the American and the European pattern in this respect may be illustrated somewhat as follows. A European family, with an income of $3,200, finding that it costs $3,600 to live, would tend to consider how its plane of living might be reduced to bring family expenditures within the $3,200 limit. An American family, confronted with a similar problem, would be much more likely to consider ways and means to raise its income up to and beyond the level of expenditures.

How may the ambitious youth get ahead? One of the most widely used and successful methods is not to plunge at once into the everyday working world, but to stay out of it and go to school. Ordinarily the longer he stays in school the better are his chances to get ahead. Not that education is considered an end in itself—the most optimistic college teacher would hardly make any such claim. Education has become a means to an end. A college or university degree, or even matriculation card, has become one of the established status-achieving devices in our business and social life, with the result that hundreds of thousands of young men and women are flooding our colleges to acquire a degree and the advantages that go with it. These advantages include knowing people, such as classmates, who will be of help to you later on; belonging to a club or fraternity whose members may assist you; getting the halo of an established institution to rub off some of its traditional prestige on you; and being listed in the personnel department of the proper college, where large corporation representatives will contact you on or before graduation. Also there will be some absorption, through the miracle of osmosis, of something which passes by the name of education. Since four out of every ten high school graduates are now going to college, we are talking about a considerable proportion of the population.

Most of our contemporary college crop is middle class, heavily weighted toward the lower-middle class. There are many large college institutions in this country today where, according to reports of observers we accept as competent, as many as 90 per cent of the students are lower-middle class. "Our student body here," writes a university professor, "is as unselected as the passengers on a New York subway train." The large increase of college and university students of recent years has been recruited largely from the lower-middle and upper-lower classes in American life, and various programs-governmental and otherwise—tend to enlarge the representation from these sources. Incidentally, the Butler Education Act in England has led recently to similar changes and enlargements in the student bodies of Oxford, Cambridge, and other English universities.

Highly interesting evidence of the use and success of college and university experience is shown in a recent study of the business elite of the nation, made by W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen. In the course of an elaborate and significant research study, based on data gathered from eight thousand American business leaders, they found (1) that most of these leaders were college men, (2) that they were better educated than their fathers, and (3) that more than one-half came from occupational backgrounds below the executive and professional level. This top-level illustration can be duplicated at each successively lower level in the occupational system.

But economic success must be translated into social position. The successful man, living as a bachelor at his club, is not typical. His success must be translated into a family—wife, a home, automobile, etc. And the responsibility for this translation falls upon the wife. The wife therefore is the complementary part of this process of rising in the open-class system, and being married to the right woman becomes a very important matter. Obviously this fits in with the upward drive by many women for higher status.

Marriage as a Status-achieving Device

Marriage then, in an open-class system, is magnified as a status-achieving device. This is said, not as a cynical verbal dart, but to state a sociological fact. There are many aspects of marriage as a status-achieving device. Merely to marry is to gain status ordinarily in your family and your social circle. Moreover, this has become true increasingly as the proportion of our young people who are married continues to rise to the highest percentage in our history. "Emily is now married." "John has a family of his own." Expressions like these carry a world of meaning in most families.

To marry is to gain status in your job or profession. We prefer the doctor who is married. Certain fields of specialized medical practice would not be considered proper for bachelor physicians, unless perhaps in the impersonal setting of a very large city. The preacher needs to take a wife. In fact, the appointment or selection of young pastors may be contingent, in many communities, upon their approaching marriage. The wisdom of a married professor is more mature. In sociology, for example, it is now opportune for him to give certain courses. A married case worker, many board members will think, has more insight into family problems. When you are a "Mrs.," you can work more appropriately with children, or be a counselor, or do personnel work, because now you understand. Being married, you are more deserving of promotion. You are a more responsible employee. You are supposed to be more settled in your habits. You can be used more appropriately in supervisory and administrative jobs.

Marriage affects financial or economic status. To marry with an eye to financial security is, of course, an age-old practice. Security is but another name for status. Once this motive was attributed chiefly to women. This sex preponderance was natural at a time when women had no economic opportunities save as they were attached to family units. Today, with increasing employment opportunities outside the home open to women, this motive in their marriages may be less operative, but it still remains of considerable importance. The complement of its declining importance for women may be its increasing role with men. A working wife is an asset. It means two wage-earners in the family. Furthermore, there is the security which inheres in the possibility of a working wife, even if she is not now employed.

These, however, are the more or less universal aspects of marriage as a status-achieving device, found among all peoples. We are concerned chiefly with those that are more peculiar to this country and which have been stimulated by the open-class system.

One of these is the use of marriage as a way of escaping minority group social status. If you belong to a group which as such has low social status, if you are a woman and your name identifies you as such, you can find escape, both for yourself and your children, by marrying a person who belongs to a higher status group. Particularly is this true of minority group members who are rebellious or have moved somewhat above the social station of their group. This is shown rather clearly in a study of Gentile-Jewish intermarriages, made some years ago by J. S. Slotkin, of the University of Chicago. He speaks of the rebellious and marginal as two personality types who "amalgamate with members of the dominant group in order to raise their own status."

Our own tabulation of 69,196 marriages in New York State, dealing with the operation of national origin and nativity class in marriage, shows the same result, with all the precision of a status-raising timetable. Similarly, William F. Whyte, in his studies of sex codes at lower social levels, points out how for lower status boys the most desirable woman for nonmarital sex relations is the girl of old American stock background, preferably blonde, who has a higher status than the street corner slum boy. Both marriage and nonmarital sex relationships involve intimate relationships, and acceptance on this basis by a group of higher social prestige is the essence of status achievement.

Such marriages, however, are but part of a larger story. In the open-class system, to marry up is considered to be one of the best ways to raise one's social status, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or nativity class. Marriages of this kind are relatively common in this country. They are made by both men and women, each with motives of their own. If you are a man on the up, to marry up may be very helpful. It may open new doors, make new contacts. You might even marry the boss's daughter, or the daughter of one of the boss's golfing companions or club associates. If you are a woman, this is the way. This is what we wish the barefoot girl had done with the Judge in Lord Tennyson's immortal Maud Muller. This is what the peasant girl does with the prince in the storybook. This is what the chorus girl does who marries the banana king's heir. This is how the screen star invades the social register.

Information on the marriages of our business elite was gathered by Warner and Abegglen, in the study to which we have already referred. Among the many interesting and significant findings here are these: (1) while the men married women from their own occupational level more than from any other group of women, more married outside their level of origin than within; (2) college-trained men tend to marry up more often than they marry down; (3) college men married the daughters of the business elite more often than they did the daughters from any other level; (4) men from white-collar origin married up more often than not; and (5) business leaders who came from laboring and farm class backgrounds responded most to status factors in their matrimonial choices.

We are not forgetting all we wrote about romance in American marriage. We are saying simply that, while the upward-moving young American marries for love, he may also be inclined to love in advantageous directions. Romance does not exist in a vacuum, nor operate necessarily on its own steam, even though it seems to do so at times. Romance is fanned by the dream of what we want, and the drive to move up the social ladder can create its own draft.

The Menace to Marriage

Our basic contention is that this scramble to move up in an open-class system carries its own dangers for family life. It tends to uproot many persons and transplant them to new settings which may or may not foster their best development. It is true that change of locale of any kind presents its own peculiar problems of adjustment, but ordinarily those which involve movement from a lower to a higher class level are more difficult and complex than change from one place to another at the same class level. Concretely speaking, it is easier to adjust at the same class level to Michigan after living in Connecticut than to make the grade successfully from lower to upper-middle-class living.

One of the principal effects upon family life of this moving-up process is that it destroys or weakens the relationship between successive generations. This is accompanied by the loss of that lengthwise view of life which is so necessary for a sane and balanced outlook. It is a process which certainly does not foster family life, except in a very restricted sense, as one of life's major values. It does not breed reverence for ancestors and the time-tested values which they personify. Rather does it encourage what Margaret Mead has called the wishful forgetting of ancestry. Having risen socially in the world, having raised our status in an open-class society, we have outgrown our kin and other associations with the ancestral hearth. People who are on the up do not want to think of their past; they want to grasp toward their future.

As a way of life, all this is made to order for the individualist described in the preceding chapter. The system is open—this gives him his chance. Birth and family are of incidental importance: this releases him from his past, its obligations, and its limitations. The criteria for a rise to a higher status are things that can be acquired. It is all up to him. There is only one thing to do, and that is to move upward. Perhaps all this will become more manifest as we become more concrete.

Let us begin with the upper-lower or lower-middle-class individualist as he goes to college, the first major step in the upward climb. Going to college often means going away from home. In any event, it means new contacts, usually above the social level of the parents. In many cases these same parents are making every sacrifice to complete the process which will alienate their children from them. One sees this over and over again. Here is a typical case.

Morris was a bright and ambitious boy. His high school record was a brilliant one. His parents both worked at semiskilled jobs. With Morris, their only child, they lived in two rooms. A scholarship, the help of a family friend, and the sacrifice of his parents made it possible for Morris to go to a nearby university. Here his record was outstanding. After graduation, he went to medical school, completing that course with very high grades. Of his ability, application, and ambition, there never was the slightest question. But the family history is not unimportant either. By the time he was graduated from the university, Morris saw very little of his parents, and nothing of his kinsfolk. He had broken with his church, and looked down his nose at his parents' friends and associates. In his last year at medical school, he made two brief visits to his parents. Morris had simply outgrown his family. He and his parents lived at different levels, they thought differently, and had different interests. Moving up had disorganized his lengthwise family relations and had destroyed his family roots.

The college years are also the marrying years. Whom does the ambitious college-bred individualist marry? Does he return to his earlier contacts and marry a family friend? A girl whom his mother perhaps prefers? An early neighborhood contact who has stayed at home and gone to work after high school? In some cases he does. But such a marriage has its own longtime risks, for he is likely to outgrow her. His years at college have given him a head start, and later, as he moves upward, she may find herself unable to keep pace with him. The open-class system is individual in its opportunities and rewards.

Confirmation of this comes from our own research work. As a part of our study of the large family system, we obtained information on the marital happiness of 440 married persons who had been reared in large families. Of these, 245 (136 men and 109 women) were past their fortieth year. In these older age groups, we found a great deal of marital unhappiness, both among the husbands and wives. Among the husbands, our case material reveals one well-defined group which consisted of men who had attained some degree of prominence and success in their chosen field, only to find that their wives had not kept pace with them in their upward climb. We reiterate: The open-class system tends to be individual, which means that members of the same family, the same immediate family, may move at unequal rates, thus straining the relationships between them.

Marrying While at College

A very definite type of marital situation has developed at many colleges and universities in recent years with the increasing proportion of students who marry before their academic work is completed. Both male and female students are doing this, but the percentage of married men is considerably higher. In some colleges approximately one-third of the male undergraduates are married.

Various complications may arise as a result. In a number of cases, the wife has not attended college, or is forgoing the completion of her academic career in order to put her husband through school, the couple deciding that this is the most promising arrangement under the circumstances. Yet this arrangement, made in such good faith, may produce in time a considerable chasm intellectually between husband and wife. A sociologist, writing about such cases, has this to say:

A wife sometimes finds herself in a routine, dead-end job which may provide enough money for the husband to complete his college education, but which offers her no real opportunity for personal growth and development. At the same time the husband is pursuing an educational program which results in intellectual growth and the creation of interests which carry him beyond those of his wife. The educational gap between husband and wife is slowly and gradually increased. Sometimes at the end of the college educational program couples are already unhappily aware that the husband has outpaced his wife. They are in the sad plight of finding that the very sacrifices of the wife which made possible the husband's education have created a gulf between them and endangered their marriage. One wonders with how many other couples this same chasm shows up in later life, particularly in families where the business and professional success of the husband depends in part on the education, interests, and social competency of his wife.*

Marrying at New Social Levels

Often the upward-moving youth marries after graduation and at his newly acquired college level. At college he meets a new set of young people. They too are on the up. Many colleges and universities are coeducational, and the girls are on the up too. The marriages that ensue are based on various common experiences and interests—lower-middle-class origin, weakened ties to kinsfolk and possibly parents too, and eyes focused on higher rungs on the economic and social ladder. Such couples tend to become partners in achieving material success and a higher social status, with the wife assuming the role of translating the material success of her husband into social status for the family. In a lesser proportion of cases, the wife may become a partner in the exciting game of swelling the family income or focusing on a career of her own.

The reader will understand that we are making no condemnation, either direct or implied, of families in which there is a normal, healthy interest in getting ahead. To make a good living, to live as respected members in a desirable community are normal and praiseworthy ambitions. We are rather trying to show here how the open-class system tends to encourage and give free rein to certain aggressive combinations in marriage, with an inordinate drive toward a constantly higher social status as a main objective in life. Such marriages often become grueling affairs, with the wives driving the husbands to make more money, the husbands prodding the wives to achieve higher social status, and the parents putting the children under pressure to enter gates not yet fully open to their elders.

Returning to our rising individualist, he may not marry until he is well established in his career. At his newly arrived level, he now selects a mate perhaps more firmly established at this level, or he may marry even above this new level, intent focused on still higher rungs of the ladder to be climbed. Or there is another alternative. The socially ambitious woman, who herself has moved up a long way, perhaps a longer way than she will admit, may seize upon him, to aid him to aid her, in her upward climb. Remember again that we are not concerned here with normal, earnest, cooperative families, but with the more abnormal and exaggerated situations which lead marriages to fail.

* Lester A. Kirkendall, "Married Undergraduates on the Campus: An Appraisal," The Coordinator, V, No. 2 (December, 1956), 56.

All this means a great deal of calculated behavior in marriage and mate selection, not particularly designed in the interests of family happiness. It involves husbands and wives using each other, in varying degrees to be sure, to promote their own individual careers. It means conspiring, however tacitly, to be what they have not been.

And it is remarkable how seldom we fool each other, no matter how subtle we are. If we were not so pleased and preoccupied with our own subtlety, we would realize this. We do not fool our own children, even when they are quite young. How difficult it is to assimilate one of the great recent advances in our understanding of human behavior—that we fool ourselves more than we do anyone else. This is the applied meaning of the concept of rationalization.

Calculated behavior in the family, of the kind we have described and sensed in some measure by each one involved, is not the best way to promote family happiness and mutual respect. There may be other ties that hold the family together, there may be balancing compensations, but the general domestic climate is not helpful.

It is an accompaniment of the open-class system that the person who moves up draws the line of acceptability just below his present position. Thus he is apt to be rather critical and disdainful of the past, of his past, which he thinks he has left. In fact, he often becomes rather cruel. Incidentally, this can be observed in political life when the demagogue, newly risen from obscure origins and winning prestige and power on the strength of that appeal, becomes ultra-arbitrary and ruthless toward the kind of people from whence he came.

Perhaps there are reasons for this attitude by the person on the up, at least in part. In his ascent, he received no help from those below him or on a level with him. The best he could expect was that they would not hang too heavily on his coattails. And he was constantly having his fingers stepped on by those above him on the social ladder. He is therefore apt to be, socially speaking, a somewhat bruised person, outwardly buoyant but inwardly resentful and insecure. Thinking in terms of social class position, he is sort of suspended in midair, as it were, a victim of conflicting forces, one pulling him down toward doors he has sought to close and the other attracting him toward gates he hopes to enter. The inability to come to rest inheres in this position.

The story of Edward Borschtum illustrates some of the results of the open-class system which we have sought to underscore. Edward was the son of an unskilled laborer. Stimulated in the course of his secondary school experience to raise his status, he determined to go to college. Good grades, scholarships, part-time employment, and student loans enabled him to do so at a local small college. He drove himself relentlessly and was graduated with an excellent record. By the time of his graduation, he had severed connections for the most part with his family, including two sisters who were very fond of him. Three years later, he took legal steps to change his name to that of a favorably known family, a step which symbolized and brought about his complete withdrawal from his family.

Ten years after graduation, having changed employers three times, each to his distinct advantage, he became department head in a large industrial plant. During this time he had sloughed off contacts with his small-college friends. "Why should I bother with them," he told a friend, "they are of no help to me."

At this time he married the daughter of the vice-president of the business concern for whom he worked. None of his family, and only one of his college mates, was invited to the wedding. If the marriage was a calculated one, designed to promote his career, as was suspected in certain quarters, he was doomed to disappointment. Perhaps a certain aggressiveness worked against him. Five years later, he left his job to accept the vice-presidency of a smaller but rapidly growing business. Two years after that, he was divorced from his wife, and soon had cut himself off from friends and contacts made in that stage of his career.

Meanwhile the business with which he was connected prospered greatly. Some time later it was absorbed by a much larger corporation. During the merger, Edward caught the attention of the president of the larger corporation, and was given a highly responsible position in the new setup. Edward remained with this company, ultimately advancing to the position of president.

En route, he was married a second time, to the older unmarried daughter of an old, socially established family, now in none too affluent circumstances. Edward's income and his second wife's social position proved an effective combination, his wife translating Edward's executive position into an acceptable social status.

Three children blessed this union, each going to ultra-fashionable schools. The children's social position was secure, taking after that of the mother. As they grew up, they came to sense, in various ways, that their father, while very successful in business, did not rate socially as did their mother. There was also the high social position of their mother's people, and no mention ever of the father's family. Edward and his wife never discuss matters of this kind. It is one of the family's areas of avoidance. They and the children "understand" the situation. Edward, with some degree of awareness of his social position, lashes himself to gain further business success, evidently to compensate for his feelings of insecurity.

The story of Edward is in many ways a typical American success story. Beginning on almost the bottom rung, his progress upward has been steady and spectacular. He has proved himself an able executive. He is a generous husband and father. His small college holds him up as a shining example of what "our boys have done." But he is not a happy man. In fact, he is in many ways a very lonely man. He has no family roots now. Through the years, with the pressure of business as an excuse, he seldom visited them. There is a story to the effect that he paid his sister to keep away from him so as not to impede him socially. He has no connections with his boyhood friends and few with his college associates. He never hears from his first wife. He tries not to think of the reality of his arrangement with his present wife. His children's contacts are all with the mother's side of the house, and at times he feels like an outsider in his own home and with his own family. Lately, so the story goes, he has been finding comfort with a mistress, an affectionate widow whose origin, like his own, goes back to "across the tracks." Edward apparently is finding comfort in going "home."

There is, of course, the reverse of all this. It is the story of those who, like Edward, try to move up, but, unlike him, fail in their efforts. This is a less spectacular story, largely untold, but it involves many more people than those who move up. Theirs is the fate of frustration, bitterness, or resignation. Some of them tried too hard, and our class system has words other than of approval for the bounders. Others tried, also too hard, and in doing so stepped outside the established rules of the game and brought discredit upon themselves. Still others tried, but lack of ability, careful planning, methodical application, and/or acceptable behavior spelled failure. Finally, there are those who failed because the breaks were against them.

These failures in the effort to move up socially have their significance for family problems, too. It is a common practice to rationalize one's failure, that is, to "explain" it in terms that enable the retention of one's own ego. One such way is to find a scapegoat who can be blamed. And who is handier at times than the matrimonial mate? How often one hears these words: "If it hadn't been for my wife (or husband)." "If I had had the right kind of wife (or husband)."

Evidence on this point appeared in our own study of marital unhappiness. Concerning men in their fifties who have failed in life's struggle, we found them to rationalize somewhat as follows. They never had a chance to succeed, they say. Their wives were of no help to them. If it were not for the handicaps which their wives imposed, they would have succeeded. In other words, their wives become the scapegoats for the failure of their husbands. The husbands find comfort in the development of feelings of self-pity and of animosity toward their wives.*

*The completed study can be found in The Large Family System, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1956.
 
Whatever the reader's reflections on the open-class system and its meaning for family life may be, this much is sure: it does not foster family life of the kind which has characterized the great civilizations of the past. Nor does it make for values which stress the family as a group rather than its individual members, which emphasize the family as a vehicle for the continuity of life, and which make for a lengthwise rather than a sidewise view of life. The open-class system turns the eyes of the family outward on keeping up with or surpassing the Joneses, instead of having them turn inward upon the development of family rapport.

Certain readers may disagree with our conclusion that family life is not highly valued in our culture, pointing out that there is much emphasis on romanticism and romantic happiness in marriage, even in this book; that there is marked admiration in American life for happily married couples; and that our family literature is replete with sentimental references to marital happiness. All of this, to be sure, is true, but we are writing here of the debit side of our society in its meaning for family life, and this focuses attention on forces which operate in opposing directions. Moreover, the marital happiness thus lauded is individual romantic happiness, multiplied by two. Cleavage even in marriage, status-climbing as individuals—this is the open-class system at its logical best and its family worst.

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