Working with Class by Daniel Walkowitz
Polls tell us that most Americans--whether they earn $20,000 or $200,000 a year--think of themselves as middle class. As this phenomenon suggests, ""middle class"" is a category whose definition is not necessarily self-evident. In this book, historian Daniel Walkowitz approaches the question of what it means to be middle class from an innovative angle. Focusing on the history of social workers--who daily patrol the boundaries of class--he examines the changed and contested meaning of the term over the last one hundred years. Walkowitz uses the study of social workers to explore the interplay of race, ethnicity, and gender with class. He examines the trade union movement within the mostly female field of social work and looks at how a paradigmatic conflict between blacks and Jews in New York City during the 1960s shaped late-twentieth-century social policy concerning work, opportunity, and entitlements. In all, this is a story about the ways race and gender divisions in American society have underlain the confusion about the identity and role of the middle class. |This study of social work and social workers illuminates the interplay of race, ethnicity, and gender in the formation of middle-class identity.
Donna Haverty-Stacke is Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960 (NYU Press, 2009). Daniel Walkowitz is Director of Experiential Education, Acting Director of Metropolitan Studies, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, and Professor of History at New York University. He is an American social historian who specializes in labor, urban, and working-class history. Over the past thirty years, Walkowitz has authored over thirty articles and co-edited or authored six books. His most recent books are Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (North Carolina, 1999), and, co-edited with Lisa Maya Knauer, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Spaces (Duke, 2004). He is also General Editor for the ten-volume Social History of the United States, forthcoming fromABC-Clio.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780807847589 |
| ISBN 10 | 0807847585 |
| Title | Working with Class |
| Author | Daniel Walkowitz |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Year published | 1999-03-31 |
| Number of pages | 440 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |