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This chapter reviews the Conservative decision at the Carlton Club meeting of 1922 to end the coalition with the Lloyd George Liberals, and examines the part played by the Conservative's identity as the party of anti-socialism in this decision. Key issues discussed include the impact of taxation, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and the activism of the middle classes with the formation of the Middle Class Union, the Anti-Waste League, and the People's Union for Economy.

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.

This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second section addresses the role of heroism, another appealing quality, primarily through miners, firemen, and life-boat men. Such strong and appealing working-men offered a more comforting vision of working-class masculinity than that in which they were politically and socially dangerous. Kindness was attributed to both brawn and brave stereotypes, taming the muscular and reckless body. This was not their only function for a middle-class audience, since the same combination of alluring physical and emotional qualities also rendered the working-class male body desirable as a manly ideal. The chapter then shows that the working classes created and disseminated their own highly emotional and material manifestation of working-class manliness on the material culture of trades unions and friendly societies. However, the emotions associated with them were subtly different and deployed in different ways. For middle-class men, the attractive working man was reassuring and admirable, for working-class men he was a measure of their right to be included in the civic polity. (185 words)

Chapter 1 examines the Wheeler family in the decades after emancipation and highlights their educational accomplishments, which put them on a path toward middle-class respectability in the early part of the twentieth century. It underscores how their middle-class status and economic independence provided the Wheeler children with more of a level playing field when compared to the black masses, or as much as possible given the limitations of the Jim Crow South. Moreover, it argues that the ideological underpinnings of the industrial “New South” at the end of the nineteenth century offered black business leaders a similar vision of racial uplift through economic independence as a way to reclaim full citizenship. This first chapter sets the stage for understanding the close proximity Wheeler had to black business from an early age—the result of his father becoming an executive with NC Mutual—and why he chose a career in banking.

This chapter demonstrates how cultural accounts of men in the home inculcated feelings that produced, reinforced, and disseminated notions of masculinity. It shows that while manly men were considered integral to its success they were nevertheless envisioned outside the home, fighting for it, defending it, or providing for it. As such, this chapter addresses men’s absence from home through the popular motifs of men leaving and returning, dreaming of home, and their ‘absent presence’; that is objects which acted as reminders of men who were away from home for long periods. When print and visual culture imagined men within the home, it was as catalysts for a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ home, predominantly fashioned through their performance of key emotions. Men could produce ‘happy’ homes through their provision, frugality, kindness, love, and affection. Or their disruptive unmanly behaviours resulted in ‘unhappy’ homes, sites of domestic violence. The chapter focuses on representations of working-class men because middle-class imaginations often scrutinised their emotional and sexual performances in the home, since it was deemed central to a successful society and nation. As such, they also functioned to remind middle-class men what they should aspire to and avoid being. (194 words)

One of the most notable features of urbanization in China in the past two decades is the rise of an urban middle class. From the proliferation of nightlife entertainment in urban hot spots to the consumption of luxurious items and/or foreign brands, the drastic increase in car ownership to the growth of gated communities, cityscape in contemporary China has undergone drastic changes in the course of urbanization and socio-economic re-stratification. The rise of a newly formed middle class in the major cities is both an agent in shaping the changing cityscape and an outcome of current urban development. This chapter, drawing upon the authors’ observations conducted in a suburban middle-classcommunity in Beijing in 2007-2017 and the study of the middle class in Shanghai since the mid-1990s, reports on the emergence and formation of an urban middle class in contemporary Chinese cities. It is argued that this middle class came into existence when China’s economy was marketized and the social structure had undergone a major transformation as a result of such economic changes. Within a period of 20-25 years, there witnessed the birth of a middle class in the context of the transition to a post-socialist economy, the formation of new class identities and lifestyles, and growing class-related anxieties. Our discussion covers the formation of this urban middle class, its social and cultural outlooks, and an analysis of how their class interests shape the social landscape of the Chinese cities.

This chapter uses three different source bases to examine middle-class attitudes towards class and social change in the 1970s: interviews from Paul Thompson’s Edwardians oral history project, the journalistic study Voices from the Middle Class, by Jane Deverson and Katharine Lindsay, and the diaries of an upwardly mobile man, deposited with Mass Observation. It argues that some older middle-class people in the 1970s still thought of class as something given by birth and breeding, and still felt comfortable voicing class prejudices. However, even among older generations, some recognized that such attitudes were no longer widely acceptable. Younger generations of the middle classes were far more heterogeneous, and many younger middle-class people rejected class distinction and tradition. Social change, particularly the expansion of upward social mobility in the post-war decades, meant the middle classes were more heterogeneous and less bound by a common culture.

This chapter focuses on class-based features of grandfathering in the context of a Nordic welfare state. Based on interviews with 17 middle- and working-class Finnish grandfathers, the chapter shows that while men’s grandparenting practices are not limited to auxiliary roles to assist grandmothers, grandchildren’s age has an effect on how grandfathers spend time with their grandchildren. School-aged children received most attention, and working-class grandfathers tended to provide their grandchildren with practical skills, whereas middle-class were focused more on increasing their grandchildren’s social capital. Working-class grandfathering practices emphasised creating continuity between men’s generations and transferring masculine knowledge. In the middle-class, active grandfather role was explained by the pressures of working life among the middle generation. Day care services, provided by the welfare state, are not flexible enough to meet the needs of middle-class families whose work demands are set by global enterprises, and who thus need support from grandparents.

Raised in a what he refers to as a "closed milieu," Ali embarked on a total questioning of his conservative upbringing when moved to Istanbul to attend Boğaziçi University. Over the course of his four years in Istanbul, Ali has come to inhabit a "flexible" self - one that allows him to distance himself from his upbringing while in the company of his middle-class, high-achiever peers, yet remains malleable enough for him to maintain his connection to his family and place of origin. Given the uneasiness of Ali's claim to urban, middle-class masculinity, success in romance is an important domain by which Ali judges and understands his success in self-making. In this regard, Ali's failure to build a long-term romantic coupling with a young woman named Arzu becomes a major source of anxiety and tension in his search for a new middle-class, masculine subjectivity.

After 1918 local politics became a pressing concern for Conservatives as although a Labour parliamentary majority appeared unlikely, achieving control of municipal councils provided it with a key means of expanding its support base through the provision of efficient public services, thereby laying the foundations for future success in national contests. During the 1920s various Conservative identities across the English regions. Opposition to government ‘waste’ proved popular amongst many party activists, particularly in southern England. However, Conservatives in cities like Leeds and Birmingham promoted a more consensual form of anti-socialist politics, focused on their local efforts towards the amelioration of social conditions and the integration of working class activists into the party. In cities where Labour plausibly promoted moderate reforms in local government Conservatives proved more reluctant to tar their opponents with Bolshevik or extreme socialist associations.

In this chapter I argue there are three modes of Black middle class identity, which individuals towards each identity mode adopting specific cultural repertoires. Firstly is the identity mode labelled strategic assimilation. Here, individuals adopt repertoires of code switching and cultural equity; they switch identities when around the White middle class, and strive to consume dominant cultural capital to achieve a cultural equity with White middle class people. Secondly, there are those towards the ethnoracial autonomous identity mode. They reject the strategy of code switching through their repertoire of browning, and through their repertoire of Afro-centrism they prioritise consuming cultural forms which give positive representations of Black diasporic histories, knowledges, and identities. Lastly are those towards the class-minded identity mode. They adopt repertoires of post-racialism – arguing that we are ‘beyond racism’ – and de-racialisation, seeing themselves as ‘middle class’ rather than Black.

This chapter reviews the historical development of the contemporary middle class in Egypt. This class has grown in number since the 1960s and has experienced the greatest shake-up in Nasser’s era when the upper bourgeoisie of industrialists was replaced by the new class of bureaucratic and managerial elites. The title, Misri Effendi (or Mr Egyptian) refers to a caricature character invented in late 1920s as a symbol of the average Egyptian. Historically endowed with adequate cultural and social capital in terms of education and positions in state bureaucracy, the Egyptian middle class has been caught between their aspiration for prosperity and a diminishing income that shatters these aspirations.

This chapter asks how everyday depictions of slums as dirty, uncivil and out of place—what the author calls “nuisance talk”— gain legitimacy in popular representations and state visions of urban space. The author remedies the relative lack of scholarly attention to middle class groups' mundane, often place-specific constructions of civility by analyzing the cultural politics of Delhi's world-class redevelopment. By exploring urban housing for the poor and slums from Delhi, we can see how the unstable environment of slums is negotiated and utilized by its dwellers to seek respite and solace in the very processes of urban development that might later exclude them.

This chapter describes the rising importance of middle-class refinement in the United States, and shows that black and white Americans fostered this culture together. Pursuit of middle-class status on the part of blacks and whites created unique kinds of dependencies, with whites dependent on black service workers for their very appearance and sense of subjective wellbeing and black Cincinnatians and Louisvillians reliant, in part, on white allies for legal and political advocacy in state legislatures. Black and white Americans imagined a common bond in the pursuit of refinement and the security of middle-class homes and families.

Cultural subordination is defined here as the suppression of important black values or folk ways—questions and concerns of keen importance to blacks—in the American mainstream culture. Like juridical subordination, cultural subordination is animated by post-Jim Crow norms that perform important rhetorical and regulatory functions in civil rights discourse—racial omission (traditionalism), racial integration (reformism), racial solidarity (limited separation), and social transformation (critical race theory). After defending the belief that blacks do have a distinct set of values that transcend class stratification, and after discussing the legitimacy of cultural diversity in American society, this chapter crafts four models of cultural diversity defined by these post-Jim Crow norms—cultural assimilation (traditionalism), biculturalism (reformism), cultural pluralism (limited separation), and transculturalism (critical race theory). It then proceeds to explain how most of these visions of cultural diversity subordinate legitimate black values. Deploying these models to purposefully enhance our racial democracy, which lies at the root of cultural diversity, can reduce (but not entirely eliminate) racial subordination in the American mainstream culture.

Chapter three demonstrates that changing medical responses to alcohol abuse developed in a social context of capitalist transformation and economic instability. Developing class distinctions, along with new conceptions of gender and race, shaped both perceptions of heavy drinking and the experiences of those who suffered the consequences. The chapter constructs a social portrait of inebriates through a study of over 1,500 individuals recorded as having died of alcohol abuse in Philadelphia between 1825 and 1850. Delving into hospital records, burial registers, almshouse dockets, and other sources, the chapter links medical concerns with pathological drinking to the growth of a socially distinctive middle class, the rapid growth of urban poverty, and fears about urban decay and epidemic disease, especially cholera. The chapter argues that as temperance became the sine qua non of social respectability, the persistence of heavy drinking among the status conscious middle-class drove new medical responses to and definitions of pathological drinking.

American scholar Charles Murray claims that class divisions have vastly expanded over the last half-century. The working classis not only experiencing stagnant wages but has almost completely lost touch with how to live successful, meaningful lives. The consequence for intergenerational poverty is ominous to say the least. A permanent underclass is in the making. Policies that are focused on a single number or a limited set of indicators can produce unexpected outcomes with perverse effects . … relying on single targeted public policies to treat complex social objectives that have multiple highly interrelated dimensions, like poverty, often falls seriously short of expectations.