Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:37:35.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Exploring Diversity in Middle-Class Families: The Symbolism of American Ethnic Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Susan Kellogg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This article began with a puzzle. In our book Domestic Revolutions, Steven Mintz and I took as one of our major themes the rich ethnic variety among American families. Indeed, we argued that there is no such thing as the American family. Yet as we moved forward in time, the theme of ethnic variation became submerged in discussions of class and racial variation. To some extent, our discussion mirrored the historical and sociological literature. But the slipperiness of ethnic variation in contemporary families may also reflect something about the nature of contemporary ethnicity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 27 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1990 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, B. (1968) Kinship in an Urban Setting. Chicago: Markham.Google Scholar
Baldassare, M. (1986) Trouble in Paradise. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Barth, F., ed. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Bergen-Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Bellah, R., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W., Seidler, A., and Tipton, S. (1985) Habits of the Heart. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bensman, J., and Vidich, A. (1987) American Society: The Welfare State and Beyond. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.Google Scholar
Blu, K. (1980) The Lumbee Problem. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Caplow, T., Bahr, H., Chadwick, B., Hill, R., and Williamson, M. (1982) Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Abner, ed. (1974) Urban Ethnicity. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Coleman, J., and Hoffer, T. (1987) Public and Private High Schools. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Coleman, R., Rainwater, L., and McClelland, K. (1978) Social Standing in America: New Dimensions of Class. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Degler, C. (1980) At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
di Leonardo, M. (1984) The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Epstein, A. L. (1978) Ethos and Identity: Three Studies in Ethnicity. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Farber, B. (1981) Conceptions of Kinship. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Fischer, M. M. J. (1986) “Ethnicity and the post-modern arts of memory,” in Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds.) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 194–233.Google Scholar
Gans, H. (1988) Middle American Individualism. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Glendon, M. (1981) The New Family and the New Property. Toronto: Butterworths.Google Scholar
Golab, C. (1977) “The impact of the industrial experience on the immigrant family,” in Ehrlich, R. (ed.) Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Charlottes ville: University Press of Virginia: 1–32.Google Scholar
Golden, C. (1981) “Family strategies and the family economy in the late nineteenth century,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press: 277–310.Google Scholar
Gordon, M. (1964) Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gottdiener, M. (1977) Planned Sprawl. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Greeley, A., ed. (1974) Ethnicity in the United States. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Groneman, C. (1977) “She earns as a child—She pays as a man,” in Ehrlich, R. (ed.) Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia: 33–46.Google Scholar
Handlin, O. (1951) The Uprooted. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Hareven, T. (1983) “Origins of the ‘modern family’ in the United States.” Journal of Social History 17: 339–44.Google Scholar
Hareven, T., and Modell, J. (1980) “Family patterns,” in Thernstrom, S. (ed.) Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jackman, M., and Jackman, R. (1983) Class Awareness in the United States. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, J. (1984) The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.Google Scholar
Johnson, D. L. (1982) Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Kowinski, W. (1985) The Mailing of America. New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
Levison, A. (1974) The Working-Class Majority. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan.Google Scholar
Lieberson, S. (1980) A Piece of the Pie. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
MacCready, W. (1974) “The persistence of ethnic variation in American families,” in Greeley, A. (ed.) Ethnicity in the United States. New York: Wiley: 156-76.Google Scholar
May, E. T. (1988) Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Mindel, C., and Habenstein, R. (1976) Ethnic Families in America. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Mintz, S. (forthcoming) “Regulating the American family.” Journal of Family History.Google Scholar
Mintz, S., and Kellogg, S. (1988) Domestic Revolutions. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Nakane, C. (1967) Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural Japan. London: Athlone; New York: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Newman, K. (1988) Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Novak, M. (1972) The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. (1973) “On key symbols.” American Anthropologist 75: 1338-46.Google Scholar
Perm, C. (1988) Belonging in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Phinney, J., and Rotheram, M., eds. (1987) Children’s Ethnic Socialization. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Pleck, E. (1979) “A mother’s wages: Income earning among married Italian and black women, 1896-1911,” in Cott, N. and Pleck, E. (eds.) A Heritage of Her Own. New York: Simon and Schuster: 367-92.Google Scholar
Popenoe, D. (1977) The Suburban Environment: Sweden and the U.S. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ruggles, S. (1987) Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America. Madison: University of Wisconsin PressGoogle Scholar
Schneider, D. (1968) American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Schneider, D. (1980) American Kinship. 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, D., and Smith, R. (1973) Class Differences and Sex Roles in American Kinship and Family Structure. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Taylor, P. (1971) The Distant Magnet. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.Google Scholar
Troll, L., and Bengston, V. (1979) “Generations in the family,” in Burr, W., Hill, R., Nye, F. I., and Reiss, I. (eds.) Contemporary Theories about the Family, vol. 1. New York: Free Press: 127-61.Google Scholar
Turner, V. (1967) The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Van Horn, S. (1988) Women, Work, and Fertility, 1900-1986. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Weitzman, Lenore (1985) The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Yanagisako, S. (1985) Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese Americans. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Yancey, W., Ericksen, E., and Juliani, R. (1976) “Emergent ethnicity: A review and reformulation.” American Sociological Review 41: 391–403.Google Scholar