Large Homes
More than any other single large-purchase item, a larger home was deemed by many of those taking place in the research to be the central symbol of proving they had achieved success. This attitude is more prevalent among those raised in blue-collar environments, of course, but the symbolism is hardly limited to that group. A bigger home has traditionally been an essential component of the American Dream and remains so even in the far more complex social environmental today.
College Degrees
For many of the spouses coming from a white-collar environment, the value of a college degree goes beyond the utilitarian of increasing job opportunities and salary expectations. The discipline and even the actual educational benefit itself is to a certain extent almost beside the point; having nothing more than advanced than bachelor’s degree symbolizes education itself. The more advanced the degree, the weightier the education that is symbolized. Notably, however, this symbolic attachment to a college degree is often not directed inward but rather outward to the spouse who has not finished college. The result being, naturally, strong pressure applied the spouse with a college degree upon the spouse without one to rectify the disparity.
Watching Television
Almost exclusively applied to the white-collar wives is the view toward watching television by their husbands as a symbol of wasteful expenditure of time on things of a low cultural standing. This is one of the few symbols that seems to be directly and exclusively tied to a correlation between gender and economic disparity with almost no blurring of lines. Blue-collar wives, for instance, do not make the same complaint against white-collar husbands nor does it work in reverse in that situation. The faithful and steadfast attachment to excessive television is certainly related to the lack of other opportunities for spending leisure time or the ability to afford those that are available. That the complaint is almost entirely limited to blue-collar husbands carries a wealth of possibilities that could account for a reasonable explanation.
Housecleaning
The equitable division of labor when it comes to cleaning house remains the iconic symbolic representation that old-fashioned patriarchal views about the “role” of wives in the marriage remains so firmly intact as to almost not have budged since the feminist revolution of the 1970’s. Contrary to what all those commercials on television advertising housecleaning products would have America believe—at least according to this research—wives do not just do the overwhelming bulk of housecleaning, but are still expected to even when those domestic duties involve cleaning up after husbands who are unemployed, attending school or work at home. The number complain shared by all the wives—not just the television thing limited to white-collar wives—was systemic laziness combined with an outdated expectation that housework is the wife’s job even when she goes to work every day and the husband has no job at all.
Collars
The research involved in this book divides the spouses in the marriages into those raised in blue-collar environments and those raised in white-collar environments. Though originating from a literal use of white and blue clothing, today these two terms symbolize more than simply types of labor or even disparity in economic earnings. White-collar symbolizes the perception—and not always the reality—of a person who enjoys the social benefits of being better educated, receives higher pay in a job requiring less physical exertion, receives greater respect in general from service industry employees, has access to better health care and lives in a bigger in a better neighborhood with greater influence. Blue-collar symbolizes the perception—and, not always reflected by reality—of a person more satisfied with simple pleasures, whose work is more honest and who works harder doing it, is more family-oriented, is more religious and more patriotic and, above all else, is profoundly misunderstood and underestimated by the white-collars.
