In an age in which class departments are becoming starker than ever, some individuals are selecting to wed across class. The Power of the Past traces the lives of a subset of these individuals – highly-educated adults who wed a partner raised in a class various from their own, mostly in between those from blue- and white-color backgrounds. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with spouses who revealed the inner functions of their marital relationships, Jessi Streib reveals that crossing class lines is difficult, and that even though these couples shared checking account, mortgages, children, and friends, each partner was still shaped by the class of their past, and subsequently, so was their marital relationship. Streib exposes what was rarely apparent to the husbands and wives she interviewed. The class of their past did not just matter in determining the amount of cash they had as children or what job their parents went off to each morning; It likewise mattered in more subtle methods, by systematically forming their ideas of how to set about their lives. Upwardly mobile partners who matured in blue-collar families discovered to take a laissez-faire approach to the world around them: they preferred to go with the circulation, take advantage of the minute, and prevent self-imposed restrictions. Their partners, who grew up in expert white-collar households, however, wanted to handle the world around them: they arranged, planned, kept an eye on, and supervise. Coping with a spouse who was born into a various class implies navigating these distinctions – distinctions that appeared throughout nearly every aspect of their lives, from how they handle their financial resources, to how they manage their time – both at home and on holiday – to concepts about how their kids should be raised. The Power of the Past shows that when people are raised in different classes, merged lives do not result in merged ideas about how to lead those lives. People can come together throughout class lines, however their long-lasting class attributes can not be left.
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