Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America
In Labor's Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation's future.Drawing from more than a hundred years of census data, Cherlin documents how today's marriage gap mirrors that of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, a time of high inequality much like our own. Cherlin demonstrates that the widespread prosperity of working-class families in the mid-20th century, when both income inequality and the marriage gap were low, is the true outlier in the history of the American family. In fact, changes in the economy, culture, and family formation in recent decades have been so great that Cherlin suggests that the working-class family pattern has largely disappeared.Read more
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