Why is it assumed as a matter of course that all working-class people are perforce stupid?
“They’ll never rise” is the implicit assumption of the one percent. The one-percenters smugly assume they’ll get away with their crimes forever because the other 99 percent are too incompetent or too cowed to rise up against them.
I spent a great deal of my life having my intelligence underestimated by my supposed superiors. One day at the Singapore Desk of the State Department, where I, then 23 years old, was working as a secretary, the economics officer suddenly rushed out of his office. He went to the large dictionary that sat on its own stand against the wall of the larger area where the three secretarial desks stood and began rapidly leafing through it. “I need to know how to spell ‘brouhaha’!”
I spelled it for him and added helpfully, “The etymological origin is probably French—from the French word for ‘noise’--you know, ‘le bruit’.”
The guy looked at me as if I had suddenly grown an extra head, as did the other two secretaries, one senior and one very senior.
There were other occasions. One occurred when, having left the State Department to work at Headquarters Marine Corps, I was asked to intercede in a dispute between my manager, a civilian, and the lt. colonel who headed the Family Housing unit in the next office. The two men loathed each other. Hoping to score a point, my boss pointed to the first three words of a sentence in a report the colonel had just given him. “If Family Housing were…” the sentence began. “Is this right?” my manager demanded. “Shouldn’t it be ‘If Family Housing was’?”
“Well, yes, sir, in this case it would be right,” I said. “The word ‘if’ implies the subjunctive mood, and the subjunctive mood always takes a plural verb.” Noticing the stunned look on their faces, I added, “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s the English language for you! Blame the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.”
Again, all six of the men in the room looked at me as if I’d just grown an extra head. Finally, the Navy commander’s jaw, which had dropped, resumed its normal position. “I guess you must have paid attention in school,” he remarked. “All of that got right by me.”
Until the mid- to late 1970s, it was commonly assumed that no secretary had a measurable IQ. We were thought to be poorly educated and rather stupid, and that was why we deserved our low status and pay. It never occurred to anyone male that most working women, well-educated or not, were forced to be secretaries because that line of work, aside from nursing or teaching, was the only one open to us.
Nor was the stereotype of stupidity limited to women. After my husband and I had been married for a few years, he decided to take out an insurance policy. As his was the type of work that hardly permitted him to take time off during the week, a doctor came to our house one evening.
The doctor took Dearly Beloved’s blood pressure and so forth. As he was packing up to leave his gaze fell on a copy of Encounter magazine, which was lying on our dining room hutch. He did a double-take. “I didn’t expect to see a copy of that in a bricklayer’s house,” he said.
I just shrugged, having become used to such attitudes. I was brought up in a working-class home, with a father who earned his living as a journalist and a mother who was a housewife. Our home was filled with my father’s books, particularly his Everyman’s Library collection of classic works of literature. The walls of our four-room duplex were covered with his paintings. My mother played opera records all day Saturday except when she listened to the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday opera broadcast, and on Sundays she and my father played Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, Grieg, Mozart, and other musical classics on our record player. At college I realized that the Humanities course that students were required to sit through was nothing more than a recap of what I’d grown up with.
Nowadays, of course, the profession of secretary is very nearly extinct. Employees are expected to make their own travel arrangements, package their own shipments of materials to distant branch offices, and process their own travel expense reimbursement reports and petty cash requests. It’s burdensome, but fair—just as the descendants of the real-life Downton Abbey types are expected to wash their own dishes, make their own beds, and mow their own lawns.
But more fairness in some spheres of human activity does not compensate for the pervasive, ravaging unfairness of our economic reality: falling wages, fewer jobs, the almost complete lack of protection for American workers, and the almost total lack of a social safety net. Meanwhile the one percent enjoys ever-higher economic rewards and complete control of our supposedly “fair, free, and democratic” elections.
When will we rise? What will it take?
At the risk of sounding like an anarchist, I venture the opinion that we will have to occupy the fourth estate. Somehow, some way, we must take control of the media to ensure that our message of economic and political fairness will prevail.