15.There were a couple of notable exceptions. Wendy, for example, felt that giving to her alma mater was unnecessary. She said, “I’ve been given all the opportunity in the world, and I’m going to give my money to people who haven’t been, not to me twenty years ago.”
16.A donor-advised fund is a charitable fund usually administered by a public organization such as a nonprofit in which the giving is directed by the donor over time.
17.Resource Generation exists, like some other similar organizations, partly in order to create spaces where people can not only talk about these issues but also come up with giving priorities and plans (Wernick 2009).
18.Donovan also explicitly connected the moral dimension of the question of how much to give to his own spending rather than his assets. He said, “I mean, what’s the right metric? Should you be focusing on giving away a percentage of your assets? What’s ethically interesting to me is not what percentage of your wealth you’re giving away but what’s the connection between what you’re spending on yourself and what you’re giving away. Again, I don’t spend a lot as a percentage of my wealth, [and] I don’t give a lot as a percentage of my wealth. But I give a lot as a percentage of what I spend on myself.”
19.See Whillans et al. 2016 on the idea of “giving back” as linked to taxes.
20.It is interesting that Nadine chooses the language of “death tax” over “estate tax,” because “death tax” is more often used by opponents of the tax.
21.As Ira Silver (2007) has argued, the organizations of the type supported by the most progressive in my sample do tend to challenge inequalities of various kinds rather than only reproduce privilege. Yet he shows that the structures of these organizations (in his case, progressive groups that make grants to smaller organizations), despite the best efforts of staff, donors, and activists, often still reproduce class divisions between funders and activists and/or reproduce donors’ claims to have particular kinds of identities validated. See also Ostrander 1995a; Roelofs 2003; Wernick 2009. For a philosophical discussion of this dilemma, see Cohen 2000.
22.This link between individual entitlement or advancement and awareness of systematic inequality has also been noted, in a different context, by Heather Beth Johnson (2006).
23.See Mogil and Slepian with Woodrow 1991.
24.As noted in the introduction, these respondents are not included in the core sample of fifty parents.
CHAPTER FIVE: LABOR, SPENDING,
AND ENTITLEMENT IN COUPLES
1.See Acker 1988 on the ways interpersonal relations in the family deflect attention from the gendered distribution of resources.
2.See, e.g., Blumberg 1988; Blumberg and Coleman 1989; Blumstein and Schwartz 1991; Burgoyne 1990; Chang 2010; Dema-Moreno 2009. Additional literature looks at how couples manage money, especially whether they share it or separate it; whether pooling systems lead to equal access to and control over money; and how members of couples spend similarly or differently (Kenney 2006; Klawitter 2008; Ludwig-Mayerhofer et al., 2011; Pahl 1983, 1990; Treas 1993; Vogler 2005; Vogler and Pahl 1993, 1994; Vogler et al. 2008; Yodanis and Lauer 2007). Though pooling seems more egalitarian, it actually can mean less independence for women; because both partners feel that earning confers greater control, male earners spend more and women nonearners less (but when women earn more, men still spend it) (Schwartz et al. 2012, 259–60). See also Chang (2010) on the barriers to wealth accumulation for women.
3.For an overview, see Shockley and Shen 2016 and Zelizer 2005, 244. For a recent discussion of gender identity specifically, see Schneider 2012.
4.This is in a sense an economy of recognition of each person’s contribution, similar to Hochschild’s (1989a) concept of the “economy of gratitude.”
5.See, e.g., Acker 1988; Coulson et al. 1975; DeVault 1991; Folbre 1991; Fraser 2014; Laslett and Brenner 1989; Molyneux 1979; Nakano Glenn 1992; Schwartz Cowan 1984; Secombe 1974; Weinbaum and Bridges 1976; Zelizer 2005. See also Raxlen and Sherman 2016.
6.I have more data on relations in these households because I have seventeen such households in the sample; the dual-earner, dual-contributor, and inherited-wealth categories all include fewer households, which vary more in terms of the gender of the person bringing the wealth. I thus go into more depth on the single-earner households here. I have masked some identifying characteristics in this chapter because many interviewees said that these issues were the most private.
7.By this I mean the few women who worked very part-time, usually freelance. These women would not characterize themselves as stay-at-home mothers (avoiding the stigma of that label) but spent the vast majority of their time on family rather than paid labor.
8.Nearly all had joint bank accounts, at least for daily living, and pooled savings in retirement and college accounts. But many also maintained their own individual accounts (occasionally in secret, as we’ll see). Practices of daily money management varied. In some cases, one person of the couple paid all the bills; in others, each partner was responsible for different expenses.
9.Although in a few cases this claim rang untrue—I suspected that they were saying it in order to avoid disclosing numbers—many seemed genuinely not to know. Julia, for example, underestimated the cost of her $600,000 renovation by $200,000, and her husband corrected her. When men worked in some finance or legal jobs or owned their own businesses, this lack of clarity was compounded by the fact that bonuses or unpredictable windfalls constituted a large share of their income and/or that their assets were invested in their companies. Thus they either did not receive a conventional salary or it was only a small part of their total compensation.
10.In a few of these families, the man had participated more actively in the decision making. But in only one case did the husband take the lead role across the board (partly because his wife was pregnant).
11.In some cases this was another facet of concern regarding the prudent use of money. For example, one woman said her husband had insisted on high-end kitchen appliances because he cared about resale value, although they were planning to live in their renovated house long-term.
12.I suspect that my interviewees in general were likely to underestimate or keep silent about the amount of conflict they had with their partners over spending. Those who did talk about it usually emphasized that it was deeply private.
13.On “consumption work,” see Weinbaum and Bridges 1976.
14.The wealthy women volunteers Kaplan Daniels (1988, 33) studied similarly had to prioritize their husbands’ needs over their volunteer work.
15.It seems that Alice was going to say she “proved” she could work. This is the same kind of interpretive move I described in chapter 2, in which because Alice “did that” she can feel like a worker, or have a worker’s “mindset,” even without currently working for money.
16.With limited variation in the gender of inheritors, it is difficult to draw comparative conclusions. I also interviewed more inheritors than spouses of inheritors, so it is hard to make claims about spouses’ views.
17.She told me, “Thank God my kids learned to write in cursive. ’Cause you know they don’t teach that in public schools anymore. Because they will need to sign their names a lot.”
18.Ehrenreich 2002; Hochschild 1989b; Rollins 1985.
19.DeVault 1991, 1999; Streib 2015.
20.A few women in inheritor households also worked full-time, but they typically had more flexible jobs.
21.See Tichenor 2005.
22.Tichenor 2005.
23.On the family myth, see Hochschild 1989b.
24.Zelizer 2005, 243; see also Zelizer 2012.
25.See, e.g., Bittman et al. 2003; Brines 1994; Evertsson and Nermo 2004; Hochschild 1989b; Schneider 2012; Tichenor 2005.
26.Yodanis and Lauer 2007.
27.See Chang 2010.
28.See Zelizer 2005 on the relationship of legal categories and processes to family relations around money.
29.Acker 1988, 487.
CHAPTER SIX
: PARENTING PRIVILEGE
A modified version of this chapter has been published as Sherman 2017.
1.See Khan 2011; Lareau (2011) uses this word to mean a more positive sense of empowerment. See the introduction and Sherman 2017 on this point.
2.See, e.g., Cooper 2014; Katz 2008, 2012; Nelson 2010.
3.See Cucchiara and Horvat 2014 for a discussion of school choice as identity construction for parents.
4.Nelson 2010, 6. See also Katz 2001, 2008, 2012; Lareau 2002, 2011; Streib 2013. On the pursuit of educational advantages specifically, see Calarco 2011; Johnson 2006; Lareau and Weininger 2008. For the UK context, see, e.g., Devine 2004; Reay 1998, 2005a; Vincent and Ball 2007; Weis et al. 2014. For more detailed engagement with this literature, see Sherman 2017. For popular literature on questions of entitlement, see Carlyle 2012; D’Amico 2010; Gallo and Gallo 2001; Hausner 1990; Lieber 2015.
5.As I discuss later in the chapter, they also taught children to observe the behavioral prohibition on talking about money.
6.As others have pointed out, being a good parent means being a good consumer in the sense of both consuming for children and guiding their consumption (see Cucchiara 2013; Pugh 2009; Schor 2003).
7.See also Pugh 2009.
8.Kolbert 2012.
9.This scheme cultivates not only the child’s willingness to work for what he wants but an ethic of self-improvement: he chooses both the type of self-improvement he engages in to obtain the points (participating in school) and the type of self-improvement for which he redeems them (the art class).
10.Pugh 2009.
11.Allison Pugh (2009) has described similar practices and feelings of ambivalence among the upper-income parents she studied, who used “symbolic deprivation” and “rules and allowances” to manage their children’s consumption and their own anxieties about that consumption. Those parents also expressed concerns, linked to their own histories, about how restricting consumption affected their children’s dignity. Pugh (2009, 119) theorizes the tension between indulging children’s desires and constraining them primarily as having to do with parents’ fear of raising kids without self-control and anxiety about materialism as morally unworthy. My complementary interpretation extends this view into the realm of managing affluence more generally by avoiding “entitlement.”
12.It is possible that the family travels with a domestic worker accompanying the children in coach class, as I have been told some families do. Unfortunately this possibility did not occur to me during the interview, so I did not ask Allison about it.
13.Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard 2013, 3.
14.Reay et al. 2007 call this “an act of appropriation”; see also Pugh 2009.
15.See Jackson 2001; Pattillo 2013.
16.Pugh 2009; Lacy forthcoming. As Karyn Lacy (2007, 152) has noted in writing about black middle-class parents, “In addition to teaching their children to negotiate the black-white boundary, these parents must also prepare their children to manage class-based boundaries between different groups of blacks.” Pugh (2009) also finds that affluent African American parents intentionally place their children in diverse environments, creating what she calls “exposed childhoods.”
17.Writing about white middle-class parents who send their children to urban comprehensive schools (which in the United States are known as public schools), they argue, “The white middle-class interest in difference and otherness can thus also be understood as describing a project of cultural capital through which these white middle-class families seek to display their liberal credentials and secure their class position. The ability to move in and out of spaces marked as ‘other’ becomes part of the process through which this particular fraction of the white middle classes come to know themselves as both privileged and dominant” (Reay et al. 2007, 1047).
18.Reay et al. 2007. See also Gillies 2005; Khan 2011.
19.Some of the less affluent parents also worried that their kids would feel bad about themselves if they thought they were the “only ones without a country house,” in Linda’s words.
20.See also Cucchiara 2013; Cucchiara and Horvat 2014; Johnson 2006.
21.Pugh 2009, 194.
22.One such parent told me the boarding schools were actually more diverse than the public school in her elite, nearly all-white suburb.
23.This is the sense in which Lareau (2011) uses the word. See Sherman 2017.
24.Pugh 2009.
25.Coined by Allison Pugh (2009, 178), the term “pathway consumption” means “spending on the opportunities that shape children’s trajectories,” especially including school and activities such as summer camp.
26.Bourdieu 1990.
CONCLUSION
1.Stewart 2016.
2.Indeed, much of the press coverage of Rowling has highlighted her status as a struggling single mother on the dole when she wrote the first Harry Potter book.
3.Boshoff 2006.
4.See Schor 1998.
5.See Cooper 2014; Pugh 2015.
6.See, e.g., Lewis 1993.
7.For a recent example, see Silva 2013.
8.Mills 2000 [1959], 8.
METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX
1.Sherman 2007.
2.Sherman 2010, 2011.
3.Lamont and Swidler 2014, 159.
4.Pugh 2013.
5.Rivera (2014) challenges the idea that the top 1 percent is the “elite”; she uses the top 20 percent because of their greater access to education. Pew Research Center (2016) defines “upper-income” as earning double the national median.
6.Elkins 2015.
7.See Roberts 2014.
8.Salkin 2009.
9.Page et al. 2013. On interviewing elites in general, see Harvey 2011; Mikecz 2012; Ortner 2003; Ostrander 1995b.
10.On schools, see, e.g., Cookson and Persell 1985; Gaztambide-Fernández 2009; Gaztambide-Fernández and Howard 2013; Howard 2010; Khan 2011. On clubs, see Chin 2011; Cousin and Chauvin 2014; Holden Sherwood 2013; Kendall 2002. On charitable organizations and foundations, see Ostrander 1995a; Ostrower 1995; Silver 2007.
11.Lamont 1992; Ostrower 1995; Page et al. 2013.
12.These multiple factors could be analyzed and perhaps disaggregated in a large-N study, which would not only require more resources than I had and pose sampling challenges, but would also require a survey-style format that would reduce complexity. See Page et al. 2013; Small 2009.
13.Snowball sampling is a sampling method whereby future study subjects are recruited by existing subjects from among people they know.
14.Bourdieu 1984; Goffman 1951.
15.This project included twenty-three interviews with personal concierges and 180 hours of participant observation in the lifestyle management industry, primarily spent working in a high-end Manhattan company offering personal assistant and concierge services (see Sherman 2010, 2011).
16.Many people (nearly always women) who start concierge businesses are quite unsuccessful, as my research has shown (Sherman 2010).
17.See Ostrander 1995b on interactions with elites in interviews.
18.I conducted one interview with a male respondent over the phone because he did not have time to meet with me in person.
19.The exceptions were two people whose interviews had included a lot of extraneous material, so I listened to the interviews and transcribed relevant sections myself. Only one research assistant coded service-provider interviews, and only one coded wealthy-consumer interviews. Both of them did coding alone only after becoming deeply familiar with my coding process, partly by reviewing my codes on many interviews before coding independently.
20.E.g., Small 2009.
21.For recent discussions of these issues, see Jerolmack and Khan 2014; Khan and Jerolmack 2013; Lamont and Swidler 2014; Pugh 2013; Vaisey 2009, 2014.
22.Jerolmack and Khan 2014; Khan and Jerolmack 2013.
23.Ortner 2003, 6.
24.Pugh 2013; also see DeVault 1990; Scott and Lyman 1968.
25.See, e.g., Kefalas 2003; Lamont 1992, 2000;
Sayer 2005; Sherman 2009; Silva 2013.
26.This finding is consistent with research on younger affluent people. My respondents differ from the young, wealthy men in the international “VIP party scene” studied by Ashley Mears (2014, 2015a). Mears suggests that participants in this global jet set are highly invested in the public display of wealth (although even they do not talk about particular amounts of money). But as they get older they may become more similar to my respondents. On the other hand, given that most of them are not from the United States, they may develop other repertoires of merit.
27.Lamont 1992, 2000.
28.See Murphy and Jerolmack 2016.
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