Alissa Quart Quotes

There are in the world no such men as self-made men. The term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “SELF-MADE MEN

Day care was intended from the start to be a weak system, as scholars of the history of childcare tell me, like a punishment for needing care because a woman didn’t have a husband or some other means of support.

In the United States, the middle class is the group of working people who, according to a May 2016 Pew survey, with a yearly household income for a family of three ranging from $42,000 to $125,000 in 2014, make up 51 percent of U.S. households.

The more I researched Alger, the more I believed “bootstrapping” was a story line emerging out of the ashes of Alger’s own personal shame for his pedophilia and the trauma he inflicted on others. His life story morphed from his longing for young boys into the ultimate story of young boys’ exerting mastery over the adults and the world around them, perhaps his own identification with his powerless victims.

Americans think their odds of success, and of rising from the bottom to the top, are much higher than they are,

According to a Washington Post/Miller Center poll, 65 percent of all Americans worry about paying their bills—as the parents I’ve interviewed, murmuring anxiously at their dining room tables, can attest. One reason for this anxiety is that middle-class life is now 30 percent more expensive than it was twenty years ago; in fact, in some cases the cost of daily life over the last twenty years has doubled. And the price of a four-year degree at a public college—one traditional ticket to the bourgeoisie—is nearly twice as much as it was in 1996.

It was also the suspicion that I was paying "rent" every time I went out for coffee or a walk, that there was no longer any public space to sit in, that a high charge was always associated with "hanging around"; once again I'd have to buy that unwanted second overpriced spice tea, or hand over another chunk of change for an hour at the indoor play space for my daughter.

Caregiving also is the object of a more realistic critique, as some have noted the psychological toll of the profession. Scholar Arlie Hochschid...worries about the potential harm to workers who must sell the most intimate parts of themselves, manufacturing smiles and cuddles for low pay.