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Priorities and Preferences in Consuming Decisions When we speak of "priorities and preferences in consuming decisions" we refer to the order of importance assigned to various kinds of expenditures by working class women. These women, like those of higher (and lower) status, are always faced with the problem of "not enough money to go around" for all the things they imagine they would like. They are continually having to decide whether to buy an extra-good cut of meat and forget about a new apron, or vice versa; whether to buy a new TV set next or put the money into the bedroom curtains. Sometimes the decisions are of even wider significance: with just so much money at her disposal, should the wife argue with her husband that they ought to spend a larger amount for a better apartment, even if this meant spending less on his car or cutting down on their movie-and-beer evenings? These are examples of the issues or problems in consuming priorities and preferences faced by working class housewives. There is first the priority point of whether money should be directed more toward food or housing (or in whatever major areas of consumption), and secondarily, there is the preference problem of what to "shoot for" in the way of housing, or food, given the financial limits. In the previous chapter, when discussing the context for consuming decisions, we pointed out the anxieties felt by working class women over potential economic catastrophe, and indicated that particular consuming decisions frequently reflected the presence of this basic anxiety. We pointed out the dilemma in which these women continually find themselves. They don't like to buy more than they can pay cash for, yet their wants are greater than their wherewithal, so they find themselves continually plunging into the installment-planned existence without ever feeling comfortably at ease in the debt pool. In this chapter we will see which kinds of purchases apparently contribute the most toward allaying the deprivation anxieties of working class women, and hence precipitate the uncomfortable, yet satisfying, plunge. In many ways, it is an academic question to ask what order of priorities a working class woman gives to food or housing or clothing as an avenue for expenditure. Neither these women nor middle class women directly confront themselves with the issue of whether they should spend more for the one than the other; it is resolved for them and reflected through the substance of a month's or a year's many and trifling decisions to spend a dollar here for food, that might have been spent there for a car, and so forth. If the record of these purchasing decisions could be studied, the pattern of priorities could be determined in their actual operation. Needless to say, such a study is not practically feasible. The working class wife is not usually greatly concerned with serving a wide variety of dishes, nor does she believe that high priced, expensive foods are necessarily worth the difference in taste or food value. She usually feels that a good, medium price standard in food will guarantee her family as tasty and healthy meal as it needs. In these attitudes, the working class woman is very much like her middle class housewife-sister. Indeed, if the actual grocery store behavior and stove-top practices demonstrated by these groups of women accord with their verbal advocacies, it would be difficult to distinguish working class women from middle class women in this respect. What can be said of working class women's attitudes toward food purchases and consumption, in distinction to those of middle class women, is that the working class woman is more single-mindedly concerned with pleasing herself and her family than with following the dictates of dietary experts or heeding the advice or hints of culinary artists. Working class women are not as vitamin-conscious or as varietyminded as some middle class women appear to be. (A minority of middle class women seem bent on being veritable Clementine Paddlefords, but most middle class women agree with one of their number who said: "We love plain foods. No burgundy sauces for us. Roast beef is our favorite. I never read the menus in magazines or cook any fancy dishes. I just make sure the food isn't boring.") The typical working class wife might not even go so far as to utter the last sentence above. She is not too often worried about whether her meals are getting boring, as long as she knows her husband's and her children's food fancies are being appeased. She can be content to continually serve them their "favorites," as long as these foods remain in favor. Working class women don't want to count the calories so rigorously or calculate the vitamins so determinedly that their meals become a treatment instead of a treat. Not that they believe that every meal must be a taste delight; they do feel, however, that the family's appetite should be stimulated fairly often with those special dishes that are the family's favorites. They know their families go for just plain American cooking -- and are happily relieved by this belief, since most of them are not entranced with the notion of creative cookery. On the other hand, they show some resistance to foods that are easy to prepare if they fear that the result would diminish their family's meal time pleasure. It is their viewpoint that: "It's not so important that food is easy to prepare -- if you know your husband likes something, you fix it and never mind if it takes longer than just frying any old thing in a hurry." After all, working class women generally do not feel secure enough in their husbands' affections to risk incurring husbandly wrath with carelessly or thoughtlessly prepared meals. The fear among working class women is too great that: "If I didn't give him what he wanted, my husband would go out and eat in a restaurant." Among these women there are many practitioners of the food philosophy that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. When it comes to spending money for their housing, what working class women want most is "a home of our own." This does not make them too different from middle class women, who almost certainly also want to own their housing. Where the differences between the two groups appear is in the meaning of home ownership and the kind of homes sought. In some ways, it appears that there is no prouder woman on the American scene than the working class wife whose husband has recently purchased a suburban home for her. Such a wife is firmly convinced that the act of purchasing such a home is both the "way of spending our money which has given us the most pleasure" in the short run, and promises also to be "most important in the long run." Her delighted pleasure is in sharp contrast to the discomfort felt by her working class sisters who still live in rented city houses or apartments. For this latter woman, any money saved toward a newer, more pleasant home of her own, is the money which takes on the most "long run importance." Working class women almost invariably feel that "for a family living in an apartment, nothing could be more important than moving into a house of its own." What is it that a "home of our own" means to working class women? It seems to be a compound of many notions and motives. Perhaps most importantly it represents freedom from domination or intimidation by landlords, freedom from the possibility of tyrannical impositions by others over oneself. A working class woman is apt to feel when she's in a rented unit that she can't pound a nail here or there, at whim. For this woman, a home of her own gives her the "good feeling that comes from knowing no one can raise your rent or make you move" -- at least not so long as you keep up the mortgage payments. A home of one's own also dramatically signals long strides on the way toward stability, away from the brink of financial chaos. To working class women, a satisfying sense of release from marginal economic status is naturally induced by their ownership of so vital a factor in their daily lives as their homes. And, this is brought home to them every month when they see their mortgage payments solidifying their hold on their houses -- for they can remember a time when they couldn't do anything with a rent receipt except regret it as representing one more instance of "money down the drain." The housing goal of working class women, the kind of home of their own they want, can be summarized in these words: a modern, comfortable, safe, soundly-built, inexpensive, unostentatious, cozy home, where the family can be close and happy together. Above all, a working class woman wants an up-to-date house with a modernized up-to-the-minute kitchen. In the first place, nothing in the way of an older house could so sharply symbolize a family's arrival into a 1950's middle-American level of housing respectability. Secondly, among the charter of freedoms sought by the working class housewife, the freedom from domestic slavery (as provided by a wellapplianced kitchen) ranks high on the list. This will become clearer in the next section when we discuss the working class wife's appliance enthusiasms. Of course, she wants this up-to-date house in a good neighborhood -- by which she means an ordinary, friendly neighborhood where she and her family can feel socially comfortable, and not be "outclassed." As was reported in the previous chapter, the typical working class woman, contrary to some literary impressions, is not thirsting after residence in fashionable or wealthy neighborhoods. She is really more concerned about living at a decent remove from slums, "crumbs," or "a den of thieves." The social comfort of living in an inexpensive, unostentatious, cozy home, built for close and happy family life, fits into the housing dreams of the working class woman. Housing extras like plenty of room for entertaining or distinctive architecture or more than one bathroom are not a part of this woman's housing vision, as they frequently are for middle class women. Even the middle class ideal of a "house with plenty of different rooms where each person in the family has a place to call his own and can have privacy when he wants it" does not appeal very strongly to the working class woman. Perhaps these women do not feel quite close enough to their children and husbands as it is -- so we should not expect them to willingly provide these other members of their families with opportunities to barricade themselves away in private cubicles. Finally, working class women exhibit a peculiar concern with the safety factor in a house's construction. Here their insecurity and preoccupation with lurking disaster manifests itself as time and again they specify that any house they'd want to buy should be "made well," "should be built of good wood so that it will last for a long time," should be "a sturdy house," with a "strong foundation." Middle class women seem to take these qualities for granted, or at least they do not feel called upon to verbally insist on them as do working class women.   Home