Preview

Gregory Mantsios Myth

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
366 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Gregory Mantsios Myth
According to Gregory Mantsios (Pg. 31) he says “People in the United States don’t like to talk about class.” Many Americans can agree on this, Barbara Ehrenreich conducted a low-wage experiment where she had to hide her identity because she was afraid that people would question her. Mantsios myth 4 demonstrates how everyone in America can be successful regardless of the class people label them with. Ehrenreich is a perfect example of being successful. Throughout Ehrenreich’s experiment working a low paying job Ehrenreich eventually gets a trailer and begins to live in it despite her lack of income. By moving she got rid of her ridiculous commute of 45 minutes but gives up her sense of “security” by moving into a trailer park that has a history
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Barbara Ehrenreich And Lapham Summary
    • 2635 Words
    • 11 Pages

    Barbara Ehrenreich And Lapham Summary

    While Barbara worked in Maine as a maid she noticed how convenience store clerks, who made $.65 less than she made an hour, look at her and her coworkers as if they were beneath them. Another example of this was when she stated that everywhere she went people looked at the uniform and instantly regarded her and her coworkers as lower class citizens. People saw there green and yellow uniforms like the white and black stripes of a convict and that their style of life isn’t as good as people in their social class. One particular instance when she bought a beer from the grocery store she could feel the cold stares that implied that the reason she had that maid job was because all her money was going to support her alcohol habit; even though Barbara has a PH.D and probably made more money than many of them all they saw was a lower class…

    • 2635 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Nickle and Dimed with Use of Sociological Theories
    • 3042 Words
    • 13 Pages

    Nickle and Dimed with Use of Sociological Theories

    Ehrenreich worked at a restaurant as a housekeeper/ server and experienced what it was like working paycheck to paycheck. She constantly struggled on making her rent payments on time and finding cheap motels or apartments that she could pay for monthly. She found it very difficult to keep extra money for food or emergencies. Under these circumstances many sociologist would classify her as the working poor which is defined as, “poor to the extent that their economic status is extremely precarious. They literally live from paycheck to paycheck… Their wages are usually low, if they do work regularly, they have difficulty making financial ends meet”(Marger,152). One of the times Ehrenreich experienced this struggle was when she was living in Minneapolis and was looking for a good place to live in and she realized that the vacancy rent was less than 1 percent but she could not afford it unless it was one tenth of that. It became really difficult for her to balance her wages with her living expenses. Ehreireich illustrated, “you don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high” (Ehreireich,199).…

    • 3042 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Ehrenreich's Rhetorical Analysis: Too Poor To Make The News
    • 765 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Ehrenreich's Rhetorical Analysis: Too Poor To Make The News

    Ehrenreich also writes about her nephew and the hardship that he and his family faced when his mother-in-law had a heart attack and was not able to provide for her disabled child and two grandchildren. The mother-in-law could no longer make her mortgage on a single-wide trailer that had depreciated as much as a used car. Unemployment rates increased as much as twenty percent in some areas and during the height of the real estate boom, rents quickly spiraled higher and higher, leaving many lower income individuals no choice but to cram as many as five people into a tiny one bedroom apartment. Dividing the rent among five people was affordable but uncomfortable and sometimes unlawful. Zoning laws were broken due to parking thus causing expensive fines for people who can’t afford to pay other obligations; domestic violence has risen due to stress filled apartments or homes due to overcrowding. The working poor is a term used to describe “individuals and families who maintain regular employment but remain in relative poverty due to low levels of pay and dependent expenses.” (Wikipedia.org) some people do not acknowledge and others have not heard of this group which consists of individuals who work at least one full-time job and sometimes even two or three part-time jobs that only pay minimum wage and have no health benefits, in order to support themselves and their…

    • 765 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Rhetorical Analysis Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed
    • 711 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Rhetorical Analysis Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

    Barbara Ehrenreich is an author of article called “Nickel and Dimed”. Barbara Ehrenreich is a down-to-earth, skilled journalist with a Ph.D. in biology. Barbara is someone does not try to be what she is. She is the kind of woman that leaves everything aside and going to experience different life in America. . In the article Barbara tells about herself as a journalism going thru a low-wage job from her normal life, and she show how her life is different from what she was before. By her experience she shares what it is like for unskilled women to be in low-wage job. Barbara uses many rhetoric techniques explaining about her lifestyle, poverty, and American dream.…

    • 711 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Bell Hooks Seeing And Making Culture Summary
    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Bell Hooks Seeing And Making Culture Summary

    In the article “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” by bell hooks, she is evaluating the misrepresentation of the poor and their values by society and explaining how humanity should change the way they label the underclass. Much of the nation believes that the poor do not have any values, morals, work ethic, integrity, and cannot be trusted. This is supported by hooks, concerning her college teachers and classmates remarks regarding the poor, when she quotes, “I was shocked…by the comments of professors and peers…They almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy” (484). A personal experience that hooks discusses to support her argument is when she describes her dorm life. Hooks quotes,…

    • 272 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Nickel And Dimed Analysis
    • 2011 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Nickel And Dimed Analysis

    In “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”, Barbara Ehrenreich, a well-off white woman with a Ph.D. in Biology questions how low-income workers, especially females, make a living. Due to the welfare reform, 4 million women were about to have to enter into the workforce, usually for less than minimum wage. Ehrenreich decides to make an experiment out of her ideas. She decided she would travel to three different cities: Key West, FL., Portland, ME., and Twin Cities, MN. (all picked based off of the low salary there), and attempt to live as a regular low-income woman. She wants to find out how they make their income work and what they do to get by. Ehrenreich makes a set of…

    • 2011 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Comparing The American Dream In Nickel And Dimed
    • 1812 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Comparing The American Dream In Nickel And Dimed

    Polyestra states, “Fewer than one percent of Americans break out of the class they are born into.” (Tea 67) She goes on to tell about her parents and their dream of class jumping, and how they devote their lives to it. To her parents, the working class neighborhood, where they lived, was only temporary. Her parents wanted better. Even her grandparents wanted better. It was embedded into each generation that you could move higher up in class, with just the right job, the right education, and the right privileges. Her family struggled with this for years. The only purpose of the “children” was to become rich. When her father landed a job that provided more money, her parents felt that they had fulfilled their dream, the American Dream. Polyestra states:…

    • 1812 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    How Mantsios Proved Himself
    • 904 Words
    • 4 Pages

    How Mantsios Proved Himself

    In Gregory Mantsios’s essay, “Class in America” he discusses his point of view on social classes in America and the impact it has on people. Mantsios pulls information from a number of different sources. He looks at differences in wealth distribution. He discusses the health concerns. He then looks at educational success, and the correlation between social class and better economic success. He claims that, “we mistakenly hold a set of beliefs that obscure the reality of class differences and their impact on people’s lives.” (698). Gregory Mantsios succeeds at proving his claim because of the amount of evidence he presents.…

    • 904 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Rhetorical Analysis of Walter Benn Michaels, "The Trouble with Diversity"
    • 670 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Rhetorical Analysis of Walter Benn Michaels, "The Trouble with Diversity"

    To fully understand Michaels objectives one must take into account his general audience. It becomes clear with his use of the first person narrative, “The argument, in its simplest form, will be that we love race—we love identity—because we don’t love class.” As Michaels points out the bulk of society is below the poverty line and when discussing economic inequality no one will listen more closely than those who are suffering the most. The upper class will also be able to identify with because as he emphasizes, “Survey after Survey has shown, Americans are very reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the lower class and even more reluctant to identify themselves as belonging to the upper class.” As a society, we would rather associate ourselves as being middle class. In this…

    • 670 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Class In America Gregory Mantsios Analysis
    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Class In America Gregory Mantsios Analysis

    In the essay of "Class in America-2003" by, Gregory Mantsios is basically about the rich and the poor of America. In Mantsios essay he talks about upper class, middle class, and lower class Americans. The most common clad the Gregory Mantsios talks about is the middle class. The reason middle class Americans are talked about so much in this essay is because; the majority of the American population is middle class people. Mantsios discuses a few points o how…

    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Nickel And Dimed Reflection
    • 1497 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Nickel And Dimed Reflection

    In the book Nickel and Dimed on (Not) getting by in America, the author lived a life of a low wage worker. This experiment, while deemed insightful by some people, was considered dull and unrealistic to one of my classmates. In response to the question, “What parts of the book made Ehrenreich’s experience unrealistic?” my peer said, “She didn’t experience what low wage workers really went through. In Into the Wild, McCandless really went into the wild and experienced everything, but Ehrenreich didn’t live a poor life. If she had done that it would have made for a much more interesting book.” I agree with my classmate on this comment because while I did learn about some struggles that low wage workers have to go through, I didn’t learn what…

    • 1497 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Sociology-Education
    • 2833 Words
    • 12 Pages

    Sociology-Education

    | This sociologist argues that the values and beliefs of lower class subcultures are self imposed barriers to educational career and success. The lower class believe they have less oppourtunity for induvial achievement.…

    • 2833 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    English 101
    • 735 Words
    • 3 Pages

    English 101

    America historically owns the reputation of being the land of opportunity, and for generations immigrants have fled to the United States to experience the freedom and equality our government lays claim to. At the root of this reputation is the American Dream, the belief that with hard work anyone can succeed based solely on his or her merits, and is believed to be [American Dream] blind to race, sex, or socioeconomic status, conversely, repeated examples and statistics of the lower-classes, those continually facing the harsh reality that opportunity and equality are just myths, only prove the opposite. The truth of the matter is that influence of a class on an individual’s identity is greater than many would like to perceive. The main reason for this misconception is the fact that everyone wants to hear what they can accomplish and not what factors stand in their way, keeping them far from reality. The idea of what factors affect identity, and most importantly, what are the underlying realities of the American mythology of success has been touched upon by many writers, among them are Gregory Mantsios in “Class in America” and Harlon Dalton in “Horatio Alger.” Even though these two writers have confronted the last topic [American mythology of success] in different ways complementing each other, I still believe that Gregory Mantsios has been more persuasive, and insightful on his approach.…

    • 735 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Feminine Mystique
    • 12188 Words
    • 49 Pages

    Feminine Mystique

    True, most were materially well off. The majority had families, a house in the suburbs, and the amenities of an affluent society. But amid that good fortune they felt fragmented, almost as if they had no identity of their own. And it was not only college graduates. "I 've tried everything women are supposed to do," one woman confessed to Friedan. "Hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn 't leave you anything to think about — any feeling of who you are. ... I love the…

    • 12188 Words
    • 49 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    A Poor Cousin Reflection
    • 652 Words
    • 3 Pages

    A Poor Cousin Reflection

    In “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” it is about a woman named Caroline Payne who was a hard worker and had a lot of motivation to work and better herself. She was not viewed from a whole person perspective. She was a typical American citizen, fifty year-old, Caucasian woman. She has a two-year associate’s degree, who works at the local Wal-Mart in Muncie, Indiana. Caroline has not lived what you call the “American Dream.” She has had a challenge trying to find ways to survive for her and daughter just be fed for dinner and clothed. Caroline has been married twice and both marriages have failed. She did not grow up with her biological father and her step-father abused her. She has four kids, three boys that live with their father and one daughter, named Amber, who is disabled. Amber has a clubfoot and mild retardation because of Caroline’s emotional assaults, not eating nutritiously, and smoking cigarettes. Caroline only got a few benefits of assistance; she got Medicaid for fix her teeth that had been damaged and social security to live off of with her daughter.…

    • 652 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics