ABSTRACT
A common allegation made against the women's liberation movement is that it is a white, middle-class movement concerned with professional and career women, with no concern for so-called "working-class" women. The goal of most middle-class women is to get enough money to hire someone to clean her house. Actually the real exclusionary women in the middle class are not the feminists but the housewives. Ethnicity has to do with the survival into the second, third, and even fourth generation of old-world, often rural, sex-role patterns in ethnic urban enclaves. One study reviewing the "new ethnicity" found major changes in the sex-role definitions of working-class women in process. At the end of the eighteenth century, motherhood became an economic, political, and class issue all at the same time. But now motherhood has become a feminist issue also. Despite the charge made that the feminist movement is a middle-class movement for middle-class women, working-class women have become as feminist as anyone else.
