SOURCE: '"Kitty Foyle' and the Concept" of Class as Culture," in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. LUI, No. 3, November, 1947, pp. 210-17.

In the following essay, Gordon discusses Kitty Foyle and its view of upper-class American life as a cultural metaphor for the era.

The traditional approaches to the concept of social class¹ can, on the whole, be placed under one of two categories: (1) economic analysis of income stratification, or the relation of groups to the means of production and (2) class consciousness—that is, concern with the presence or lack of a feeling of class identification. Each has its shortcomings.

Discussion of social class in terms of economic factors alone begs the peculiar function of the social scientist, who should be able to include economic factors in his analysis but not be circumscribed by them, whereas the question of the existence of class consciousness is also a...