To write about the working class is to discuss many disparate individuals. At any moment in the American past the researcher encounters such variety in personal aspirations, talents, and sense of self among working people as to defy stereotypes. Moreover, socially prescribed differences in gender, race, religion, and nationality have influenced various workers' behavior in powerfully different ways. Instead of listening for the “voice of the working class,” therefore, we must be attuned to many different voices, sometimes in harmony, but often in conflict with one another.

Nevertheless, it remains not only possible but imperative to analyze the American experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of conflicting social classes. The human relationships structured by commodity production in large collective enterprises devoted to private gain generated bondings and antagonisms that were, in one form or another, the daily experience of everyone involved. “As a worker yourself, you're ‘inside’ with a vengeance,” noted Smith College graduate Alice Kimball of her sojourn in a Paterson silk mill.