... This can be illustrated in no better fashion than to recount the history of a woman whose life is enmeshed in the culture of shiftlessness. The subject is a female, age 47, who has been intensively studied over a period of years. I shall call her Willie Mae Smith, although that is a pseudonym.

Willie Mae comes from a highly disorganized family milieu. Her father, Buck, was pathologically unstable. He drank too much, and was a skirt-chaser and gambler. When he went broke during the Depression, his father-in-law had to bail him out, paying Buck's rent on condition that he straighten up. Unable to do so, Buck began fighting with Mary Ann, Willie Mae's mother. The couple separated, and then began to compete for the affections of their children, Willie Mae and her younger sister, Laura. Buck initially won out He visited his daughters often, spoiled them shamelessly, and taught them his philosophy of playing "hard to get" to attract men.

Mary Ann's remarriage was a blow to him. The originally extroverted Buck became "tuned out." He drank heavily. Willie Mae, in the words of one observer, "was emotionally scarred by the events in her family situation." As a young woman she held a job briefly, and then married Roosevelt, a man much like her father, with a reputation for sexual promiscuity. He, too, came from a family prone to violence and tragedy. Three siblings died violently, one was divorced, one was mentally retarded, and another's wife had psychiatric problems. A married brother had been implicated in the drowning death of a girl friend, but the police were never able to pin anything on him. More that 20 years passed before Willie Mae got another job. "The first one had been fun," she said much later, "but toward the end I got tired. It taught me not to expect too much and not to take things for granted."

The marriage lasted ten years--much longer than one might have expected, given Roosevelt's sexual adventures, Willie Mae's compulsive spending on clothes and baubles for herself, and the fight that resulted. It was a decade punctuated by family crises. Her father, a pathetic drunk, finally died. Her sister, Laura, divorced and remarried, after having had a relationship with Jimmy, an older man whom Willie Mae was later to marry herself. Willie Mae conceived five children by Roosevelt, only two of whom are alive today. They were largely reared by others. Willie Mae's marriage ended abruptly when Roosevelt was shot to death on the street by a man who was thought to be deranged. She remained single for a while, but because of her looks and her image as a "man's woman," she had no lack of male attention. One person described her as "attracting men like honey does bees."

Her second husband was Jimmy, a divorced man whose scrapes with the law seemed to contribute to his sex appeal. Willie Mae had known him before Roosevelt's death. Rumor had it that her sister, Laura, had slept with Jimmy before Laura's first marriage broke up, and then again afrer she remarried. Jimmy had seen Willie Mae soon after Roosevelt was killed, and their relationship continued until their marriage, which was said to have infuriated Jimmy's favorite long-time girl friend, as well as a number of his more casual ones.

As Jimmy's wife, Willie Mae continued her life as a "party girl." Sometimes with Jimmy, and sometimes without, she stayed up till dawn "painting the town." As this case history was being written in early 1974, there were signs that their marriage was on the rocks. They fought often. Jimmy's daughter by a previous mariage was said to hate Willie Mae, and this seemed to be dampening Jimmy's ardor for his wife.

To sum up, Willie Mae's life-style exemplifies many of the characteristics of the "culture of poverty. She has an aversion to work, even though she could get a job. She hates housework and childcare. Her life has a random quality to it, a Willie Mae has no disciplined commitment to a life goal. She is the paradigm of the "present-time oriented individual. sometimes justifying this by the pain and suffering she has endured. She compulsively spends money on clothes and adornments. Her kin networks are remarkable for their pathology -- the involvement of their members in violence, drugs, divorce and illicit sex. The families tend to be large, and internal tensions often lead to deviance. Add to this a penchant for high living, the "dog" which is exhibited in the men. the pursuit of sex and alcohol and late-night adventure, and you have precisely that admixture of impulsiveness and irresponsibility that epitomizes "lower-class culture."