... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individuals in it “costs worlds of pain.”
ATTRIBUTION:
Lillian Breslow Rubin (b. 1924), U.S. sociologist, family counselor, and author. Worlds of Pain, epilogue (1976).
These are the final words of her study. Rubin, who had herself grown up in a working-class family, drew her title from this stanza of “The Everlasting Mercy,” a poem by John Masefield: “To get the whole world out of bed/And washed, and dressed, and warmed, and fed,/To work, and back to bed again,/Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain.”
