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This article examines the intersection between collective memory and autobiographical memory through in-depth interviews with twenty whites who came of age in the midst of key events in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Most interviewees report few autobiographical memories of the events of the Civil Rights Movement and the racial conflict surrounding these events. Instead, many center their recollections on the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The forgetting of autobiographical memories has been aided by a coalition of silence among whites about the era of integration and by reiterated media images that shaped recollections of the past. These white southerners have been able to renarrativize their pasts to forget memories that link them with the ideology of segregation and to reconstruct the self to be usable in the present. The article demonstrates ways that autobiographical memory is a social construction rather than an act of retrieval.

This research applies functionalist, Marxist, and feminist conceptualizations of class and status to an explanation of support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Multivariate analysis of a 1977 national sample indicates that for men, not socioeconomic standing but marriage to a housewife contributes to ERA opposition. Among women, those of lower socioeconomic standing are more opposed to the ERA, regardless of how class or status is measured. The findings suggest that for women, lower socioeconomic standing is as important as religious beliefs and political conservatism in shaping opposition to the ERA. Findings also suggest that a woman's position in the stratification system is based both on the class of her usual occupation, regardless of whether she currently works, and on the status of her husband or father.

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