The term “glass ceiling” is itself elitist, deriving as it does from the corporate struggles of a few professional women. Most American women are having a hard enough time on the factory floor or the unemployment line or making minimum wage at Wal-Mart; when working-class women hear a former corporate attorney carry on about a glass ceiling, they think not about gender identification but about the class divide that has widened since the term came into vogue in the 1980s.