Class matters : 'working-class' women's perspectives on social class

219 Pages·1997·3.04 MB·English

by  Pat Mahony, Christine Zmroczek

Class Matters
Class Matters:
‘Working-Class’ Women’s
Perspectives on Social Class
Edited by
Pat Mahony
and
Christine Zmroczek
UK Taylor & Francis Ltd, 1 Gunpowder Square, London EC4A 3DE
USA Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© Selection and Editorial material
copyright P.Mahony and C.Zmroczek, 1997
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
Publisher.
First published 1997
A Catalogue Record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN 0-203-99215-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-7484-0540-2 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-7484-0541-0 (pbk)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are
available on request
Contents
Chapter 1 Why Class Matters 1
Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek
Chapter 2 Class Matters, ‘Race’ Matters, Gender Matters 9
Tracey Reynolds
Chapter 3 The Double-Bind of the ‘Working-Class’ Feminist 19
Academic: The Success of Failure or the Failure of
Success?
Diane Reay
Chapter 4 Women, Education and Class: The Relationship between 31
Class Background and Research
Janet Parr
Chapter 5 Academic as Anarchist: Working-Class Lives into 45
Middle-Class Culture
Kim Clancy
Chapter 6 Something Vaguely Heretical: Communicating across 55
Difference in the Country
Karen Sayer and Gail Fisher
Chapter 7 ‘You’re not with your common friends now’: Race and 67
Class Evasion in 1960s London
Shani D’Cruze
Chapter 8 Contested Categorizations: Auto/Biography, Narrativity 81
and Class
Bogusia Temple
Chapter 9 Missing Links: Working-Class Women of Irish Descent 91
Meg Maguire
Chapter 10 Switching Cultures 105
Monika Reinfelder
Chapter 11 A Class of One’s Own: Women, Social Class and the 113
Academy
Louise Morley
v
Chapter 12 Classifying Practices: Representations, Capitals and 127
Recognitions
Beverley Skeggs
Chapter 13 Northern Accent and Southern Comfort: Subjectivity and 143
Social Class
Valerie Hey
Chapter 14 Interpreting Class: Auto/Biographical Imaginations and 155
Social Change
Val Walsh
Chapter 15 To Celeb-rate and Not to Be-moan 177
Jo Stanley
Chapter 16 Finding a Voice: On Becoming a Working-Class 193
Feminist Academic
Gerry Holloway
Notes on Contributors 203
Index 207
vi
Chapter 1
Why Class Matters
Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek
This collection represents, for us, a celebration of ten years of work on the
subject of women and social class and in particular on the experiences of women
from working-class backgrounds now living and working in a variety of contexts.
In this chapter we will briefly review our work to date, concentrating on the
main reasons for our interest and the processes through which our
understandings have developed. We will identify the major themes which have
emerged, many of which are explored in greater depth by the authors in this
volume, and point to those areas where, in our view, further work needs to be
done.
There were three main reasons for our initial interest in women and social
class. First, as two women from working-class backgrounds, the experience of
going through university as students and then working in the academy as
teachers and researchers left us confused about our own class positioning.
Though both of us were told repeatedly that by virtue of our education and our
‘position in the labour market’ we were not working-class, we did not feel
middle-class nor believe that we had necessarily ‘gone up in the world’. While we
believed that it was insulting to other working-class people to pretend that our
lives were the same as theirs, given the relative privileges bestowed on us by our
middle-class occupations, neither did we feel that we inhabited the world of the
university in the same ways as the majority of our colleagues (including other
feminists). In addition, the social and cultural assumptions underpinning and
permeating some of our worlds seemed to be very different from those of our
middle-class feminist colleagues and friends. As we began talking about these
issues in the mid 1980s, we discovered that we shared a massive sense of
confusion about where we fitted in (if anywhere) and as we talked more, we
were relieved to learn that we tended to have similar reactions (outrage) to the
subtle reminders of our ‘difference’, sometimes ascribed as inferiority.
The second stimulus to our work occurred at a conference where we heard, yet
again, that ‘radical feminism is middle-class and not interested in exploring
difference between women’. Our objections to this assertion were twofold. First,
the statement was made from a position described by the speaker as ‘one
perspective within postmodernism’, the virtues of which were, apparently, to
avoid the theoretical inadequacy of radical feminism with its alleged ‘tendency to
2 PAT MAHONY AND CHRISTINE ZMROCZEK
deal in universalizing truth claims about all women’. This is not the place to
enter into debate about the merits or otherwise of postmodernisms (Mies and
Shiva, 1993; Bell and Klein, 1996) but the irony was not lost on us in this
instance, of the tendency of postmodernism to deal in universalizing truth claims
about radical feminism. Our second objection related to our own work. We had
spent some twenty years as radical feminists, during which we had attempted to
explore differences in women’s social, cultural and political circumstances
through our own teaching and writing (for example, Mahony, 1989,1992;
Zmroczek, 1992). We were not pleased (to put it mildly) to have our contribution
rendered invisible; we may have been confused about our own complicated social
class positioning, but the claim that we were middle-class simply did not fit with
our experiences.
The third impetus for our work came from our dissatisfaction with writing on
social class. Although a great deal has been written, much of it is by and about men
and it did not have the power or resonance of feminist writing. We could find
only a few books (hooks, 1981; Steedman, 1986 and later Taking Liberties
Collective, 1989; Walkerdine, 1990) about the experiential level of class
oppression which would enable us to grasp the nature of the influences on the
formation of working-class women’s identities and the ways in which these in
turn affect our possibilities, real and perceived. Some people have mistakenly
taken our project to be an exploration of identity. It is more than that. It is a
search for theory which can begin to describe the relationships between the
classed nature of our lives and our positionings within the broader material
structures. For if we do not understand the processes which undermine us, steal
our creativity and marginalize us, we cannot interrupt or challenge them. Our
exploration is based on a feminist perspective which seeks to understand how
class power both structures our lives and is reconstituted through them.
For all these reasons it seemed urgent to find out how to place ourselves as
two white women distanced from our undoubtedly working-class backgrounds
but certainly not always comfortable in and at times positively enraged by the
oppressive behaviour of the largely middle-class world which we now inhabited.
We knew two more women who were also concerned about these issues and in
the mid 1980s we formed a group. We consisted of three ex-Catholics (an
African/Asian Scot, an English Pole and an English Irish woman) and an Asian
Muslim woman. One of us had children, two identified as heterosexual, one as
(sort of) heterosexual and one as lesbian. Our ages ranged from late forties to
early twenties, all of us had working-class backgrounds which seemed to live on
with us into the present, all of us had been to university and were in middle-class
occupations. In such a group the two of us who described ourselves as radical
feminists had little difficulty in resisting any urge to universalize our experience.
We learned a great deal about our similarities as well as the very
real differences for black and white, lesbian and heterosexual women, living in a
racist and heterosexist society. We began to clarify the ways in which the
constant drip of negative and oppressive experience operates at a personal level
WHY CLASS MATTERS 3
to re-create gendered class and race divisions in Britain. We shared our strategies
for coping with and overcoming the obstacles which had faced us at school and
in higher education, at home and in our workplaces and we rediscovered and
revalued some of the strengths we had developed by virtue of our working-class
backgrounds. We had been meeting for two years when new jobs, house moving,
family illness and pressure of work combined to make it impossible for the group
to continue.
Some time later the two of us attended a workshop for working-class women,
given by Jo Stanley at a Women’s Studies Network conference (Stanley, 1995).
We were inspired by the energy, strength, anger and humour of the women we met
and resolved to resurrect our own work and develop it.
The major themes which emerged from this stage of our work have been
discussed elsewhere (Zmroczek and Mahony, 1996a, 1996b) and it has been
particularly exciting to see many of them explored further in this volume. The
authors here write powerfully on the basis of their own experiences, of their
confusion and ambivalence in locating themselves as ‘working-class’. Others
contest the category itself while still giving voice to their dissatisfaction with the
claim that Britain is not a class-ridden and class-determined society. How to find
a place (or places) within the variety of worlds we inhabit, what counts as a place
and a desire to make a place of one’s own are all discussed in ways which will
take the debate further.
The ways in which the lack of material resources not only affected us while
we were growing up, but linger on into the present, shaping our consciousness,
attitudes and behaviour, is another theme which is developed in the book.
Closely related to this are the differences in cultural capital, awareness of which
persists long after we have acquired many of the trappings of a middle-class
lifestyle. The part that language and accent play in signifying our histories is
particularly complex. Some black women of African and African-Caribbean
origin, for example, have told us that despite their middle-class accents, it is
frequently presumed that they are working-class and that all kinds of
assumptions follow from this. In this volume, issues of class difference between
black women are discussed and questions raised which clearly need to be
pursued in a future volume. The ways in which white women from working-class
backgrounds continue to be marked out by accent (if the enforced elocution
lessons failed) also constitute areas of particular sensitivity. It is surely no
accident that many of us have learned to play with accent, to ‘use’ it in quite self-
conscious ways as a political tool to expose the pompous, to undermine the
snobbish and to challenge the stereotypes about us.
And stereotypes there are, in plenty. In the course of preparing a conference
paper (Zmroczek, 1996) in which she wanted to explain current conceptions of
class in Britain to an international audience, Chris was surprised to notice the
plethora of offensive, stereotyped representations of working-class people
appearing in the British media over a relatively short period of time. There were
also television programmes and newspaper articles which offered more positive