Class Distinctions and Self-Identification

The mothers’ understandings of class provide important perspectives and reflections on class distinctions that enable their choices. All of the mothers self-identified as middle class, with the exception of Tara, Fran and Leigh, who identified as working class. Chris and Tia did identify as working class, but I discuss this later in the chapter as dis-identification, given their education to PhD level, professional employment status and associated lifestyle. All of the mothers who identified as middle class spoke of the transience from working class upbringings or ‘struggling’ financially during their early lives. Many of the respondents found it a real effort to identify class. Their self identified answers ranged from working (8), lower/middle (3), working/middle (4), middle (20), middle/upper (1) and three who were not willing to identify. This tension between current lifestyle and family background in respect of identification of class was frequently problematic for the participants. Two sets of mother-daughter responses exemplify these women’s sense of wrestling with conflict in self-classifying:

‘We’re middle class, we’re definitely middle class. But then would all the people who have lots of money, they’re middle class. How do you define middle class? Do you define middle class by money? […] If you are looking at middle class in terms of, erm, manners, your heritage, it is, it’s often manners. But then you’ll have people who are working class with fantastic manners, won’t you? [Jenny, mother]

‘I would say upper/middle? I’m not sure, but now in terms of the money I’m earning, I don’t know. Lower/middle, middle/lower? I don’t know, because I don’t know the definitions between the two […] I would say middle’. [Jennifer, daughter]

‘I suppose it all depends on how you define it, doesn’t it? I mean, is middle class more upper class end, sort of thing? I wouldn’t say we were lower class, that’s unfair, that sounds snobby doesn’t it? That sounds awful. Yes, so no, I would say working to middle class, but I don’t like to say that, it sounds odd, doesn’t it? [Jess, mother]

‘There seems to be this new class of not doing a lot of work really, so that wouldn’t be working class would it, because working class work? So I don’t know, I’m not posh, so does that mean I’m working class? But then I have been given money wise every opportunity I could possibly have, so we’re not poor y’know […] I would say middle class was still quite posh and well-to-do […] We really don’t go by class as much anymore so maybe there isn’t a class system. But I would probably put myself between working and middle. I don’t really know’. [Jessica, daughter]

Sayer (2012: 163) recognises that class is ‘not merely a matter of unequal distribution of economic resources, but of unequal recognition’. In all cases, education, hard work and for some, financial uplift through marriage, have changed or improved the mothers’ situations. This goes some way to understanding the difficulty these women found with classification, as many explained that they grew up in working class conditions, but now consider they live middle class lifestyles. Chris, a Professor, is a prime example of a transformation of income through her educational opportunities and subsequent employment status in comparison to her working class background:

‘We are in very different life circumstances now and have different opportunities I think and that’s what I feel is different, having perhaps gone through education […] I’m the first and [Christina] is the second only ever in the family to go to university’. [Chris, mother]

Chris’ daughter, Christina acknowledges the advantages gained through her mother’s educational knowledge and status:

‘I think people my age, it’s actually quite unusual for someone not to go to university and particularly coming from a grammar school. There were like three or four people out of my whole year group who didn’t go to university and that was seen as unusual, erm and I think people actually expect to these days’. [Christina, daughter]

All of the mothers spoke of their childhood with a sense of things being financially more difficult, of things ‘being hard’ or ‘just how it was’. From the narratives, there appear to have been little conscious thought or expectation except to follow the norms of a traditional, nuclear family. The norm, however, was dependent on the social class into which they had been born. Staying at home with children, however, appeared to be a common desire for all of the mothers and was not indicative of class values. Debbie pointed out the generational change that is taking place within her family:

‘In my Nan’s day there would have been no expectation for her to go to work, but for my daughter, the idea of her being a stay-at-home mum for good is alien, so she will expect to go back to work when she has a child […] I think there’s societal expectation that women work and y’know, if you don’t work when you’ve got children then you’re lazy […] If you have children then you go without things, but they don’t see why you should. Y’know, when we had our children we didn’t go out for meals, we didn’t go on holidays and things, we had the children’. [Debbie, mother]

Debbie expresses the paradigm shift in the notion of mothering, explaining how for her, becoming a mother meant accepting a downsizing in the family’s social and economic position. Debbie considers her daughter will have a different opportunity cost, with the ‘expectation that women work’ to maintain the now common two-income lifestyle. The women in Thomson et al.’s (2011) study of modern motherhood identified that for many women,

organising financial responsibilities was a key consideration in the decision about when to start a family.

Vicky (mother) explains that for her, university was not a consideration:

‘University never entered any of our heads or our minds, my parents, mine, never. In those days, university was for those that could really afford it and that was people who had their own homes, had their own cars, erm, really the most elite people had that. It never, ever came across. It was something to be able to go to grammar school in those days’. [Vicky, mother]

Vicky has transformed her class in adulthood beyond her childhood habitus. Vicky now self identifies as middle class, her children went to an independent primary school and both of her daughters attended university, fully funded by their parents. Her daughter, Victoria, holds a very different view of class that takes university attendance as a norm:

‘I would say I’m middle class. I suppose I’ve always thought that, not working class. All my friends, all my social groups are all the same as me, we all live in the same area, same 4 or 5 bedroom house and area that we live in, I suppose we wouldn’t class ourselves as middle class, we just associate with that. I went to school with what I would call working class people, but I’m not sure about upper class […] Everyone in my social group of friends went along the same route.’ [Victoria, daughter]

In her interview, Vicky articulates that university ‘was never an option’ for her. She did not initially return to the workplace after having her children due to her lack of formal qualifications and a feeling she was not able to compete effectively for jobs. Roberts and Evans (2012) suggest that the rhetoric of ‘low aspiration’ extends to those who pursue full-time work in favour of higher education. Archer and Leathwood (2003) note that women who argue against participation in higher education blame a lack of formal qualifications

and family responsibilities, identical to the response that Vicky had given. Vicky has internalised the academic disparities acquired in her formative educational years (Bourdieu, 1999; Sayer, 2012). Fran (mother) also explores her transformation to middle class:

‘I would say we are middle class, because we, in my opinion, have a reasonable income and we can afford to give the kids most things that they request if we think they are reasonable requests […] My parents were both what I would call working class. We didn’t have a car, we lived in a council house and we didn’t have a lot of money and my mother had to struggle really just to do very ordinary things and she very much wanted us to be educated. She could see that it was the route to a better job, which it is’. [Fran, mother]

Vicky and Fran’s narratives explore the class distinctions that existed at the time they were 18, portraying how the middle classes dominated the advantage into university under an elite, classed system (Power et al., 2003). Fran’s daughter, Francesca also expressed lifestyle similarities to Victoria. Both Francesca and Victoria went to independent preparatory schools. Victoria went into the state system at 11 and Francesca remained in the private sector via a full scholarship.

‘I would probably say middle class, but other people might say upper class […] we do have, like, a fairly big house in [area] which is an expensive area and we’ve got two cars and we’ve all been to private school, so that’s probably upper class, but then I would say middle class because we’ve all had scholarships to go to school. Mum and Dad work hard, it’s not like Mum’s been a kept woman or anything’. [Francesca, daughter]

Victoria and Francesca show how they equate education to class and the ambivalence about whether you have to ‘pay’ for private education to count as upper class, with Francesca acknowledging her mother’s independence and input to the family’s income. In line with Walkerdine et al. (2001) and Reay’s

(1998b) findings, mothering work is the link between class and children’s performativity in the classroom. This idea is exemplified by Victoria and Francesca who outline how their mothers supported extra curricula activity, giving their daughters extensive social and cultural capital in the process:

‘Music lesssons, my Mum and Dad paid for those or dance lessons, ballet, whatever I wanted to do, but if I needed extra tutorage, I’m just trying to remember if I did, I think I did Maths maybe, they would obviously arrange that for me and pay for it and I didn’t really think twice about it, it’s just what the other children were doing as well’. [Victoria, daughter]

‘They got me my violin, got me my violin lessons and sent me to the Royal College of Music to play the violin. Anything that I wanted to do they always supported’. [Francesca, daughter]

The narratives above demonstrate that Vicky and Fran have raised their daughters in a very different classed lifestyle and habitus to that in which they themselves were raised. They are subsequently able to give their daughters social and cultural advantage to which they did not have access. Vicky and Fran demonstrate how children’s leisure time and education is merging through maternal involvement (Gillies, 2007). Exposure to the arts provides cultural and educational capital and preserves class hierarchy (Bourdieu, 1984). Reay (2005: 113) explores cultural reproduction through mothers’ exploitation of their capital, using Bernstein’s positioning of the middle classes as ‘better able to exploit the possibilities of public education’. These findings mirror Reay’s (ibid.: 114) view that ‘acting in their child’s best interests inevitably means middle class mothers are simultaneously acting against the interests of the children of other, less privileged, mothers’. Such behaviour, whether conscious or otherwise, is an example of the fractures that exist within different socio-economic groups.