ABSTRACT
During his term of office, John Major, the Conservative British prime minister, announced that Britain was now a classless society. The irony of this statement may have been less apparent to some in the boom economy of the 1980s, but became a cruel joke in the face of the 1990s bust. In this chapter, we will discuss aspects of the lives of a group of young women who grew up through that turbulent period of British history. They took part in a research project, which began when 30 of the girls were four and eight of them were six years old. The group of 30 girls was part of a research project when they were four, undertaken by Tizard and Hughes at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, University of London. This project, written up as Young Children Learning (Tizard & Hughes 1984), aimed to explore language at home and at school. The researchers observed 15 working-class and 15 middle-class mother and daughter pairs, recording their conversations at home and the girls in the nursery school. While the authors kindly allowed us access to both the sample and the transcripts of the recordings, we found we were at total odds with their interpretation of the relation of class and gender in the data. We therefore reworked the data to examine arguments about class and gendered socialization and the regulation of working-and middle-class mothering practices. We then followed up the same girls at aged ten, including additionally a small case-study of girls from one infants’ school in London. More recently, we received funding to follow the same girls up to research their transition to womanhood.1 For this project, on which we draw for this chapter, the young women (aged 21 and 16 in 1993), and their families were interviewed and the young women made video diaries of their lives. The majority of the young women were white, though there was one AfroCaribbean, one Asian and one mixed race young woman in the overall sample. A subsidiary sample of six black and Asian 21-year-old young women was added to the original sample. We have discussed the girls’ early years and their primary schooling at length in earlier publications (Walkerdine & Lucey 1989; Walkerdine 1989, 1998). Our aim here is to explore some of the ways in which
class differences are present for these young women in relation to their educational success, career trajectory and experiences of sexuality and motherhood. We want to concentrate in particular on the way in which the relations of sexuality and attainment figure differently for the middle-and working-class 21 year olds.
