ABSTRACT
In 1980, to supplement my PGCE grant, I was teaching sociology to a group of 16-to-18-year-old, white, working-class women in a northern further education college as part of their ‘Community Care’ course. Part of the work I did with them involved an analysis of media images of femininity. Their responses were fascinating. They were far more critical and discriminating then the contemporary theories of ideology and femininity suggested. 1 At the same time I was starting my PhD and these responses, along with the reading of Paul Willis, profoundly affected the direction it would take. It was to be a study in hegemony and practice: 2 i.e. I wanted to know if, how and why women consented to positions of subordination and what this meant for the construction of their own identities. The research question was ‘why do young women, who are clearly not just passive victims of some ideological conspiracy, consent to a system of class and gender oppression, which appears to offer few rewards and little benefit?’ It was not long before I asked myself: what alternatives do they have? The students I was teaching consented to participate in the research. In 1981 I was offered more teaching in three other caring courses and consequently the research group grew in total to 83 women (see table 4.1). 3
