ABSTRACT

When I was asked to meditate upon my sense and understanding of social class, I realized how little most literature about class has seemed to speak to my own experience. Like many other women, my own sense of class position and identity is much more complicated than most theorizing around class has suggested. In particular, mainstream understandings of the class system and of class consciousness have tended to treat women’s experiences of class in terms of their fathers’ or husbands’ class positions, which are most typically associated with their occupations (e.g. Goldthorpe 1983; Wright 1985; Marshall et al. 1988). While women, in my view, do not constitute a class per se, their class positions cannot simply be derived from those of their male counterparts (see Acker 1973; Britten & Heath 1983; Delphy 1984; Walby 1986; Zipp & Plutzer 1996).