ABSTRACT
We begin our story by locating it in the historical trajectory of education and class described in the preceding paragraphs. This trajectory (chapter 1) extends back to the previous century, to the development of mass compulsory schooling in capitalist societies and particularly, for us, in North America (north of the Mexican border). In this chapter, we reframe the topic of social class, family, and academic achievement by examining the emergence of a new class or section of the middle classes at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in relation to the emergence of the new forms of organizing society that institutional ethnography calls the ruling relations. We are particularly concerned here with the emergence of a distinctive organization of gender in which, in the middle classes, women came to play a special role vis-à-vis the public school system. The availability of women’s unpaid work among the middle classes contributes, we suggest, to the ways in which the public school system comes to operate as an engine of inequality.
