ABSTRACT
Before I begin to elaborate on these points, I need to say a few words about the background to the empirical research on which the claims of this chapter are based. During 2000/2001, I conducted a series of loosely structured focus groups with twenty-six British White and British Asian women aged between sixteen and twenty-eight, on the themes of (in)equality, Girl Power, and feminism. This varied cohort included students and secretaries, homemakers and care workers, saleswomen and engineers; it attended to differences of parental and marital status, sexuality, and (dis)ability. While social class is notoriously difficult to categorize, I would assert that these women were essentially working-class or lower middle-class by education, reflective of the constituency of the town in which they were located, which was mainly made up of skilled and semiskilled manual, administrative, and agricultural workers, with few professionals and no rolling student population (see Jowett 2003).
