ABSTRACT
The concept of femininity is only partially adequate to encapsulate the experiences by which the women of the study occupied the category ‘woman’. The women are positioned at a distance from femininity but claim proximity to it. This ambivalent positioning informed their responses. The women made feminine performances appropriate to the situations they were in. These could be made across a range of sites, with differing value and potential. Working-class women were coded as inherently healthy, hardy and robust against the physical frailty of middleclass women. White middle-class women could use their proximity to the sign of femininity to construct distinctions between themselves and others. Investments in the ideal of femininity enabled them to gain access to limited status and moral superiority. It was their desire for value that led them to evaluate others. The distance that is drawn between the sexual and the feminine was drawn onto the bodies of working-class women.
