ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways in which two contrasting groups of mature women students describe their decision to return to education and how they view themselves in this new context. Full-time residential education has provided a space for them to reflect upon and re-evaluate their sense of themselves, their sense of being women, their perceptions of feminism and their educational desires and hopes. The broader question of social class and the historical development of ideas of both interiority and childhood has received substantial attention in the work of Carolyn Steedman. The interior/exterior polarity, demonstrated in the narratives of self, also characterises the approach towards gender issues as seen in the women's accounts. The psychologist Helen Haste describes what she terms 'lay social theories' as the models, culturally specific in time and place, that inform the way people think, feel and act in relation to a particular issue or concern.
