(Re) Stor(y)ing Class: Working-Class Women, Smartness, and Higher Education

Abstract

For Canadian-born working-class women, university is often characterized through the axioms of “expanding one’s mind,” “bettering one’s life,” and “saving oneself from a life of hardship.” Associated with these adages is “smartness,” a signature orientation of the academy and a designation that has often excluded the working-class. Our article asks: What does it mean to be a working-class woman in higher education in Canada? How do working-class women negotiate competing notions of “smartness” existing between the university and their home communities? In what ways do these women resist their exclusions from “smartness” and the university project? We answer these questions by drawing on memory stories written by six working-class women who attended or were attending university. The memory stories were written at a series of workshops that one of the authors organized employing the feminist research methodology of Collective Biography. Our analysis illustrates some strategies that working-class and racialized women may use in their encounter with the university including downplaying the value of their working-class backgrounds to make way for the new knowledge to be gained in university, drawing on the strength of community for support, and positioning working-class common sense knowledge as superior to the book knowledge privileged in university. Each story involves the necessity of navigating competing notions of smartness that marks belonging within the university, family, and community.