Review of “Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times.”

Abstract

More middle-class teenagers end up “on track”—moving inexorably toward professional credentials and stable careers—than do young people of working-class or poor origins, but plans are not what differentiate them, Jessica Hardie argues in this clear, carefully argued study of young women coming of age in the US Midwest. Instead, she contends, it is the financial and institutional support for these plans that can make the difference between hopes dashed or realized. In fact, without that support, all those plans—the young voices echoing throughout these pages, saying “I want to make something of myself” and “I want to have a good job”– serve mostly to provide a market for predatory for-profit schools, or as Hardie put it: “the fodder for the growth of post-secondary institutions unconstrained by government oversight.” There is no shortage of sensitive sociological accounts about how class, race, and gender shape the trajectories of young people. What makes Best Laid Plans uniquely valuable is that Hardie interviews a set of Black and white high school girls from a wide range of class backgrounds in 2008, and then talks to most of the same young women 5–6 years later about what they have been through and what they hope for the future. The result is a close analysis of the details of these 61 people as they stand caught in the hinge between their class origins and their class destinations.