Working-class Girls Research Articles

OP-ED Constructing a liberatory pedagogy in science: Dilemmas and contradictions

Two summers ago the group of second grade girls I taught in science camp seemed to come from a large number of different backgrounds- Korean daughters of graduate students; white middle class children with parents who were musicians and who went river rafting in Colorado on vacations; white working-class girls of fundamentalist religious background; some from blended marriages; two low socio-economic status African Americans on scholarship. Jennifer, a child of intense religious views, chose not to participate in the questioning I was leading the girls through as they compared their experiences with kite flying. She did not participate in the 'science' side of anything we did. She led the class in turning our 'science' into arts and crafts; turning the empirical testing of kite tail design into a workshop on braiding. She polarized the group; her friends were torn between friendship for her and their interest in the group's inquiry. I responded by changing the curriculum to accommodate: I provided many different materials for braiding and then crafts; I asked questions about the qualities of materials in light of what the children wanted to do with them. I asked the children repeatedly to think and articulate ways they thought what we were doing was science. The science became hidden beneath the 'crafts' but it was still there as we examined the properties of materials, testing and assessing them. We designed things and tried to realize them. Such an evolution in the science we were doing happened by responding to the children's wishes rather than forcing them to choose science or their own desires. from the journal of Margery Osborne

Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.

Working-class girls in nineteenth-century England: life, work and schooling

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Patriarchy Challenged? Women and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire - Women's Work in Agricultural Production: Nineteenth-Century Norfolk and Suffolk - Schooling for Social Control: the Early Nineteenth Century - Religion, Reading and Really Useful Knowledge - An Education of Principle: the Later Nineteenth Century - Schooling for Domesticity? The Later Nineteenth Century - What a Woman Knows: the Significance of Education in the Lives of Working-Class Women - From the Past to the Present - Bibliography - Index

Performing Femininities: Listening to White Working-Class Girls in Rural Maine

In this article, I explore the ways in which sixth, seventh, and eighth grade White girls from poor and working-class families in rural Maine understand, express, and react to dominant cultural definitions of femininity. Using a qualitative method, The Listening Guide, to interpret data gathered over the course of a year from weekly videotaped focus group conversations and individual interviews, I identify and underscore the contradictory nature of what constitutes appropriately feminine discourse and behavior for these girls — discourse and behavior that is radically different from the dominant White middle-class cultural ideal and that offers these girls a wide range of physical and verbal expression not usually considered under the rubric of conventional femininity. I then examine the girls' ambivalent relationship with middle-class propriety, as well as their anger, their longing, and, in some cases, their resistance to dominant cultural ideologies of femininity. Although such resistance may serve them well in their local community, it puts them at odds with the expectations of their teachers and other adults invested in the conventional feminine ideal and thus underscores their displacement in school and society. The Listener's Guide, I contend, provides a way to elucidate the struggles these working-class girls experience as they negotiate and contest contradictory voices and visions of appropriately feminine behavior and constructions of self vying for their attention and allegiance.

The Public Nature of Women's Work: Definitions and Debates during the Revolution of 1848

On 21 May 1848 the revolutionary government held a festival in Paris to celebrate the Republic and to gather French citizens in a display of harmony and unity. Known as the Fete de la Concorde, the event took place on the Champs de Mars, which had been prepared by men employed in the National Workshops and was decorated with the results of competitions held among the nation's artists by the Bureau des Beaux Arts. Statues five meters in height representing Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity populated one end of the field, while allegories of France, Italy, and Germany, with arms extended in friendship, occupied the other. A reviewing stand held the National Assembly and other dignitaries who presided over a parade with thousands of participants: delegations of officials from the departements, the national guards of Paris and the provinces, and artisan corporations, as well as floats and choirs. A major feature of the parade was a band of five hundred young girls, dressed in white and crowned with oak leaves, who sang the Hymn of the Girondins. The presence of these working-class girls received considerable attention in press accounts and memoirs of the event, especially given both the circumscribed role they played in the overall festivities and the participation of other groups of women. Some accounts were favorable in their discussion of the girls; most were not. Commentators used gendered terms; their praise or criticism reflected their awareness of

Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 by Anna Davin (review)

REVIEWS Anna Davin. Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914. London: Rivers Oram P, 19%, xvi + 289. £19.95 (cloth). What was it like to be a working-class child in London in die last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The question, well-rehearsed in die minds of many social historians, has been analyzed mainly from the perspective of the representation of childhood by historians such as Hugh Cunningham and Carolyn Steedman. In contrast to them, Anna Davin deals widi die experience of childhood, particularly childhood for girls. One of the seUing-points of diis book is that she uses oral history derived from die interviews she conducted of her subjects in the 1970s. In doing so, she provides considerable new evidence for die position that the value assigned to die work done by working-class girls was often invisible but nevertheless essential to the steady running of the working-class household. From die girl who ran errands for her mother or neighbors to the one who 'minded a lady's baby' to die one who helped out in the sweated trade at home, Davin argues that adults — particularly mothers — relied on their daughters' labor. By analyzing both childhood experiences and the expectations placed upon children by adult society, Davin moreover provides a larger view concerning die relationship between parents and die state in diis critical period when die latter assumed increasing power over die former and tiieir families. As both members of a family and members of die State, children in late-nineteenth century Britain were the subjects of an important power struggle. To be sure, the Education Act of 1870, which forms the point of departure for this book, marked die beginning of a new epoch in which the educational demands made by die state on die nation's youth ostensibly compromised die control diat parents had over their children's current and future labor. Even so, Davin demonstrates that truancy and/or late attendance at school remained a common experience for working-class children. The often erratic promise of work in their neighborhoods meant that these children relied on piece-meal and seasonal jobs in order to supplement die family 198Victorian Review income at the expense to their own education. Where steady employment appeared, it often took the form of after-school jobs such as matchbox making at home — sometimes extending quite late into the night — and morning jobs, such as delivering newspapers or milk (particularly by boys). If such jobs enabled boys and girls to get to school on time, they may have also been responsible for prompting exhaustion and for preventing these children from achieving their maximum academic potential. Eldest daughters or 'Utde mothers', Davin intimates, shouldered the greatest burden since they were often expected to remain at home in order to look after the youngest members of the family while their mothers worked or performed domestic duties. In order to compel these girls to attend school, the London School Board convinced the Education Department, albeit temporarily, that creches ought to be established in the schools. And, as early as 1879, twelve creches were littered throughout metropolitan schools in order to meet the needs of these school-age girls — a point which raises interesting questions about the origins of the welfare state and the extent to which the School Board was able to influence government policy concerning children. Involved in a process that aided their parents to make ends meet, these children found themselves laden with responsibilities that their socially privUeged peers never knew. However strict rules, steady household demands, economic pressure and close quarters did not indicate that the children of these famtiies were treated harshly. Davin is careful to point out that growing up poor did not preclude growing up loved. In conjunction with class, Davis is concerned with race. She sheds an interesting new Ught on the relationship in the East End among the Irish, English and Jews, the latter being a group that constituted an increasing proportion of recent immigrants to this part of London from Eastern Europe. That Jewish families often hired non-Jewish children to light the fires in their fireplaces at...

The Political is Personal: Father-Daughter Relationships and Working-Class Consciousness

This article asks if the 1970s women's liberation slogan `the personal is political' has privileged a `psychologized', that is an individualistic, version of feminism which, being implicitly grounded in middle-class experiences and concerns, has made invisible those of working-class women. It looks at the problems encountered in trying to use psychology to explain reciprocal-as opposed to individual-concerns and psychoanalysis to explore working-class girls' entry into gendered identity. In doing so, the discussion draws upon Jessica Benjamin's work on cross-gender identification to explore the difficulties faced by daughters who learned from an early age of the relative powerlessness of their fathers. It argues that such experiences can be seen not as instances of individual pathologies, but as examples of how early consciousness of class positioning might provide the roots of women's adult political activity which is founded not on a gendered but on a classed identity.

Catholic working-class girls' education in Lowland Scotland, 1872-1900

Catholic working-class girls' education in Lowland Scotland, 1872-1900

When girls (and boys) just want to have fun

When Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun Naomi J. Wood (bio) Angela McRobbie. Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen.” Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991. Susan Willis. A Primer for Daily Life. Studies in Culture and Communication. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. In S. E. Hinton’s 1968 novel The Outsiders, adolescent struggle is divided into “Greasers” and “Socs,” the “have-nots” and the “haves” of class society. On the margins of the sympathetically portrayed Greasers’ world are the “greasy girls”; they are forever banned from the romantic discourse of heroic rebellion—associated in the novel with the southern gentlemen who ride bravely into certain death in Gone With the Wind—by their gender. All males in The Outsiders want “nice” girls, who are, by definition, Socs. Hinton’s narrator, Ponyboy, does not question the values that make Soc girls the prize in romantic sweepstakes, values that relegate Greaser girls to the also-rans; nor, until recently, have the many social and cultural critics questioned these values. In the 25 years since Hinton published her novel, definitions of adolescence itself remain masculine, with girls tacked on as an afterthought. In 1991, however, two books were published that examine the social construction of childhood and adolescence as intimately informed by class and gender. Both Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture: From “Jackie” to “Just Seventeen” and Susan Willis’s A Primer for Daily Life focus on the ways cultural texts and their consumers both support and subvert the hegemonies that produce them. Both books provide important questions for critics and teachers of children’s literature to ask themselves about their field. Sociologist McRobbie’s book is a collection of landmark essays on [End Page 123] English working-class female adolescence. It grows out of her association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, but also poses questions that her colleagues had not thought to ask about what adolescence means for girls. Following a roughly chronological arrangement, the chapters reflect the growth and change of methodology of cultural studies over the last 18 years. The early essays, “Girls and Subcultures” (1978), “Settling Accounts with Subcultures” (1980), “The Culture of Working-Class Girls” (1979), and “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text, and Action” (1982), provide an overview and critique of ostensibly radical sociological analyses that treat adolescent girls as uninteresting adjuncts to the real business of youth culture. McRobbie’s implicit point is that no sociological study can be complete without understanding the roles girls play in culture. Like other feminist scholars in the early 1980s, McRobbie is concerned with the silencing of female voices, with the absence of femininity as an object of study in male-dominated academic work. McRobbie wants to “combine a clear commitment to the analysis of girls’ culture with a direct engagement with youth culture as it is constructed in sociological and cultural studies” (17). For her, any real feminist intervention in culture must take place with understanding and dialogue between the objects and the subjects of study. The last, and most metacritical essay in this group concludes by criticizing the position of the researcher in relation to her subjects and by discussing the pros and cons of less “objectively scientific” and more participatory research. The crucial question for McRobbie is: “How can we make talk walk?” (79); she answers it by urging feminists to engage both in intellectual and political work, while “recognising both the value and the limitations of the kind of work we do” (79). McRobbie grounds the study of adolescent female culture by posing questions that need to be asked. She demonstrates how simplistic notions of class fail to consider the specificity of gender. In the second group of chapters, McRobbie focuses on literary texts as a way of understanding teenage socialization. This section reflects most clearly the revolution in popular culture study that the work of Cora Kaplan, Dave Morley, Janice Radway and others in the middle-1980s made in the understanding of the relationship between texts and readers. While “Jackie Magazine: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl” (n.d., late 1970s) analyzes various codes of the teen magazine and suggests possible results of...

A room of one's own? Farming and working-class girls in Norway during the 1930s and 1940s

A room of one's own? Farming and working-class girls in Norway during the 1930s and 1940s

Acquiring a leisure identity: juvenile jazz bands and the moral universe of ‘healthy’ leisure time

The ways in which juvenile jazz bands cater for the leisure time of young girls in a working class neighbourhood of Newcastle upon Tyne are illustrated. In addition to ethnographic material, statements made by the Jazz Band Federation of the UK which indicate the objectives of the organization, as well as its views on the ‘problem of youth’ in modern society are drawn upon. Finally, the data have been analyzed within a framework of historically changing social relationships, and the ways in which the Jazz Band Federation plays a mediating role as the moral gatekeeper of an activity popular with many working class girls are illustrated.

The Contested Terrain of Reproduction: class and gender in schooling in India

Abstract This article addresses the need to elaborate the concept of resistance by creating an historically specific and more nuanced typology of student behaviours in schools, in the context of the particular configuration of capitalism and patriarchy in India. In particular, responses of upper/upper‐middle class and lower‐middle/working class girls are analysed. It is argued that socio‐economic background, as well as the structure of the school itself, plays a vital role in directing the channels taken by the students’ resistances. Data for this research project were gathered in the summer of 1986, from two schools in Calcutta, India.

Radiator girls: The opinions and experiences of working-class girls in an East London comprehensive

Radiator girls: The opinions and experiences of working-class girls in an East London comprehensive

Women in UK Universities, 1920-1980

This paper examines the participation of women in UK universities since 1945, with some reference to the twenties and thirties. Not surprisingly, females stj/[ participate unequally wuh men at all levels of university education,· though the gap has closed markedly throughout the twentieth century, most noticeably in the years since 1960. In the period 1920-1980 there has been a moderate but uneven growth in the female share of undergraduate enrolments. At the honours and postgraduate level, the improvements are less marked and, partly as a result, in 1980 women made up only 13.6% of university staff. The reasons for the imbalances between fomale and male participation at all levels are complex. Social class plays a part, since middle class girls do better than working class girls. Changes in the organisation of secondary education, such as the Act of 1944, are also relevant. But heightened government funding with the consequent expansion of universities and anti-discrimination legislation have been perhap...

Contraceptive experience and attitudes to motherhood of teenage mothers.

SummarySexual experience is increasingly common among teenagers. Evidence suggests that while many teenage pregnancies are unintended, teenagers remain less than totally effective users of contraception. Among a sample of 102 teenage mothers, only two-thirds had ever used contraception, although only a quarter of the pregnancies were planned. About half of the teenagers were upset on hearing the initial news of the pregnancy; half of these had been using the pill, which in many cases had been given up without another form of contraception substituted. These girls present a formidable challenge to providers of contraceptive services, especially in view of the restricted opportunities available to working-class girls.

Language and social class: is verbal deprivation a myth?

A study was made of complex usages of language in the spontaneous conversation of 30 4-year-old girls, their mothers and their teachers, at home and at school. There were significant social class differences in frequency, but almost all the usages appeared in the talk of almost all the mothers and children at least once. The working class girls' language style changed more between home and school than did that of the middle class girls. The teachers' talk contained a higher proportion of these usages than the mothers', but the overall input to the children was less at school. The findings are discussed in relation to Labov's argument that verbal deprivation is a myth.

Social Class-Sex Contrasts in Patterns of Cognitive Style: A Cross-Cultural Replication

In a cross-cultural replication of an Australian study, multiple discriminant function analysis was used on responses of a sample of 79 Californian adolescents (classified on an SES/Life Style index) to determine whether their pattern of cognitive functioning differed on a battery of cognitive style tests along a social-class/sex dimension. On Function I, middle-class (M) and working-class (W) boys displayed broad estimates of category width, while middle-class girls and working-class girls scored high on originality and conceptual differentiation, but low on category width. On Function II, middle-class girls and boys scored higher on conceptual preference for descriptive-analytic labels, and on category width working-class girls and boys showed a preference for inferential labels. The results indicated close similarity between the Australian and United States sample in terms of the dimensions analysed, although both groups of U.S. girls displayed greater preference for analytic and creative modes, respectively. Results were interpreted within socialization theory, the discrepant results being attributed to different socialization clusters operating within the culture.

Class and gender: Role model considerations and liberations in advanced capitalism

In this paper, I have presented a model with very few nuances. My object has been to explore the most typical differences between the social classes and, therefore, I have not commented upon the situation of the lower-middle classes; nor have I given much attention to boys in bourgeois categories. My reason for this is that this special category has very often been the focus of socialization research. Rather I have tried to throw some light upon the socialization of working-class girls, where the concept of familism and of solidarity has been important in my analysis. However, the insights and thought patterns of boys and men in bourgeois categories must, in the same way as those of other social groups, be understood as a consequence of capitalism as a social system — and also be understood within a dialectical frame of reference. In other words, while boys in bourgeois categories are socialized in a way which often makes it possible for them to gain the most sought-after positions in society, they have to suffer certain disadvantages that may be costly for themselves as individuals and for society as a whole. My intention has been to discuss some relationships between socialization and the societal model of production. In a capitalist society, there is a need for some boys to be socialized into the elite and for some girls to be socialized into the reserve army of workers. The cause of women's liberation (as well as men's liberation) may be served in many ways and on many different levels. To me it seems especially important to understand the underlying societal forces that shape the roles of working-class girls and women.

The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen, 1900–1940

Of all forms of personal services supplied to business enterprise, that of sales workers has perhaps defied the application of “standard” management practices more than any other. Professor Benson shows that this generalization is especially applicable to female department store sales personnel, who were necessarily recruited chiefly from “lower” social classes whose members lacked education and refinement. Thus, regimentation and rote training seemed appropriate. On the other hand, selling style goods to sophisticated female customers involved elements not of a trade but an art, and an attitude of deference, which was not a common trait among working-class girls. Department store managers, almost exclusively male, failed to solve this paradox and, as Professor Benson relates, failed also to deal with the invisible solidarity of female sales persons.

Social class differences and the identification of sex in children's speech

ABSTRACTJudges were asked to identify the sex of prepubertal children by listening to their tape-recorded voices. More incorrect guesses were made of working class girls than of their male counterparts. For middle-class children, however, the pattern was reversed, with more boys being misidentified as girls than the opposite. These findings are related to work demonstrating an association between masculinity and working-class speech, and to the ‘covert prestige’ attaching to such speech as a result. Some practical implications of the results for researchers in the field of child language are also discussed.