What defines "class" in a family?

[chatenoire]

It got me thinking as my DH would be considered WC on his own (manual work low salary, GCSE), whereas I come from a more middle class (parents went to uni, I have a master's). Our joint income is just above £100k. So my assumption is that as a family we're MC.

Joint interests are going on mini breaks, a bit outdoorsy (but no camping!), the arts, but we also like going to your average indie gig.

I think more insecure than anything else

and too much time on her hands to navel gaze about it

Working class.

I'd say it's manners

Ok, I think I get it. The idea that working class are more house proud, and more likely to work in manual jobs (have dirty clothes and boots)?

(I’m not from the UK, always find these threads fascinating and baffling)

More likely working class know what a faff it is to clean floors, middle class have cleaners and won’t be doing it themselves.

A lot of them are outdated now anyway. I’ve embraced many aspects dh’s working class culture, like taking shoes off (though I don’t insist on it as we have wooden floors downstairs now), I’m house proud, we have loads of Christmas lights outside including an inflatable snowman, fake garlands etc. Real tree though.
I was asking my mum about some of the other things you ‘should’ say. So say napkin not serviette and I said what about paper and she said they’re paper napkins. Also don’t say pardon. You can say sorry, I beg your pardon or what (though so many people find what offensive). Then she and my aunty argued about whether their mum said ‘don’t say what say pardon,’ my mum insisted her mother would never had said such a thing.
I asked my mum why she’d learned these rules and passed them on. At her school, they were told they need to know the etiquette in case they married someone important and she said she didn’t want me to feel embarrassed at a dinner by people looking down at me for doing the wrong thing. I did say they’re the ones who should be embarrassed if that happened, plus at uni, it was clear who the boarding school kids were and I found them quite loud/intimidating/entitled anyway!

Oh and I’ve never had any such dinner with fantasy nobility and don’t ever want or expect to!

We'd like to think class isn't a thing, but it is, in every country in the world. Humans are tribal beings and we look for signifiers of 'belonging'. There are always 'people like us' and 'people not like us', and especially in today's society where social mobility is stalling it is naive in the extreme to consider class 'irrelevant'.

One of the things I've found fascinating about moving abroad is how class signifiers have changed/'don't work' in new contexts. To the extent that I have noticed I shift behaviour/how I dress depending on whether I'm in the home country (U.K.) and new country.

I'd say that the more obsessed you are about it then the less secure your position is. A person who is confident and secure about themselves wouldn't be talking about class all the time.

My dad satd that someone who was well brought up would use their manners to make people feel comfortable. Much like the late Queen Elizabeth II used to do, it's quite crass to wonder which class someone is from.

That’s interesting. A teacher friend of mine told me that before the age of 8 or so, children will play with and mix with any child. After that, you’ll see them mix with children from their own class/background. We wondered why that is.. what is it that makes them aware, does it come from their parents?

Sorry for hijacking thread, OP.

Class is an outdated concept.

That’s a bold statement. How so?

I remember this daft thread

OP - has it clicked with you yet that your parents are twats?

It’s terribly un classy to talk about class imo.

ah - oldish thread.

Do you use your knife to cut a roll or do you break it with your hands?

Re York, when I went with a dd some years ago, we visited the Treasurer’s House (IIRC) where there’s a B&W video of an old man (since dead) telling of how as a young man he’d been in the cellars working as IIRC an electrician or plumber on something.

He heard something like a trumpet call, but assumed it had come from a radio upstairs. Very soon afterwards he saw, coming through the wall, a troop of Roman soldiers, visible only from around knee height upwards. Petrified, he flattened himself against the wall, but they ignored him completely, and, as he said, looking tired and dishevelled, carried on and disappeared through an opposite wall.

When he eventually emerged upstairs, looking presumably white-faced and in shock, someone said, ‘Oh, you’ve seen them, then.’

He was asked to describe the clothing and helmets, and historians at the time (IIRC this was in the 60s) said they were all wrong, but later it was realised that his description was correct.

During later excavations in the area it was found that the building was right on the path of a Roman road, and the knee-upwards only appearance of the soldiers would tally with the road surface level at the time.

OOps, wrong thread! Mods pls move to spooky stuff!

Worrying about class status is possibly the biggest signifier of being middle class. WC people don’t give a shit about this sort of stuff.

Worrying about class status is possibly the biggest signifier of being middle class. WC people don’t give a shit about this sort of stuff.
I don't know if it's that simple.

I remember growing up and hearing relatives talk about things they'd not go to because it wasn't 'our type of thing'. Based on my own childhood, I also suspect that there's a lot of WC subtle self-exclusion from things based on ideas of class even if that wasn't the language that was used.

Talking to friends it's really telling to see how differently we've been treated by different services and professionals. I suspect a lot of that is down to what assumptions those professionals/service providers are making.

I think some of the problem on Mumsnet is that there's a lot of middle class posters who don't really understand working class culture, or worse seem to confuse working class culture with a series of behaviours and values that most working class people wouldn't recognise as their own (and then performatively take offence on behalf of people whose experiences they know nothing of). It's almost like they're simultaneously wanting be all Hyacinth Bucket, whilst also proving they're right on and defenders of the poor.

Class is important in the UK, whether we like it or not; but there's no need to obsess over it.

I'm quoting someone here but can't recall who - but the trope about "being the first person in your family to go to university" is nonsense because so many more people now go to uni. The quote I'm trying to recall said something like it was akin to being the first person in your family to wear a polyester jumper.

Class is about lots of things - but I think accent is one of the overarching ones. And people pick up on this kind of thing without even realising it, and assign unconscious privileges to those who come across as "higher class" than they are.

That was my wonderful ex MIL, who'd love to say she was working class, but would only shop at John Lewis and Waitrose.

The op is back!