class/social standing and Feminism

[sparky159]

is there a place for working class people in Feminism?
ill answer my own post to as why im asking this.

I think you need to explain that SAF.

Yes we are riddled with class prejudice, and perceptions of the class of others are immediately apparent to any British person on meeting another.

But I just don't think that it is solid enough thing to base conversations on, as chances are when one of us says "middle class" or "working class" we all immediately think of different tihngs, and a lot of the time those things are stereotypes, and I just don't think we'll get very far.

Also is it all a bit euphamistic? That we are uncomfortable about others being poor, or illiterate, uneducated, and so we refer to vague "classes" so we don't have to explain what we really mean?

And about family background
Where you went to school
What your tastes are
What things you know about
What your hobbies are
Your dress
Your hair
Where you go on holiday

And so on and so on

It's far too complicated to explain, hence the huge threads on here, the bafflement of people who have not been immersed in it.

Class exists, but it means different things to different people, people label themselves as one thing when other would say they were another, I just think it is a poor basis around which to frame a debate.

sorry second was to saf's post

Janos, I agree. Essentially cultural elements of class prejudice in Britain are equivalent to cultural elements of religion in the US. Who needs the protestant work ethic when we can claim hoop earrings to be a sign that someone is morally questionable?

There are aspects of being working class as a cultural experience that I feel are important. There is very much a middle class standard of behaviour that is often praised and promoted on MN, as in life. I find this has parallels to what is considered acceptable feminine behaviour in society.

I am very keen to reject middle class standards in the same way that I am keen to reject standards of femininity (I may enjoy some of them, but I am not going to be pressured into conformity to all of them) because I feel the purpose of these standards is to make people into what capitalism needs and wants. It is an inauthentic experience and alienates us from a sense of shared identity with previous highly politicised working-class generations.

But that aside, social inequality and class are primarily about income, and I do feel it is sexist to define it otherwise, but it is then used as a way of getting at a group of powerless, poorly paid women who are branded as 'middle class' and privileged when they actually work in jobs like nursing or in a call centre on low pay.

milly, please can you define the working class as referred to in your post,

And what are these "middle class standards" of which you speak?

Is that related to the codes that advertisers use or is it something else?

the ones that advertisers use probably (depressingly) give quite an accurate picture.

I haven't had a chance to read all the thread so can only throw out a few random thoughts.

The women on my mothers' side are feminists and my great nan chained herself to the railings at Downing St as a part of the suffrage movement. They are solid working class, although my mum is recognised internationally as an expert in her field.

I'm not educated as such but I hope I'm intelligent enough to keep up here more or less. Anything I don't understand I'll ask or google.

The class thing...I wonder if this is why people are trying to claim that Katie Price is a feminist icon? Is it a way of keeping working class women firmly in their place by getting them to think that unless they look a certain way and are prepared to sell themselves then they can forget any idea of success and independence?

Yes saf which is why IMO it is not a helpful basis for a conversation.

if people want to talk about poor people, let's talk about poor people.
if people want to talk about the difficulties faced by single parents who can't get a job which pays enough to pay the childcare, let's talk about that
And so on...

ISNT - yes, I think the British obsession with class must seem utterly bizarre to non-Brit posters.

Excellent post MillyR. Very eloquent. I agree WRT your comments about there being a middle class standard of behaviour which is held up as an 'ideal'.

I would personally love to see a more empowered and politically aware working class. My feeling is that there is a scale of who is most 'worthy' in our society and that working class women are very much toward the bottom end of that scale. That is not right.

Mind you, I speak as a tasteless hoopy earring wearer of course. I prefer silver though which I am sure you will all agree is less common

SAF, if someone on a million pounds is working class then your use of working class is utterly useless in a discussion of social inequality and discrimination. I am not sure in what kind of conversation such a definition is useful or what point you're trying to make about power structures. I hope that doesn't come across as an abrasive thing to say, but what are you trying to say?

ISNT - I would not like to start defining it as I think it is a massive topic that is constantly either covertly or explicitly debated all over MN. I do think that being prejudiced against working class forms of behaviour is very much secondary to the discrimination faced by people on a low income, which to me is much more important.

But anyway, an example I would give is regional accent. There have been many threads on here about people who dislike teachers with regional accents. It is extremely important to me that my children retain their regional accents. I feel that the insistence that people who become educated need to drop their accents in order to get various jobs is a kind of divide and rule. It alienates people from their heritage, their local community, and creates pointless class divisions in order to fit some safe, bland kind of person who is lacking in identity. The division of a teacher into 'middle class' and a builder as 'working class' when they are both on 22 grand which is a very insecure wage to support a household on, is ludicrous. The invention of a middle class standard that is looked down on if your deviate from perpetuates this lack of solidarity between people. It is also expensive to maintain the middle class standard (you must live in a certain size house in a certain expensive area) encourages debt, a love of status and is only in the interests of capitalism which wants us to buy status symbols that we don't need.

But that is just my perspective. Cultural elements of class are complex.

I do find the whole class thing fascinating though, which probably reveals something about my class

but I am still confused.

spiritmum what does "solidly working class" mean?

what is this middle class competitive cupcake thing? I don't know anyone who behaves like that... and we haven't even got into the fact that the middle class is classified further into lower, middle and upper...

The whole things a bit silly if you ask me, and doesn't bear analysis. No-one ever agrees on what is what. But still very interesting

"one cliche definition of the middle classes is there obsession with appearances and etiquette"

Yes, absolutely. Not being common (ugh, awful). Elbows on the table being rude (why) etc...

Yes it is silly ISNT. And yet people talk about it all the fecking time! We are obsessed with it over here, it's ridiculous.

The only people who care about that stuff are just very insecure, usually social climbers though janos. Normal people don't give a fuck. The people who care are the ones who are trying to decode what behaviours the people "above them" display, and then ape them.

And I think that milly your post demonstrtaes quite well the difficulty, in that the obliteration of regional accents and an obsession with house size and area, isn't sometihng I associate with anyone I know. People who think like that might be twats, frankly, but i don't think it is a "middle class thing". IYSWIM.

So when you say "I don't like middle class standards" I have no idea, it wouldn't even have crossed my mind that you were talking about obliterating regional accents. I have never even heard that as a class thing before.

I think we need to say who and what we are talking about, explicitly, and then talk about it

Oh and saf the thing about keeping people content with their lot by telling them they've "arrived" - I have read that somewhere before - how "we're all middle class now" is a trick.

SAF, yes I absolutely agree that if someone is from a working class background, it is difficult to change that, especially for people growing up in the current generation.

The point I am making is that while what you say is true, it is also incredibly easy for women from middle class backgrounds (especially mothers) to end up on low incomes for their entire lives, and I would like the idea of what constitutes working class in a political sense to take that into account, rather than pretending that by virtue of having higher education, poor women were somehow not really poor.

If has to be about both gender and class, because if it isn't, it is hard to explain why despite their being equal numbers of working class boys and girls born, most adults living in poverty are women.