Class Work: Mothers' Involvement in Their Children's Primary Schooling

Class Work Women & Social Class Series editors: Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek (Roehampton Institute, UK) This new series aims to address a relatively neglected area of feminist theory, women and social class. The series is intended to analyze social class in relation to women’s lives, to theorize it by highlighting personal experience and to understand it in ways which move beyond the macro analyses provided by male, ‘left’ oriented accounts. In developing feminist understandings and analyses of how class continues to operate across and within diverse contexts, the series is committed to evaluating the ways in which social class combines with other social forces to produce inequalities for women in the present and in the future. Already published: Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social ClassEdited by Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in their Children’s Primary Schooling Diane Reay © Diane Reay, 1998 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 1998 by UCL Press UCL Press Limited 1 Gunpowder Square London EC4A 3DE UK and 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101 Bristol Pennsylvania 19007–1598 USA This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A Catalogue Record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available ISBN 0-203-97981-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBNs: 1-85728-915-3 HB 1-85728-916-1 PB This book is dedicated to the memory of my great- grandmother, Alice Pickering who died in the workhouse at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 1929. Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Hidden from View: Mothers in Parental Involvement 7 Chapter 3 Women and Social Class: A Different Version 15 Chapter 4 Mothers and their Children’s Schools 36 Chapter 5 Lessons from Life: The Influence of History and 48 Geography Chapter 6 ‘A Labour of Love’ 70 Chapter 7 ‘Just Talking to the Teacher?’ 101 Chapter 8 Social Whirls and Domestic Routines 125 Chapter 9 Men on the Margins 145 Chapter 10 The Conclusion 158 Appendices 165 References 170 Index 186 Acknowledgments I would like to thank both the mothers and teachers in the two schools where I conducted my research for their many insights and reflections. I am extremely grateful to my series editors, Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek. They were very generous with their time, providing encouraging as well as constructively critical comments on an earlier draft of the book. I am indebted to Miriam David, my supervisor at South Bank University, for her unfailing positive support over the period of completing a Ph.D. and since. Heidi Mirza has provided intellectual and emotional support and sustenance throughout my time in academia. Her warmth, wisdom and humanity have been a continuing source of strength. Chapter 1 Introduction This book’s main aim is to reassert the centrality of social class, as gendered and racialized, in an explanation of the maintenance of educational differences and the reproduction of social inequality. Over the past twenty years social inequalities have increasingly become something many of us take for granted, rather than something we feel responsible for. The myth of meritocracy normalizes inequalities, converting them into individual rather than collective responsibilities. Furthermore, meritocracy sustains fictions of equal access and homogeneous provision, denying differences that count. Behind the bland rhetoric of difference as diversity lie differences that add up to social advantage for some and subtract into social disadvantage for others. Certainly there is no fair distribution of reward for the time, commitment and energy expended by the mothers in this study in support of their children’s education. Time, commitment and energy all count for more if they are underpinned by material and cultural resources. There is a long history of sociological writing which positions the educational system as instrumental in the distribution of social advantage and disadvantage within society (Jackson and Marsden, 1966; Willis, 1977; Halsey et al., 1980; Connell et al., 1982; Gewirtz et al., 1995). However, few of the studies of social class reproduction have attempted a gendered analysis, and even fewer have included ‘race’ within their ambit. This book attempts both through a focus on the home-school relationship as the key to social class reproduction. Much has been made of pupil-teacher interaction, and the school site as pivotal in working- class educational failure. Far less has been written of middle-class monopolization of educational markets (Cohen, 1981; Sieber, 1982; Gewirtz et al., 1995) and how mothering work in support of children’s education is differentially rewarded through the operation of educational markets which privilege middle-class cultural capital. The tales mothers tell run counter to the ideology of the market and claims of neutrality and classlessness. This is a story, then, of unfair advantages and unfair disadvantages, not individual deficits. Black and white, workingclass mothers were working just as hard on their children’s educational attainment as the white, middle-class mothers. But as the words of the women throughout this book illustrate, it was not hard work that counted. 2 CLASS WORK Nicos Mouzelis argues that much sociological theorizing of human interaction continues to be conceptualized in a hierarchical vacuum (Mouzelis, 1995:26). Hierarchies are the key to comprehending home-school relationships. In order to understand how parental involvement sustains rather than erodes existing social inequalities, there needs to be a recognition of three interrelated hierarchies. The link between the mother and children’s educational attainment highlights the hierarchical relations embedded in hetero-sexual relationships. Despite 30 years of second-wave feminisms, women are still the parents with the responsibility for the children. Beyond the home, class and ‘race’ hierarchies permeate parent- teacher interactions. Lastly, there are hierarchies of ‘race’ and class pervading the wider educational marketplace. These result in the privileging of white, middle-class cultural capital and the monopolization of the UK state-educational market by white, middle-class parents acting on behalf of their children. As Jordan et al. argue in relation to white, middle-class families: The paradox of their lives was not the constraint associated with riches, but the self-defeating pursuit of advantage. Putting the family first implied that they had to take every step available to give their children a better chance of making something of themselves than other people’s children enjoyed… the logic of their choices must always tend towards giving their offspring a headstart—more learning capacity, greater concentration, more practice, better facilities, more resources, a favourable environment, more qualifications, more confidence, more contacts, more social skills—over others who would also be striving to make something of themselves. (Jordan et al., 1994:222) This book is about 33 mothers living in metropolitan London. At the same time, the story that I have woven out of women’s words and actions is powerfully influenced by my own history as a white, English woman from a working-class background, who has experienced periods of being a lone mother alongside longer periods of being partnered. I have written extensively elsewhere about reflexivity and research methods (Reay, 1995c; 1996a; 1996b). I believe all research is in one way or another autobiographical or else the avoidance of autobiography. I agree with Heidi Mirza’s analysis of what happens to black women’s writing. She writes of how tales from the margins are appropriated and rewritten by the dominant culture: In writing about our world, our place on the margin, black feminists take the risk of what happens when you expose yourself as an object of study. Laid bare in our unveiling, our inner-most life stories become objects for public gaze; our resistance is known. We engage in naming our subjectivity, telling our story. We undertake journeys of self-discovery, which are then appropriated and recorded as objec tive knowledge, ‘original context’ and ‘specificities’. The dominant culture achieves INTRODUCTION 3 hegemony precisely by its capacity to convert and recode for the authoritative other. (Mirza, 1997:18) I would contend that similar processes are at work in relation to the words of working-class women, both black and white, and to a lesser extent ex-working- class women like myself who continue to struggle with an identity as middle- class (Reay, 1997a). I have a past record of using myself and my earlier experiences in my texts, and I believe much revelation in academic texts is about a failure to fit the norm (Reay, 1996b; 1997a). Because I have written about my subjectivity as a researcher elsewhere, I only discuss briefly my own experience in the field in this book and, instead, give a conventional account of the research methods in Chapter 4. I recognize that the researcher can never be entirely absent from the account, regardless of whether they are referred to directly (Stanley and Wise, 1993). At the same time I believe it is inevitable that, when we write of ourselves as researchers in our texts, we invariably give a partial picture. Even when researchers are in confessional mode (Van Maanen, 1988), enumerating inadequacies and describing mistakes in the field, we rarely resist the opportunity to invite sympathy, to paint a favourable portrait. Research is paved with deceits and conceits—the researcher’s more than the researched.

Load more