Page 114 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 107
they were concerned with the activities involved in bringing up young
children. Their practices, and what they said, involved negotiating with,
sometimes competing, discourses derived from their own situation, their
upbringing and parenting, the norms presented by their peers and others
around them, the resources available to them, and the actions of wider pub-
lic institutions and state agencies, in particular the education system. The
question of being a mother, bringing up and overseeing the education of
children, involves the encounter between the intimate psychic level of the
individual with wider public discourses. This encounter takes place is and is
shaped by the material, in the form of both the resources available and the
nature of placed and localised interactions.
This chapter focuses on the accounts of a particular group of women and
examines a range of practices connected with motherhood. This enables the
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exploration of raced and classed practices of inclusion and exclusion, as
well as the ways in which mothering involves work to produce raced, classed
and gendered subjects. The first section, ‘Sensitive mothers’, explores some
of the ways in which motherhood has changed the interviewees’ sense of
who they were and how they described their work as mothers. The next
section explores how the women talked about the friendships that they had
made as mothers. Friendships were focused on the local area and clearly
involved classed and raced practices of inclusion and exclusion. The women
discussed the different practices of ‘filtering’ that were involved in finding
friends in the local area. Friendships with people who fell into similar classed
and raced positions were easily made, whereas encounters with others
were limited, and sometimes a little fraught. In the next section, ‘Choosing
schools’, the question of primary education for their children is explored.
This was a much more contentious area. In the interviews, there were many
discussions of the different state schools locally and their relative merits. It
emerged that mothers were looking for schools that had a particular classed
and raced composition. The ‘right’ school was one that had the right social
and racial ‘mix’ of students. This, it emerged, was a school that was not seen
as being too black or working class. Raced and classed ‘others’ appeared to
risk disrupting or threatening their children’s ability to gain the right racial-
ised and classed social capital from school. As the final section, Guess who’s
coming for tea Mummy?, shows, this desire for the ‘right mix’ influenced not
only the choice of school but also the ways in which mothers organised their
children’s social lives and viewed some of their interests.

Sensitive mothers
The majority of the women whose accounts are examined in this chapter
belonged to two groups of white middle-class friends or acquaintances who
were living within a one and a half mile radius of each other in Clapham.
They worked, or had worked, in largely professional occupations, as teach-
ers, journalists or in private sector management. They were living in an area