Page 119 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

112 In search of a ‘good mix’
moment when parents hand their children over to schools for a large part of
the day. Decisions about schooling involve a reappraisal and reimagining of
3
what mothers (and fathers ) want for their children. This will be explored
in the section on choosing schools. However, the next section will consider
one resource used by all the women in the Clapham group to cope with
the transformation in their lives – that of social networking. This will il-
lustrate the role of class and ‘race’ in shaping daily intimate practices and
interactions.

Mothers’ friendships and social networking
As mentioned above, for all the women, motherhood meant that they were
suddenly spending much more time at home and in their local area. Some
responded to this situation, and their new position of being mothers, by
actively seeking out other mothers to spend time with and as a form of sup-
port. For many, these friendships and social activities affirmed their sense
of motherhood. It enabled them to meet people who had a common cause
and could, hopefully, confirm their sense of doing motherhood well. This
was not the case for all the women I interviewed. Madeleine, for example,
explained how she avoided such public enactments of motherhood:

I hated one o’clock clubs and ohh no, I couldn’t cope with them at all
[. . .] I don’t know if I very really saw myself as a mum, really to be honest.
I didn’t enjoy it very much when she was little. I was quite young, ...it
wasn’t something I’d decided I wanted to do ...um... and I found it
very hard to identify with other mums [laugh].
(Interview 9)

Discussions of this particular moment of socialising offer an opportunity
to see how the women in Clapham negotiated differences within their social
worlds. Through their accounts, we are able to see the complex (and some-
times not so complex) processes of mutual appraisal, selection and filtering
involved in establishing a friendship group. As Bourdieu writes:

Individuals do not move about in social space in a random way, partly
because they are subject to the forces which structure this space (e.g.
through the objective mechanisms of elimination and channelling), and
partly because they resist the forces of the field with their specific inertia,
that is, their properties, which may exist in embodied form, as disposi-
tions, or in objectified form, in goods, qualifications, etc.
(Bourdieu 1994: 110)

A criticism of Bourdieu is that he tends to focus solely on distinctions of
class. Savage et al. note how Bourdieu makes little mention of gender and
his discussion ‘slides between individual and household analyses of cultural
practices and habits’ (Savage et al. 1992: 103). However, it is clear that the