Page 121 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

114 In search of a ‘good mix’
have no manners, they have no control over their own children
and basically I think it is probably because a lot of them work
and they’re with the nannies a lot of the time. And when they’re
with them, they just don’t know how to control them. Which
I think is quite sad actually, you see that quite a lot. And they
do run absolutely wild. Whereas if my children, don’t get me
wrong, are sort of doing something wrong, I’m there straight
away, sort of reminding them and telling them ‘look, don’t do
that’. But some people just sit back and think ‘oh they’ll sort it
out’, which is just not the case, because if you don’t correct them
then they’ll never know.
(Interview 38)

Karon showed the painful experience of feeling social exclusion: ‘they
make it known they won’t be dirtying with you’. But she also took care to
reverse some class stereotypes – here it is the middle classes who let their
children run wild. She consciously labelled herself as ‘working class’ and
referred to both working- and middle-class people as collectivities: ‘we’ call
‘them’ yuppy mums, ‘they’ behave in certain ways. This marks a contrast
with the skirting around labels and more vague talk of different ‘social
groups’ that was more common in the interviews with middle-class women.
In the following account, Stephanie explained that social geography ensures
that there is little social (or racial) mixing in the area she lived in:

I think I mean my experience tends to be around things, in Clapham,
tends to be around things you know mother-and-child activities and the
one thing I think is very noticeable about them is they are accessible,
much more accessible to the middle-class women, um . . . [. . .] It’s dif-
ficult to know whether it is just about, you know financial accessibility
and the information being spread widely enough, or whether it’s simply
because I go to groups that are very much in the sort of heartland of
what I was talking about. And therefore, you know someone from Bat-
tersea wouldn’t come up to that group, but they would go to a group
more in their local area, and they would find in their own groups that
they don’t have . . ., that the number of women from the social classes
that I’m talking about go to the groups that I go to. So I don’t know,
but certainly ones that I go to are predominantly white women. . . . I
don’t know in percentage terms, but a huge number with partners in
the city. You know, most of the people I know are married to bankers or
stockbrokers or people in insurance.
(Interview 31)

In the above extract, Stephanie appears to be awkward in talking about
both class and ‘race’. She skirted around various possible reasons as to why
the groups she went to were so middle class and white. Geographical loca-