Page 123 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

116 In search of a ‘good mix’
Teresa approved of the ‘mix’ of ‘privilege and money, all the rest of it, and
a lot of deprivation’, which was ‘great’, but did not elaborate why. Again,
neither class nor ‘race’ was mentioned explicitly, but implied in the signifi-
cant ‘all the rest of it’ and in the ‘pushy’, ‘more educated’ mothers who were
taking the lead in running the playgroup. Here, for the first time in this chap-
ter, there is the introduction of the concept of ‘mix’, which was central to the
discussion on schooling developed below. Despite her positive attitude to the
‘mix’, it was not without problems and frustrations. Teresa did put herself
into the shoes of these ‘others’ – she tried to imagine their point of view and
the other pressures in their lives. But she still resisted identifying tensions
as having a classed or raced element. Questions of material resources and
inequalities were hinted at, but not faced directly.
Stephanie and Teresa were referring to broader level raced and classed
differences that might potentially cause conflict. However, for much of the
discussions around social networking, the differences that most exercised the
middle-class women I interviewed in Clapham were more subtle distinctions
between different kinds of middle class. This was the level at which they
were most aware of making conscious choices about friendships. It is not
likely, for instance, that Teresa considered the ‘deprived’ mothers she met at
the playgroup as potential friends to spend time with outside the context of
the playgroup. Thus, in the following extract, Jan, who described how ‘I sort
of threw myself into ante-natal, post-natal networking with great gusto’, was
describing a very different level of social contact and filtering:

Certainly I was very aware when I first had Zoe that it was like being a
fresher, first term of university when you find yourself joining the row-
ing club and thinking afterwards ‘what was I thinking of? – oh you must
join everything and meet lots of people’ and actually realise that I don’t
want to meet all sorts of people, I want to meet people that I like and
who have similar, you know similar with differences that are interesting,
but not sort of in-your-face kind of, I don’t know. It’s a bit like that
when you have your first child. I remember going round to someone’s
house for tea who I’d met at a baby clinic and the only thing that we
had in common was the fact that we had a baby under 6 months, almost
nothing really. And we never saw each other again. It was just a mutual
realisation that it was, you know . . .
(Interview 30)

The comparison of what Jan was doing as a new mother with being a
‘fresher’ immediately suggests the classed nature of the activity. This in-
volved certain material resources – meetings are generally held in people’s
homes, requiring space and home environments to which you want to invite
people, as well as mobility and the time to go to the meetings. But, more
significantly, this particular, almost aggressive, socialising being referred to
assumes certain forms of social and cultural capital. This includes the will-