Page 124 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

In search of a ‘good mix’ 117
ingness and ability to ‘join everything and meet lots of people’. Jan also
made clear how processes of inclusion and exclusion were involved in this
‘networking’. She was interested in meeting people who were not too ‘simi-
lar’ but whose differences were not ‘in-your-face’. She did not elaborate on
this carefully modulated distinction. In the example she gave, it was a lack
of ‘things in common’ that was a problem, rather than objectionable dif-
ferences. It seems clear that class and ‘race’ would play into Jan’s notion
of differences that were ‘too in-your-face’. Jan had previously explained an
objective that shaped her involvement in pre-natal and mother and toddler
activities: ‘At each stage, you meet people. You tend to sift out what activities
you’re not going to find like-minded people in really’. The quest for meeting
‘like-minded’ mothers was one that was mentioned (using the same words)
by several other middle-class interviewees. Middle-class respondents would
mention activities that they undertook with other mothers, such as visiting
Kew Gardens or art galleries.
These activities are clearly instances where class and ‘race’ are performa-
tively re-inscribed. Some of the mothers mentioned (sometimes with regret)
that most of their friends were, like them, white and middle class. As well
as undertaking activities that reinforced and reiterated classed and raced
subject positions, inevitably these friendships would involve exchanges of
ideas and opinions that also involved the reiteration and negotiation of nor-
mative discourses. This was particularly apparent in the context of decisions
over schooling. Jan was involved in a particularly close-knit group of friends
who had met through an ante-natal group and who continued to meet regu-
larly. She described these women as ‘my kind of people’. Nevertheless, the
group had experienced tensions around the time their children first went to
school:

Jan: But it’s quite interesting, this group, when we meet up. Because
we’ve been through this choosing nursery schools and schools
and some fairly uncomfortable afternoons while people sat
there and basically sort of felt that they had to justify endlessly,
me included, why they were making the choice that they were,
you know. And out of the original people, I think of the eight of
us that still meet up (two have gone out of London now), three
went privately and three went to the other school, the other
state school, and two have gone to Heathcote [the school that
her children attended]. 4
BB: And you had to justify it?
Jan: Well, no people sort of sitting there saying, ‘well which school
are you thinking of’ and all that kind of thing. And those people
that were going privately felt that they . . . you know were going
to get a rough time for the fact that they weren’t going for a
state school and vice versa, you know. Um, and I was just really