Page 141 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

134 In search of a ‘good mix’
But I don’t know how important that is at this stage, I don’t get too
excited about it.
(Interview 43)

One aspect of children’s play and interests that arose several times in the
course of interviews with mothers reveals another way in which mothers
were having to deal with issues of class and gender. The interviews took
place at the peak of the impact of the Spice Girls on British popular culture.
The Spice Girls were particularly popular among young children, particu-
larly young girls, and therefore were almost unavoidable for parents (except
parents of preschool children where the Teletubbies held sway). What is
particularly interesting about the Spice Girls is how they brought up classed
concerns (especially around sexuality) for the interviewees. The Spice Girls
were a classed phenomenon. They were working-class women who had
found a powerful route to success, without recourse to the more accepted
routes, such as education or even their own entrepreneurship (this is akin to
more classically working-class male routes to success through sports such as
boxing and football). The Spice Girls played with highly sexualised images,
often dressing in a sexually provocative way and delivering a particular mes-
sage of ‘girl power’ and control of one’s own destiny and desire.
For mothers, or at least those with daughters of the relevant ages (6 or
7 years old and above), the phenomenon of the Spice Girls could not be
ignored. Their daughters wanted to decorate their rooms with posters of
the group, listen to their music and imitate their dress (or the dress of their
favourite Spice Girl) and their style of dancing. The subject of the Spice Girls
often arose in the context of considering gender differences between chil-
dren. Among middle-class mothers, there was an almost universal discourse
that it was desirable to try to bring up children in a ‘gender-neutral’ way, but
that this was impossible. They argued that girls will be girls and boys will be
boys. But this left the question of whether girls had to be Spice Girls. In the
following extract, Madeleine moved swiftly from discussing her daughter’s
gendered dress to the Spice Girls and their ambiguous relation to her aspira-
tions for her daughter:

I mean I was just horrified when Yasmin was old enough to start saying
what she wanted and she wanted to wear pink dresses and high heels
and have blonde hair and you know, I was just ‘how did that happen to
me, how did I produce a child like this’ [laugh] and then you just realise
that everybody’s little girl is like that it’s so rare . . ., they just all go
through that stage and they want to wear bows and frills and pink, you
know have pink bedrooms [laugh] and she’s actually now grown out of
that and she likes dark colours and she wants to wear black and dark
blue, terribly serious. [. . .] I think that the Spice Girls brought up a lot
of issues for parents of girls [big laugh] because you then had to start
– they wanted to know about girl power – and you then had to start