Page 69 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

62 Narrating the self
count, the school treated its pupils as gendered subjects who should not have
high ambitions:

Careers advice was just hilarious, it was ‘you can be a nurse’ (there was
no ‘you can be a doctor or a surgeon’), ‘you can be a nurse or a secre-
tary’ – and then if you asked about something, like, ‘well I want to be a
brain surgeon or something’, ‘oh dear, well you’ll have to come back in
a week when we’ve got the information’. I mean they were very helpful
but they didn’t really set their sights very high for girls.

But fellow pupils also demonstrated by example the perils of other forms of
gendered and class behaviour, such as early pregnancy, which she wished to
avoid: ‘we’d see a lot of the girls who’d left after O levels, walking around
with, in some cases babies and things it was frightening. I mean we found
it frightening’. This is also tied into locality. Moving away from the area
signifies leaving certain gendered and classed positions behind. In a similar
way to Sally, Deborah characterised what she has left behind as narrow and
restricted and again emphasised her independence and freedom.
Apart from these suggestions from her school days, Deborah presented
few struggles over her gendered, class or raced identity. She had worked in
a profession where the majority of her colleagues were women and where
there was a good atmosphere as a woman. Nor did her relationship with her
partner represent a possible ‘turning point’ (this is at least partly maintained
by keeping a strict separation in her account between the public and the
personal or emotional):
But, yes turning points? I mean, even when I decided, well we decided
to get married it was kind of a logical step really, and I didn’t change my
name I still haven’t changed my name, because it wasn’t part and parcel
of being me. You know, I didn’t, I never thought of being married as
anything terribly significant as far as the world was concerned, I mean
obviously from an emotional point of view yes, as far as I was concerned
but it didn’t change my status or make me feel any different. I mean
maybe if I had changed my name – maybe that’s why I didn’t change
my name because I didn’t want it to change my sense of me. Because I
got married when I was 33, so maybe if I’d done it earlier when I was in
my 20s I would have changed my name or something, but it was never
really a big deal.
(Interview 40)

Deborah did not present her subjectivity as racialised. This did not mean
that she did not see herself as white, but that she saw her self occupying a
normative position that did not need to be described, elaborated or ques-
tioned. In the following extract, I was asking about her experience of work-
ing in an office. She had explained how the working environment was good
for women.