Page 71 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

64 Narrating the self
For Deborah, normative discourses offered her a subject position which
she inhabited with comparative ease. Her experiences of being positioned
as a white middle-class woman had confirmed her sense of her self as a
normal and coherent person with agency. Her sense of self was heightened
by the sense that she was in a privileged position, in that she worked in a
professional and specialised field and had an uncomplicated sense of being
white and belonging in England (this will be discussed further in Chapter 7).
Some of this privilege was lost on becoming a mother. Deborah found that
she was unable to continue to work in exactly the same field because of her
responsibility for her son: ‘it was quite difficult to let go because I built up
quite a lot of contacts and lot of work’. Yet she was able to continue work-
ing in a different field, and it did not seem to affect her sense of herself as a
subject with agency.

Rosemary: ‘going with the flow’
In contrast to Deborah, Rosemary, a white working-class woman with four
children who lived in Camberwell, presented herself as someone with very
little agency. She had lived in the same area all her life and the same block of
council flats since she was a young child. Rosemary had an extremely close
relationship with her mother who lived in the same block of flats and who
provided childcare for Rosemary every day. It is striking how, over the course
of two interviews, Rosemary did not provide any narrative of her self. 8

BB: So I was wondering if I could ask you a bit about, we talked a bit
about being a parent, and I was wondering if I could ask you a
bit about life before being a parent, your life?
Rosemary: It was years ago! What before I had the children?
BB: Yes, like one thing I ask is what would you say were the key
turning points or crucial events in your life?
Rosemary: My children [laugh]. They’re my life. But I didn’t go out to
having four. And I didn’t really think: ‘oh I want children now’,
before having children. It weren’t like, ‘oh I’m 24, or 23, I want
a child now’. It just sort of happened.
(Interview 32)

Other questions met a similar response and there was a continual pull to
the present:

BB: And like being a mother, does it make you look back at your
childhood and remember it more clearly or in different ways?
Rosemary: It don’t really make me remember it. It might, like if we’re do-
ing something and I think ‘oh I done that when I was a child’.
It might remind me of things that I do with them that I did as a
child. Or like we might be walking somewhere and I go ‘oh, I