Growing Up Girl: Psycho-social Explorations of Gender and Class [Paperback]

'...an important counterpoint to the sociological youth research literature that still tends to represent young people's move from education to the job market as involving a series of fairly rational choices. The book's analysis of structural and other theories of class and its grounding in sociological and psychoanalytic theories will be especially useful for those readers who might not be familiar with these debates.' - Christine Griffin, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Feminism & Psychology

Set against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, rising male unemployment and the feminisation and casualisation of the labour market, Growing Up Girl graphically explores the complexities of gender and class during a period of massive social change. It tells the story of today's 'I can have everything' girls who face unprecedented shifts in the organisation of family, education and work, and yet who continue to struggle with the not always visible but always palpable pressures of wealth, poverty, class and ethnicity. Drawing on data spanning nearly twenty years, the authors of this ground-breaking study provide a sobering antidote to commonplace platitudes about 'girl power' and a feminine future. They reveal the hidden price of middle class girls' apparently effortless achievements - obsessive hard work, guilt and devastating feelings of inadequacy - and they trace how the labour market cruelly sets material limits on the disappointed hopes and ambitions of working class girls. Vividly illustrating their arguments with quotations from the research participants, they show how young women's practices of self-invention are regulated both by unconscious processes and real social and economic constraints. Their insistent conclusion is that class is far from dead. Indeed, it is centrally important to our understanding of what it is to be a young woman in today's complex and challenging world, This important and grippingly written book is essential reading for students and scholars alike in sociology, cultural studies, women's studies, education and psychology. It will also be of interest to anyone else struggling to make sense of the position of women in society today.

VALERIE WALKERDINE is Foundation Professor of Critical Psychology at University of Western Sydney, Nepean. She was previously Professor of Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, London. She is the author of a number of books including Daddy's Girl and Mass Hysteria. HELEN LUCEY lectures in the School of Education, King's College, University of London. JUNE MELODY is a Psychotherapist in training, living and working in West London.

Introduction

This book is about something that refuses to go away: social class in Britain. We write this book at a moment when new forms of subjectivity, organisation and community are very much on the agenda. The challenge is to understand the role that class plays in relation to gender today, when almost everything that traditionally defined class has broken down. We are no longer in an era in which progressive social change towards any kind of socialism or social democracy, backed up by trade unions or union struggles, is on the agenda. We no longer have a large manufacturing base to provide the pivot for understanding social stratification based on class divisions. Rather we are confronted with huge changes in the global labour market, changes that have caused the British economy to become dominated by the service sector, the technology and communications industries and a huge and powerful financial sector. In the new global economy, the stable Fordist model of manufacturing has given!
way to downsized industries that are shadows of their former selves. Many of the new manufacturing industries are not even British owned and products are assembled in different places, with capital, production processes and workers now being much more mobile.

What used to be the working class is now dispersed into the service industry, their labour based on individual contracts, piecework, homework and work in call centres, jobs for life having disappeared. The Fordist working class drew its strength and unity from the large numbers working in one location, with mass occupation of a single factory space. In the new labour market there are huge salaries to be made, but equally there is massive unemployment of men, who used to be the backbone of the working class. As the 1997 hit film The Full Monty made clear, men who formerly worked in factories are struggling to reinvent themselves in the light of a new economy in which some women have the economic power they have lost. Women's employment, however, is divided between those who have the educational credentials and skills to enter the professional and managerial sector and those who leave school with few or no qualifications and enter a labour market characterised by poorly paid, often part-time work, little job security and periods of unemployment. They may be the sole breadwinner in their family.

These changes have been so profound and so successful in absorbing the rhetoric of internationalism and progressivism that there appears to be very little space left for notions associated with the traditional social democratic parties. The Blair government is fully committed to globalism, and its attempts to reduce the welfare state are quite in line with monetarist practice. By and large it sees its job as the humane management of an inevitable global shift. In this context, for social democrats the end of `welfarist dependency' and words such as autonomy, grass roots organisation and social capital provide the basis for a mode of government with some element of personal control at a time of profound but inevitable change. Expressions such as `life-long learning' have replaced `jobs for life' in recognition of the inherent insecurity built into the system. Such a shift demands subjects who are capable of understanding themselves as autonomous agents, producers of their present and their future, inventors of the people they are or may become (Giddens, 1991). However, such self-invention demands a particular kind of psychological subject, standalone people who are aware of and responsible for their own thoughts and actions. Such subjects are the psychological subjects of modernity and are made, not born, made through the psi sciences that create the appropriate subject of a neoliberal democracy (Foucault, 1979; Rose,1999; Henriques et al., 1998).

Nikolas Rose (1992) argues that neoliberalism that is, a form of liberal government that depends upon subjects who are free and rational agents of democracy, recreated in the context of globalism and economic rationalism demands a psychological subject who is capable of `bearing the serious burdens of liberty': `However apparently external and implacable may be the constraints, obstacles and limitations that are encountered, each individual must render his or her life meaningful, as if it were the outcome of individual choices made in the furtherance of a biographical project of self-realization' (ibid., p. 12). If we think about the end of jobs for life and the production of a culture of uncertainty, self-invention through a discourse of limitless choice provides a way to manage the government of potentially unruly and disaffected subjects. This project requires acceptance of certain kinds of psychological discourse as a true description of oneself. Here psychological discourses and services (counselling, as in chat shows, popular psychology books with titles such as `Women Who Love Too Much or Do It Now!', women's magazines and popular newspapers) combine with people's desire to make something of their lives. So if one is out of work, one has to transform oneself into the right kind of employable subject. This transformation is taking place alongside the transformation of the social fabric of Britain changes in the labour market, the breakdown of old established communities, feminism and new ethnicities, to name just a few. How do people cope with such complex demands? What are the social and psychological mechanisms by which they cope with the complexity of their social positioning?