Abstract
Foregrounding my mother’s role in my experience of being a ‘Scholarship Girl’, this chapter traces the inter-generational transmission of gender, class and educational achievement in the life of a white woman of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation. There is a noticeable feature common to a number of women writers of my generation: that of the unkind, withholding, even cruel mother who is unloving towards, ‘exploits’ or otherwise tries to ‘thwart’ her daughter. In telling a tale through narrative, poems and diary entries, of a female pilgrim’s progress from growing up in a council flat in the post-war period of the welfare state to an academic career, I paint a more sympathetic picture of my own mother and her travails in attempting to escape a stigmatised self and to achieve the middle-class status which I now self-consciously enjoy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.
- 2.
A kind of gingerbread cake originating in Yorkshire.
- 3.
All names are fictionalised.
References
Addison M. & Mountford V. (2015). Talking the talk and fitting in: Troubling the practices of speaking ‘what you are worth’ in higher education in the UK. Sociological Research Online 20, 2, 4.
Chernin, K. (1983). In My Mother’s House: a memoir. New Haven: Ticknor & Fields.
Childers, M. C. (2002). “The Parrot or the Pit Bull”: Trying to Explain Working-Class Life Signs, 28, 1, 201–220.
Cosslett, T. (2000). Matrilineal Narratives Revisited, in Cosslett, C. Lury & P. Summerfield (Eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (pp. 141–153). London: Routledge.
Donnelly, M., Baratta, A., & Gamsu, S. (2019). A Sociolinguistic Perspective on Accent and Social Mobility in the UK Teaching Profession. Sociological Research Online https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418816335
Forster, M. (1996). Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir. London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. (1985). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin Books.
Goode, J. (2007). Telling Tales out of School: Connecting the Prose and the Passion in the Learning and Teaching of English. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 6, 808–820.
Goode, J. (2018a). Fashioning the Sixties: fashion narratives of older women. Ageing & Society, 38, 3, 455–475.
Goode, J. (2018b). Exhuming the good that men do: the play of the mnemonic imagination in the making of an autoethnographic text. Time & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X18787645
Griffin, C. (2004). Good Girls, Bad Girls: Anglocentrism and Diversity in the Constitution of Contemporary Girlhood. In A. Harris (Ed.) All About the Girl. Culture, Power, and Identity. (pp. 29–43). New York and London: Routledge.
Hanley, L. (2016). Respectable: The Experience of Class. London: Penguin Books.
Hey, V. (1997). Northern accent and southern comfort; subjectivity and social class. In P. Mahony & C. Zmroczek (Eds.), Class matters, ‘working-class’ women’s perspectives on social class (pp. 140–151). London: Taylor & Francis.
Hey, V. (2006). ‘Getting over it?’ Reflections on the melancholia of reclassified identities, Gender and Education, 18, 3, 295–308.
Kingston, M. H. (1976). The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts New York: Vintage Books.
Kuhn, A. (1995). Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso.
Lawler, S. (2000) Mothering the Self, mothers, daughters, subjects. London & New York: Routledge.
Lorde, A. (2001). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: Crossing Press Feminist Series.
Loveday, V. (2016). Embodying Deficiency Through ‘Affective Practice’: Shame, relationality, and the lived experience of social class and gender in higher education. Sociology, 50, 6, 1140–1155.
Maslen, J. (2013). Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968. Memory Studies, 6, 1, 23–36.
McInerney, L. (2019). Working Class: An Escape Manual. In Kit de Waal (Ed.) Common People, an anthology of working-class writers. London: Unbound.
Nandi, A. & Platt, L. (2010). Ethnic minority women’s poverty and economic well-being. London: Government Equalities Office, HMSO.
Reay, D. (1997). The double-bind of the ‘working-class’ feminist academic: the success of failure or the failure of success? In P. Mahony & C. Zmroczek (Eds.), Class matters ‘working-class’ women’s perspectives on social class (pp. 18–29) London: Taylor & Francis.
Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation. Bristol: Policy Press.
Scott, S. & Scott, S. (2000). Our Mother’s Daughters: Autobiographical inheritance through stories of gender and class. In C. Cosslett, C. Lury & P. Summerfield (Eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (pp. 128–140). London: Routledge.
Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. (1972). The Hidden Injuries of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class & Gender. Becoming Respectable. London: Sage Publications.
Skeggs, B. (2012). Feeling Class, Affect and Culture in the Making of Class Relations. In G. Ritzer (Ed.) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology (pp. 269–286). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Steedman C. (1986). Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Women. London: Virago Press.
Walkerdine, V. (2014). Coming to Know Rhizomes Issue 27 http://rhizomes.net/issue27/walkerdine/index.html
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Goode, J. (2019). Too Clever by Half. In: Goode, J. (eds) Clever Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29657-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29658-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)