la_marquise | A sense of class

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A sense of class

Several years ago, a Chinese colleague asked me how he could tell what social class someone British belonged to. I opened my mouth, hesitated, and said, 'Ummm' a lot. Because in that moment, I realised that I simply did not have a straightforward answer to that question. I could, reliably, assess the social class of pretty much every Briton I met. I'd learnt to do that from my earliest days. But I didn't know a shortcut. I think in the end I suggested he look at food choices, knowing at the time that that was probably of little help, as being able to make that assessment itself depended on knowing nuances that he might not recognise. I can define class, assign class, recognise class within my culture, but except in the broadest way, I cannot easily explain how I do it. It's made up of numerous little things, expressed in dress and speech and posture, food and expectations, politics and cars and television programmes. I am first generation lower middle class. The marquis is solid upper middle class, and rooted in it for at least 4 generations. My friend A is middle middle class, as is friend B, but there are substantive differences between them based on region. My friend C, on the other hand, is a classic class traitor (ahem), born into the working class but deliberately assimilated into the upper middle class. My current next door neighbours are way posher than me and I'm a bit scared of them, but beyond them is an upper working class family who I really like and find easy to chat to. To the best of my knowledge I don't know any members of the British Upper class, let alone the aristocracy, though I do know several people who are definitely much, much higher up the social ladder than me (and who as a result are sometimes almost incomprehensible to me in certain ways). From time to time, friend D (who comes from a very similar background to mine) and I get together and shake our heads over the class-based weirdness of some of those we know. I like all these people, but how I react to them, my comfort level in talking to them, and the degree to which I and they experience moments of dissonance varies considerably according to class.

Or, at least, it does for me. It's a peculiarity of people like me -- first generation left-wing lower middle class -- that we tend to be class-conscious. Some of that is about training. The UK, like it or not, is a hierarchical culture and people react to you according to where you sit in that. The lower middle are a bit too posh for the working class, but rather suspect to the middle and upper middle (don't ask me about the upper class. They're outside my experience). It's a curse of the lower middle that we are hyper-aware of this, and always rather anxious about it, partly from embarrassment, partly from fear, and as a result we are also rather annoying. Tell me I have a class-based chip on my shoulder, and I have to hold up my hands in acknowledgement. I have known, as long as I can remember, that there are places where I don't belong and wherein I have to be extra good. I've been taught from birth to notice where I don't fit and to feel obliged to try not to make others uncomfortable about that. (Well, except about politics. My socialist beliefs go as deep as my class consciousness, and are central to who I am and to my definition of correct, ethical behaviour.)

A number of my upper middle class friends find this awareness of mine very irritating (and I don't blame them). They don't have this sense and they don't see the need for it. I find this interesting, too. They're higher up the tree than me: they don't need to notice as much as I do. As in any hierarchy, the better your position, the more relaxed you can be. None of them are bad people, not in the least. They're just different to me. But class shapes everything in this country, and we cannot, however we try, get away from it. There's a healthy dollop of class snobbery in the broadsheet dismissal of reality television, for instance and the perpetual gas-lighting of certain food choices as simply 'bad' without allowing for factors about price and access and cooking facilities. Sometimes this is easy to see: tabloid sneering at those receiving state benefits, the very different treatment meted out by gossip columnists to pop stars from working class and middle class backgrounds; stereotypes of public schoolboys and chinless wonders. Sometimes it's all but invisible: the ins and outs of how public funding ends up being used and assigned, the places that are written off without any apparent notice, the people who are deemed to be, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, "the undeserving poor". The current Tory project to clear the deficit entirely through cuts is rooted in one understanding of class rights and privileges. The call, in the late 1970s, by Labour Chancellor Dennis Healey to 'tax the rich until they squeak' is rooted in another. (Anyone who's known me for more than about 20 minutes can guess, I suspect, which of those positions I'm more comfortable with.)

And it stacks. Like everything else in our uneven, unfair, hierarchical culture, class intersects with gender and race and sexuality and ableism in ways that can be deeply, deeply damaging and toxic and cruel (and that's one reason why denials of the effect of class are themselves so suspect, as they discount things which can really harm).

When my 12 year-old self went into the lobby of a 5 star hotel just to look, along with my mother, she said to me beforehand that she hoped they wouldn't mind, and both of us looked around with the same reverence we would have accorded a church or museum. I didn't know why, I just knew she felt that we didn't belong there, and therefore had to be extra polite. When my 18 year-old self was made to feel she didn't really belong in her university, it took me a while to realise that that wasn't because these new people could read my mind and knew I wasn't good enough, it was that they heard my short vowels and regional phrases, assessed where I got my clothes, considered what I chose to ate and pegged me, precisely, as a lower middle class girl from the midlands, who wasn't *quite* one of them. I loved the place anyway, because it let me sit in the library all day and read and my favourite lecturer, though he teased me unmercifully about my vowels, encouraged me as a student, made me feel bright, and supported me every step of the way. But my social circle as an undergraduate, by and large, was made up of people who, like me, came from what might now be called non-traditional backgrounds and I knew better than to try and be part of the famous shiny things which were marked out as the territory of the established upper middle and upper classes. I knew they weren't for me, like that 5 star hotel. I've always known, and I reproduce that everyday. It trips my tongue about, for instance, self-promotion (not done by women of my class); it inhibits me about trying for things ('that's not for people like me'). It gets everywhere and effects everything in British daily life.

But I couldn't explain it to my Chinese friend, not without talking for hours and trying to explain what is, in some ways, inexplicable (seriously, some of my upper middle class friends swear that this is not so and are utterly baffled by me, and that's fair enough). I could, of course, have pointed him to the classic The Frost Report class sketch:

but it is itself embedded in knowledge of how the system works and what the signals are -- and it's dated, rather, and it's all about men. I could only in the end umm and ahh and talk about table manners, because that's how it works, that's how it replicates, by being everywhere and in everything and being so very, very hard to explain.

Skirt of the day: blue flags (not the flower, but the cut -- it has vertical layers and a jagged hem, as if banners have been sewn to it).

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Educated working class here. But that's a Scottish sub-division. An education doesn't automatically project you into the middle classes. As education is seen as something for itself, and not as a pathway.

So you have shepherds in plays going off to get a degree and coming back to be shepherds.

'Cos, education isn't class based, it's resource based.

I do know nobility like. Proper nobility. Real upper upper class people are very much more like working class people than the middle classes.

The middles classes are the odd one out.

Education _was_ pushed into me to allow me access to the upper classes: I was privately schooled and had elocution lessons. So I had the skills to speak the correct vowels. But that was far more to do with my being illegitimate, than my being working class. That was about making sure I could fit in anywhere and no one would 'suspect' the hidden bits of me.

So I've always been comfortable with all types. Grew up in the poorest of the poor bogey-man areas (I had impetigo as a child, from playing with the other street kids near the broken sewers) yet privately educated in tiny select convent.

As I said, education was resource based: it was about having the money to get you into better paying jobs, but this is not automatically seen as moving out of the working classes in my area.

You can choose to move to the middle class houses: but you can also choose to stay in the 'scheme' (estate) and no one would think anything about it.

Lots of teachers in my area of birth lived in the same houses and streets as their working class pupils. Maybe a slightly posher end of the street, but they were not 'middle class' just as they were well educated.

That's interesting. Educated working class used to be a powerful Welsh identity, too, but it was one of the casualties of the Thatcher years and the deliberate de-skilling and dismantling of those communities. My parents both came from the very poor end of the working class (agricultural workers in my father's case; unemployed due to WW1 related ill-health in my mother's) but my mother's family had that powerful educational ethic, too, and she passed it on to me. (My father is his family's black sheep -- he wanted to study and he's left wing.) When I was a child we always lived on estates and there was the sort of social mix you describe. And I went to the local comprehensive, because my parents were both hotly anti private schools (and I refused to take the exam for the grant-maintained ex grammar school, because it was socially immoral. I was a very irritating 11 year-old, I suspect).

The other half of it is that there is a division within working class, or course. There's upright, moral, hard working, working class, with clean houses, kids with spotless clothes (even if they are well darned) and pride.

Then there's slovenly, low, dirty, unkept working class, who didn't keep their houses spotless and the their kids clean (and drank alcohol, often to the detriment of food for the kids.)

To be the latter was to be outcast in your own community, and looked down on with pity. But never to be accepted within the community of the righteous.

So the push in working class to be 'better' wasn't to be as good as the middle classes, it was to be one of the 'good' and acceptable working class people in the area.

I grew up in very bolshy Lanarkshire (where you get to be referred to as having grown up Lanarkshire Labour, a very militant view of working class people making themselves BETTER working class people, as opposed to working up to being middle class)... so I didn't have the fear of being seen to aspire to, or to mix with, middle class people. No 'getting above your station' as such. More the old Marx one of everyone travelling first class - so I didn't get much exposure to the 'be afraid of your betters'.

Your 'betters' were simply people with more money. No one was actually 'better' than you, simply richer.

Whereas there was a very strong sense of the 'lowers'.

Much of this distinction come from Industrial Working Class, as opposed to Rural Working Class. Huge differences I've found, between the two.

Of course you were probably in a Protestant/Methodist working class environment. Mine was Catholic. Rather different views on some aspects of working class life and righteous living. But the spotless, orderly and disciplined family attendance at Sunday services probably the same. But I suspect we had more colourful head-scarves. ;-)

Oh, absolutely -- that distinction between the 'clean' and the 'unwashed' worker goes so deep and I see it in my Welsh and Welsh border family, too. We tended to Methodism (Welsh side) and vague C of E (Herefordshire) which fed into different attitudes to society, too -- the rural side tends to be Tory, but the mining valley methodists are Labour. My paternal grandmother felt she'd married down, and that was a big issue, but otherwise on that side, the awareness was mostly about money and getting ahead through it. Whereas the Welsh side are much more class conscious -- possibly because of the mining connection, which is dangerous dirty and might make you look lower than you wished. And the push there was to get educated, which was seen as a desirable thing in its own right.

The shame of not having enough money to buy soap MEETS the shame of being too 'low' to use soap.

And it always comes down to the woman. No matter how poor, no matter how depressed, no matter how beaten (literally), no matter how hungry, no matter how uneducated... she is the one that has to scrub the front step clean, even if she only has water to do it.

Because dirt is the devil of being poor. And a dirty woman is a slut. I always find it interesting that slut moved on to be something else (dirty steps = loose morals) but slavern stayed the same.

We owned the corner shop. I suppose one reason I saw all this so clearly is that every came into the shop, and everyone was served.

But not everyone was treated equally.

So I saw the casting out of the low, first hand, every day.

Literally. We lived in the poor block. It's where the shop was. But we had broken glass cemented into the tops of the walls in the back yard to keep the rogues out!

And every woman had a standing and every woman knew what it was.

It was why my illegitimacy had to be covered up at all costs. We were on the 'decent' side. And an indecent child did not fit.

Which is why, of course, I was shipped out every day to a private catholic school miles away. So 'no one would know'. Hah! But that's another story. :-)

My mother to this day worries about what the neighbours will think. Appearances.... And yes on the illegitimacy thing. One of my grandmothers may have been illegitimate and her siblings and husband held it over her lifelong.

Also language. I, here in town, grew up alongside his wife-to-be in a small S Welsh mining village, but they did not speak until they were 18, because her family spoke Welsh and his spoke English.

"You weren't born in a cowshed", is what I heard as a child whenever I was caught eating with my fingers or doing some other cowshed thing. :-)

"Educated working class" is also known as the "first gen immigrant" in the States, both with and without cause. Your parents came in from non-Western-Europe (Eastern Europe, Asia, etc), and pushed you to go to college so you'd make something of yourself. And it would reinvent itself every few decades, depending on who was coming in.

Second- and third-gen was where you got the solid middle class (pre-1990's).

I think we've talked about this before - education used to be one of the major social dividers in the US (it may still be, despite shifts). Not only if you went to college but what school you went to - and once there you could reinvent yourself utterly, and that was not only accepted but expected.... so that's where a class disconnect could happen between you and your parents.

Edited 2015-02-07 00:31 (UTC)

This used to be so here, too and is, I think, about to swing back that way, if the tendency to reintroduce selective class-centred schooling by the back door continues. But Thatcherism ushered in a culture of looking down on education and educators in the public sector and depicting business skills as the only valuable way to rise, which has hugely undermined state education here.
My mother is a 1st generation immigrant, in a way -- she moved from Wales to the English Midlands to get work. And that has had its effects, too, as she was definitely Othered.

Here in the States education is also seen as resource-based. People will burden themselves with big loans in order to get professional pay for the jobs they want. Here, though, the end result is rapidly becoming a decline in actual education in favor of technical training programs disguised as college degrees.

We have a long tradition of night school classes whereby the poorer working classes could access education after work.

Or at least we did.

Then we got Thatcher.

We also had a very strong tradition of industrial training for practical jobs like engineers etc. That was diluted to everyone going to University, not lots going to technical colleges.

We had, in fact probably still have, a Workers Education movement. I'll see if I can find a link...

http://www.wea.org.uk/about

Worker's Education associations also did a lot of very early work in social film documentary of working class life in the early 20th century.

Does the USA see education and higher income as moving you out of your 'roots'? Or do you simply have more money than your neighbours in the poor areas?

My impression is that the USA is more towards moving to the posh people's areas as quickly as possible. (Which is also true of a lot of areas of the UK - hence me pointing out that I grew up with a different structure to that than most people.)

I can see that in terms of a current snap-shot, but my own experience with educational aspects of USAn class is more generational and expectation-based. Did your parents get college degrees? Did their parents? Was it simply expected that you would go to college--taken for granted?

There's a fascinating case study in my father's family (the generation born just after WWI). My grandfather was a small farmer with intervals of union dockhand work. My grandmother was a schoolteacher with a teachers' college certificate. But my great-grandfather had been a doctor (IIRC) in the midwest before they picked up stakes to homestead in the NW.

My Dad's generation all grew up doing farm labor and most put in a stint of either military or manual union work or both. And every single one of them** (boys and girls both) got a four-year college degree without ever questioning that it was part of their life path. Of the 7, they turned out 2 college professors and 2 lawyers. And that same expectation was passed on to my generation. It doesn't really align with class in a traditional way and seems to be on a different axis than financial measures.

** Except for my uncle Rick who died in WWII before having the chance.

My father is the first person in his family to get a degree, and they rather wondered why he wanted it. My mother's side, however, come from that powerfully education-centred strand of Welsh culture, where working class boys in particular were supported to get as much education as they could. She didn't go to university, though she was offered a place, but that was for reasons to do with circumstance, not because of her gender.

My generation is the first to get a degree in my family. It would actually have been me, if I'd gone to Uni at 18 as I was projected to, but I didn't go until I was 30 so my younger cousin got the 'first' degree in the family.

Poor immigrants who came from peasant stock, it took three generations to get to Uni.

But the majority of the family are college level educated in skills: HGV driver, hairdresser (running their own business), shop keepers (no paperwork certificate there but you have to be highly educated to run a small business).

Not enough resources for those who might have developed an academic passion to go to University. The need to earn money being the main one, as soon as you could, to bring money into the rest of the family.

So, again, the going to get the degree is not a sign of success. All my family are successful in working class terms. But each generation worked in order to gain the family enough resources that going to University was supportable resource wise.

Again, education is about education. Not about moving up a level. (Unless moving up a level is something you personally find important.)

Absolutely on education for its own sake. This is a huge thing with the Welsh side of my family, and with my father too. It's not about mobility, it's about the love of learning.

Nods. The trend is towards that here, too, as successive Thatcherite governments (including Blair) set out to price the poor and the lower middle classes out of education and to destroy the idea of education as a a good in itself (educated people think. This does not suit the right.)

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A sense of class

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