(NAME-MCE) Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity

[Anselmo Villanueva]

*Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity** *by Julie Bettie
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Review by Jennifer McNulty

A detailed portrait of senior high school girls at a California high school,
Bettie's book lays bare the ways in which young women's lives are too often
oversimplified by one-dimensional, gender-focused popular analyses like
Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.  Girls are, in fact, engaged in a far more
complex process of identity formation that guides their choices and shapes
their futures, said Bettie, who points to historical and structural forces
that shape the lives of contemporary girls, including the growth of
low-wage, service-sector jobs, changes in family structure, and changing
laws on affirmative action and bilingual education.

http://www.classism.org/book_archive_May2008.html
*Women Without Class: Girls, Race and Identity* by Julie Bettie

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003

Review By Jennifer McNulty (originally appeared at UC Santa Cruz Currents
Online)

In her book, Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity, Julie Bettie
calls for an overt discussion of social class--along with race and
gender--as the key to ending educational inequality.  "Young women are
negotiating the multiple axes of race, ethnicity, class, and gender as they
come of age, but that complexity often gets overlooked as their practices
are misread and their lives misinterpreted as being primarily about gender
and sexuality," said Bettie, an assistant professor of sociology at UCSC.

A detailed portrait of senior high school girls at a Central Valley high
school, Bettie's book lays bare the ways in which young women's lives are
too often oversimplified by one-dimensional, gender-focused popular analyses
like Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.  Girls are, in fact, engaged in a far
more complex process of identity formation that guides their choices and
shapes their futures, said Bettie, who points to historical and structural
forces that shape the lives of contemporary girls, including the growth of
low-wage, service-sector jobs, changes in family structure, and changing
laws on affirmative action and bilingual education.

But Bettie is equally critical of scholarly studies that focus on race or
class to the exclusion of gender. Women Without Class (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2003) has been called "a challenge to
feminists who can see only gender and theorists of class and race who cannot
see gender at all."

In researching the book, Bettie spent a year interviewing and hanging out
with more than 60 white and Mexican American girls from working- and
middle-class families during their senior year at a school she calls
"Waretown High" to protect the identities of her research subjects. Bettie
talked with girls about school, family, work, fashion, dating, friendships,
popular culture, college, and their futures. Her book reveals that class
differences are part of our everyday interactions but are rarely talked
about overtly. Class differences are key to middle-class practices of
exclusion that make school success difficult for working-class students
across race and ethnicity, she asserts.

Bettie's research shows that school cliques (including "cholas," "hicks,"
"preps," and "skaters") and the styles they display at times reflected race
and class differences among students. Bettie documents the categories of
subculture and style that high school students use to express class and
racial/ethnic differences among themselves, and she focuses on how girls
form their identities in opposition to one another as different kinds of
girls. Bettie argues that differences in clothing, makeup, and hairstyle
have meaning beyond gender.

"Young people have a sense of inequality, but they rarely express it in
political terms," she said. "Instead, class struggle is waged over modes of
identity expression where style can be used to express group membership."
Contemporary girls' "performances of identity" are complex, she added.
"Adults often fail to see that the practices that disturb them, like sexual
display, piercings, and tattoos, often mark class and race relations among
girls and are not solely expressions of gender inequality," said Bettie.
These "emblems of race and class membership" too often are misunderstood and
interpreted as moral differences in sexual practices between supposed "good
girls" and "bad girls," she added.

In particular, Bettie recognizes that girls, not just boys, are "class
actors" who will hold jobs and have an economic impact. "The fact that girls
are future workers gets overlooked when school officials interpret girls'
choices about clothing and makeup as solely about an interest in boys and
sex, when it can be as much about their identity as members of the working
class or of a racial/ethnic group," she said.

Bettie's research reveals the consequence of schools' treatment of "girls
without class."  For instance, schools too often envision low-income boys as
on route to becoming "workers" but tend to see girls--especially
working-class and/or Mexican American girls--as on route to various kinds of
"family" lives.  On the contrary, even during high school, working-class
girls, like boys, were working and bringing home money to assist their
family, Bettie found. "Girls, too, are class actors with identities and
futures in relation to work and income," said Bettie.

Social policy, too, reduces poor women to a family-based identity, asserted
Bettie. "You see it when low-income women--especially welfare mothers--are
not understood as poor due to low wages but because they are considered to
be in between men," said Bettie. "That view makes their economic dependence
on men seem natural or inevitable and sidelines the real causes of women's
poverty."

Girls today want and expect to be economically independent from men, which
is often possible for middle-class girls and women, noted Bettie. "But the
fact is that living-wage working-class jobs are still not available for
working-class women and are, in fact, increasingly scarce for young
working-class men."  "The problems that working-class girls face are not
unique to their age or part of a crisis among youth," said Bettie. "Their
problems are the same problems that plague adult working-class
women--occupational segregation, low wages, lack of affordable child care,
higher education, housing, and health care."

Bettie's research also underscores the salience of race and ethnicity on
academic achievement. She found that middle-class students of color were
more likely to be represented in working-class and "downwardly mobile" peer
groups than were middle-class white students. "At a moment when policy
makers are debating affirmative action and the relative importance of race
and income on educational achievement, my research shows that class is a key
variable for understanding academic achievement but that race and ethnicity
remain equally salient," said Bettie.