Studies on the working classes have not always paid attention to gender relations. In a masterful ethnography, B. Skeggs shows that the order of sexes and sexualities is imposed at school and is not an immutable division of tasks.
The book by Beverley Skeggs recently translated by Agone editions is rather “ breathtaking » seen from the French sociology of the working classes (more often focused on workers in the case of young people and on the domestic space in the case of women). Young people from working-class backgrounds here are women, women who are neither mothers nor wives and who live in a region in the northwest of England where the female employment rate is traditionally high. This book thus highlights the relationships between young women from working-class backgrounds, observed in high school, on outings to the pub or in nightclubs. Although the investigation was carried out during the 1980s and 1990s, this book is also strikingly topical: these young women were already massively encouraged to demonstrate their supposed devotion to others (caring) on the labor market and to invest in jobs providing care for children and old age.
An intimate investigation
The strong point of the work lies in the very long ethnographic insertion, which allows us to enter in depth into the world of these young women. The investigation system is not new but rare enough to be highlighted: a teacher in a college (a small establishment preparing for the brevet, the baccalaureate but also including professional sectors), Beverley Skeggs chose to survey 83 young female students in three professional courses: Social Work, Paramedical and Home Help. She followed their trajectory for more than ten years, at a time of intense recomposition of popular circles affected both by rising unemployment and by the political disintegration orchestrated by the Thatcher government.
Even if it is obvious that there is no need to be from working-class backgrounds to study and understand them, we nevertheless see how the origin and experience of the sociologist constitute a resource without which this investigation cannot be carried out. wouldn’t be what she is.
Beverley Skeggs’ mother was a cleaner, also working in a school canteen, while her father, a docker, managed to become a bank employee through evening classes. In addition to this modest origin, the author’s first steps in adult life were very similar to those of the young women she studies since she left school at 16, without qualifications and enrolled in a training to help people, even getting engaged at 18 years old… The combination of this shared experience – having experienced certain dimensions of these women’s lives yourself and perhaps feeling the confinement in this destiny – and the system investigation – seeing these women almost daily for the investigation once she herself has escaped from this condition – allows the sociologist to go very far in revealing intimacy and nourishes the finesse of the questioning . Beverley Skeggs strives to bring to light the forms of domination suffered by these women who are constantly judged by others but without ever forgetting that “ they are also subjects who themselves produce the meaning of the positions they occupy or refuse to occupy “.
Beverley Skeggs escaped the professional training that predestined her for family jobs and managed to access university by becoming a great reader, in all directions, of sociology, philosophy, political science… This specific intellectual path is seen in the eclecticism of the references mobilized to analyze its materials: it draws from Bourdieu, Foucault, Butler, Raymond Williams, the Black FeminismScott, Connell… Some may see this as a theoretical weakness. And in a sense, it is true that the discussion of concepts and authors sometimes takes precedence over the exhibition of materials, of which we would have liked to be even more numerous. However, it is this intellectual tinkering – and a certain de facto distance from academicism – which allows the sociologist to think outside the box in working-class environments and to very subtly call into question the categories produced by sociology to think about women. of these environments.
A feminine inter-self
Beverley Skeggs is interested in the way in which these young women simultaneously construct a class and gender identity by delving into five themes: the dispositions to dedication worked in these professional training courses, the relationship of these young women to the working classes, to femininity , sexuality and feminism. With the preface by Anne-Marie Devreux (p. 7-32) – which situates the work in all of the sociologist’s research and highlights the feminist thread that guides it –, with the afterword by Marie- Pierre Pouly – who highlights the contributions of the work to a sociology of cultural domination while discussing them – but also with the text by Marie Cartier published in 2012, we already have in France a detailed and varied presentation of each of the themes addressed by this book. We will find in particular in the article by Marie Cartier an analysis of the contributions of Beverley Skeggs to a sociology of “ care » which breaks with maternalism and strives to distinguish from empirical materials the fact of doing something for others (caring for) and caring about others (caring about). These dimensions having already been largely covered, I propose to insist on certain less central points in this book but which I find enlightening for the reflection that I have begun elsewhere on the forms of collective resistance, class solidarity and ordinary politicization in women from working-class backgrounds.
In quite colorful passages in the chapters devoted to femininity and sexuality, the book depicts very strong collective moments between these young women, such as during their outings to the pub. We can easily imagine the effect produced by these groups of laughing, noisy and united women when they arrive at a club. They use the signs of femininity as they are imposed on them (notably through dress) while having fun with them and making fun of them through their ways of being collectively in the public space, perceived as outrageous, rowdy, rude. Beverley Skeggs calls these moments “ clothing masquerades “. Same striking evocation when the author describes a small collective forming to humiliate a professor by embarrassing him with crude and direct sexual remarks. Young women from the Home Help option and the Social Work option launch into a discussion (sufficiently audible to the class) about the gender of their teacher. This gives for example: “ Well my bastard, what could you possibly do with that, not much » (Mandy). “ I can’t believe he has kids with something so small, we don’t really see how he could lift it » (Thérèse)… Faced with the prejudices of their teachers about sexuality in working-class environments that should be educated and supervised (Karen, a student, furiously recounts the joke that this same teacher made to her one morning when asking her if she was raised with her left foot and adding: “ Ok, but from which bed ? »…), these young women sometimes know how to collectively turn the situation around. Beverley Skeggs also emphasizes the positive identification of these young women with the mobilization of the wives of miners on strike in 1984-1985, a dimension very present in the comments of her respondents. In short, these women create a community close to that demonstrated for the men in their environment (based in particular on hedonism and camaraderie) and express, just as much as men, forms of collective resistance and solidarity. class.
The educational imposition of a sexual order
Highlighting this dimension allows us to emphasize another interest in the study of these professional training programs centered on care and hyperfeminized. Based on the sociology of the working classes, we would tend to take the sexual divisions within working-class environments as given (by internalizing them as a trait of working-class families) and in doing so to implicitly consider that class solidarity is doomed to play out on separate, even competing, stages for men and women from these environments. Beverley Skeggs allows us to glimpse the continuities between the practices of sociability and collective resistance of men and women in these environments ; it also allows us to better understand the decisive role of school in the creation of gendered divisions: school directs people towards segregated sectors and shapes gendered ethos, which do not necessarily pre-exist.
The young women she met, while assuming some of the important domestic tasks in their family, are not necessarily won over to the ideology of unconditional devotion to others. There is the very beautiful (and funny) example of Ann on this: during a lesson, to the question of whether she would be ready to give up going to the cinema to look after a friend’s child, Ann responded positively. in accordance with his teacher’s expectations. Later discussing this exercise again with the sociologist, Ann tempers her response and explains to him that it would still depend on the film (if it is flash dance she refuses !) and points out in its own way the simplicity of the test: but if it is to go to the cinema that this friend wants to have her child looked after, what do we do? ? Skeggs reveals in an unprecedented way the specific role played by the educational institution – the male and female teachers from bourgeois backgrounds in particular but also the framework imposed by the State – in creating the dispositions for dedication of these young women from working-class backgrounds. And more precisely, it highlights the role of the educational institution in the implementation of the cognitive processes which lead these young women to internalize a way of serving others, to believe that they must put forward the interests of those and those for whom they work before their own interests.
We should probably go further by transposing these questions and the survey system to analyzes of young men from working-class backgrounds. To what extent does the educational institution – and all the economic and state actors who participate in vocational and technical education today – by massively directing boys towards sectors glorifying virility, locks them into a certain number of professions where all occupational health surveys show that they will die early and never receive their pension rights ?
Beverley Skeggs’ work thus allows us to understand how a study aimed at revealing the social order, class inequalities, cannot avoid revealing the sexual order that is intertwined with it.