Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
The 1950S

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

Linking Moralisation and Class Identity: The Role of Ressentiment and Respectability in the Social Reaction to ‘Chavs’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
White Working Class

This paper aims to link two fields of research which have come to form separate lines of inquiry: the sociology of moralisation and studies on class identity. Expanding on recent papers by Young (2009 , 2011 ) and others, the paper argues that the concepts of ressentiment and respectability can be used to connect moralisation processes and the formation of class identities. This is explored through a case study of the social reaction in Britain to white working-class youths labelled ‘chavs’. It is demonstrated that chavs are constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have some elements of a moral panic. Moreover, moralisation is performative in constructing class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’ white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous. Moralising social reactions are here to an important extent triggered by feelings of ressentiment. This is a dialectical process where respectability and ressentiment are tied, not only to the social control of certain non-respectable working-class others, but also to the moral self-governance of the moralisers.

Punk, class, and taste in Desert Island Discs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Webb
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Economic Hardship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Uk

This chapter attempts to use popular music as a way of connecting a number of castaways who shared a similar love of punk and post-punk and who described certain experiences that their appreciation of that music had resonance with. The music is used as a starting point to trace the experiences of the castaways to wider sets of social, cultural, and political histories of the UK. Among the castaways chosen are Kathy Burke, Ian Rankin, Ricky Gervais, and Hanif Kureshi. Each of these had a working-class upbringing and Kureshi grew up in a working-class area with parents who had been well off in India before moving to the UK. The choice of music intertwines with their descriptions of economic hardship, domestic violence, and racism but also a developed sense of community, sensitivity, and humanism that illustrates a sector of British life in the 1950s through to the 1980s.

Sounding Like Liverpool

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-108
Author(s):  
Alexandra M. Apolloni
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Class Identity

Cilla Black sang and spoke with a pronounced Liverpool accent. Despite attempts to eliminate it, this quality remained, ultimately becoming a point of identification for listeners. This chapter explores how Black’s voice defied class-marked notions of respectability. Her voice—and persona—were a problem for music critics. Unlike the cool ordinariness embodied by singers like Sandie Shaw, Black communicated a different ordinariness, one rooted in working-class identity, which complicated her position in hip, modern, Swinging London. Her first hit, “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” reveals how this plays out musically. The chapter considers Black in the context of Merseybeat and the ideology of authenticity that characterized rock and roll and places her performances in the context of the mid-1960s boom in popular linguistic and quasi-ethnographic publications purporting to document Liverpool culture. The chapter concludes with reflections on Black’s early TV career and considers how contemporary Liverpool musicians contend with her legacy.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 370-382
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The conclusion looks at the implications of the failure to organize southern workers for the United States today and asks how successful southern organizing might have led to different outcomes. Foremost is the possibility that the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would have been much more powerful if more white working-class support had been enlisted. This possibility, which the book asserts was real, had the potential to make the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States vastly different.

Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty

2012 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Transitions To Adulthood ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Post Industrial

Past research in both the transitions to adulthood literature and cultural sociology more broadly suggests that the working class relies on traditional cultural models in their construction of identity. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, traditional life pathways are now much less available to working-class men and women. I draw on 93 interviews with black and white working-class young people in their 20s to 30s and ask, in an era of increasing uncertainty, where traditional markers of adulthood have become tenuous, what kinds of cultural models do working-class young people employ to validate their adult identities? In contrast to previous studies of working-class identity, I found that respondents embraced a model of therapeutic selfhood—that is, an inwardly directed self preoccupied with its own psychic development. I demonstrate that the therapeutic narrative allows working-class men and women to redefine competent adulthood in terms of overcoming a painful family past. Respondents required a witness to validate their performances of adulthood, however, and the inability to find one left many lost in transition.

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