Reconfigurations of Gender and Class Relations: Class Differences, Class Condescension and the Changing Place of Class Relations

Linda McDowell
School of Geography, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; linda.mcdowell@ouce.ox.ac.uk

This paper addresses the question of class: its significance, construction, representation in official policies and the changing place and nature of class relations and struggles in contemporary Britain. It argues that both changes in womens labour market participation patterns and a new rhetoric of class condescension and symbolic violence have significant implications both for widening class divisions between women and for the nature of class contacts in contemporary cities. As ties of love and affection and mutual exchange that (purportedly) characterise the home are being transformed by the growing importance of the home as a locus of commodified domestic labour, the home is a new site of inter-class contact and conflict. Thus private households are increasingly becoming the sites of class struggle, adding strength to feminist arguments about the inextricable connections between class and gender relations.

Introduction
Five years ago, Neil Smith (2000) asked What happened to class?, regretting its virtual disappearance from the geographical agenda. Class is now firmly back on the agenda in all sorts of ways in geography and in other disciplines, including discussions of why it is increasingly insignificant (Beck 2004; Urry 2004) and debates about its changing form and representations (Cannadine 2000; hooks 2000; Skeggs 2004; Sayer 2005) as class differences are re-invented within the cultural and media field (Bottero 2004; McRobbie 2004) and as the intersections between class, gender and ethnicity take new forms in the new economy, dominated by service sector employment (Browne and Misra 2003; Glenn 1992; McCall 2001; Perrons 2004). In this paper I want to explore some aspects of the changing connections between class and gender, the significance and shape of growing class divisions between women and the consequences of the rise of commodified domestic labour in the home for the location of class struggles in contemporary cities. My argument is in large part an extension of the long critique of the public/private
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divide that has been so significant in western liberal thought and the development of the social sciences (Pateman 1988; Pateman and Grosz 1987) and my empirical and policy examples are drawn from the British case. I want to investigate some of the ways in which the diverse patterns of womens entry into the relations of waged employment has affected the nature of class society as well as relations between women in different class positions. I also want to connect some of the arguments from recent work on the politics of difference to class analysis. My purpose is to stimulate debate and new work on class and gender divisions. For many years, feminist scholars have challenged conventional assumptions made by geographers and other theorists (Harvey 1982; 1989 and see Thrift and Williams (1987) early arguments about adding space to class theory) about the nature and location of class struggles (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Massey 2005; McDowell and Massey 1984; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004; Pateman and Grosz 1987; Pratt 2004; Women and Geography Study Group 1984, 1997; Young 1990). Class is conventionally defined as a relationship with its origins in the public sphere, as the development of resistance to exploitation in the labour market became the key social division in urban industrial economies. As Bottero argued in a recent evaluation of cultural notions of class identity, class exists out there in the public domain, the arena of politics, the media, the workplace (2004:999) and is less likely to be perceived as part of personal relationships. Gender relations, in contrast, have typically been theorised as a private affair, a relationship based not only on exploitation and the cash nexus but also on affective ties and so where struggles occur between men and women, these are often located in the domestic arena, the private sphere of the home, and so tend to be seen as of little political significance. This theoretical and spatial division has resulted in claims that the household is outside the capitalist economy: even a pre-capitalist form of association (Gibson-Graham 1996), an argument reflected in regulation theory (see McDowell 1991), despite the swingeing criticism of this assumption by Margery Spring-Rice ([1939] 1981) in her pre-war plea for the recognition of household as a site of womens labour. In their long challenge to this binary spatial division, feminist scholars have documented the inter-connections between class and gender, insisting on the significance of gender divisions in the public as well as the private arena and on the interconnections between the two spheres. Empirical analyses documenting the ways in which class and gender relations are interconnected in a range of locations have expanded in number and variety. In the institutions of the labour market and the polity, in wider social and cultural relations the interpellation of class and gender have been explored, showing how gendered assumptions are written through the entire structure of industrial urban economies (Baxter and Western 2001; Ferber and Nelson 1993; Hanson and Pratt 1995).
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One of the earliest achievements of feminist scholarship was to place the home firmly on the agenda of the social sciences, rescuing it from its previous theoretical and empirical obscurity. Based on theoretical parallels between class and gender exploitation, socialist feminist scholars insisted that the appropriation of individual womens labour in the household by individual men was not only the domestic equivalent of exploitation in the labour market but also a key mechanism in ensuring the availability of industrial labour (Hanson and Pratt 1995; Mackenzie and Rose 1983; Milkman 1988; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004; Pratt 2004; Walby 1990, 1997; Women and Geography Study Group 1984, 1997). This domestic labour debate thus constructed the home and womens unpaid work therein as appropriate objects for analysis and a long series of both theoretical (Seccombe 1974; Walby 1990) and empirical studies explored both the connections between work and home and the home as a site of exploitation and violence in which inequitable gender relations were reproduced. In more recent feminist work, however, the locus and the explanation of womens oppression have shifted. Largely influenced by post-structuralist arguments about the multiple construction of gendered identities and the shifting sites and forms of gender relations, attention has been focused on new arenas and discursive forms of analysis (McCall 2005; Pratt 2004). The complexity of social identities and social relations, the fluidity and multiplicity of categories including gender (Fausto-Sterling 2000) and class are emphasised and new methodological strategies to explore complexity led to a growing emphasis on meaning and representations (Bottero 2004; Fuss 1991; McNay 2000), a declining emphasis on the large-scale, material and categorical structures of inequality (McCall 2001, 2005; Phillips 1999) and more qualitative, case study and ethnographic analyses, exploring new forms of writing and representing womens lives (Behar 1993; Lather and Smithies 1997; Pratt 2004). In the late 1990s, in a now well-known and well-referenced debate between a number of feminist political and cultural theorists, the relative significance of cultural and materialist forms of explanation were hotly disputed (Butler 1998; Fraser 1998, 2000; Phillips 1999). More recently, however, a rapprochement might be detected as there seems to be a developing consensus: critics of merely cultural explanations gave ground, seeing virtue in extending their work to encompass the wide variety of forms of social relationships (see, for example, Fraser 2000; Fraser and Honneth 2003) and as those interested in representations of difference recognised the importance of material inequalities, especially in the increasingly harsh neo-liberal climate of the US and the UK (McDowell 2004a; McNay 2000; Phillips 1999; Segal 1999; Witz and Marshall 2004). In this recent work, however, the importance of the private sphere, the intimate space of the home, as both an arena of gender and class inequality, has been largely ignored, at least
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in comparison to earlier times. Attention has shifted to different arenas of inequality. At the same time, despite growing acceptance that cultural mis-recognition and material inequalities (Fraser 1997, 1998, 2000) are connected, in recent feminist analyses, the widening of class inequalities between women has tended to be ignored. In this paper, I want to partially correct this lacuna, based largely on a critique of both recent post-structuralist accounts of social structures that insist on the decline of categorical distinctions, the emptying out of class as a significant category in post-societies (see, for example, Becks (2004) argument about class as a zombie category) and its replacement by theoretical definitions of mobility as the defining characteristic of a new form of the social in post times. Here I take a lead from stimulating recent feminist criticisms of these new versions of a mobile society, especially the work of Lisa Adkins (2004), and yet I want to suggest that, despite Adkins and others insistence on the continuing significance of structural inequalities, most feminist scholarship continues to prioritize gender difference per se rather than looking at new intersections of class and gender which, I suggest, are of key significance to the understanding of the changing structure of contemporary western societies such as the UK. I end the paper by outlining a prospective empirical research agenda. My examples throughout are drawn from the UK, where new class divisions, a virulent form of class condescension and the privatisation and commodification of childcare are perhaps more evident than in other European economies, but seem to parallel recent changes in the United States.

Reconfigurations of Class and Gender

Perhaps the most significant transformation of the early twenty-first century is the movement in Britain to an economy in which employment participation is expected of all working-age adults, regardless of their family status. In contrast to what is often referred to as the heyday of full employmentthat period between the end of the 1940s and the early 1970s, when almost all men aged between 21 and 65 years of age were in waged work, the goal of moving towards full employment in the new millennium now includes women as putative employees. The combination of workfare policies in which the British state sets goals for increasing employment participation among groups defined as underachievingincluding single mothers and people on incapacity benefitand new forms of service sector work has led to rising labour market participation rates among women. Thus in the shift from an industrial to post-industrial society, from a Fordist manufacturing dominated economy to a post-Fordist service economy (Amin 1994), and from a welfare to a workfare state (Peck 2001), older gender-differentiated patterns of expectations and participation in economic and social
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structures are being transformed (Jarvis 2005; Lewis 2003; McDowell 1991, 2001; McDowell et al 2005a; Perrons et al 2005). In the 1950s and 1960s, mens and womens lives were in large part structured by distinctive gender-based patterns of expectations and obligations as well as different labour market trajectories (Lewis 1992; McDowell 2005; Walby 1997). Mens expectations were based on an ideology of the male breadwinner who, through waged labour, supported his dependents. Thus most men relied on employment, often for a single employer across their entire working lives, to provide income for themselves and their family, whereas women were expected to care for their husband and dependents through the private provision of services in the home for those related to them by ties of love and co-sanguinity. This domestic servicing may be combined with limited labour market participation among mothers, typically on a part-time basis. In practice, millions of working class women were never able to achieve the domestic, privatised familial life that informed the hegemonic version of femininity and lay behind the development of the post-war welfare state. By the turn of the millennium, however, in many advanced industrial countries, this idealised distinction between men and womens responsibilities and the patterns of their expected working lives had largely disappeared (Baxter and Western 2001; Lewis 2003) as womens labour market participation rose, associated with changes in, inter alia, womens educational attainments, reduced welfare support for families other than the poorest and changing gender expectations. In 2003, for example, almost 70% of women in Great Britain were in employment: one of the highest rates in Europe (although part-time participation by women remains a common pattern in the UK (Rubery, Smith and Fagan 1999)). Increasingly well-educated, less likely to become mothers than in previous generations and, for those who do become mothers, raising fewer children, women have entered the labour market in growing numbers across Europe (Perrons et al 2005). The changes have not (yet) abolished distinctive gender differences in participation patterns, however. As Table 1 shows, women work in different types of occupations than men. While men continue to hold the levers of power and dominate the ranks of management and senior positions, women are nevertheless making inroads into professional occupations (where they have attained, at least numerically, nearly equal representation). The table also clearly shows womens dominance of the servicing occupations, amongst the fastest growing job categories at present, even though poorly represented among the better paid jobs (Bryson, Daniels and Warf 2004; Castells 2000; Dickens, Gregg and Wadsworth 2003). One of the most significant features of womens growing participation in waged work has been an expansion of employment by mothers, including those with young children. Although mothers are still less
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830 Table 1: UK employees by occupation and sex, 2003

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Men (%) Managers and senior officials Professional Associate professional and technical Administrative and secretarial Skilled trades Personal service Sales and customer service Process plant and machinery operative Elementary All 69 58 52 21 91 17 30 84 54 53

Women (%) 31 42 48 79 9 83 70 16 46 47

Source: Social Trends 2004, no 34 (figures originally from Labour Force Survey Spring quarter, not seasonally adjusted)

likely to be employed than single women, especially in their 30s, currently just over half of all mothers of pre-school age children are in employment, albeit often on a part-time basis, compared with 27% twenty-five years earlier (Duffield 2002). And for women with children, job tenure (the length of time in the current job) is also rising (Gregg and Wadsworth 1999), in contradiction to often-quoted trends about the growing flexibility and decreased labour market attachment of British workers (Doogan 2001). It is clear then that the old idealised public/private distinction and the gender bargain, embodied in social theory and central to the establishment of the institutions of the modern welfare state in the post-war era, have been disrupted. The good mother is no longer a mother who stays at home to care for her loved ones, but is instead an eager participant in the social relations of waged work, supporting her children through the purchase of a consumptionbased life style. Pitt (2002), for example, has identified the emergence of a new discourse of mothering, one that she suggests revolves around being a new capitalist mother in which striving, personal achievement and a commitment to life-long learning are paramount. Older womens self-abnegation, their absorption of the self by others, finding fulfilment in caring (Finch and Mason 1993; Griffiths 1995) apparently is no longer the dominant discourse among young mothers (Benn 1998; Pitt 2002) nor in the institutions of the state that support a particular and hegemonic version of mothering, but one that in the early twenty-first century seems to be changing, although the evidence is not yet conclusive and many women continue to hold clear moral beliefs about the value of caring for others (Carling, Duncan and Edwards 2002; Duncan 2005; Duncan et al 2003; McDowell et al 2005b; Sevenhuijsen 1998). Nevertheless, it is clear that women in western economies are entering the labour market
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in greater numbers and for longer periods, both on a weekly and lifetime basis. As the tax and benefit systems are restructured, addressing practices that previously differentiated workers on the basis of gender, more women, whatever their age or family responsibilities, both choose and are encouraged to enter waged work. At the same time, new policies offering paid leave for caring responsibilities or financial support providing replacement domestic labour give more and more women the prospect of largely uninterrupted labour market careers. The question then arises of how the entry of women alters the understanding and structures of class societies, both at the aggregate level and in terms of daily social practices in different spatial arenas and the ways in which they are culturally represented.

Widening Class Differentials Between Women

It is clear that the growth of womens labour market participation has been uneven and that new class divisions are emerging between women workers in Great Britain (for the US, see McCalls (2001) careful analysis of class differences between women in different local labour markets; Walby (1997) provides a more aggregate analysis for the UK). As many commentators have noted, new service-based economies are more polarised than old Fordist manufacturing economies (Castree et al 2004; Goos and Manning 2003; Machin 2003; Peck 2001). The most rapid growth typically has been in jobs and occupations at either end of the income/status hierarchy, resulting in a bifurcated set of opportunities (Ehrenreich 2001; Toynbee 2003). As Castells (2000) has argued, at the top end credentialised workers with specialist skills are employed in highly paid positions with a large degree of self-determination, if not necessarily security of tenure; at the bottom end, however, what he terms generic workers with few skills work for low pay in poor conditions with little or no security. While this pattern marks all service employment and currently in the UK 70% of all men and 91% of all women employees are working in service occupations1 it is, as Bruegel and Perrons (1998) noted, exacerbated among women, and reflected in an income polarisation that is more marked among women than men. Recent empirical analyses have documented rapid recent growth in female-employing jobs and occupations at both ends of the income scale and status distribution in the British labour market (Bradley et al 2000; Equal Opportunities Commission 2004; Lyons 1999), and as women in the better-paying and higher status occupations are also more likely than other women to be employed on a full-time basis, the pay differentials between them are increased (Dex, Joshi and McRae 1996; Glover and Arber 1995). I want to return to the significance of this developing division after a discussion of post-Fordist class analysis, Urrys (2004) work on mobility and what Adkins (2004) has termed the post-structural social. It is here
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that interesting new debates about the significance of class and gender are sharpest.

Post-Fordist/Post-industrial Class Analysis

It is clear that womens labour market entry complicates the nature of class analysis and, in particular, the relationship between employment and gender identities. In an earlier time, the world of work was the world of men, and masculinity was almost synonymous with employment participation. A mans worth, his very identity as a man, was inextricably linked to his occupation and social class (Connell 1995, 2000; Mac an Ghaill 1994). Whether part of the cerebral world of rational masculinity inhabited by middle class and well-educated men or the rough and tumble masculine camaraderie of high-risk, embodied manufacturing work, being a man meant being a worker. Class analysis too was a relatively simple affair. Researchers mapped this distinction between management white collar occupations and manufacturing blue collar jobs onto a middle class/working class division and assumed that the status and income of the (usually male) head of household accurately summarised the class location of all of his co-residents. But economic change from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the rise of the service economy and, especially, the transformation of womens working lives have huge implications for class analysis, disrupting the masculinist basis of conventional categorisations. Until recently, two interconnected and predominantly technical debates dominated the literature of class analysis in response to the changes outlined above. The first was the debate about the boundary question; and the second, how to insert women into the class structure. In the first debate, the growing significance of middle class occupations in information or service economies was the main focus (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1993; Wright 1977, 1985), culminating in an insistence on the specificity and the long-term significance of a new service class (Butler and Savage 1995; Savage 1992, 2000), which is distinctive both for its ethos of service and for the conditions under which it labours. In more recent variants of these arguments, that I shall turn to in a moment, these educated workers are defined by their personal skills and professional skills which enable them to construct individualised career trajectories as portfolio workers, free from the traditional constraints of the bureaucratic occupational structures of middle class jobs. The second argument that tended to dominate class analysis in the 1980 and 1990s was about the unit of class analysiswhether to base class analysis on the household as a unit, and typically on the occupation of the male worker therein, or to analyse individual positions. In large part this was an argument about the class significance of the changing position of women, their growing independence, the extent to which womens life cycle and career patterns differed from mens (and especially
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from male relativesfathers and husbands) and the importance of the expansion in the numbers of never-married women (see, for example, the arguments of Baxter 1994; Goldthorpe 1983; Stanworth 1984; Wright 1989). Although there was no clear consensus among these class analysts, it seemed to be widely accepted by the end of the 1990s, that class and gender relations should be analysed in association and that women had their own class position and identity. As Angela McRobbie argued more recently, womens identity has changed in contemporary western economies. No longer defined in terms of husbands, fathers of boyfriends, women and in particular younger women have been set free to compete with each other, sometimes mercilessly (2004:100). Despite this acute recognition of the significance of class divisions by a cultural theorist, in the last few years, the whole basis of these categorical groupsclass and genderhas been disputed. As I noted in the introduction, post-structural theorists have disputed the theoretical validity and continuing empirical significance of class and gender as analytical categories.

The Declining Significance of Class and Gender Divisions: The Post-structural Social
A wide range of theorists, including Giddens (1991, 1992), Beck (1992) and Bauman (1998) have recognised the significance of new forms of employment both for gender identities and for class location and mobility. In brief, their argument suggests that the traditional constraints of gender and class location have become less important in predicting economic outcomes. In late modern or risk societies, economic success is increasingly a correlate of the ability to construct an individualised workplace performance, as portfolio workers move between high-status occupations in flexible careers marked by mobility rather than by loyalty to a single employer. Other theorists have noted how this form of career path also depends on greater time mobility or, more accurately, an elision of the strict demarcation of time into work and non-work time. Increasingly, for these mobile portfolio workers, there is a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, as contacts, socialising and sporting events become opportunities to develop employment-related prospects. For this detraditionalised class fraction, the old constraining structures of class and gender have lost their power to determine social outcomes (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). These arguments have taken both a pessimistic and an optimistic formsome regretting the loss of traditional loyalties between employers and their employees (Gorz 1999; Sennett 1998) and others celebrating the greater freedoms of new forms of work (Lash and Urry 1994). In a recent book and in a paper in Environment and Planning and so explicitly addressed to geographers, John Urry (2000, 2004) has
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extended this insistence on the theoretical implications of the declining power of structural categories in his reformulation of the object of sociological (and geographical) inquiry. The social, Urry asserts, is being materially transformed from the social as society to the social as mobilities. Thus the object of sociological analysis, he argues, should become movement rather than pre-defined structuresthe movement of people, money, ideas, knowledge, information and imagesas mobility, uncertainty and contingency replace the ordered social structure and stasis of previous eras. In this new sociology, a hybrid, mobile subject is the iconic figure, moving between rather than trapped within categorical positions and locations. In parallel, the territorial basis of nation states is being undermined and replaced by an increasingly distanciated geography that connects the near and the far, replacing presence and place/presence in place by networks and connections between absent or non-copresent individuals. To grasp the nature of this post-social world, Urry (2004) believes that sociologists must rethink their methodological toolkit and, in a move guaranteed to resonate with geographers, he places scale, flows and connections at the centre of analysis and connections based on fleeting interactions rather than predetermined class- or gender-based interactions. But, as Adkins points out, the privileging of mobility and mobile subjects reinstalls and idealises a disembodied, disembedded subject who moves unfettered across and within the social realm (2004:146): a subject that typically is masculine in its lack of ties to others and to place. In a detailed analysis and critique of Urry, as well as of Beck and Beck-Gernsheims (2002) arguments about the growing significance of self-design and the self-creation of individual identities and biographies, Adkins suggests that a new gendered binary is being constructed in dominant theoretical explanations of the post-social era. Drawing on Lashs (1994) arguments that life chances in the post-social erawhat Lash refers to as the structural conditions of reflexivity in which access to the mode of information replaces access to and place in the mode of productionAdkins argues that men are what Lash (1994:133) termed the reflexivity gainers and women the reflexivity losers. Women are excluded from the upper ends of the high-tech information and knowledge economy, part of a new under or lower class, which even though Lash defines as a class position, he emphasises that ascribed characteristicsrace, country of origin or gender (Lash 1994:134) are of crucial significance. So while men become the active subjects in the new mobile post-social order, many (most?) women remain trapped in the social, in the old class and gender hierarchies of industrial societies because of their exclusion from the cultural field. Thus this shift in theorisation locates women as overdetermined by the social and men as freed from the constraints of the social, or at least from the constraints of socio-structural forms of determination (Adkins 2004:147, original
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emphasis). Adkins notes that Beck, in a belated gesture to feminist arguments that previously he had ignored, now insists that gender is part of an older modernity and moreover women find it difficult to remove themselves from these social traditions and become individualised subjects (p 151). So women are now trapped in the social (rather than the pre-social as the regulation theorists argued), forever doomed, it seems, to lag behind mans progressive march forward to individual freedom, unable to achieve the form of personhood required to participate in the new modernity (Adkins 2004:152), still committedpresumably by their consciences, if no longer by oppressive gender relations requiring them to remain in the hometo a version of freely given care and love for their dependants, unable to become the mobile individualised subjects of a new post-social networked space. Now while these arguments have considerable force and empirical verification, and I whole-heartedly agree with Adkins trenchant critique of the masculinist biases in this new mobilities theorisation, I want to take her critique a step further empirically and suggest that the growing class differences between women have implications for her arguments. I want to suggest that, paradoxically, theorists must continue to take account of the salience of gender differences between men and women, but also challenge its theoretical and empirical significance by insisting on growing disparities between womens social position and on the impossibility of analysing gender relations separately from class relations. As I noted above, not all women are able to aspire to an uninterrupted and untramelled lifetime career, but then neither, empirically at least, are they all trapped in the social. Many women are equally able to traverse the mobile spaces of the post-social, reliant on the rising commodification of a wide range of those tasks that previously constituted the privatised domestic labour many women undertook in their own homes. Through formal and informal mechanisms, both in the market and in the home, individual women are buying the labour, in the main of other women, to free themselves from the gendered structures of unremunerated care that propped up the old industrial era. Furthermore, as recent detailed empirical analyses of employment patterns in the UK have shown, womens growing labour market participation and labour market attachment ratesin terms of declining job mobilityare not only cementing their labour market positions but their work-based identities are assuming greater significance in womens conceptions of themselves. Indeed, if Hochschilds (1997) study of working mothers at a Fortune 500 company in a Midwest company town can be generalised, it seems likely that, for many women, especially educated middle class women, the workplace rather than the home is increasingly the sphere of emotional fulfilment and a sense of achievement. Some women, in other words, seem to be becoming more like men. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that a new form of class antagonism between women
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is the result, based on the individualised competition between women noted by McRobbie. In the rest of this article, I want to explore the bases of this class antagonism as well as some of the consequences of middle class womens escape from (some of) the obligations of unpaid domestic labour through purchasing the labour of working class women.

New Class and Gender Antagonisms and their Spatiality

In a move that in part parallels the shift to post-structural analysis and the deconstruction of categorical inequalities, those analysts who continue to recognise the centrality of class in post-Fordist societies have deepened understandings of new forms of class differences and inequalities by placing bodies, meanings, representations and the significance of daily lived practices at the centre of their work, developing new theorisations of class as constituted through cultural representation. Geographers and sociologists, for example, have drawn on work by, inter alia, Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and Judith Butler (1995) in documenting the growing importance of bodily performance in the lived practices that constitute and reinforce class antagonisms (see Adkins and Skeggs (2004) for a survey of feminist work drawing on and extending Bourdieus (1984) ideas about habitus, field and social capital). New theorisations of class have moved beyond a focus on economic inequalities constituted in the sphere of production to look both at discursive representations of class and at class behaviours in other spheres of social action, as well as the moral basis of class identification (see, for example, the recent work by Sayer (2005)). New markers of class identification, such as weight, skin colour, accents, intonations and gestures, are used to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable class-specific performances and to mark working class bodies as increasingly unacceptable in the tanned, toned world of the new service economy and in commodified forms of consumption and entertainment (McDowell 2004c; Walkowitz 2002; Young 1990). Angela McRobbie (2004), for example, has documented the rise of a new genre of reality television shows in Britain that depend on the humiliation and temporary makeover of typically working class volunteers who are given a glimpse of a middle class world to which they may aspire but are, in general, excluded from in the competitive and individualised neo-liberal economy. McRobbie argues that these TV programmes both reflect the arguments about individualisation and flexibility, the insistence on mobile performance and the transformative potential of continuous personal reinvention but that, significantly, they also solidify class differentials by revealing the significance of class hatred and animosity refracted at a bodily or corporeal level (2004:100). The distinctive bodily failings and unappealing characteristics including voice, manners, facial expressions etc of working
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class women exclude them from the meritocratic and individualised new society and as McRobbie notes class makes a decisive re-appearance through the vectors of a transformed individualism (2004:100). New class and gender divisions, then, are emerging based on the denigration of low class or poor and disadvantaged women by means of symbolic violence (2004:101). In the USA the talk shows that portend to resolve problems faced by working people but in fact which encourage them to humiliate themselves play a similar role in the construction and affirmation of class condescension. These forms of humiliation reflect, or extend, older divisions between women constructed on the basis of class-specific notions of moral worth that divide middle from working class women and also differentiate between rough and respectable working class women. Skeggs (1997), for example, in her ethnographic study of working class young women in the north of England, has vividly documented the ways in which the discourse of respectability affects behaviour. These forms of cultural violence or class humiliation based on bodily dispositions are not restricted to social relations between women. There is also at present, in Britain, a growing disdain among the more affluent for the less fortunate, and indeed for working class attitudes more generally. Recently, for example, there has been the development in Britain of an awful mocking discourse of the chavthe lumpish youthful proletariat in shopping malls distinguishable by their clothes and jewellery.2 Indeed in the Spring of 2005, working class youths identified by that iconic garment the hoodiea hooded sports top were banned from entering one of Britains biggest shopping malls, the Bluewater Centre in Essex. In his recent book, Ferdinand Mount (2004), a right-wing commentator, has argued that a new class divide has emerged in contemporary Britain that is based increasingly on cultural attitudes, creating a division between the middle and working classes that he sees as far wider than in earlier generations. Significantly, especially for a commentator from the right, he does not place the blame entirely, or indeed even largely, on the working class but identifies as important the growth of cultural condescension towards the masses among the ruling class. Skeggs (2004) also suggests that increasingly class is a symbolic representation based on forms of moral value and specific dispositions that are neither equally accessible nor similarly valued. In a peculiarly resentful book about his own origins in a South London working class neighbourhood, Collins (2004) argues that what were once the decent working class have been unfairly transformed into what he terms a tribe of spongers, whingers and wastrels in popular representations. Recent evidence of cultural condescension, or perhaps rather a discourse of moral disapproval, is clear in Britain in official policies too. It is evident in, for example, the Governments White Paper on Health
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published in November 2004 which aimed to persuade smokers (who are in the main in Great Britain working class men and womenrates of smoking have declined among the middle class, remained static among working class men but risen among young working class women) to give up smoking and drinking and start exercising and eating vegetables, even though a few weeks earlier in a well-meant but dreadfully condescending and so revealing comment the then Health Secretary, John Reid, attempted to defend working class single mothers on council estates for whom smoking was in his opinion the only possible pleasure they had, the only escape from lives limited by poverty and social exclusion. This anxiety about unfit working class bodies and economic competitiveness is brought together in an anxiety evident in current Government statements about the lack of social mobility in recent decades (Aldridge 2004). If the working class does not pull itself together, diet and study, then the prospects of ever achieving a wellpaid job in the higher echelons of the service economy and moving into the middle classes is minimal. These discourses and practices also take a spatial form in British citiesReids mention of council estates was not an innocent one as class distinction in cities has become ever more rigid. Class (and racialised) differences are increasingly spatialised, not only at the level of the body and the habitus as McRobbie noted, but in cities, as spatial containment and protection has become a strategy of the white middle classes in protecting their interests and properties from a range of urban others (Haylett 2001, 2003; Savage 2000; Skeggs 2004). Contacts between the classes are becoming increasingly rare as the middle classes construct a cordon sanitaire around their lives through strategies of spatial distancing, such as gated communities and the declining use of public transport. Indeed, as Skeggs insists, in Britain in the new millennium, geographical referencing is one of the contemporary shorthand ways of speaking class (2003:15). The significance of urban space and location and the identification of particular areas in British cities as deprived or disadvantaged and so needing special measures have also recently re-emerged in policy debates. Apparently ignorant of the critique of small area policies in the geographical literature from the 1970s and early 1980s, a new focus on particular places in certain citiestypically working class council estates on the urban periphery or inner city areas with high concentrations of black and minority ethnic residents and regarded as in need of local remedial actioncan be seen in British Governmental reports and policy statements (Amin 2002). In 1998, for example the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) based in the Cabinet Office issued a report showing that poverty was increasingly concentrated in a small number of areas in Britains inner cities and outer local authority estates, following this with a second document in 2004 (SEU 2004). As a consequence,
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policies were devised to focus on these localities, in large part reflecting the individualist emphasis of the Blair Government and so largely consisting of exhortations to the occupants of these areas to seize hold of their lives and to adopt middle class attitudes. As Chris Haylett (2001, 2003) has shown, small area policy documents increasingly emphasise cultural changes through policies of re-education, parenting classes and even lessons in dress codes, to facilitate the re-inclusion of the socially excluded in normal (for which read middle class) society. She has argued that these documents embody a discursive construction of the British working class as un-modern, anti-cosmopolitan, backward and worthless, not playing their part in the newly competitive and multicultural Britain: defined and denigrated by what Haylett identifiesalso drawing on Bourdieuas a form of class racism. In other policy areasthe Sure Start programme, for example, which provides childcare and other forms of support to parents, especially single women in small areas of cities identified as disadvantaged the working class, especially working class women, are also similarly discursively constructed, defined as inadequate parents and as socially excluded because of their social and cultural attitudes rather than by poverty (McDowell 2004b). The same sorts of assumptions are behind the growing use in British cities of anti-social behaviour orders to monitor and control the public behaviour, predominantly among working class young men. Those receiving these orders are restricted to and excluded from certain areas in the towns and cities in which they live, as well as in some cases being tagged by a recording device and/or being subject to a curfew. Thus the working class is increasingly being penned and corralled into particular areas of cities (Dorling and Thomas 2004). While these spatial manifestations of class relations are familiar in geographical work, analyses of class conflict in the home figure less frequently. It is to these conflicts that I turn in the next section.

Women Working for Women: New Class Conflicts

While these new developments of class theory have emphasised the body, the habitus, and city spaces, one location is missingthe home. Although, as I argued earlier, the home has been a significant focus of feminist theorising, typically the focus of analysis has been on gender relations and conflicts rather than on social class divisions within the home. Men and womens social class position may differ and indeed often does as the debates about its significance for the class allocation of the household mentioned earlier illustrate. However, in most cases, although not all, men and women are tied by bounds of affection and partnership and share the spaces of their homes and the ways of living within them. However, just as womens entry into the labour market raises questions about the overall structure of the class hierarchy and
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the degree of polarisation between classes, the growing importance of commodified domestic labourespecially childcare in which middle class women buy services from typically working class women to facilitate their own labour market participationalso raises new questions about class divisions and class contacts between women (as it is usually women who organise childcare and other forms of home servicing such as cleaning) both within and outside the spaces of the home. Here, in the growth of childcare, of cooking and cleaning services, provided by the rise of the new servant class identified by Gregson and Lowe (1995) a decade ago, the trend towards increasing spatial separation of the classes and the cultural condescension of the middle class is challenged. Millions of middle class women depend on the labour of their working class sisters in childcare centres, in nurseries, after-school clubs, in their own homes and in the homes of childminders to reproduce the close daily interactions of care between children and adults3 . But if, as theoreticians and cultural commentators quoted above suggest, the working class as a group is considered as conservative and anti-modern, to be feared and despised, as too loud, too big, too flashy, as tasteless, eating, drinking and smoking too much, placing immediate pleasures above deferred gratification, then how is it that working class women may be relied on to care for middle class children? And what are the consequences for growing daily/weekly interactions in that most private of private places the home as personal face-to-face contacts between the classes, between women in the main, are growing, as the new servant class cleans, cooks and cares for middle class households? Why are working class women constructed in the discourse of social exclusion as poor mothers, failing as adequate providers of income and material benefits, unskilled and poorly educated, and yet, when they enter the relations of wage labour, most often in the sort of low-paid, caring jobs that provide commodified domestic and caring services for middle class households, their caring and interpersonal skills seem above question? As Cameron, Mooney and Moss (2002) noted, there is a large socio-economic gap between parents who rely on childcare and the workers themselves. Employers of childcare are typically middle class and educated, working in full-time high-status employment, whereas the employees are poorly educated (very few childcare workers have any qualifications above GCSE level), and their work is generally considered as low status and poorly paid. So how then are these inter-class, and often intergenerational, social relations negotiated within the spaces of the home and the family?4 Which aspects of everyday social behaviours, attitudes and mores are tolerated and which are contested as different class patterns are reproduced within the home? How are relations of trust established?5 And what are the boundaries of the spaces that a care-giver might occupy when the employertypically the motheris present and when she is absent? Are there spaces within the home that
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are off-limits to waged carers, places/rooms that remain private family spaces? Is the division of space different when the caregiver lives within the family home rather than working on a daily basis? And how are these movements regulated and controlled? As work by feminist geographers (Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004; Pratt 2004) and others (Anderson 2000) has documented, to incorporate working class women who labour in their homes, middle class employers typically construct a rhetoric of family belonging or what has been termed false kin or quasi-family relationships in studies of au pairs (Cox and Narula 2003) and other domestic workers who live in (Bakuan and Stasiulis 1997; Radcliffe 1990). This discursive construction is often used in an attempt to include the waged worker within the relations of intimacy and caring that are the ideal form of connection between the carer and the cared for, as well as reducing the economic obligations the requirement to pay the basic minimum wage, for example, or to regulate hours. In a Canadian study, Stiell and England (1999) found, for example, a rhetoric of maternalism in the ways employers related to young, live-in domestic workers. Interestingly, in a recent ruling by an Employment Tribunal in Britain in which a live-in domestic worker challenged her designation as part of her employers family, it was argued that tests such as whether the display of photos in public rooms in the house included the domestic worker and whether she was included in dinner parties as an adult in her own right are good discriminators6 . As Pratt notes, these discursive battles over the definition and meaning of home and family (common in the US and Canada as well as in the UK) are significant as they are about the redefinition of a domestic caregiver as a worker, removing her from the highly gendered discursive frame of familialism and reimagining her within the language of class (Pratt 2004:50), bringing the concept of class struggle into the home and so transforming conventional definitions and representations of the home. But clearly this transformation has barely begun, condemning that low-paid army of domestic labourers, especially those providing personal care, to a shadow world, neither workers nor family members. It will require a wholesale rethinking of the discourses of caring as well as a new form of politics that will have to find ways to cross the public/private boundaries of the workplace and the home to organise hundreds of thousands of individual women labouring in the private homes of other women. As the growing literature about care work (Anderson 2000; Ehrenreich and Hoschschild 2003; Gardiner 1997; Gregson and Lowe 1995; Pratt 2004) has explored, exploitation and harassment but also affection, ambivalence and guilt are common features of the relationships between employers and live-in domestic workers. In a study undertaken for the Department of Education and Employment (DfEE) in 1999, for example, trust in the carer where child care was
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provided by an individual (nanny, childminder or relative) and a preference for someone who would show a child affection (La Valle et al 1999:4) were the most important factors influencing parents choice of child carer. Clearly, co-presence and relations of obligation, affection and trust affect the language of class struggle, as well as influencing the forms it takes, between child-carers and their employers (as work as varied as that on class relations and other forms of obligation between farm workers and their employers (Newby 1977) and in post-colonial and post-imperial movements (Hardt and Negri 2000) has also shown). Furthermore, there is a class division between women in their preference for and employment of different forms of domestic carers. Working class women are far more likely to employ a family member or friend on an informal basis than to purchase formal care in a market-based relationship, in large part, of course, a reflection of differential earning power (Wheelock and Jones 2002). Interestingly, class disapproval, if not condescension, also operates in reverse. Some of the working class young women who work as nannies or mothers helps believe that their employers, because of their absence, are not good mothers. Cameron, Mooney and Moss (2002), drawing on studies of the childcare workforce undertaken in London in 1999 and 2000, note that many (childcare workers) are opposed to the idea of working full-time when their children are young, subscribing strongly to the idea of attachment pedagogy (2002:577) or as a childcare student noted disapprovingly some people put their job first, and they employ people to look after their families (2002:579).

A New Research Agenda?

The transformation of class and gender relations set in train by womens rising participation in the public world of work has enormous theoretical and practical implications. Clearly ungendered class analysis is no longer appropriate but then nor is unclassed gender analysis, as womens lives diverge on class lines. The new post-structural social formation or the post-Fordist economy has reconfigured the connections between class and gender in ways that are still emerging. The social policy analyst Esping-Andersen (1993) has, for example, suggested that there seems to be evidence in western Europe for a new dual class structure, distinguished by gender, in which there is an older hierarchical male class structure, still similar to the Fordist era, that differs from a female bi-polar post-Fordist class structure. Others disagree (McDowell et al 2005b), suggesting that Esping-Andersens female structure may also become common among men in economies increasingly dominated by service sector employment. The claims by Urry and Adkins critique of his identification of new post-structural mobile subjects also cry out for further empirical investigation into the extent to which emerging
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divisions map onto or cross-cut gender differences are explored. Many men also remain trapped in the social, overdetermined by traditional social obligations and by discursive gendered identities and are unable to attain the status of mobile post-social subjects. Spatial variations in the ways in which class and gender relations are being reconfigured also need further investigation. It is clear that differences in national social policy provisions and in national and local labour market policies have a significant impact on the ways in which, for example, women are incorporated into the labour market and on obligations to care for dependants. The current disagreements between EU members about the advantages and disadvantages of the transatlantic neo-liberal consensus is but one example as different states have different conceptions of the responsibility citizens have for each other. It is also clear that radically different conceptions of mothering and maternal care are embodied in the workfare policies of the new Labour Government compared with previous welfare policies. These conceptions perhaps also differ from those held by the majority of parents in Britain (Kendall 2003). As Hilary Land (2002), among others, has argued, the growing emphasis on labour market participation as the responsibility of all citizens who are able, regardless of their care for dependants, to enter the relations of waged employment, means that unpaid care has been devalued and less recognised in comparison to its significance in the institutions of the post-war welfare state when caring for children was seen as the primary responsibility of married women. While not wanting to suggest to a return to those days, nor to deny the advantages that accrue to individual women and to their families from enhanced incomes and greater independence, it is important to question whether current policies are adequate to meet the needs both of parents and their children and indeed whether they concur with their desires and hopes for their children. At the local level, differences in economic history, in class structures, in local structures of feeling, cultures of mothering and political traditions all have an impact on the ways in which class and gender connections work out at the local scale and the extent to which class conflicts are prevalent and would repay further work. At the very local scale of social relations in the home an interesting question is the extent to which new forms of surveillance might be used to regulate inter-class relations. In a recent paper extending his arguments about mobilities to a theoretical discussion of connections, Urry (2004) suggests that intermittent bodily co-presence needs to be conceptually examined. In his discussion of its implications, however, he ignores social relations of caring that demand co-presence in the most local of spacesthe home or childcare centre, for examplebut which are currently being reconstituted. As Urry concludes we may see some epochal changes in how, when and where such small worlds (the worlds where relationships depend on bodily
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presence) do meet up (2004:36). As service economies are restructured and as greater polarisation seems increasingly evident between the screen-based/relationships at a distancethe worlds that dominate Urrys speculative suggestionsand the low status, hi-touch, embodied, indeed bodily, work of the servicing sectors of concern here, I think there is already little doubt that one of the epochal changes lies in the changing nature of care and the spaces in which it is given/exchanged and paid for. Home/family/domestic life has changed for most households and as one of Hochschilds respondents, speaking for many other overstretched working fathers and mothers, noted: I am not putting my time where my values are (1997:219). Finally, what all this means for class relationships, for the increasingly common representations of British working class men and women as backward and feckless, is harder to judge. Whether co-presence within the home will modify the evident cultural condescension widely apparent at present or whether growing spatial segregation between the classes at other scalesthe local, the urban, the northsouth divide in the UK will exacerbate both this discursive construction and class inequality is still an open question. Whatever the answers, it is clear, however, that class analysis needs to embrace such questions.

Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the participants of the Working Class Lives seminar funded by the ESRC and organised by Alison Stenning and others for discussions that partly informed this article, as well as two referees whose comments were extremely helpful in revising it.

Endnotes
Service occupations are defined as distribution, hotels, catering and repairs, financial and business services, transport and communication, and other services which include public administration, education, health and other community, social and personal services activities). 2 Chavi is a Romany word for child but it is not clear that this is the derivation of chav. There is a website http://www.chavscum.co.uk where examples of the derisive and condescending attitudes may be explored. 3 Indeed, we might argue that what Hochschild (2003) dubbed the commercialisation of intimate life seems to be accelerating as therapy, massage, working out, life training etc replace ties of affection based on mutual respect and reciprocal exchange; close intimate contacts in confined spaces between the classes might actually be increasing at present. 4 It is extremely hard to find accurate statistics of employment within the home the Labour Force Survey (LFS) includes workers in day nurseries, after-school and play groups, childminders and nannies in a single occupational category. Adding this to nursery nurses gives a figure of about 350,000 childcare workers but this probably excludes a sizeable proportion of those women (and between 98 and 99% of all childcare workers are women) who work in other peoples homes. A study in the mid-1990s
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(Bone 1997) found that informal sources, including family members such as fathers and grandparents and friends, provided the main care for about half of all pre-school children. A more recent Women and Equality Unit (2004) survey found that two-thirds of all families used informal care, and of the remaining 32%, only 13% used registered childcare arrangements. But these later studies exclude nannies and au pairs working within private homes. However, among couples who are both in employment, the use of formal care rises to 43%. 5 A recent extreme example is the trouble David and Victoria Beckham had in Spring 2005 when, despite a confidentiality agreement, their nanny sold stories of marital discontent and other discord in the home to the tabloid press. 6 Case number 2202602/2002thanks to Bridget Anderson, COMPAS, University of Oxford, for this information.

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2006 Editorial Board of Antipode.