Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue:
I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box.
In my experience people who talk about choices are the people who have the most choices to talk about.
The rhetoric of choice erases any sort of meso or macro level understanding of constraints on human behavior. It’s this overly individualistic mentality that drives me nuts.
I’m also tired of graduate students complaining about how poor they are, especially when so many of them have the money to travel abroad, have nice cars, and have an alcohol and weed budget in excess of $50 dollars a week. (If you fit this description, you ain’t poor.) Hell, I wasn’t poor in grad school (well not in my PhD program). I got paid $18,000 a year for a grad student stipend and managed to carved enough adjuncts together to make $30,000. Having grown up without indoor plumbing in Appalachia, I felt like I was in hog heaven. I was even able to buy a condo and a car.
My friend told me about leg waxing in grad school (people in southern Ohio just don’t do such things), and she said it was relatively affordable only $30-50 every 6 weeks. I remember thinking that I could get a pack of 15 razors, for $10.
Yes, this is an all over the place rant, but reading the post will address where the slightly unrelated thoughts are coming from. I also think people may like to follow the discussion on this post over at Rachel’s Tavern since the discussion over at my place always seems be different from the one here at Alas.
A Little Piece of My Social Class Story
I have experienced a great deal of class mobility in my life, and I am the poster child for the idea that getting a good education can move you up the class ladder. For me this worked in two ways, through my mother’s education and through my own. See my mother’s family is the quintessential white working class family. Almost all of the stereotypes about working class white people apply to them. Unlike her 6 siblings, my mother managed to get a college degree. To this day, I don’t really know how she financed it. My Dad, on the other hand, came from a GI bill middle class family. My grandfather was able to go to college thanks to the GI bill, and he became a chemist, which allowed my grandmother to be a homemaker who raised 4 children. When her children left home, my Grandma went to college and started a career as a teacher. Even though they didn’t grow up well to do, my grandparents were vaulted into the middle class, and my father benefited from it.
It took a long time for my parents to enter the middle class because they came of age in the economic recession era of the 70s and early 80s, so most of my childhood, we were poor and our neighborhood was even poorer. (For those who don’t know, I grew up in Appalachia, southern Ohio to be precise.) But, we had an ace in the hole my Mom’s college degree. After years of substitute teaching, my mother finally got a full time teaching job in the mid-1980s (I think with a pathetic starting salary of $17,000.). Once my father’s income from a small business was added in we were over the $20,000 dollar mark right around the time I finished high school.
I have also benefited greatly from my own education. In spite of going to a low income school and having high school guidance counselors, who were incompetent, I went to college. My parents did a tremendous job of picking up the slack for my less than stellar school. I had the advantage of having a teacher mother, and a father who got me hooked on National Public Radio, sometime around kindergarten. I am not dissing my teachers, but they were expected to perform without many resources that other schools had.
I really noticed the social class gap in junior high and high school after I managed to get myself into this program at Northwestern University (thanks largely to John Smith the county gifted education coordinator and my teacher for the gifted class Mrs. Evans). The program was wonderful, and I got to be around other nerdy kids. However, it would not have been possible for me to go to this program, if I didn’t get need based scholarships (I believe from the University and a local foundation.). When I got there, I quickly realized I was the poorest kid around. In fact, one of the teachers decided that I had a self esteem problem (which is very far from the truth) when I noted that the other kids were way ahead of me. I never thought that I was slow. I knew that these kids were from rich suburbs around Chicago, Detroit, and Columbus, and they had schools with many counselors, AP classes, and all of the other advantages that wealthy people had (Most of the kids were also Asian Americans which was another interesting aspect of the camp that I should probably write about someday.). Truthfully, I thought I was pretty damn smart because I was in the same place as these wealthier gifted kids, and I had fewer resources. In fact, one of the things that angered me the most was when I saw other students getting a year’s worth of high school credit for taking these courses and the guidance counselors at my school said that they couldn’t do this because “it had never been done at our high school.”
The Northwestern program along with my other outside of the classroom experiences motivated me to get great grades in high school, and sometime around 10th grade, I started my college search. To make a long story short, I got into the University of Detroit Mercy with a full scholarship, and subsequently earned assistantships, which paid for my master’s degree program at Bowling Green and my PhD at the University of Connecticut. I had to pay small sums for fees and books, but somehow I managed to get a PhD and not pay any tuition. I was happy to earn scholarships, because I was worried that my parents were not going to be able to help me finance my education. (I suppose one of the more ironic twists to this story is that my father’s business took off while I was in college, and my parents moved into a very comfortable middle class status.)
Tying it All Together–My Feminism and My Social Class
Each step in my education has marked a step up the class ladder. With every degree that I earned, I helped buffer myself from poverty. Moving up the ladder like this, gave me a different take on social inequality and ways of fighting it (i.e. socialism, feminism, anti-racism, heterosexism, and so on).
I don’t personally blog much about feminism and body hair or high heels, and I’m not going to put down people who do. However, I do worry that we need to stop framing everything in the language of choice, as it frequently, implies a smorgasbord feminism, where everything is laid out and we just pick from it. When I was young and we were poor, my concern wasn’t about choices I made, it was about opportunities–the opportunity to go to college, the opportunity to play sports, and admittedly, the opportunity to get out of southern Ohio and find a place that had a shopping mall, more than one TV channel, and good schools. Now that I have a middle class job and live in a county that is one of the wealthiest in the US; I have many more opportunities, and with those new found opportunities I get to make choices–whether or not to buy a designer handbag, whether or not to get digital cable and high speed Internet, whether or not to go to dye my hair, and whether or not to live in a wealthier community or a poorer community. Hell, I even get to choose which mall to go to or which gym to be a member of. Having many choices is the product of having many opportunities, and having many opportunities is the product of being a privileged class/group. This is something I have to remind myself all the time, and the best way to do it is to go back to high school and elementary school when my choices were more limited.
Endnote: I appreciate anybody who took the time to read this looooooong post. I pledge to myself and my readers that I will try to post more short and fun posts. I have been producing long treatises lately. LOL!
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What I have always taken from the little “choices” piece, is that it is far from the choices of level of participation witin our capitalist society and more along the lines of personal choices. It is everyone’s choice to; perpetuate violence that they may have grown up with, to choose illegal ways of obtaining income(although this is loaded with what other equitable options are available), choice to be an ally or let a comment slide, choice to not let your circumstances destroy you and search for self empowerment, choice to ask for help, choice to…
I have always taken the choices piece to be as such, that it is these things that are within all of us and our own responsibility.
you were really lucky to get scholarships. my broke self is in direct loan hell…and i don’t feel like i’ll be leaving anytime soon. i want to go to law school but may not be able to afford it (REALLY bad credit card debts)
anyway my point is is that college is a double edged sword-it can give you some really great opportunities, but also put your butt in some serious debt, and in my mind what’s the point of continuing on if i have to pay upwards of 1/3 or more of my income to student loan corporations?
Good and thought-provoking post, Rachel. Classism is the dirty little secret of American society, and I think those of us who have been able to move from poverty to lower class to middle class to upper class tend not to want to think about it very much. I work with a lot of people who have trust funds and truly don’t understand how difficult it can be to have your choices constrained by circumstances not under your control. Like, why buy shoes at Payless that will fall apart in a few months when you can get some really good shoes at Nordstrom’s that will last a couple of years? Well, dude, if I had the $150 all in one place at one point in time to buy a pair of shoes at Nordstrom’s, I might consider it, but right now I just have $30 and I need a pair of shoes, dammit. And I can’t wear any of the other pairs while I save up, either, because I don’t have any others – I just have one pair that even duct tape won’t save, OK?
My mom’s family was very poor until my grandfather was able to take advantage of his 4F draft status to move up into management while his peers were off fighting WWII. Unfortunately, most of this advantage was wiped out by the cost of his final illness, so that my grandmother has been at or below the poverty line for most of her life. My mom and her siblings were lucky that the period of relative prosperity coincided with their teenage years, so they have college degrees, which allowed them to move into a solid lower-middle-class lifestyle and still help my grandmother.
The thing is, until very recently, education was a relatively easy and painless way to achieve upward mobility. I think it’s harder nowadays unless you’re dirt poor, because if you’re low-income or lower-middle-class, the student loan burden is tremendous (as kristen noted above). That 10 years of postgraduate payback is getting harder and harder to sustain, I think, because fewer and fewer of the people entering the workforce have the funds for discretionary spending. If you bring home $800 every two weeks and only have $20 for mad money because one paycheck is for rent and half of the other paycheck is for student loans, I think more and more people are starting to say “why bother?” to higher education and to the jobs that require higher education but don’t pay well – teaching, nursing, etc.
I very much related to your story of the transition process from one class to another. It’s similar to my own in several respects, although neither of my parents is university-educated.
Most grad students are not poor. Not in any kind of an absolute sense. However, grad students are treated like they are members of the middle or upper middle class, expected to behave that way, and are relatively poor by those standards.
My current PhD stipend is probably about the same amount as my mother makes, and she raised two kids on that (plus some child support from my somewhat better-off father). I’m actually not doing so well living off that right now, since I’m living in a very expensive area and also supporting my husband who currently lives in another city. But in general, for a single person, this is lots of money. Once my husband moves down here, it should just cover our thrifty-but-middle-class lifestyle.
The problem is, most grad students have middle class and upper middle class backgrounds. To them, not being able to afford a car and such is poverty. However, to those of us with working class backgrounds, we’re living in unimaginable luxury. The food I eat, the places I travel (for academic conferences) and just the level of respect I get from other people is much different from that of my background.
>Most grad students are not poor. Not in any kind of an absolute sense. However, grad students are treated like they are members of the middle or upper middle class, expected to behave that way, and are relatively poor by those standards.>
That’s a useful distinction, thanks.
Yeah: -expectation- also plays a part, here.
of course, if one is a grad student who does -not- come from the middle-and-up, then other stuff gets added on as well, I imagine: feelings come up when classmates talk about “poverty” as though they were on the same page as oneself when in fact no such animal; maybe ambivalent feelings about “moving on up” if it means leaving parents, family, friends behind? I am speculating, and extrapolating from similarly expressed sentiments i have seen/heard from some folks at one point or another.
Correction: if you’re in the right field, in the right university, and get lucky, you’re not poor. My salary is precisely 9600 a year, and I’m unable to work during the academic year. I can work during the summer, but in a college town that means no more than 7 bucks an hour. Add to it the required wardrobe, 500 dollars of textbooks a semester…
Now, I take out loans. A good chunk of them actually, so I’m doing alright. And when you get used to living on very little, the loan payments aren’t so scary compared to what (I desperately hope) I’ll be making.
International students aren’t so lucky. They can’t take out loans and are legally barred from working. Nor are students who don’t get funding, and at least one major department here (at a Big Ten U) only funds about half of their grads.
Now all that having been said, I chose this life knowing damn well what I was getting in to. It’s a trade off: I’m never gonna make much money, but I get to do exactly what I love doing, and I’ll get by. But for those grad students with 50 booze budgets there are grad students who decided whether or not to eat lunch.
Rachel, two of my sons have gone to the same program at Northwestern. My partner and I noticed the same thing about how the other children are predominantly Asian American. (We are Caucasian.) And it seemed to go across all fields of study, not just the stereotypical math and science. I would love for you to write more about this observation and what you think it means. I did not get the impression that Northwestern’s undergraduate school was necessarily a school that attracted more Asian Americans than any other school of its caliber, so I am curious as to why you think the C.T.D. program would attract such a disproportionate number of Asian Americans. Thanks. – Leslie from Indiana
Hey Everyone,
Since Wed. is my teaching day, I wasn’t able to respond until today.
femilution said, “It is everyone’s choice to; perpetuate violence that they may have grown up with, to choose illegal ways of obtaining income(although this is loaded with what other equitable options are available), choice to be an ally or let a comment slide, choice to not let your circumstances destroy you and search for self empowerment, choice to ask for help, choice to…”
Certainly on some level pretty much all people have some choices, but my point is that ones position in the social structure impact the number of choices you have. For example, the person working for $5.15 an hour at Burger King really doesn’t have as many choices about where to shop, but also about whether or not to call out their boss on his sexist behavior. The risk of being fired in retaliation is much greater for the person in this position because s/he is much more likely to not have a savings or friends and family to fall back on in that event. I’m not saying poor people don’t have choices, but I am saying that the constraints and consequences of those choices are much greater.
kristen,
Just as a little side note here, I saw a recent study that found that students in more prestigous universities are not more likely to get a greater return on their degrees. But I feel for you on the loan tip. I know many folks who wouldn’t be able to get the degree without the loans. One possibility that you could look into, is trying to get outside scholarships from local organizations–most universities have a database of scholarships that may help some.
OriginalLee said, “I think it’s harder nowadays unless you’re dirt poor, because if you’re low-income or lower-middle-class, the student loan burden is tremendous (as kristen noted above).”
I hear this frequently, but I’m not sure if I believe it. I understand the logic behind it, but I think the major obstacle for the poorer kids is just getting into college in the first place. Plus, unless you are going to the cheapest of the schools, grants and loans don’t cover the full cost of tuition. Nevertheless, this is an empirical question, and I don’t know what the research actually says about this.
twf,
That is a great point. Sociologists use this term “comparison referents.” It’s a social psychological concept that refers to the people we compare ourselves to. I think you’re right about the grad students. They are probably using their parents and the professors that they work for as comparision referents.
belledame222 and twf,
I did get a few comments throughout graduate school about people being surprised that I was there, but one of the interesting things was that my whiteness buffered me from much of that. People had to really know where I was from, and since I was from southern OH (which every Ohian knows is really poor) but going through my PhD program on the east coast, many people didn’t know. The default assumption was I must be middle class. Had a been brown or black, probably would have been a different story (even if I was middle class).
AleiraKieron,
I strongly agree about the internaitonal students; many of them are in a real bind, and if they lose funding the problem can be even worse. But I think that it is interesting to note that the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was 9,827 in 2004. So by the time you add in the extra summer money, it would put someone above poverty. This certainly isn’t wealthy, but it is important to note this. The other point is that if a person in graduate school got really desparate and had to quit s/he could fall back on the undergrad degree.
I’m not saying that grad students are sitting pretty, but having just completed grad school myself, I got tired of hearing the complaints.
Leslie,
I took English classes both years I went, and I think nearly half of my classmates were Asian American, mostly Korean American. What perplexes me, is that we are talking about the middle of the US, where the Asian population is very small.
Reminds me of my own story, only more fortunate. I was offered entry into the gifted programs, but my parents decided against it as they didn’t want to make me “different”. In their dirt poor psychology, they tried to prepare me for their life. I ended up dropping out of high school eventually (had to pay my way) and all the expected drama of such a lifestyle has shaped me very differently than yourself. I managed to get back on track after a few years, and am now almost done my undergrad, with some student loans on my back (I was never taught the byzantine art of navigating bureaucratic systems, had no one to go to to ask, so I missed out on the financial support that I’d later discovered was available to me). Actually, reading your story was a combination of pain and hope to me, thank you for sharing.
`Just a humble guy trying to survive.
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