Mothers, daughters, and education redemption narratives

Girls are an education success story. In recent decades, outcomes for girls have improved dramatically: girls are more likely to achieve good grades at GCSE; they are more likely to equal or (typically) exceed boys for top A level grades; and they are much more likely to go to university. Given these figures, you would be forgiven for thinking that the work of feminism is done. Boys are ‘underachieving’ in education; girls on the other hand are ‘not a problem’ (Ringrose, 2007).

But girls are not a monolith. The prevailing successful girls/failing boys discourse lacks nuance and obscures wide variation across intersections of social class and race. One group which faces particularly stark inequalities is White British girls eligible for free school meals (FSM – a blunt but widely used proxy for working-class pupils). Only 22% of these girls go onto HE compared to 50% of White British girls not eligible for FSM, and just 3% – versus 15% – attend high tariff institutions. Yet, these girls and young women remain largely invisible in public debate, caught between two contradictory discourses: positioned as the ideal neoliberal subject by their gender, while simultaneously positioned – by their class and race – as suffering from a ‘poverty of aspiration’.

My doctoral research asks how young women from white, working-class backgrounds make sense of their journeys to higher education; what narratives and discourses do they draw upon in telling their story, and what version of themselves do they produce in the telling? One pattern I encountered across the interviews is what I have come to describe as working-class family redemption narratives. Several of the young women made sense of their position as first-generation students through their mother’s education histories. Their own journeys to higher education were narrated as meaningful beyond personal achievement, representing second chances at education for their family and, for many, an opportunity to realise what earlier generations of working-class women had been denied.

One of my participants, Harriet, narrated her parents’ education journeys very differently. Her father’s education story was one of individual regret – “he wished he’d tried harder” – a cautionary tale. Her mother’s was different: “she’s very clever, but she never had the opportunity to get into education because she couldn’t afford it.” Born into a single-parent family, her mother left school at 16 because she simply “didn’t have that choice.” Becoming a young single mother herself, to older half-siblings of Harriet’s, her options for returning to education became even more restricted. Despite this, she saved to take Harriet to plays, bought her books, made sure she was “widely read”, bolstering her daughter’s chances for educational success. Harriet narrated her own academic achievement in direct relation to this, her mother’s unrealised potential becoming the lens through which she understood her own university progression.

Another young woman, Ashleigh, brought the gendered dimension into even sharper focus. Her mother was older, in her late sixties, and had attended a grammar school as a girl. The promise of a grammar school education creating new possibilities for academic working-class children did not materialise: “it was kind of like, okay, you go to secretarial school, or you’d be a teacher or a nurse. And that was sort of the options for girls.” Ashleigh, by contrast, moved away to university aged 18 to study physics, but left the comparison implicit. A generation on, and the paths available to girls from similar backgrounds had changed substantially. Ashleigh narrated her own journey against the backdrop of her mother’s constrained education choices.

What these narratives share is a way of using family narratives (here, of mothers’ unfairly restricted possibilities) as a resource for understanding what it means to be an educationally successful, first-generation, working-class young woman studying at university. This narrative gives the young women access to the position of pioneer for the family, transforming the unchartered path of higher education into something purposeful and grounded in their family history.

International Women’s Day invites us to mark progress in gender equality. These narratives are a reminder that progress is not an individual story, that behind the stories of first-generation students often lies a family history of marginalisation from education shaped by gender, class and race. They also encourage us to think about the different stories students carry with them to university and what it means to teach and support students for whom arriving here represents not just their own achievement, but a family’s long deferred one.

Pseudonyms have been used to protect participant identities.

References

Ringrose, J. (2007). Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neoliberal discourses of educational achievement and gender equality. Gender and Education, 19(4), 471–489. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250701442666

Jessica Benson-Egglenton is a Research Fellow in the Sheffield Institute of Education