Julie Bettie Women Without Class Summary

Classifying people, objects, and practices according to conceptualized distinctions can create symbolic boundaries between people. Julie Bettie’s book, Women Without Class, shows that symbolic boundaries, such as symbolic economies of classes can create social boundaries. She focuses on class and racial relations among female senior students at Waretown High. She analyzes how these senior girls’ racial/ethnic identities shaped their performances at school and their future class opportunities. The most visible symbolic boundaries between the preps and las chicas were seen in different gender specific commodities at Waretown High (62). The symbolic oppositions of these groups expressed specific group memberships and peer hierarchy that distinguished

white middle-class preps from Mexican-American working-class las chicas. Preps and las chicas brought different cultural values and resources from their families that shaped their class identities and their futures.
A visible symbol that made a distinction between preps and las chicas was seen in their clothing styles where girl friendship groups maintained race/class specific versions of femininity. Preps preferred to maintain school-sanctioned femininity such as wearing light makeup, french manicure, and natural hair while las chicas preferred darker colors, tights, tank tops, and colorful hairstyles.

Color and brand worked as a tool of race/class distinction that not only showed class differences but it was also understood as different sexual identities among school members. Las chicas were seen more sexually active by their peers because of their appearance and behavior at school. Las chicas chose their outfits to show their bodies as much as they could but this was not parallel with that they were more sexually active than preps. Both the school personnel and preps misread las chicas’ styles because it was not about showing sexuality toward men but it was more about bonding and showing resistance against middle-class preps’ norms. However, las chicas more likely got pregnant during school and kept their babies than their white counterparts. But this was not because they were more sexually active but it was because they acquired different cultural capitals from their parents. Las chicas traditionally did not believed in abortion and did not get the knowledge about the usage of birth control pills from their parents. In contrast, middle-class preps were aware about birth control pills and their

health care also covered abortions that they sometimes could get done without the knowledge of their parents (book). This explains that not only racial/ethnic differences existed among students, but also explains the class future differences between preps and las chicas. Mexican-American las chicas wanted to become young mothers during or right after high school, while preps wanted to go to four-year university. They had different images about their future because they had different markers of adult status which was the consequence of their class differences and cultural capitals that they inhabited. Working-class las chicas sometimes “intended to be mothers” at a young age which highly affected their future opportunities because without finishing high school they lowered their own chances to get good jobs (68). Middle-class preps’ goals were to attend to college after high school because their parents also had college degrees and could support them financially. White middle-class parents could provide cultural capital through stable social statuses to their children that increased preps’ future opportunities.
Furthermore, las chicas established their own “girl culture” in the school that made them skip classes and resist school-sanctioned activities. The school personnel failed to provide las chicas information about college prep classes because the teachers said that they were not ready to take those classes (77). Teachers generally put them on vocational tracks based on their race/ethnicity that lowered their chances to go to college. Las chicas experienced racial discrimination in the school environment because while middle-class prep students were informed about college-prep classes, while las chicas were automatically put into vocational courses. This shows that the culture of the school did not provide equal treatment and opportunities for middle-class and working-class performers which created an institutionalized inequality related to race and class. For example, during school ceremonies only white prep students got awards but working-class students still had to attend even though they knew they would never be celebrated (71). Mexican-American students felt that these ceremonies were for the “glorification of prep students” and showed them their own failures academically that would shape their futures (71).
Peer hierarchy and school organizations not only excluded Mexican-American working-class students but also excluded white, hard-living students, also known as smokers.

The school government provided more power to preps by allowing them to organize all of the school activities that ultimately excluded white hard-living students because of their cultural poverty and economic differences. Teachers also had better relationships with preps which all allowed them to acquire higher self-esteems than non-prep students. The environment of the school advertised that preps naturally deserved more than smokers which made the white working-class invisible at Waretown High. At the bottom of this peer hierarchy, smokers rejected all the things that school offered and instead they maintained “alternative badges of dignity” (108). Smokers also unconsciously acquired hard-living habitus in which they rejected any middle class norms, wore different clothes, skipped classes and school activities because their hard-living cultural capital dispositioned their world view about their individual behavioral choices. Working-class white students were judged by their teachers and preps because their parents had illegal jobs, and addictions to drugs and alcohol. Smokers were not as recognized by school personnel as preps because they showed little interest in academics and because they did not perform whiteness appropriately. On the one hand, preps were favored by teachers and the school personnel

“understood them as popular” (103), and on the other hand smokers were described as “white-trash” because they were the deficit of “the white race” (128). Middle-class performers excluded hard-living students by marginalizing their successes not just in organized school activities, but they also “assisted them in feeling like failures” in the classrooms (107). This peer hierarchy among students created an unpleasant school environment for hard-living students that school personnel could not castigate. Moreover, this peer hierarchy reduced hard-living students’ self-esteem that reduced their ability and personal enthusiasm to perform well in school.
However, there were some working-class girls who were upwardly mobile and it was because they gained insight the advantages of middle-class students. They understood that they had to work harder than preps because they did not have the adequate resources from their economic cultural capital. These working-class white and Mexican-American girls were conscious about their class cultures that allowed them to perform better. Working-class white girls were upwardly mobile because their parents wanted to provide them good education by borrowing money from other close relatives to send their children to private schools. These parents wanted to avoid their children from “bad influences” (141). For both white and Mexican-American girls, playing a sport allowed the ability to be upwardly mobile and interact with middle-class students who were for instance aware of college-prep classes. Another factor that allowed working-class students to be upwardly mobile is their desire to learn from older brother’s failures and older sister’s experiences in high school and college. White working-class girls did not want to follow their brother’s mistakes and they wanted to prove to their families that they can be successful academically. For Mexican-American working-class girls going to college could be seen as a tradition. They were told that other relatives also went to four year colleges in Mexico and that education could give them the hope to reach the American Dream. However, for Mexican-American working-class girls it was harder to be upwardly mobile because they had a different racial/ethnic identities, while white students did not perceive “white” as a race. White students could move upward more easily because they did not have to face the accusation of “acting white” and they were not tracked to vocational classes because of their race (159). Cultural capital is very powerful in shaping class futures because not every student with a lower class status can perceive and understand cultural class differences and the advantages of middle-class performances. However, Mexican-American girls adopted strategies to formulate a bicultural racial/ethnic identity without “assimilation to whiteness or acting white” and they also put extra hard work to de-track themselves from vocational courses (159). That is exceptional when working-class girls feel the desire to work harder than their middle-class counterparts to gain cultural capital consciously by their performances that later becomes their unconscious habitus.
The girls at Waretown High started to formulate their identities and futures based on their own cultural capital and their race. Girls’ future class positions were not only dependent on their limited economic and cultural resources, but they also intersected with gender. Women of color and white women often experience inequality through educational accomplishments because of the existing institutionalized race, gender, and sexual inequality in schools. The girls and school personnel constructed identities in which race and gender were the most visible. Inequality was reproduced by race/gender differences because of white supremacy and male dominance that made women’s classes even more invisible. Class invisibility, race segregation, and gender gaps caused a confusion among girls’ identities and future ideas that affected their opportunities in relationship to educational success, work and income.