Young women and further education: a case study of young women's experience of caring courses in a local college

Skeggs, Beverly E

Abstract

This is an ethnographic account of 83 young women on caring courses at a local Further Education college. It represents an attempt to understand and explain how these students experience the institutional parameters of Further Education. It also represents a more general attempt to understand the ways in which subjectivity is constructed in relation to structures of class and gender; and how, in this process, young women come necessarily to be implicated in constructing their own future subordination.
The study starts by establishing its historical background; in particular the origins of the legacy of young women being prepared for a role outside the labour market. Then it proceeds to examine the organisation of Further Education, its modes of presenting knowledge, and the ways in which the institution is used to transmit ideology. This analysis divides broadly into two areas, representing on the one hand the role of the institution, and on the other, the student's responses to that role. Further Education is seen to contribute towards reproducing social fragmentation; naturalising the young women's status as domestic labourers; and making specific allocations of role and responsibility in this context. The student's responses are characterised by attempts to resist powerlessness, and to establish some degree of autonomy; but this response takes place within the frameworks prescribed by the institution and wider class and gender structures. In this respect the responses contribute towards producing a guilt culture, and the establishment of systems of self-surveillance, thus creating a whole pattern of behaviour that reaffirms subordination.
In a wider context, these courses are indicative of recent State initiatives on pre-vocational education, and it is one of this study's main overall concerns to show the way that caring courses are part of a more general attempt by the State to restructure social relations.

Citation

Skeggs, B. E. (1986). Young women and further education: a case study of young women's experience of caring courses in a local college