Hailey’s Story

Abstract

Angela McRobbie (2004) suggests that the increasing feminization of the workforce, the weakening of traditional family roles and greater opportunities for the construction of individualized female identities have initiated new forms of class distinction and differentiation, so that the representation and inscription of social divisions has itself become increasingly feminized. Both McRobbie (2004) and Skeggs (2004) see in the positioning of young working-class mothers as ‘the abject of the nation’ (Skeggs 2004, p.23) a particularly powerful element in the process of marking class and value. This transference of class antagonism and conflict from male to female bearers of working-class physicality is recirculated in media and political discourse, giving rise to persistent stereotypes of incontinence, wastefulness and bad parenting, creating ‘tensions and impossibilities’ in the lives of young mothers (Vincent et al. 2010). One manifestation of political discourses of this nature is the proliferation of courses aimed at working-class teenage parents, and as we have seen, we met some of our participants through such provision. In this chapter, we discuss the experiences of Hailey, who was 16 years old and seven months pregnant when she began to take part in our research in March 2011. In a later chapter, we will also trace Isla’s story; both young women, in different ways, were required to confront moral evaluations of their behaviours, and their differing experiences of education illustrate the challenges facing teenage mothers from working-class backgrounds.