Customer Reviews

Women without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity

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"Women without Class" is a tour de force of exceptional scholarly research and keen social observation. Bettie does a tremendous job exploring how class operates in many powerful, yet subtle ways in the lives of young women in one California high school. She highlights the role of economics, but also addresses issues of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Through sustained, in-depth ethnographic research, Bettie illuminates the complex social dynamics of a community and brings the personalities, experiences and worries of these young women to life. The book is honest and sharp, reading almost like a novel. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sociology, education, youth, race/ethnic relations, or gender.

As a person who works daily with young people both in and out of academic settings, I found this book gave a fresh perspective on how we view teenagers (both men and women) and the influence we have on their lives; especially those influences that are unconcious on our part. It changed the way I perceive my students and gave me new tools for communication. I also thought it was a terrific read; often dramatic and moving. I highly reccomend this book to anyone whose work or lives are connected with young people in America.

This is a great ethnography for anyone interested in teaching and/or school administration. Should be required reading before anyone steps foot in the classroom! Teachers expectations and actions matter!

Julie Bettie (2003) conducted an ethnographic study about how high school girls experience class in the school, and how their experiences of class intersect with race and gender. Bettie presents a case that girls and women have often been ignored in studies of class, and that when girls are studied it is usually with a focus on their gender over all other parts of identity. Her study demonstrates how girls' experience of class influences how they experience gender and race, and vice versa. She does not seek to establish class as the primary aspect of one's identity, but rather to show how the social discourses of class, race, and gender interact with each other and the individual to shape our identity and understanding of the world. Bettie is particularly interested in how these discourses shape girls' educational experience and attainment.

Bettie outlines the recent scholarship and theoretical debates regarding class, gender, race, and education. Studies on class include the symbolic meaning of class and how these meanings inform our identity. Feminist theory incompletely recognizes women as subjects with class, making gender the primary analytical feature. This tendency within feminist scholarship hides the way class impacts women's experience of gender (and race and age), making class invisible in the scholarship. The ways class is hidden or invisible in scholarship is demonstrated through Bettie's analysis of the research and through her study.

What really endangered the success of Bettie's message was not humanly bias, but her writing style. Bettie tries so hard to convince the reader that her study is important that she becomes verbose; she spends so much time telling us everyone else has it wrong (except for her) that her tone goes from conviction and pleasantly tenacious to grating. The complexity of the issue need not result in literary inaccessibility. Bettie's sentences stretch into several lines and her chapters become bloated when they could easily be summed up by what most people already know: we're missing the rest of the picture if we just focus on gender--it's a more complex issue...otherwise known as: you can't see the forest for the trees.