Critical Thoughts

By Katie Beswick

In December 2019, my nan passed away after a long illness. I think of the potted history of her life story as I listen to the Women Working Class Podcasts, a series of conversations between working-class women artists, recorded at the end of 2021. 

I want to tell you a little of my nan’s story: She was 84 when she passed, and she had lived a difficult life that was also filled with joy and love. An identical twin born in the 1930s and raised in the East End of London, Nan was evacuated during WW2 —she was homed with her twin sister in relatively nearby Kent, but the journey was prohibitive for their mother, meaning years went by in which they barely saw one another. It was to cause a rift that endured, despite their remaining close. Nan enjoyed her teenage years, partying in the Christian youth clubs of the 1950s (the spirit of which was be revived some decades later in the short-lived jukebox musical Dreamboats and Petticoats). Adult life was marked by a tragedy — Nan was left widowed at the age of thirty, a single mother to three children at a time when this was a significant stigma (although widowhood was undoubtedly the least stigmatised of ways to become a single mum). Yet, she was not destitute. Nan had a council tenancy — later she was to buy the property under the Right to Buy — and there was a welfare state that supported her through the worst of the financial trauma, as well as a loving, extended family on hand to offer practical and emotional support. Later, her daughter would receive a grant to attend University, the first in her family to do so. Later still, her granddaughter would graduate with a PhD, writing a thesis partly inspired by the complex social position afforded to the mid-twentieth century working-class woman, at the brief historical moment in which social mobility was sometimes possible.

Although she likely wouldn’t have recognised the journey of her life as much more than the outcome of luck, most of my nan’s existence — as a working-class woman — was conditioned by a wider cultural and political landscape: by policy and by power structures, many beyond the reach of her vision. As Imogen Tyler notes, the stigma and shame of the kind my nan experienced because of her working-class singleness was not merely socially conditioned, but rather the product of political order in which feelings of shame and fear are ‘always enmeshed with wider capitalist structures of expropriation, domination, discipline and social control’. Still, amidst the hardship there were social spaces and social safety nets in the 1950s, 60s and 70s that do not exist today. As the welfare state that supported my family through hardship and education has been slowly eroded, the spaces for working class women to bare, understand, discuss and take control over the events of their lives have become fewer and more difficult to access than perhaps ever before. In the realm of the arts, The Report Panic! 2018 —It’s An Arts Emergency demonstrated the huge disparity that exists creative industries, where the working-class are rarely in control of the stories that are told about their lives.

It is this gap in the narrative of working-class women’s lives that the Women Working Class Podcasts fill. Over eight episodes, working-class women are given the platform to tease out the ways their class positions have impacted their choices and experiences. They discuss how they have found ways to bare the hardships which are often part and parcel of working-class existence (being seen as ‘factory fodder’; managing caring responsibilities, chaotic home lives, racism, and economic struggle), shedding light on how their artwork is connected to their working-class identities. Though the discussions are personal and often tentative, they feel radical and connected to a larger context. Here, on the podcasts, are working class women, speaking to one another, listening, responding, without being interrupted, dismissed or told they are wrong.  

The wider political context in which the podcasts sit is obviously now bound up with the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has highlighted inequalities that continue to exist in spheres of work and leisure when it comes to the gendered division of labour, with several studies and anecdotal evidence revealing that not only were women significantly more likely to shoulder the bulk of caring responsibilities during ‘lockdown’, but that they were also more likely to work in jobs impacted by the lockdown and to suffer financial hardship as a result of the economic impact of the pandemic. The state of affairs exacerbated by the crisis evidences what feminists have long known: that women continue to shoulder unequally the burden of caring responsibilities; that the expansion of women into the world of work has not eased the domestic burden nor necessarily made it possible for all women to fulfil their desires beyond domestic and familial roles. This is especially the case for working-class women – who are far more likely to carry primary responsibility for domestic and family care, not only because they do not have the economic means to outsource such labour, but also because successive policy, education design and social expectation has conditioned such women to find pleasure, value and self-worth in domestic and caring work. Of course, while the finding of fulfilment in domestic care is not necessarily a problem, the stigmatisation of self-centred desire-seeking continues to create oppressive cultural conditions of shame that can limit the possibilities for fulfilment both within and outside of the domestic sphere. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the 2017 #metoo movement, in which women across the world shared evidence of sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace and elsewhere, women’s pleasures are still routinely conditioned and controlled by patriarchal values and male violence. In this cultural context, women’s needs, thoughts and desires are often subsumed and denied, as women’s effort and labour become directed at navigating external expectations and cultural norms. For working-class women, this often means navigating multiple points of inequality as the oppressive structures of sexism are compounded by economic precarity, class prejudice and racism.

These complex themes are tackled across the podcast recordings in personal reflections that unfold as a series of conversations sparked by a provocation. Each podcast pairs an artist from the South East articulation of the Women Working Class collective with an artist from the North West collective. The North/South pairings enable productive reflections on the ways geographies of class operate to nuance classed experience. In some episodes, the women invite other working-class guests to join them. The conversations that follow are in turns gentle, rageful, thought provoking and always carefully nuanced and grounded in lived experience. Managing to parse the complexities of working-class identity, the women and their guests make space for one another in their differences — acknowledging the ways their working-class identities are mediated by disability, race, sexuality and location. The podcasts begin a necessary path of listening to women who for too long have had their lives narrated by other people.

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