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

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

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