Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education in America.

RECLAIMING CLASS: WOMEN, POVERTY AND THE PROMISE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L Dahlberg, eds. (Temple University Press, 2003)

The product of the conference "From Welfare to Meaningful Work through Education," held at Hamilton College in 1999, Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. Dahlberg's Reclaiming Class is one of several recent collections of essays by academics from working-class backgrounds about their experiences in colleges and universities both as students and as teachers. In its introduction, the editors mention the most recent and influential, C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Law's This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (1995); Michelle Tokarczyk and Elizabeth Fay's Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993); and Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey's Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class. (1993). Also mentioned is the classic discussion of the experience of "upward mobility," The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett (1972).

What differentiates this book from the essay collections of the mid-1990s is its focus on what the editors term "poverty class" women and its discussion of contemporary welfare policy's effects on poor women who seek university education. In section one, "Educators Remember," professors from poverty-class backgrounds describe their experiences in academia and connect them to larger patterns of ideology about poverty. In section two, "On the Front Lines," students and graduates of professional programs describe their efforts to complete their educations despite the punishing effects of welfare reform. The final section, "Policy, Research and Poor Women," synthesizes research about women, education, and welfare policy done over the last ten years.

Despite volumes of research connecting college education to upward mobility for women, the book shows that increasingly punitive welfare policies penalize women for attempting to educate themselves to achieve financial independence. Not only policy-mandated changes but also stereotypes about welfare mothers, along with the historical class biases of the academy, make the entire educational process itself painful, even with its potential for long-term benefits. The costs of increasing drop-out rates are high, not only for the students, but for society as a whole. Indeed, contributor Lisa Brush argues in her essay about battered women and welfare policy: "The United States cannot afford a welfare and education system that sanctions poor women for taking a beating."

In Reclaiming Class, the personal essays by teachers and students from backgrounds in poverty reveal the experiences of a "hidden" class within higher education. In "Educators Remember," five essayists use various contemporary theories to interpret their experiences in graduate programs where they often felt shamed and exploited by teachers and other students. Vivyan C. Adair uses Foucault to describe poverty's marks on her body. Nell Sullivan and Sandra Dahlberg use frameworks from ethnic and sexuality studies to argue that class prejudice is similar to racism and homophobia. Lisa K. Waldner's essay, "If You Want me to Pull Myself Up, Give Me Bootstraps," makes reference to several important sociological works on stratification to connect her personal experiences to larger patterns and makes the important point that "failing to differentiate between private troubles and public issues occurs because welfare mothers are not considered among the deserving poor." Also in this section, Jocelyn K. Moody's especially strong essay, "To Be Young, Pregnant and Black," challenges sociological literature about middle-class Black attitudes about welfare by describing the ordeal of being in college and receiving welfare-sponsored prenatal care that came with blaming looks and negative comments from Black welfare staff workers: "If you can afford to go to that college, you don't need to be here." Despite the odds, all these women were able to complete their degrees--partly because of pre-welfare reform policies. Echoing the insights of previous books about working-class academics, many of the authors express great ambivalence about the effects of their college educations on their experiences of home. They also articulate resentment of the middle-class norms in the academy that "presumed [the] desire of the poverty class ... to transcend class boundaries."

The worst experiences represented are those of women attempting to achieve education following the passage of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. In section two, "On The Front Lines," essayist Tonya Mitchell was compelled to leave school after only a few months, because she was certified "work ready" and would be dropped from TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) if she did not immediately take a low-skill, low-mobility job. Mitchell writes,

"Although one of my professors went with me to petition the state, to show transcripts and to testify about my promise as a student, my case was denied and I was forced to 'be responsible' and 'work first.'" The essays in this section show dramatically how the new welfare reform laws act out negative stereotypes about poor women, for example, shaming children in welfare families by notifying teachers and administrators of the person's public assistance. Such knowledge can lead to lowered expectations for these children and makes it harder for them to use education as a ladder out of poverty.

Illuminating the stereotype of the "welfare queen," by contrasting it to the real lives of women on welfare within institutions of higher learning, Reclaiming Class will be useful in a number of contexts: undergraduate surveys and graduate courses in sociology, women's studies, and public policy. The book's personal essays explore and explain the ways that colleges and universities reproduce existing social hierarchies, both through subtle elitism and through structure and institutions, such as financial aid policies. They reveal that even in the most liberal enclaves of academe, welfare stereo-types remain alive and well. While many works describe welfare reform and welfare stereotypes, this collection of essays provides a unique window through which to look into the effect of stereotypes on students and teachers. Such a book will do much to correct damaging stereotypes of poverty-class women.

Still, as strong as the personal narratives and interpretations are, many essays in the collection are constrained by the scholarly framework of multiculturalism and by unsupported general comments about others that reveal assumptions rather than scholarly enquiry: Is it really the case, for example, as Nell Sullivan argues, that "most middle-class academics have had no direct experience with financial aid outside their graduate fellowships"? This seems hard to believe given the cost of higher education and the debt burden under which even college graduates from middle-class backgrounds enter the job market. Perhaps more important, it is strange to see a discussion of "classism" using the paradigms of race, gender, and sexuality, rather than attempting to grapple with Marxist literature--or even Weberian literature--that addresses class and status more directly. Vivyan C. Adair opens her Foucauldian discussion of class with a brief dismissal of these two frameworks as inadequate, but the book does not convince this reader of the superiority of the concept of "classism," which so personalizes "class" as a category.

Given the division of the American working class by race, the argument that theories based on the experiences of racial minorities should also apply to poor whites are especially problematic, as they seem to enter the race vs. class debate that is being used for retrograde policy initiatives combating affirmative action. Reclaiming Class does not, for the most part, pit the (white) working class against African Americans or gays and lesbians as "interest groups." However, Sandra Dahlberg claims in her first essay that while analysis of race and gender is supported in academia, class analysis is not. It is true that Americans are generally not class-conscious in the way that Europeans are, are not sure how to define their class, perceive themselves to be middle-class, and are, as Dahlberg argues, largely uncritical of the myth of meritocracy. "Our uneasiness with class," she argues, "is best shown by the fact that, at present, there are no journals that primarily address issues of class in terms of practice or pedagogy. There is no recognized [academic] community to which poverty-class or working-class people can come out, and there is no theoretical legitimization of class positionality." While this statement may be true of journals within the framework of multiculturalism, it overlooks Marxist and labor journals entirely, and avoids mentioning its own location within a quite voluminous set of recent academic writings that would posit class rather than race as a primary organizing principle.

With the exception of Lisa K. Waldner, the essayists are also strangely silent about the existing literature on social reproduction in academia, such as the work of Pierre Bordieu, Jay MacLeod, Jonathan Kozol, and Paul Willis, who have written about many of the individual problems that the authors describe in their discussion of academic institutions as reproducers of class hierarchy. It would have been interesting to see the ways that the experiential essays in the book could have benefited from and added to that field of "social reproduction theory." Because of this neglect, while readers with a background in that literature will find new and valuable information in Reclaiming Class about the intersection of welfare policy and experiences of higher education, they may be disappointed with some of the personal essays. Without a Marxist analysis, the essayists are trapped in a liberal framework that points to flaws in the ideology of meritocracy and snobbery within the academy, but doesn't identify much in the way of systematic reform. The reader is left with the notion that individual middle-class academics should recognize and combat personal biases, that working-class and poverty-class academics should be recognized as a group with valid experiences from which we must learn, and that welfare and educational funding policies should be reformed. The larger economic context of changes in higher education and the U.S. job market are not addressed. Sadly, academic unions are not addressed either.

The final section, though, "Policy, Research, and Poor Women," provides a broad context for the personal experiences discussed in the opening chapters, and it might make more sense for teachers to use this section of the book first in classes, as it provides a framework through which to understand the first ten essays, and provides readers with valuable information about the specific elements of university financial aid policies and welfare reform that have not been widely discussed elsewhere. According to one cited study, for example, the drop in college enrollment among welfare recipients after welfare reform ranged from 29% to 82%. Sandra Dahlberg's essay, "Families First: But Not in Higher Education," both explains how financial aid policies disadvantage independent single parents attempting to go to college and how those policies feed into hidden ideologies about the deserving and undeserving in higher education. These discussions of institutional biases should convince most readers that the problems of welfare reform have directly contributed not to a general class bias in higher education, but to a crisis in educational access.

In this time of crisis, Reclaiming Class is an important book that will inform readers about the short and long term effects of welfare reform on the capacity of women to use higher education as a means of social advancement. Offering a rare and accessible discussion of both welfare policy and welfare stigma and their impact upon people's capacity to learn within American institutions of higher education, it brings much of the current literature on welfare and welfare stereotypes into a concrete realm that students will understand in connection with their own lives. For that reason especially, it is a very valuable book.