Landscape for a Good Woman

"This is quite a difficult book. It is essentially autobiographical but it’s also about her mother. Her mother came from a working class Lancashire mill background from the 1920s. There is quite a lot about that, and also about Steedman’s adult life as she was growing up in London in the fifties. Her book is on one level an attack on Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy , which was published in 1957. This was said to be the book that lay behind the British television series Coronation Street . It was in two halves, the first half about Hoggart’s working class childhood in Leeds between the wars, and he writes it in fantastically evocative detail. The second half was an attack on the Americanisation of popular culture. The book had a huge impact and was part of the working class coming in the late fifties into the centre of the frame. But in her book Steedman accuses Hoggart of seeing the working class in an over-homogenised way. In effect she says the working class are made up of individuals who are more interesting than Hoggart gives them credit for. She uses her mother as an example of that, showing how her mother came out of a deprived childhood which gave her a great appetite for material things. As a young adult she was really keen on the New Look – the fashion that came in just after the war in 1947. And she became in her politics a working class Tory. For myself, I found that an incredibly helpful perception. Class is so important in Britain and we were a very class-divided society, but you have to drill deeper than just looking at class if you are actually going to see how society works. History from below and a focus on class really came through in the sixties – people like EP Thompson with his book The Making of the English Working Class , which was an instant classic. History was no longer just about high politics and diplomacy. Social history also became important. Then in the eighties, for understandable and good reasons, there was less of an emphasis on class and more of an emphasis on gender and identity. Obviously this came out of the women’s movement of the seventies – and as we became more of a multicultural society, class got rather forgotten about. I can only talk for myself, but I think it continues to be a very important part of our social history alongside gender and identity. I think we underestimate class. I just watched the first of a three-part television series by Melvyn Bragg about class and culture. Bragg argues that class has been replaced by culture, which has a unifying effect that makes class less important. I’m not sure I agree with him. If you travel around the [UK] and go to different places, class is very much still a defining issue of people’s lives and how they live. You cannot say that class is dead."