Contrasting Settled Living and Hard Living

1180 Words5 Pages
In this paper, I will contrast as well as compare the settled living and hard living girls at Waretown High from Julie Bettie’s book “Women Without Class.” Both within working class come from similar yet different family backgrounds. They amongst their race and gender are distinguished from each other based on social identity within working class people. Also as Bettie described both groups, that led me to believe that settle livers have a better chance of succeed due to their different outlook informed by upbringings. Both hard livers and settled livers come from families with low income as their parents could only land jobs based on their educational level. The injury for both bard and settled living white girls is that their parents lives have influence on their personal inadequacy that lead to the sense of individual failure in which their class is variously displaced. As lack of money affects the girls. The status associated with having money for the name brand clothes, nicer cars and so forth. And as Bettie stated, “…along with the status differences associated with aspirations for four year college vs. community college, and, related to that, with participation in a vocational vs. college preparatory curriculum, was a clear source of class and race resentment and helped shape membership in friendship groups.” (Bettie, 2003, page 11) The fact that settled living and hard living girls share the common of economic struggle status organized them as “non preps” which means they are not considered the achievers or leaders in school’s eyes. The invisibility of economic class problem is common in the school whereas teachers and students assumed that economic class did not affect individual students’ lives. They believed that popularity and success were not linked to social class. Instead of thinking about economic and cultural capital, students thought
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