And I've been talking in prose, too
Though I don't think that's quite the same thing?
Another one of those 'how privileged are you' set of questions is going the rounds, and as usual it's very US-ocentric (because access to healthcare in the UK, hello NHS, not really a marker of privilege - how good the care was, and how long you had to wait, okay, postcode lottery, changes over time etc etc).
And some things were yes and some things were no, because when I was young my father had a job that routinely involved working weekends as part of normal working hours, rather than having to have a second job. Also, I'm thinking that the 'healthy food' question is very presentist and what was perceived as a proper diet when I was growing up might not altogether win approval these days.
I'm not sure about the 'taking a job while at high school/college': I had a Saturday/summer holidays job in Woolworths for pocket money, and I would work during uni vacation, but I didn't have to work during term-time, which these days probably counts as immense privilege. But not then.
On the media representation thing, at the time (and pretty much still) I think UK-born over-educated women of working-class origin were not something I saw much in e.g. literature.
What sort of 'vacation' is implied under taking one as a family. For many years we did what would now be called 'staycation' where there was a railway ticket you could buy and make excursions over a significant area for a week. There were also a couple of holidays in a boat on a local river. Modest.
As I think I've commented before, a whole lot of any privilege I have was not about family background but about collective societal factors like the welfare state, grant-funded university education, availability of employment on graduation, etc which gave me social mobility. I'd describe my privilege as one of my historical generation (there was an article about this recently in the paper with someone pointing out that for a whole lot of reasons that were not unusual then but pretty rare now he was able to buy a house in relatively central London by the time he was 30).
But it was really quite late in life, comparatively, that I've felt it. Because so much of it was part of that common experience of people born at a particular period (though I would cop to the supportive family environment, books in the house, factor). And perhaps I have been more fortunate than some, even though there were swathes of my life that were about distress and turmoil and insecurity. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2305927.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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