Gendering Bourdieu's Concepts of Capitals? Emotional Capital,Women and Social Class

Introduction

Although Bourdieu deals extensively with gender differences in his work, far less space is given to the emotions. This chapter attempts to address this lacuna by extending Bourdieu's concept of capitals to the realm of emotions. While Bourdieu never refers explicitly to emotional capital in his own work, he does describe practical and symbolic work which generates devotion, generosity and solidarity, arguing that ‘this work falls more particularly to women, who are responsible for maintaining relationships’ (Bourdieu, 1998:68). This chapter takes on-going research into mothers' involvement in their children's education as a case study for developing the concept of emotional capital. It describes the intense emotional engagement the vast majority of mothers had with their children's education. The chapter also explores the extent to which emotional capital may be understood as a specifically gendered capital, in particular, by examining the impact of social class on gendered notions of emotional capital.

The background: Bourdieu's concept of capitals

In this chapter I am attempting to unravel a number of feminist conundrums and at the same time develop a theoretical understanding of emotional capital. I am trying to extend Bourdieu's concept of capitals into the murky waters of the emotions. While Bourdieu himself never mentions emotional capital, he does develop an extensive theoretical understanding of other forms of capital. Cultural capital is Bourdieu's best known concept. It is primarily a relational concept and exists in conjunction with other forms of capital. Therefore, it cannot be understood in isolation from the other forms of capital, economic, symbolic and social capital, that together constitute advantage and disadvantage in society. Social capital is generated through social processes between the family and wider society and is made up of social networks. Economic capital is wealth either inherited or generated from interactions between the individual and the economy, while symbolic capital is manifested in individual prestige and personal qualities, such as authority and charisma (Bourdieu, 1985). In addition to the interconnection of the types of capital, Bourdieu envisages a process in which one form of capital can be transformed into another (Bourdieu, 1986). For example, economic capital can be converted into cultural capital, while cultural capital can be translated into social capital. These, however, are complex processes which are not straightforwardly achieved.

The overall capital of different fractions of the social classes is composed of differing proportions of the various kinds of capital (Bourdieu, 1993). It is mainly in relation to the middle and upper classes that Bourdieu elaborates this variation in volume and composition of the different types of capital. For example, individuals can be adjacent to each other in social space yet have very different ratios of economic to cultural capital. These differences are a consequence of complex relationships between individual and class trajectories. Moreover, the value attached to the different forms of capital are stakes in the struggle between different class fractions. Bourdieu uses the analogy of a game of roulette. Some individuals:

For Bourdieu all goods, whether material or symbolic have an economic value if they are in short supply and considered worthy of being sought after in a particular social formation. He describes a process in which ‘classes’ invest their cultural capital in academic settings (Bourdieu, 1977). Because the upper, and to a lesser extent, the middle classes, have the means of investing their cultural capital in the optimum educational setting, their investments are extremely profitable. From this perspective educational establishments can be viewed as mechanisms for generating social profits (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). However, cultural capital is not just about the relationship of different social groupings to the educational system, it is also about the centrality of the family to any understanding of cultural reproduction (Reay, 1998a). Bourdieu, in his article co-authored with Boltanski, states ‘the educational system depends less directly on the demands of the production system than on the demands of reproducing the family group.’ (Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1981:142–3).

Cultural capital is primarily transmitted through the family. It is from the family that children derive modes of thinking, types of dispositions, sets of meaning and qualities of style. These are then assigned a specific social value and status in accordance with what the dominant classes label as the most valued cultural capital (Giroux, 1983). Integral, therefore to cultural capital, is the potential for a complex analysis of the interactions between home background, the processes of schooling and a child's educational career. According to Nash:

Families, therefore, provide the link between individual and class trajectory and, as such Wilkes asserts, ‘should be the units of study for class analysis’ (Wilkes, 1990:127). However, while the concept of cultural capital implies the centrality of the family, Bourdieu also seems to be recognizing the centrality of the mother:

Feminist research on the domestic division of labour would also point to the mother as the parent who expends the most time on childcare (Graham, 1993; Oakley, 1993; Lawler, 2000) and thus the parent most directly involved in the generation of cultural capital. Childcare is made up of a complex amalgam of practical, educational and emotional work (James, 1989; Oakley, 1993; Reay, 1998b). Within the sphere of parental involvement in education recent research has highlighted the gendered nature of parental involvement in terms of both the practical and educational work involved (David, 1993; David et al, 1993; Reay and Ball, 1998). However, very little consideration has been paid to emotional involvement, although a growing body of both sociological and psychological research points to the gendered nature of emotion work in personal relationships (Erickson, 1993; Duncombe and Marsden, 1993; Reay et al, 1998; Wharton and Erickson, 1995; Zajdow, 1995). This research shows that within families, women engage in emotional labour far more than most men, taking responsibility for maintaining the emotional aspects of family relationships, responding to others' emotional states and also acting to alleviate distress. As Nicky James (1989:27) asserts, managing the family's emotional life requires ‘anticipation, planning, timetabling and trouble-shooting’. Bourdieu, in Masculine Domination (2001:77), writes that ‘it has often been observed that women fulfil a cathartic, quasi-therapeutic function in regulating men's emotional lives, calming their anger, helping them accept the injustices and difficulties of life’. In this chapter, however, it is the quasi-therapeutic role women perform in relation to their children that I want to focus on. It was this emotional management aspect of mothers' involvement in their children's education that emerged time and again in the research projects that I have been involved in over the past ten years. As Steph Lawler (2000:125) points out, ‘children's needs, and especially their emotional needs, are the point of motherhood’. Emotions within the family have traditionally been conceptualized as standing outside economic interpretations within both mainstream theorizing and feminisms. One of the few feminist exceptions is Diane Bell's work. Bell (1990) argues that an economy of emotion operates within families and that it is the responsibility of women. She equates mothering with book-keeping, arguing that one of the major roles of mothering is to balance the family's emotional budget.

The genesis of emotional capital

While Bourdieu never refers explicitly to emotional capital in his own work, he does highlight the key role of the mother in affective relationships. Writing of the practical and symbolic work which ‘generates devotion, generosity and solidarity’, Bourdieu argues that ‘this work falls more particularly to women, who are responsible for maintaining relationships’ (Bourdieu, 1998:68). It is only over the last twenty years that the view that emotions are somehow outside the remit of sociologists has begun to be challenged (Hochschild, 1983; Jackson, 1993; Duncombe and Marsden, 1993; Williams and Bendelow, 1997). One of the main challenges has come from Helga Nowotny. Nowotny, drawing on Bourdieu's conceptual framework, developed the concept of emotional capital. She saw emotional capital as a variant of social capital, but characteristic of the private, rather than the public sphere (Nowotny, 1981). Emotional capital is generally confined within the bounds of affective relationships of family and friends and encompasses the emotional resources you hand on to those you care about. According to Nowotny, emotional capital constitutes:

Unlike the other forms of capital – cultural, economic, social and symbolic which are invariably theorzsed in ungendered ways – Nowotny saw emotional capital as a resource women have in greater abundance than men. Linked to this gendered perspective, however, Nowotny saw emotional capital as developed in adverse circumstances – in response to barriers rather than possibilities. She asserts that the important question we need to ask about gender differences in capital is ‘why women have been able to accumulate only certain kinds of capital and why they have been equally limited in converting the capital they have gained into certain other types’ (1981:148). So Nowotny recognizes a key difference between emotional and other capitals. Emotional capital gained in the private sector lacks the direct convertibility of other capitals like cultural and economic capital. However, the main consequence of emotional capital's lack of value in the public sector is that it is ‘largely used for further family investments in children and husbands’ (1981:148). To an extent Nowotny could be seen to be endorsing Bourdieu's analysis of women in their capacity as wives and mothers as capital-bearing objects whose value accrues to the primary groups to which they belong. This, however, plunges us straight into the problematic Terry Lovell (2000) raises in relation to Bourdieu's theory. Such an analysis ties in with understandings that position women as objects rather than subjects in their own right; as means rather than ends! Clearly we have moved on considerably since Bourdieu was writing about masculine domination in the 1960s and 70s and Nowotny about the position of women in Austria in the early 1980s. The contemporary labour market provides many examples of ‘women as subjects with capital-accumulating strategies of their own’ (Lovell, 2000:38). However, Lovell also writes about ‘the cultural housekeeping’ undertaken by women of the symbolic, social and cultural capital of their families and their responsibilities for its transmission across generations.

Patricia Allatt has drawn on Nowotny's work in her research into families using the private schooling sector. Her research describes processes in which all the capitals are interwoven in the transfer of privilege – for example, economic capital augmenting social capital, emotional capital compounding cultural capital. She defines emotional capital as ‘emotionally valued assets and skills, love and affection, expenditure of time, attention, care and concern’. Thus, emotional capital can be understood as the stock of emotional resources built up over time within families and which children could draw upon. Allatt lists support, patience and commitment as examples of such emotional resources (Allatt, 1993). Her empirical work described ‘emotional capital’ in the families studied ‘particularly in the way mothers devoted their skills gained from their formal education to the advancement of their children’ (Allatt, 1993:143).

Nowotny also cites examples of women for whom credentialism is first and foremost about furthering their children's educational advancement rather than their own. However, the most intensive feminist exploration of emotional capital in the domestic sphere is Eva Illouz's (1997) conceptualization of domination and capital as both gendered and classed and I refer to her work extensively in my own attempts to theorize emotional capital.

Difficult emotions: trying to understand mothers' emotional involvement in their children's schooling

In the rest of this chapter I try and work with case study data from three research projects in order to make links between emotional involvement, emotional capital and educational achievement. The first project on mothers' involvement in their children's schooling was carried out between 1993 and 1995, a second on black women and their involvement in supplementary schooling was conducted in 1996, and a third on transition to secondary school conducted between 1997 and 2001. I have referred to existing literature which examines mothering in terms of emotional management; a focus on the emotions of other family members. However, accompanying mothers' attempts to manage children's emotional life in the context of schooling in all three research projects were very powerful emotional responses of their own. One of the strongest impressions I have gained from fieldwork has been of the intense emotions, both positive and negative, permeating mothers' accounts of their children's schooling. Across all three research projects one of the few constants was mothers' emotional involvement in their children's education. The women experienced an extensive range of emotions in relation to their children's schooling. Guilt, anxiety and frustration, as well as empathy and encouragement were the primary motifs of mothers' involvement. Whereas within both Allatt's and Nowotny's conceptualization of emotional capital it is primarily positive emotions that generate profits for families, the first analytic problem I faced was that seemingly positive emotions could sometimes have negative repercussions for children, while apparently negative emotional involvement could spur children on academically.

So, while it would seem logical to view only positive attributes as constitutive of emotional capital, there was no simple correlation between positive emotions and emotional capital. Many of the emotions that mothers felt and communicated to children in the course of supporting their education could have both positive and negative efficacy. Cynthia Burack (1994) writes about how ‘the disagreeable passions, and, in particular anger have been problematic for both feminisms and malestream theorizing, especially when they are embodied in women’. I found that anger could communicate to children that the mother had clear expectations of educational performance that she would back up with sanctions and this could result in the child making increased efforts. At other times, it could generate resistance, non-compliance and the break down of communication. Similarly, a mother's anxiety could produce an intense involvement in her child's schooling which communicated to the child the importance of educational success and led to educational progress. It could also result in the child becoming anxious alongside the mother. Some mothers, in particular working-class mothers, gave children positive feedback and support for their educational performance even when class teachers felt the children concerned were either making insufficient effort or were underperforming. Thus the data showed no single pattern of consequences from mothers' emotional involvement. This left me with a conceptual dilemma of how to theorize the relationship between emotional capital, emotional involvement and educational achievement when there appeared to be no clear cut pattern.

However, across differences of class and ethnicity it soon became clear, despite substantial areas of overlap, that emotional involvement was not always a process of transmitting emotional capital from mother to child, although all the mothers were involved in providing children with emotional capital at times. In particular, my research data indicated a very thin dividing line between empathy and over identification when children were experiencing difficulties in school. Many mothers talked poignantly of their concern at children's distress. However, while it was natural for mothers to share in children's feelings of anxiety and unhappiness, if they became too enmeshed in children's distressed feelings they were often left both unable to provide appropriate support and having to deal with a welter of negative feelings of their own. Working-class Maria talked of how difficult it was for her to separate out her extremely distressed feelings about her own educational experience from what was happening currently to Leigh. She felt this enmeshment made it particularly difficult to support Leigh through his own problems:

In the excerpt above, Maria's emotions, in particular her intense anxiety, can be seen to be inhibiting the acquisition of both emotional and cultural capital. She talked of a continuing feud between herself and Leigh over whether spellings should be corrected:

Illouz (1997:56) argues that ‘the ability to distance oneself from one's immediate emotional experience is the prerogative of those who have readily available a range of emotional options, who are not overwhelmed by emotional necessity and intensity, and can therefore approach their own self and emotions with the same detached mode that comes from accumulated emotional competence’. She views such a disposition as classed and in particular a skill associated with the ‘new’ middle classes and their involvement in what Rose (1998) terms ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘the psy industries’. Unsurprisingly, it was primarily working-class women, with negative personal experiences of schooling, who found it extremely hard to generate resources of emotional capital for their child to draw on if they experiencing difficulties in school. Negative emotions, however, did not always result in negative educational repercussions for children.

The efficacy of negative emotions was particularly evident in the project on Black mothers' and supplementary schooling (Reay and Mirza, 1998; Mirza and Reay, 2000) but was a feature of black women's accounts across all three studies. I've tried to bring black feminist theorising together with Bourdieu's concepts in order to make sense of the apparently paradoxical positive returns black mothers seemed to generate from a range of negative responses to mainstream schooling. In ‘The Use of Anger: Women responding to Racism’ Audre Lorde (1984) links the conceptual and political work of confronting racism with the capacity to be angry and to tolerate and use anger. It was this positive efficacy of anger that black mothers often demonstrated in relation to their children's mainstream schooling in the research on black supplementary schooling. Black mothers appeared to have learnt an awareness of enhancing ways of providing children with emotional support through their own experience of dealing with racism.

Below, I draw on the case study of Cassie, a mother in the Black supplementary school study, in order to illustrate this theoretical point:

Cassie goes on to talk about the intense emotional support she has to provide Akin with to help him deal with the problem, and also her own strong feelings of anxiety and anger when she went to discuss the incident with Akin's class teacher:

There are parallels here with Gill Crozier's research into black parents involvement in their children's education where she found parents, and in particular mothers, were engaged in resisting discriminatory practices and thus defending their children, rescuing and comforting them in the face of abuse and humiliation (Crozier, 2002). In In Other Words Bourdieu writes that habitus ‘can also be controlled through the awakening of consciousness and socio-analysis’ (Bourdieu, 1990:116). It seems possible from Cassie's and the accounts of other black mothers that this awakening of consciousness and socio-analysis and the emotional capital it generates can be triggered in response to living in a racist society. Yet, there remain problematic issues around seeming to sanitize oppression and its dirty work, this time in relation to ethnicity and race rather than gender. Certainly, black mothers often articulated powerful, politicized understandings of racial oppression and its potential impact on their children, nearly always accompanied with strategies to support their children emotionally and educationally:

The emotional costs for mothers and children

Annette Lareau's research exemplifies the emotional costs to both child and mother of such intense involvement in children's schooling. She describes the symptoms of stress manifested by children, particularly low attainers, in the white middle-class school in her research study. In outlining the case study of Emily, she points out that Emily's mother, unlike her husband, found it impossible to achieve any emotional distance on Emily's underachievement. Instead she felt ‘she had failed as a mother in her role of supervising, intervening and compensating for the weaknesses in her daughter's education’ (Lareau, 1989:152). The vast majority of men in my research studies also operated in the background. As one father said ‘fathers are involved – but at a distance’. Increasing numbers of men may be appropriating femininity and feminine ways of being in order to increase their mobility in the labour market (Adkins, 2002), but in the domestic sphere there seems to be more fixity around who does the mothering with women still taking responsibility for the majority of emotional involvement and emotional management. The women in my research approximated more to Giddens' (1992:200) ‘emotional under-labourers of modernity’ than to the women in Benjamin and Sullivan's study (1996) who were able to transform their affective role within the family.

While emotional involvement was gendered, however, it did not differ greatly by social class. Yet, as we can see from the example of Maria, working-class women found it more difficult to supply their children with resources of emotional capital than their middle-class counterparts because they were frequently hampered by poverty, negative personal experiences of schooling, insufficient educational knowledge and lack of confidence. We find the same dynamic relationship between the different forms of capital that Allatt writes about in relation to her privileged families but this time operating in a depreciating spiral rather than the one that Allatt describes in which the different forms of capital augment each other (Allatt, 1993). Working-class women were often caught up in a spiral in which low levels of dominant cultural capital, economic capital and social capital all made it relatively difficult to provide their children with the benefits of emotional capital. Class differences also played a part in determining whether mothers could divert their emotional involvement into generating academic profits for their children. Working-class women often lacked the right conditions or context for providing either emotional or dominant cultural capital. That is not the same, however, as saying that working-class mothers did not provide emotional capital through their involvement in schooling; rather it did not go hand in hand with cultural capital to anything like the extent middle-class women's did. Despite disadvantage, there were many examples of working class women's sensitivity, emotional support and encouragement all combining to enhance their children's emotional capital. (See Reay, 2002 for a case study of a white working-class boy whose educational successes in a failing comprehensive school were supported and encouraged by his mother.)

Across class boundaries there was regular marshalling of motivation with mothers encouraging and developing feelings of confidence and enthusiasm in children. Yet, as Maria's account demonstrates, it was far more difficult for the working-class mothers, often dealing with a personal history of academic failure, to generate the same levels of academic confidence and enthusiasm among their children as their middle-class counterparts. I have written about the impact of working-class habitus on mothers' relationships to their children schooling elsewhere (Reay, 1997). History is key here; I suggest that, in common with other forms of capital, there are generational aspects of emotional capital in that reserves are built up in families over time. While working-class Dawn talks in terms of a mother working long hours in the labour market who ‘was never there for her and so I found primary school terrifying’, middle-class Lindsey talks of a mother who always encouraged and helped her with her school work: ‘she was always certain all her daughters could do anything they set their minds to’.

Much of the data demonstrate the costs to mothers of their emotional involvement in their children's schooling. They are using up a lot of time and emotional energy in their support which, as I have demonstrated above, sometimes brings them into conflict rather than harmony with their children. They are often unsupported in this emotional work by male partners (David et al, 1994; Reay, 1995). Involvement in children's schooling generated intense class anxiety, in particular, for some of the middle class mothers who expressed fears that credential inflation and increased marketization within education was making it more difficult than in the past for children from middle-class backgrounds to attain appropriate jobs (Jordan et al, 1994; Brown, 1995). However, there were also costs for children and, in relation to emotional capital, if there are hidden costs for the child then emotional capital can be seen to be depreciated. A recurring theme throughout the elaboration of middle-class mothers' work in relation to schooling is maternal control. As Liliana told me:

Virginia Morrow writes about the possible negative impacts on children's self-esteem of the current climate of increasing academic pressure in education, arguing that as a consequence schooling may enhance children's cultural capital while simultaneously depreciating their emotional capital (Morrow, 1999). In the research projects on mothers' involvement in schooling and secondary school transition there were numerous examples of familial strategies for enhancing cultural capital operating to deplete emotional capital. The middle-class mothers in the sample were far more likely than their working-class counterparts to see academic work in the home as an area which was not open to negotiation. Freedom was perceived to be a consequence of self actualization. One outcome was little apparent freedom in the lives of their school-aged children (Reay, 1998c). Freedom seldom went further than the freedom to choose between dance or drama classes, learning the piano instead of the violin, and socializing on a Friday rather than a Saturday. This lack of freedom can only be made sense of in connection with the notion of future ‘choices’ that educational credentials allow. Here we need to evoke the ideal of the ‘free’ bourgeois subject, a subject that must be intensely regulated as a child in order to achieve these ‘freedoms’ as an adult – a contradiction entirely hidden in discourses of mothering and child-rearing. We can see graphically this curtailment of freedom and the emotional costs for children in the case study of Sally, one of the middle-class children in the transitions project I carried out in collaboration with Helen Lucey (see Lucey and Reay, 2002). Sally's mother, herself extremely anxious about the local secondary school market, decided to enter Sally for four selective school exams without telling her:

Sally actually gets a place in one of the four selective schools, the only one of the sixteen middle-class children in the sample who sat the test to do so. However, despite Sally's success her mother is aware that taking the tests and waiting for the decision has had emotional costs for Sally:

Sally's mother acknowledges that Sally is suffering and is sensitive to this. At the same time her ‘longer view’ allows her to deny the emotional costs to her daughter in the present. It is impossible to look at the relationship between emotional involvement and emotional capital without examining the ways in which mothers conceptualized children's happiness. Here there were key class differences. While all the working-class mothers talked frequently about their child's happiness in the present, apart from a small number of women with children with special educational needs, the middle-class mothers, like Sally's mother, were much more likely to be working with a conceptualization of future happiness. Their concept of happiness was not just based on children's current mental state but was also premised on a projection of what would constitute happiness in adulthood – this was seen to be highly dependent on educational success (Allatt, 1993; Jordan, Redley and James, 1994). But, with its clean, rational focus, the concept of deferred gratification misses out all the emotional messiness of the here and now. Instead it launders the emotional conflicts and costs that are occurring on a range of different levels: the mother-daughter conflict of desires, the anxiety, worry and fear Sally is having to carry and the internal psychic conflict being defended against by both mother and daughter. A year later Sally is having to get up at 6.30 to get to her prestigious secondary school and comments that ‘I have to go so early and get back so late it's really stressful and tiring’. Her mother rationalizes this:

The term ‘trade-off’ is telling here because, through the lens of Bourdieu's concept of capitals, this is exactly what is happening – emotional capital is being forfeited in the pursuit of cultural capital. There is a further irony here. Sally's mother, a psychotherapist, may be marshalling ‘the enhanced emotional competences of the new middle classes to achieve an educational profit’ but lurking behind educational gains are emotional losses.

The problematic of emotional wellbeing

The case study of Sally and her mother suggest that emotional capital cannot be linked conceptually to educational success in any clear-cut way. A number of the mothers seem to pursue educational success at the expense of their child's emotional wellbeing. These women were primarily middle-class but also included a small but growing number of working-class mothers. As a consequence, in some of the mothers' accounts children's educational success carried an emotional cost rather than a profit, enhancing children's cultural capital while depreciating their emotional capital. In contrast, a majority of the working-class women and a few of the middle-class mothers made a distinction between children's emotional wellbeing and educational success, prioritizing the former. This distinction highlights a problem which permeates all of Bourdieu's concepts of capital; they are underpinned by an assumption of middle-class practices and attitudes as normative and within middle-class frames of reference, academic success is given primacy as a goal. The norm was for middle-class mothers to be working extremely hard on their child's educational attainment. Notions of voluntarism rarely entered their accounts. They all expressed intense anxiety about the increasingly competitive nature of the local secondary school market and the consequences in terms of extra educational work with children. This continuous pressure on children to succeed academically needs to be set against the positive impression of highly motivated conscientious pupils that the middle-class children gave in the classroom context. In contrast, we have working-class Lisa who sees her daughter's emotional wellbeing in terms of freedom from academic pressure:

This data presented me with a second feminist conundrum. I was faced by extensive evidence of mainly middle-class mothers beavering away at the sort of practices sanctified and enshrined in government educational policy. There are similar processes at play here to those Lisa Adkins (2002) found in relation to sexuality and gender. In this case the idealization and normalization of the relations of privilege and exclusion are mobilised in relation to class and education. And all too often the flip side to this reification of middle-class practices as normative has been the relegation of working-class mothering to the realms of deficit and pathology. I have struggled with the problematic of how to theorize beyond middle-class norms as an academic researcher; of how to hold on to different ways of being and acting that are equally valid and appropriate for the context in which they are being enacted. I don't feel Bourdieu achieves this but neither does the vast amount of feminisms. Although Illouz (1997:52) is careful not to develop a classed binary of idealisation and deficit, she does argue that middle-class women with the emotional and verbal habitus necessary to achieve dominant definitions of intimacy are far more likely to attain emotional wellbeing for themselves and their families than their working-class counterparts.

My own analytic response has been twofold. Firstly, to argue that, unlike the other capitals, cultural, economic, social and symbolic, the concept of emotional capital disrupts neat links between profit, or what Bourdieu calls increases in capital, and educational success (ie, educational success generates increases in cultural, symbolic, social and often economic capital). The same relationship does not automatically exist between educational success and emotional capital. If emotional capital is to be viewed as inextricably linked to educational success and the acquisition of cultural capital then for substantial numbers of mothers and their children, it would perversely appear to be at the cost of emotional wellbeing. As I have demonstrated through my data, some of the middle-class children's academic success seemed to be at a cost to their emotional wellbeing and my understanding of the processes in play was that having to focus so intensely on academic achievement depreciated emotional capital while simultaneously augmenting cultural capital. In particular, as Walkerdine and Lucey found in their sample of middle-class, ten year old girls (Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989), a number of the high achieving middle-class girls were both very anxious about school work and negative about their own academic ability. Conversely, some mothers, predominantly working-class but including a small number of middle-class mothers, appeared to emphasize children's emotional wellbeing over and above educational achievement. High levels of emotional capital were being generated in the mother-child interaction around schooling but levels of cultural capital remained relatively low.

My second response has been to stress that what constitutes emotional capital seems to vary between different class contexts. Whilst recognizing that sensitive, sympathetic encouragement and support will always have positive efficacy regardless of class differences, in contradistinction to prevailing discourses of parental involvement (DFEE, 1994), what constitutes an optimal response to children's education appears to vary according to the very different class contexts of parents (Reay and Ball, 1997;1998). Positioning in the field is crucial. Middle-class emotional investments in education generate higher, more secure returns for the same level of investment compared to that of working-class parents for whom any level of emotional investment is relatively risky and insecure. Emotional wellbeing is more easily achieved in circumstances of privilege (Wilkinson, 1995). Economic security and high social status enhance individuals' sense of emotional wellbeing while poverty is not an environment in which emotional capital can normally thrive.

Many of the mothers on benefit and income support were emotionally preoccupied with surviving from day to day on inadequate resources. Some of the working-class mothers talked about sometimes getting so depressed about their financial situation they found it impossible to find the emotional space to support their children's education:

A culture of survivalism and the anxieties and tensions it produces are not conducive to the transmission of emotional capital. As Jalil illustrates above, living in poverty constitutes an emotionally draining experience (Oppenheim and Harker, 1996; Smith and Noble, 1995).

The damage of middle-class normativity is most apparent in Maria's account. I have discussed earlier her intense emotional involvement in Leigh's schooling. This inability to separate out emotionally from what was happening in school left both Maria and Leigh feeling ‘failures’:

Maria, extremely anxious about Leigh's academic performance, is locked into a negative interaction with him in which increased pressure from her results in a pattern of withdrawal and refusal where, as Leigh's teacher points out, ‘he is terrified of getting anything wrong so basically has stopped trying’. Maria constantly measures herself against middle-class standards for parental involvement despite lacking middle-class resources. In contrast, Lisa has protected herself and her daughter from such invidious self labelling by consistently refusing ‘shameful recognitions’: what Bev Skeggs defines as ‘recognition of the judgment of others and awareness of social norms’ (Skeggs, 1997:123).

As a consequence, high levels of emotional capital are transmitted by very different practices according to mothers' past and current social class positioning. This class-based variability means that some working-class mothers would appear to be better able to pass on emotional capital to their children when they achieve a degree of disengagement from the educational pressurising common among the middle-class mothers. Intense emotional involvement in children's schooling often produced small returns for the working-class mothers relative to their middle-class counterparts because other key ingredients such as educational knowledge and confidence, material resources and social capital were not available. Emotional capital appears to have a much looser link with social class than Bourdieu's other capitals. It does not necessarily rise in parallel with increased social status and appears to be generated by different practices depending on the class contexts of mothers.

Conclusion

Within contemporary educational markets, class and gender continue to infuse attitudes and actions. As Beverley Skeggs (1997:167) asserts, ‘there are potent signs of the unremitting emotional distress generated by the doubts and insecurities of living class that working-class women endure on a daily basis’. There is also a much more hidden, but equally visceral, emotional distress within middle class families where practices ‘of doing the best for your child’ and ‘deferring gratification’ can result in extensive negative emotional fall-out for middle class children, especially all those ‘good, clever’ girls like Sally. Eva Illouz (1997:61) argues that it is increasingly ‘moral resources, the very sources and resources of the self, that are robbed by an increasingly expanding market that not only undermines the moral resources of the self but also restructures their allocation’. Although Illouz is writing about the labour market, her insights are equally relevant to the new developing markets in education. I suggest that the concept of emotional capital is useful for unravelling some of the confusing class and gender processes embedded in contemporary educational markets. The gendered practices which make up involvement in schooling are exemplified in the complex contradictions of ‘a capital’ which is all about investment in others rather than self – the one capital that is used up in interaction with others and is for the benefit of those others. We can also glimpse how uneven and uneasy processes of individualization have been for women. At the interface of home and school, processes of female individualization are rendered both complex and conflictual as contemporary notions of ‘living your own life’ clash with conventional expectations of ‘being there for others’ (McNay, 1999; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). In particular, the processes through which emotional capital is generated highlight the costs for mothers of always being ‘close-up’, while men maintain their prerogative to remain ‘at a distance’. Emotional capital also reveals some of the class specific intricacies of parental involvement. The concept problematizes prevailing values which uncomplicatedly identify academic success as uniformly positive; an unmitigated ‘good’. It also uncovers a further feminist conundrum in which both middle-class mothers, in their pursuit of educational advantage for their children at the cost of their emotional wellbeing, and working-class mothers, constrained in ways which mitigate against the acquisition of both emotional and cultural capital, are at risk of disadvantaging their children, albeit in differing ways.