Meanings of Class and Social Mobility: the Public and Private Lives of Female Civil Servants

Abstract

This often cited, but rarely followed suggestion to consider history, biography and society together is the methodological key to this small scale study of women’s social mobility. I shall suggest that social position and social mobility can usefully be seen as components of the biography of the individual; a biography constructed within the socio-economic constraints of the particular historical period within which the life-cycle is located. The study is a synthesis, therefore, of ‘humanistic’ sociology, social history and oral life-histories. It reflects the interactionist account of personality and the individual construction of reality, but places these ‘constructions’ within historical context.¹ Since this is not how social mobility is usually studied, some explanation for this theoretical and methodological deviance is required.

Every individual lives from one generation to the next in some society; he lives out a biography and he lives it out within some historical sequence (C. Wright Mills, 1959, p. 6).