Chapter 4 turns to the Institute of Community Studies, the Bethnal Green-based social research organization where Young and his colleague Peter Willmott published probably their best-known work, the 1957 Family and Kinship in East London. This and other Institute of Community Studies publications, such as Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, suggested that the family and extended family were crucial sources of mutual aid and social support for working-class communities, and that this aspect of working-class life had been overlooked by middle-class policy makers and urban planners who thought in terms of a more isolated and conventionally middle-class ‘nuclear’ family of parents and young children. This chapter shows that while Young and his colleagues did detect strong kinship networks in the communities they studied, their emphasis on the extended family was informed by a variety of contemporary developments in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and by a political project to challenge the Labour Party’s emphasis on male labour and suggest that the extended family could provide an alternative to the workplace as a site of social solidarity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of women in Young’s dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, which argues that Young idealized women, and the relationships between them, for being less defined by work and professional status.
Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self