Tidy House

by Carolyn Steedman

This is an account of three working class eight-year-old girls writing a story.

They wrote the story during one week in the summer term of a social priority school classroom. For one day during this week a friend, a lecturer from a local training college who was in the process of collecting material for a course on child language, had a tape recorder running continuously on the table where the three girls were working.

There are some four hours of recorded conversation on these tapes, conversation between us and the children, between the children themselves, to accompany the other material. There is a hum of voices in the background, a boy bends down to sing into the microphone, a bell rings, someone comes to the door, there is a class lesson about triangles, a piaster is put on a bleeding finger by one of the three girls, all is suddenly lost in clatter as the rest of the class go out to play.

Taping under these conditions, some conversation has been lost. But where we talked to the three girls, and where they, infrequently, only from necessity, talked to each other about their work, there is a remarkable clarity.

Genres: Feminism

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999.

Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989.

In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.