Parents, Partners, and Professions: Reproduction and Mobility in a Cohort of College Women

This article draws on data from a twelve-year longitudinal qualitative interview study of forty-five white women who started college in 2004 at a public flagship university in the American Midwest. We compare the class position of women's parents (captured when women began college) to women's own adult class position at age 30. Despite substantial downward mobility and modest upward mobility, we find that white women's social class was relatively sticky; that is, even downwardly mobile white women from privileged families did not fall far, while upwardly mobile white women from less privileged families were blocked from the top of the class structure. We develop the concept of "class projects," or multigenerational approaches to obtaining desired and imaginable economic circumstances, to explain patterns of intergenerational mobility in our data. We document three distinct class projects-gender complementarity, professional partnership, and self-reliance. Women experienced better outcomes when they engaged in a project that was a fit with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security.