Gender and Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 150

performativity for her analysis of the investments her respondents made in femininity.
But in the context of British culture where whiteness and masculinity are valued
forms of cultural capital, the young women she investigates had only a paucity of
capital endowments with which to trade. They made investments in female identity
as nursery carers, but their feminine capital could only be converted into limited
economic gains through a declining labour market. Heterosexual marriage was one
of the only other avenues for trading their scant amounts of capital. Providing a
feminine appearance was a means towards securing a higher exchange rate on the
marriage market - but perhaps more significantly, performing femininity offered
a means through which to access what Skeggs argues has historically been denied
working-class women: respectability.
Skeggs argues that by the nineteenth century ideal femininity had become
established as white and middle-class. Femininity was regarded as, 'the property
of middle-class women who could prove themselves to be respectable through their
appearance and conduct' (Skeggs 1997, 99). Essentially passive, femininity came
to be equated with characteristics 'of ease, restraint, calm and luxurious decoration'
(ibid.). Working-class women, on the other hand, were defined negatively as
physically robust against the genteel fragility of middle-class women. For Skeggs
contemporary constructions of working-class femininity are framed by these
historical antecedents: working-class women continue to be systematically denied
access to respectability. For Skeggs's subjects therefore, investments in femininity
offer a means to provide a distance from the pejorative associations of working-
class femininity as devalued and sexually promiscuous. The anxious desire to obtain
female respectability frames many of their life decisions, particularly in relation to
appearance, demeanour and the interior decoration of their homes.
Bourdieu himself acknowledges that women play the chief role in their families
by transforming economic capital into symbolic capital through their consumption
of cultural taste - yet women's choices only 'count' in class terms in relation to their
families. Hence the blindness in Distinction (1986) to the gendered inflections of
taste that women might exercise as subjects in their own right. Skeggs's formulation
of feminine cultural capital counters the omissions in Bourdieu's schema. Firstly
her work has a vested feminist interest in singularly theorising women's movements
through the social field; and secondly, her work offers a historical means of
understanding why both middle- and working-class women make investments in
femininity as a form of capital - and by extension, why the cultivation of feminine
taste acts as a capital investment. Using the idea that gendered taste generates forms
of cultural capital, the following section turns to the particular investments the men
and women of my study made in flowers and floristry. Proximity to class, I argue,
had a direct bearing on how gendered investments were manifest.
Floristry is defined by Scott-James as 'the intensive cultivation of flowers to
achieve a perfect bloom' (Scott-James 1981, 80). Imported originally from French
and Flemish artisan refugees - in particular weavers, flower breeding began to appeal
to cottage gardeners as early as the seventeenth century in Britain. Floristry was the
ideal hobby for the cottage gardener whose garden would typically have been small,
for it required time as opposed to space. The cottage weaver, who worked at home at
his loom, had access to his prized plants and could therefore afford them the special