1. Introduction

This chapter lays the ground covered in the collection, which brings together autoethnographic accounts by a diverse group of three generations of women from predominantly working-class backgrounds, to explore the production of the classed, gendered and racialised subject. It poses the question of whether socially mobile clever girls from relatively modest backgrounds still experience the kind of tensions documented by contributors to Liz Heron’s Truth, Dare or Promise? Girls Growing Up in the Fifties. If so, how, do they inhabit a ‘psychic economy’ of class, gender and ethnicity and the ways these intersect in complex ways that position the individual in a ‘liminal space’? When and where do such tensions manifest themselves, how do we manage those moments and at what cost? This chapter identifies the landscape inhabited by contributors who are the children of the Welfare State/Butler’s 1944 Education Act, Thatcher/Blair’s children and Cameron/May/Johnson’s post-EU referendum/Trump-era children at another moment of radical change; explains the genesis, rationale and structure of the book; and introduces the contributors and their stories.