A Place in Town

Abstract

How do socioeconomic differences take on meaning in our daily interactions? Each morning for a summer I joined nine women in a coffee shop in a small rural town. In this public setting, I observed how women “do” class. During interaction, women use work, family, and leisure-related behaviors, values, and tastes associated with socioeconomic positions in the process of class categorization. No set hierarchy results from this process, however. Rather, what emerges from the Coffee Shop is that doing class involves an ongoing struggle to situate one’s own class category higher, not lower, than the others.