The role of the family and the educational system in the trajectories of working-class rural and urban women

Abstract

This article analyzes the influence of institutions such as the family, the educational system, peer groups, the workplace and legislative changes in the life accounts of three working-class rural and urban women. The presentation and interpretation of their three life stories is organized against the backdrop of the history of Spain in the last decades of the twentieth century in order to compare their life trajectories with those of their mothers, and in some cases their grandmothers’. Our main purpose is to recapture the structural frame and social milieu which inform and give meaning to these life accounts in order to transcend their particularity and gain awareness of the role of historical inertias and social and institutional logics. The sociological portrayal of the life trajectories presented in the article takes into account the interrelationships between Bourdieu’s economic capital, cultural capital and social or relational capital.