Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2021
‘I think the world is my oyster. I’m of the mindset that I can do whatever I want if I set my mind to it. No I’m not worried at all [about the future].’
(Celia, 27, middle-class, white, HR Manager, London, December 2014, emphasis added)‘I am worried [about the future] to a certain extent, but I think everybody is. I’m anxious about where I am going to be in ten years’ time and how that's going to affect things in the long term. Am I going to be able to buy a house? Or will I be renting forever? And also, there's the general worries: will we be with the person that we want, will we have a family, will we feel secure in this scary world?’
(Rose, 26, middle-class, white, university student, Brighton, May 2015, emphasis added)‘Sometimes I just sit there thinking, what does the future hold for me? What am I going to do with my life? I can't see it. It's bad now, I’m sure it's going to get a lot worse in years to come. Everybody wants a good future, but I just don't know if it's possible.’
(Scarlett, 23, working-class, white, receiving Income Support, Leeds, August 2014, emphasis added)While previous chapters have focused on how austerity is made present through the lived experiences of women, this chapter pays particular attention to how women's future imaginaries are felt in the present. It explores how austerity affects these imaginaries and asks which types of futures have women begun to imagine in the context of austerity? Women's future imaginings are multiple and, as this chapter shows, are affected particularly by class positioning. This is because, Rebecca Coleman (2014a, 2014b) notes, inequality and power are produced and reinforced through women's different kinds of imagined and real futures.
Economic, political, technological and social changes, which began in the 1970s and intensified in the following decades, delivered new and different expectations for the future. Many authors (Sennett, 1998; Bauman, 2005; Ehrenreich, 2005) have explored how such changes have resulted in a situation where people no longer work with the possibility of long-term planning, and without consideration for the directed construction of a future.
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