THe Last Debutante

One of the first places I visited in London was Kensington Palace. I loved being able to tell my friends back home that I had gone to class, gone shopping, and taken a tour of a palace. Since visiting a home of royalty is an everyday part of life here in London! At the palace, they were featuring an exhibit called The Last Debutante. It was about life in the upper middle class during the fifties and sixties. The museum had dresses, makeup, pictures, and other memorabilia from the day. It even had a room to teach the visitor how to curtsy and walk with correct posture! The young men and women featured in the exhibit described a life of posh parties, some of which even the queen attended. This was the first glimpse I got of the apparent class system in England.
During our BLC lecture about the class system, the speaker said that it was difficult to move up in the social structure already in place in this country. This type of lifestyle is opposite from how we are raised in the US, in which we are told from a very young age that we can achieve anything we put our mind to. In England, a person normally stays in the social class that they are born into. Our first speaker made the comment that no matter how hard she works, she knows that she can never be queen.
In the video we watched in class "Mrs. Minerva", one of the purposes for making the movie was to show a dissolving class system in England. In the movie, Mrs. Minerva socialized, and even became a relative of an upper class woman. This theme was meant to cause Americans to sympathize with the British and see that the class system is not as prominent as once thought.
While the English still claim that there is a distinct class system, I have yet to encounter it in my experiences in London so far. Other than not being able to meet the Queen, my middle to lower class standing has not had much of an effect on my stay.