‘Proud to call ourselves home’ – Gemma June Howell reviews Maya Jordan’s ‘Resistance Tales of a Working-class Woman’.

Maya Jordan’s Chopsy: The Resistance Tales of a Working-class Woman isn’t a sentimental tale of hardship. Instead, it refuses to accept the cultural narrative that working-class lives are only worth noticing when they can be consumed as cautionary tales. Jordan is frank about deprivation, but she doesn’t write for a mainstream appetite for poverty porn; the ‘lapping up of trauma like it’s jam.’ Instead, Chopsy is a reclamation: warm, defiant, funny, and full of hard-won dignity.

Jordan writes out of council-estate life shaped by money rows and daily negotiations with scarcity. It is here that class is not presented as backdrop but as a pressure system – a choreography of survival that teaches girls to be ‘small and tight and invisible.’ Yet the book’s pulse is resistance, and Jordan’s ‘chopsy’ stance is both ethical and embodied. She calls herself ‘a moral absolutist with an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong; injustice burned my skin. Maybe this is where being chopsy was born.’ This passage is at the memoir’s heart: not self-pitying, not detached, but morally and politically awake. Her anger isn’t performative, it’s principled – what Alice Walker might call an ‘outrageous, audacious, courageous’ reclamation.

If class teaches self-erasure, culture offers alternative scripts. Jordan’s early influences of female ‘sass’ were often found outside the narrow domestic model of a 1960s housewife. Jordan notes the stark contrast between 1950s Hollywood glamour and 1970s Britain: two worlds shaped by gender expectations, but only one offering the potential for expansiveness and empowerment, despite it being so far removed from her reality.

This book is vivid on the material details of poverty. She recalls the humiliation of holey school shoes, of being known as the hand-me down ‘bag’ girl, of being hungry, and the constant improvisations that become second nature: making do, filling the gaps, and stretching what little you have. Jordan describes resilience and resourcefulness with precision, and I found myself recognising most of it; especially the domestic hacks, missed opportunities and segregation of being the ‘povo’ kid in school. That recognition is part of what makes Chopsy so affecting. It doesn’t simply describe working-class life; it summons the reader’s own memories.

School is another arena where class is not just an idea but a daily reckoning: ‘The school was in an affluent area, and it was the 1980s – kids in towelling Lacoste and Benetton jumpers. Even the carrier bag you carried your crap in had to have a label.’ Jordan’s humorously observed phrasing captures the cruelty of the consumer era, signalling the importance of cultural capital in a burgeoning neoliberal Britain. And this is a key theme which runs throughout: the permanent sense of never being good enough, never dressed right, never polished enough, never safe from exposure.

Then there is the sexual harassment. How sexism polices women into objectification and how schools and workplaces become extensions of entitlement: ‘hands up skirts,’ ‘hands down tops’ and being cornered on the football field by schoolboys; the ‘groping hands’ of the chip-shop boss and offers of cash to undress; the coercive humiliations of workplaces where men weaponize their authority, making female employees sit on their laps in exchange for pay packets. One of the memoir’s most devastating observations comes from Jordan’s first job at Payless, where a manager demands that she wear a ‘skin-tight’ top ‘two sizes too small’ and when she refuses, she is hounded: ‘It was a bizarre situation to be shamed as being too ugly to be sexually harassed.’

Yet Jordan does not wallow in victimhood, writing that she ‘wore [her] bravery with pride,’ and the memoir ultimately honours that arc with the long, hard-won battle from invisibility to self-determination. Chopsy insists that working-class women are not simply acted upon – we are thinkers, makers, resisters, moral witnesses and we have agency. There is so much to unpack, as Jordan’s life demonstrates, but the book’s gift is that it offers clarity about what harms working-class women, what sustains them, and what it costs to persevere. 

Whatever your background, I’d urge you to read Chopsy. Not just because it universalises lived experience, but because it refuses reduction. Jordan shows that to be a working-class woman is not merely to lack money; it is to live inside a set of institutional forces and cultural norms that shape your body, choices, safety, confidence and ambitions. With this memoir, she writes herself back into the story with a pride that comes from naming a life lived in survival mode, without apologising for it.

Chopsy by Maya Jordan is available from September Publishing.