Abstract
This article examines British poet Stevie Smith's adoption of a childlike persona in her 1960's performances in the context of Victorian and modernist discourses of childhood. I argue that Smith made use of these discourses’ notion of childhood as a period of freedom in order to critique traditional notions of femininity, beginning in her poetry of the 1930's, continuing in her personal fashion text in the 1950's, and concluding in her performances of the 1960's. Through her “act” of childhood, Smith both reinserted the marginal areas of a woman's life and questioned the demarcations of femininity.
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