Middle-class Girls Research Articles

Lanka Mahila Samiti, Mary Rutnam and girls’ education

This article engages with the maternal education politics in late colonial Sri Lanka by looking at the implementation of maternal health in the gendered syllabus of middle-class girls’ schools. After...

“It’s the Time You Got to Wear Whatever You Wanted”: Pre-Teen Girls Negotiating Gender, Sexuality and Age through Fashion

Worries about the marketing of fashion to pre-teen girls and the power of fashionable clothes to sexualize these girls, have been on-going for some time. However, there is little research with this age group of girls that explicitly explores the ways in which fashionable clothes are understood and worn by the girls themselves and the impact on their sense of identity. Yet girls are increasingly considered in childhood sociology to be competent social actors able to articulate something of their own interactions and understanding of their social worlds. This study uses focus groups, participant photography and interviews with 32 predominately white, middle-class girls from the South of England, to examine pre-teen girls’ fashion practices to address this gap in knowledge. This article argues that young girls are active and thoughtful in their consumption of dress, aware of the construction of gender norms in responding to aged sexual expectations as they decide what to wear. In considering the context of their constructions of aged, gendered and (a)sexualized identity, girls code-switched between identity forms, actively constituting their subjectivity through clothing.

Ważna rola stowarzyszeń kobiecych w rozwoju edukacji dla kobiet w Czechach

Introduction: The article follows the development of views on girls’ education in the Bohemian lands from its humble beginnings dating back to the middle of the 19th century to allowing university studies for women. Research Aim: The aim of the study is to present the importance of women’s associations for the development of women’s education in the Bohemian lands. The research question was formulated as follows: How has the education of women within women’s associations changed during the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century? Which goals did the individual associations want to achieve with their activities? What was the curriculum of the schools formed by individual associations? Which target groups did the individual associations focus on? To get these questions answered, we compared women’s associations which in the second half of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century focused on women’s education in the Bohemian lands. Method: The study is carried out using historical-pedagogical research, the method of content analysis of documents was used. Normative materials, archival documents and scientific articles were used. Results: The women’s associations pursued various goals: supporting girls and women to be able to play their traditional female roles of wives and mothers as best as they can, helping poor girls and middle-class girls to better position themselves in the labour market, preparing girls for university studies. Conclusions: Women’s associations played a significant role in the feminist movement. In consequence of the indomitable work of these associations, women are now educated in various fields, and we can see them in non-stereotypical professions.

(In)equity in athletics: U.S. antidiscrimination law and the white, middle-class advantage

ABSTRACT Equity in Athletics, Inc., v. Department of Education (2011) questioned whether schools could cut men’s sports for Title IX compliance. The case uniquely wedded racial and gender antidiscrimination precedents to argue Title IX harms men and therefore is unconstitutional. The courts disagreed and validated Title IX’s constitutionality. We argue this case did far more than endorse Title IX. Equity in Athletics showcases how antidiscrimination laws failed to redress the roots of racism, capitalism, and sexism all while ignoring harms done at the intersections. We use Crenshaw’s (1988, 1989, 1991) intersectional legal framework – single-axis, essentialism, and restrictive view of equity – to analyze Equity in Athletics. An intersectional reading of the case showcases three areas of the law – constitutionality tests, quotas, and segregation – that increase the athletic advantages for white, middle-class cis-gender girls and women at the expense and exclusion of lower-income, Girls and Women of Color, and transgender athletes.

A comparative analysis of White and Indigenous girls’ perspectives on sexual violence, toxic masculinity and rape culture

North American feminist scholarship on violence against women (VAW) focuses primarily on gendered-based violence and does not substantively incorporate intersectionality. In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of Canadian Indigenous and White middle-class adolescent girls’ narratives of toxic masculinity, rape culture and sexual violence. I use VAW research, Indigenous feminist theory and girlhood studies to focus on the following: (1) the ‘boys will be boys’ discourse, (2) the feminist critique of the stranger danger discourse and (3) the surveillance of girls. I analyze focus group data with girls (aged 13–19 years). I am interested in how girls both accept and resist the status quo in their day-to-day negotiations with family, peers, schools and public spaces.

American Tomboys, 1850–1915

Baseballs, not bows. Dungarees, not dresses. Many women remember their youthful tomboy pleasures but reject the term for implying that such pleasures were not typical of girls or women. Renée M. Sentilles, a self-described tomboy, was not interested in becoming a boy, but she did want to become a girl who was “strong, fearless, [and] undaunted” (p. ix). An associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, Sentilles was raised in central Missouri during the 1970s and 1980s, experiencing both the women's liberation movement and its backlash. She found that she was not alone in wanting liberation from stale gender constructs. Sentilles's American Tomboys examines how the term developed after the Civil War and became a transitional identity for girls and women who did not fit the gender assumptions of the time. The term was then adopted as a positive and important transitional stage for white, middle-class girls on their way to becoming the all-American girl and the New Woman. Developed during the period of American empire and eugenics, American nationalism, and white supremacy, the American tomboy represented the fierce independence and freedom of women in American western mythology. Sentilles argues that the tomboy, once moored to later domestic expectations, came to describe the idealized New Woman of the early twentieth century.

Girls’ friendships as habitus in an elite, middle-class secondary school in Ireland

ABSTRACTThis study examines gendered and classed friendships in a predominantly middle-class, girls' secondary school in the southern region of the Republic of Ireland. Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus, interactively, with Gidden's (1984) concept of practical consciousness, and Gambetta's (1987) intentional rational choice informed the conceptual framework for the study. Narrative sources yielded data about girls' friendships and peer interactions inside and outside of school. The social class and habitus of each of the girls mediated their friendship formation and friendship choice. Data sources highlight that the middle-class girls' friendships were situated in fluid and multiple cliques; given their hegemonic positionality within the school. Contrastingly, working-class girls' friendships were situated in a contained and single clique, often evidenced by their resistance to the institutional habitus. The ways in which these peer friendships operated as powerful shapers of the girls' actions and identities is discussed. This paper provides examples of the nuanced ways that girls' friendships are developed and maintained based on conformity or resistance to the school norms and expectations of academic success. Importantly, findings evidence the differentiated and instrumental use of friendships among the middle-class and working-class girls in a competitive, elite school setting.

Право на мобильность: траектории перемещения героев детской литературы 1920-х годов

The article presents the analysis of characters’ movement trajectories in the fictional space of Russian children’s literature of 1920s. Gender and social traits of the characters of Soviet children’s literature of the NEP era are correlated to spatial structure of the texts. Characters’ movements are ideologically conditioned and correspond to the propaganda campaign of “uniting city and village”, targeted at the economic and cultural integration of urban and rural population of Russia in 1920s. Male characters are generally more mobile while female characters’ movements are restricted to the rural area where the central accomplishment for them is to enlighten elder women in a family. Children’s literature does not offer examples of girls freely traveling around, notwithstanding the early Soviet propaganda for female emancipation, for the rights of working women, and for including girls in the young pioneer movement. While at the same time, male characters freely travel around the city, suburbs, and countryside. Female mobility is restricted regardless of their social origins (a daughter of a peasant, a daughter of a kulak, a daughter of a priest, etc.). Depiction of spatial emancipation of low- or middle-class girls in Soviet literature is suppressed by the traditional view on women’s freedom of movement, although it was diversely represented in pre-revolutionary children’s literature about daughters of nobility. The analysis showed that among characters of children’s literature of 1920s the city boys are the most mobile while country girls are the least mobile group.

Playing the Festival Queen in Appalachia: Exploring the Influences of Local Culture on Classroom Play

ABSTRACTThis case study using ethnographic methods addresses how teachers shape cultural processes related to girlhoods, and the roles of children’s play in this dynamic. Poststructuralist theory of the carnival was used to analyze gendered, classed power dynamics within two rural Appalachian preschool classrooms influenced by a popular local festival. The findings indicate that the “feminist” approach to cultivating “good” girls for the community—those who could go to college to gain the capital to support men if needed (and thus the turbulent extractive industries)—did not always have “feminist” effects of equalizing gender roles. It masked a status quo that supported the domination by men and young boys over women and girls, including the classroom teachers and girls in this study. In addition, it supported the myth of the meritocracy and the role(s) of extractive economies in its construction, a narrative that continually excluded the working class from middle-class girls’ play spaces. The research suggested that place-based education and teachers’ understanding of classed, raced, and gendered tensions related to local community life are important ways of thinking about carnival in the classroom that may support possibilities for shifting power dynamics in play relations.

American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War by Jennifer Helgren

Reviewed by: American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War by Jennifer Helgren Susan Eckelmann Berghel American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War. By Jennifer Helgren. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. viii + 226 pp. Cloth $59.96. In American Girls and Global Responsibility, Jennifer Helgren tells an empowering history of white, middle-class girls, ages ten to seventeen, as "global ambassadors of world friendship" (83). Building on Sara Fiedston's Raising the World [End Page 463] and Penny Von Eschen's Satchmo Blows Up the World, Helgren convincingly illustrates how American postwar visions promoted teenage girl citizens' "intimate diplomacy" to enhance US global power and advance peaceful relations. The author's ambitious and careful examination of American youth organizations' handbooks, internal memos and meeting records, scrapbooks, pen pal correspondence, and oral histories; Seventeen magazine reprints of girls' essays, stories, plays, and poems; as well as educational textbooks and other pedagogical resources reveals that 1940s and 1950s girl citizens' international friendships and cultural exchanges offered an alternative to traditional notions of maternalism. Broadening the historical periodization of international youth activism, Helgren shows that antimilitarism, antiracism, and decolonization, typically associated with 1960s social movements, already represented important forces in 1950s teenage culture. Chapter 1 traces the shift in American youth culture and democratic education after World War II. Politicians, youth organizers, and educators instructed American girls that international friendship and fighting for equality strengthened American democracy at home as well as abroad. As Americans' racial attitudes changed, postwar girl agencies adopted integration policies and cross-cultural activities. A girl from Nebraska maintained that her generation "could not make the mistakes which our forefathers made" (54). Much of Helgren's narrative focuses on adult-led initiatives. By considering archival repositories beyond teenage magazines and youth organizations like the Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, or YWCA Y-Teens, historians might be rewarded with new discoveries about teenage girls' engagement with political issues and foreign affairs. Scholars looking to include Helgren's work in an undergraduate classroom will find in chapters 2 and 3 effective assignments in engaging students. Both chapters document postwar girls' pen pal correspondence and package projects that supported war-torn nations, sought to reduce conflict, and intended to strengthen America's global image. In chapter 2, Helgren features an archival treasure trove. The six-year correspondence between Elizabeth "Liz" Frank, the Jewish American daughter of a Hollywood producer, and Lore Petzka, a Catholic Viennese girl (whose father served as a former Nazi soldier), represents one of the most illustrative stories of international friendship and reconciliation among postwar girl citizens. Sharing dreams, thoughts, and personal experiences restored a degree of balance and equality to the girls' otherwise uneven friendship. Representing the "Voice of America," adults stressed girls' good manners and flattering descriptions of the American political and economic system. Many girls deviated from these official Cold War scripts when addressing continued racial problems, or worse, exhibited racist attitudes. Girl [End Page 464] agencies' cultural exchanges faced additional obstacles: a lack of resources at times, language barriers, and Cold War anticommunist rebukes. One might wonder just how much information was lost in translation in these written exchanges. Chapter 3 sheds light on American girls' role in reimagining former enemies Japan and Germany. Teenage girls learned to view Japan as "compliant" and "subordinate" in contrast to the United States, the "generous" and "benevolent" superpower (87, 86). Regarding German peers "as victims rather than villains," young Americans were urged to reeducate former Nazi youth (95). Liz Frank's correspondence illustrated her rage toward Hitler, the international symbol of evil, but empathy toward her friend Lore. American youth organizations urged girls to export American consumer values among foreign peers by sharing doll collections, fiction, and recipes. In chapter 4, Helgren asserts that American girls' international involvement pursued two important American Cold War objectives by "showcasing the American good life" and stabilizing foreign markets for American goods. Some peers abroad occasionally commented on American girls' "shallowness." A British girl explained that youth her age "thought for themselves and worked for themselves, whereas American girls had everything done for...

Between Girls: Lateral Discipline in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom

Henry Handel Richardson’s representation of lateral discipline in her 1910 novel, The Getting of Wisdom, is significant for the way in which it makes visible the reorienting of disciplinary structures that took place as the private, domestic tuition of middle-class girls gave way to institutional, collective schooling in the last third of the nineteenth century. Focusing on this novel, which fictionalizes the author's own experience of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College from 1883 to 1887, this article considers her representation of girls as not just objects but agents of disciplinary action. I argue that in boarding school, novels such as Richardson’s discipline functions laterally, between peers, in ways that often reiterate the ‘vertical’ authority of parents and teachers but also contest it, moving into the space created by its failures or absences. Reading these novels thus requires a reorientation of our own theoretical models for thinking about discipline, in particular, the Foucauldian panopticon and his conception of the segmented space of the school, which do not allow for the kinds of sideways glances that proliferate across Richardson’s novel. The Getting of Wisdom thus provides the opportunity to theorize anew the role played by the peer group in shaping girls into social subjects, a role that was a cause for both celebration and concern by commentators of the time.

"What My Generation Makes of America": American Youth Citizenship, Civil Rights Allies, and 1960s Black Freedom Struggle

This article engages questions about the relationship between charismatic leadership and youth action, conceptions of age and competence, childhood pastimes and adult concerns, and private acts and public correspondence. An analysis of children's typed and handwritten letters, notes, poetry, and school pamphlets mailed to public leaders offers a new understanding of 1960s youth protests, rights discourses, and grassroots action. Building on Lori Rotskoff's concept of postage power, this article understands child and teenager letter correspondence with 1960s public leaders as a citizenship practice. By focusing on the world of predominantly, but not exclusively, white, middle-class girls and boys, I argue that such written communication not only acted as a key strategy for children's political participation, but also allowed young people to define such action using lenses uniquely relevant to them as children and teenagers. Bake sales and monetary charity made their citizenship practices visible. School assignments and creative productions provided minors with a medium to assert their moral competence. Markers of childhood, such as jelly beans and The Wizard of Oz, allowed young people to articulate their critical understanding of Jim Crow practices and the violation of constitutional statutes without relinquishing childhood innocence or abandoning youth-based customs.

Ambivalent aspirationalism in millennial postfeminist culture on Gossip Girl

ABSTRACTThe teen television show Gossip Girl positions classed subjectivities as based on an imagined authentic moral value system as opposed to economic reality, with troubling outcomes for middle-class girls. By combining the postfeminist myths of individuality, choice, and success with capitalist ideology, the show preserves a hierarchy in which social climbing is presented as dangerous to only girls. Gossip Girl suggests that middle-class girls' primary value is in their sexual purity, a notion that works to exacerbate gendered economic instability by positioning girls, according to heteronormative dictates, as dependent on men for economic and moral protection.

Staging Japanese Femininity: Cross-cultural Dressing in Australian Photography

The popularity of Japanese inspired dress in portrait photographs of middle-class Australian women and girls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers new insight into cross-cultural dressing and its links to identity. Rather than simply mirroring Orientalist fantasies of the distant and exotic East, these photographs indicate how Anglo-Australian women’s material cultural practices spoke to their own experiences of modernity and their impressions of Japanese femininity. Through their production and consumption of Japanese inspired fashion, musical theatre, decorative arts and travel photographs, these women were encouraged to respond to their admiration of Japanese femininity with their own embodied performances for the camera. Photographs of Australian women and girls in kimonos also illuminate the complexity of Australia’s cultural engagement with Japan in the era of the racially exclusive “White Australia” policy and Japanese imperialist incursions in the Asia-Pacific region. In staging their perceptions of Japanese femininity at home and in the photographer’s studio, Australian women also reconciled a series of conflicting ideals associated with dress reform, women’s suffrage and the “new woman.”

Working-class girls and child-centred pedagogy: what are the implications for developing socially just pedagogy?

Existing international research suggests that widespread performative pedagogy has contributed to producing educational inequalities for ‘disadvantaged’ learners. There have also been calls for alternative pedagogies, which can be characterised as child-centred. This paper analyses pupils’ hierarchical positioning in a contemporary, mixed socio-economic, child-centred classroom using Bernstein’s theory of competence pedagogy and the concept of the ideal pupil. The ideal pupil’s central characteristics were perceived ‘intelligence’ and ‘good humour’, which were closely associated with middle-class boys. Middle-class and working-class girls were positioned against a female ideal pupil, who would take on a supporting role by creating a facilitating environment for boys’ learning. While middle-class girls were moderately successful in approximating these characteristics, working-class girls were positioned at the bottom of the class hierarchy. These findings have implications for these pupils’ self-perceptions, and raise questions about the implications of child-centred pedagogy for social justice.

Public and Private Spaces: Sport and the Construction of Middle Class Femininity in Sydney Independent Girls’ Schools 1880-1922

This article documents the history of sport in independent girls’ schools in Sydney, Australia, from the introduction of compulsory education in 1880 until the formation of the Girls Secondary School Sports Union in 1922 to organize interschool sporting connections. While there have been many vigorous studies that have followed the history of sport in Australian independent boys’ schools, this has not been replicated in the role of sport in Australian independent girls’ schools. The Australian independent girls’ school sector, however, accounts for a significant portion of the total student population. This article demonstrates that sport was significant in Australian independent girls’ schools and became dominant to the education of middle class girls. Modeled after the English Public Schools that had embraced the educational ideology of ‘athleticism’, Australian girls’ independent schools also reinforced the ideology that sport was a part of a well-rounded education. By the early 1920s sport was part of the independent girls’ schools extracurricular accomplishments and the sporting landscape became a ‘public space’ where middle-class femininity was constructed.

The Working and Middle Class Disparities in Sports Participation among Girls Students of Hyderabad Disdtrict

The present study is designed to examine social class differences in sport participations among girl students of Hyderabad District. It is assumed that working class girls will have greater participation in college competitive sports than the middle class girls do. A total of 120 participants were randomly selected from different colleges of Hyderabad District Sindh, consisting of sport participants and non-participants of college-girl students. The instruments that have been applied in the present study are personal information questionnaire, self-esteem questionnaire, adjective checklist, attitude towards out-door games and college principal information questionnaire. Different statistical procedures (e.g., reliability Coefficient, test, etc,) were applied to analyze the data by using Statistical package for Social Science (SPSS) The main objective of this study was to investigate the social class difference in the sport participants among female students in Hyderabad District Sindh, to provide mass awareness of sports and healthful activities to them and focus the attention of female students of Hyderabad District towards physical education and sports. The main colleges of the Hyderabad District were selected for the present study. The focus of the study was to undertake research on middle and working class participants. In this context other related factors such as social status, time spent by female students in sports, their problems like ethnic, societal and parental attitudes towards female sports are identified. The basic purpose of the study was also to survey sports facilities available in girls’ college, realizing the social class belongingness of sports participants, to measure self-esteem and self-adequacy of the female college students and to measure the attitude of people towards female sports. It also explores dominant factor that play a vital role in the development of attitudes of the youth that helped significantly in promoting the process of national integration. In view of the changing trends in respect of modernizing physical education, the present study is an attempt to 'divert the attention of the society towards female participation in sports and to give physical education a professional meaning for the integration and total development of girl’s personality; and to confirm whether female participants having social class difference have significant effect on their perception and self-esteem scores. Many parents feel that the impact of sports activities would negatively affect their body features. In our tradition bound society, number of widely held beliefs, though significantly inaccurate, this may be one of the-reasons for parents to discourage their daughters to participate in s ports. Due to in adequate knowledge of physical education and sports, it is believed that girls participation in competitive sports is physically dangerous, as they may eventually lose their femininity and harm delicate female reproductive system. This study has also dealt with to analyze the perceptions of female participants about being more affectionate, smart, physicality and socially strong and, adjustable in tackling the affairs of the society in terms of understanding, predicting, communicating and controlling individuals. Further, to investigate whether female sport participants. have better capacity to cope up with the pressure of competition, crowd and its behavior, importance of winning, influence of coach, parents, friends, and observe the societal attitude 'with confidence to make them responsible citizens.

Becoming a Woman: self-fashioning and emotion in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

This article explores the self-fashioning of a bourgeois woman in nineteenth-century France by analysing Geneviève Laurent-Pichat's letters to her father. Geneviève's illegitimacy compounded the emotional difficulties of her path to womanhood, but it also illuminates the processes by which bourgeois girls learned emotional self-management and shaped a self that fitted their assigned social position. Geneviève's letters also enable a reassessment of the role of letter-writing in women's self-fashioning. Engaging in family correspondence was central to the upbringing of middle-class girls, but its protocols reinforced the norms of conventional femininity. Family correspondence thus directed opportunities to explore and constitute the self into acceptable channels, creating a paradoxical feminine self whose fulfilment lay in self-denial.

Gender and high school chemistry: student perceptions on achievement in a selective setting

This paper reports on research undertaken in a middle-class Australian school. The focus of the research was on the relationship between gender and students’ engagement with high school chemistry. Achievement data from many OECD countries suggest that middle-class girls are achieving equally as well as, if not better than, boys in many subjects. This has led to claims that the ‘girls and science’ agenda is no longer necessary, and indeed may have been detrimental to boys’ achievements in science subjects. The data collected from students at this site indicate that at this school this agenda is far from a completed one. These data indicate that whilst girls’ achievement levels are comparable with those of the boys, for many students chemistry is still perceived as a masculine subject. Hence, the girls in the chemistry classrooms at this school construct themselves, and are constructed, as outsiders in the subject.

The ‘games playing ethos’ in Australian Independent Girls' Schools: from origins to the National Curriculum

This paper traces the history of sport in Australian Independent Girls' Schools (IGS) from its origins until the proposed introduction of the National Curriculum in 2014. In particular, the paper focuses on the role played by the Girls' Secondary School Sports Union and its successor the Independent Girls' School Sport Association to coordinate inter-school sporting exchanges. While there have been a number of studies that have documented the history of sport in Australian Independent Boys' Schools, there has been little equivalent scholarly interest in the role of sport in Australian IGS. This paper demonstrates that sport loomed large in IGS and became central to the education of middle-class girls in Australia. Modelled after the English Public Schools that had adopted the educational ideology of the ‘games playing ethos’, Australian IGS used sport to create a female public space.