Middle-class Girls Research Articles

The “Black Girl Turn” in Research on Gender, Race, and Science Education: Toward Exploring and Understanding the Early Experiences of Black Females in Science, a Literature Review

For the past 40 years, research studies have largely focused on sex equity issues. However, within the last few years, gender equity issues have become a hotly debated area of research. One may contend that sex is biologically determined maleness and femaleness; whereas, gender is influenced by cultural, social, and historical factors. Although, there has been much emphasis on the unfair treatment or exclusion of girls from science, the focus was mainly on White, middle class girls with little focus placed on Black girls. Thus, this has fueled the debate for the promotion of the “Black Girl Turn” in research on gender, race, and science education, as over the centuries Blacks and girls have been denied their turn in science due to cultural and historical–biological reasons. This literature review concludes with a call for more student-based inquiry approaches that can explore and seek to understand Black females’ experiences in science.

Λόγοι για την εκπαίδευση στα ελληνικά γυναικεία περιοδικά του οθωμανικού χώρου (19ος αι.-1906): Η γυναικεία λαϊκή εκπαίδευση

Katerina Dalakoura, Discourses on education in the Ottoman Greek women’s journals (19th c.-1906): the emergence of female popular education The paper is concerned with the connection between women’s publishing culture and education within the Orthodox/Greek communities (Rum Millet) of the Ottoman Empire, during the 19th century and until the 1908 Constitutional Reform. More specifically, the paper investigates how women’s discourses in periodicals negotiated women’s right to education, focusing on the changing content of ‘female popular education’, while at the same time presenting the argumentation and the philosophical traditions that underlied education and popular education claims. The study is based on three Greek women’s journals published in Istanbul, namely Kypseli (1845), Eurydice (1870-1873) and Bosporis (1899-1906) – the only ones edited by women and addressed exclusively or mostly to female readership within the entire Ottoman Empire during the period under study. The paper argues that although middle-class girls’ education was the apparent focus of the education-related debate in the journals, women’s popular education also featured in the agenda, spotlighting the dominant education discourses as highly progressive –almost radical– for the era until the 1870s. From this point in time onwards, women’s discourses appeared to be limited to just improving education quality, without venturing beyond what had up to then been achieved.

Body talk: students’ identity construction while discussing a socioscientific issue

Vision II school science is often stated to be a democratic and inclusive form of science education. But what characterizes the subject who fits into the Vision II school science? Who is the desirable student and who is constructed as ill-fitting? This article explores discourses that structure the Vision II science classroom, and how different students construct their identities inside these discourses. In the article we consider school science as an order of discourses which restricts and enables what is possible to think and say and what subject-positions those are available and non-available. The results show that students’ talk about a SSI about body and health is constituted by several discourses. We have analyzed how school science discourse, body discourse and general school discourse are structuring the discussions. But these discourses are used in different ways depending on how the students construct their identities in relation to available subject positions, which are dependent on how students at the same time are “doing” gender and social class. As an example, middle class girls show resistance against SSI-work since the practice is threatening their identity as “successful students”. This article uses a sociopolitical perspective in its discussions on inclusion and exclusion in the practice of Vision II. It raises critical issues about the inherited complexity of SSI with meetings and/or collisions between discourses. Even if the empirical results from this qualitative study are situated in specific cultural contexts, they contribute with new questions to ask concerning SSI and Vision II school science.

“The Piano Player at the Picture Show”: Virgie Rainey and Navigating High and Low in The Golden Apples

JASON DUPUY River Parishes Community College “The Piano Player at the Picture Show”: Virgie Rainey and Navigating High and Low in The Golden Apples IN AN OFT-CITED PASSAGE FROM HER BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY,ONEWRITER’S Beginnings (1984), Eudora Welty reminisces about watching movies during her youth: “All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go without chaperone in the long summer afternoons” (880). This passage suggests Welty’s clear interest in film, and some scholarship has attempted to make a substantive connection between film and Welty’s writing. In the first essay to discuss Welty’s relationship to film in detail, Leslie A. Kaplansky suggests, The presence of these film allusions in her stories attests to Welty’s engaged involvement with film culture, to be sure. But I would argue that her work reveals a formal association with film as well—one that centers on her use of various cinematic techniques that, learned from her experience as a moviegoer, afforded Welty new ways of experiencing “stories” and, in turn, inspired new ways of writing them. (580) As a specific example, Kaplansky writes that “one of Welty’s most pronounced and characteristic manipulations of rhythm is her verbal equivalent of filmic slow-motion—a specific cinematic rhythm used to heighten a profound moment of (subjective) revelation” (583). The problemwithKaplansky’sformulationisthatthereisnothinginherently cinematic about slow motion, and there’s no reason that slow motion in film has to be used in the way that Kaplansky describes. Any examples of Welty’s languid writing style could be attributable to other sources. Her use of slow motion might be like a movie’s, but it’s also like a lot of other things. Taking a similar cue, Dina Smith, discussing The Golden Apples (1949), says, “We enter into Morgana and the lives of its former citizens through a myriad of voices and eyes, or through a series of narrative ‘reframings.’ In this way the text operates like a camera that moves about a space, repositioning its gaze” (84). Again, there is nothing 518 Jason Dupuy inherently camera-like in any type of floating, changing narrative point of view. Both of these critics make worthwhile observations about Welty’s work, but they also engage in a type of criticism that allows almost anything to be labeled “cinematic.” A more useful approach to Welty and film is the one taken by David McWhirter in “Eudora Welty Goes to the Movies,” an essay arguing that the Bijou’s showing of “Orientalist” movies such as The Sheik (1921), with Rudolph Valentino, allows not only for examples of multiculturalism in the seemingly closed-off world of Morgana but also sustains “an ambivalent function, providing both an escape from and a reinforcement of the conventional southern scripts of female sexuality that surround and restrict Morgana’s white middle-class and movie-going girls” (78). These movies “also provided a means for the Mississippi middle-class girls to project themselves into the world, a language that helped them not only to give names to their desire, but to see themselves and be seen, differently, out there, and ‘terribly recognizable’” (83). Virgie Rainey, one of the central characters of The Golden Apples, plays piano at the Bijou, the local movie theater, and is frequently associated with silent film stars by the book’s narration and characters. The fact that Virgie makes her living playing piano in the Bijou is significant, even more so since Virgie makes one of her first appearances in a scene that calls specific attention both to movies and to the act of movie-making. In fact, we often see her, both implicitly and explicitly, treated as a silent movie star. Through Virgie’s experience with film, The Golden Apples explores the high/low divide between art and mass culture in showing the ways that people can use mass culture as a framework to help them make sense of the world around them.1 Virgie, in Miss Eckhart’s estimation, also reaches a high level of technical proficiency at playing classical music. But...

Assessing a Measure of Femininity Ideology for Low-Income, Latina Adolescent Girls

The purpose of the study presented here was to examine whether a measure of femininity ideology, normed on largely white, middle-class samples of adolescent girls, could be verified among a sample of low-income Latina adolescents. The results revealed that the previously identified factor structure could not be confirmed for this sample, which brings the scales’ validity for use with low-income, Latina samples into question. These findings suggest that minority girls may interpret femininity ideologies differently than do white, middle-class girls and underscore the importance of examining the validity of measurement tools for use with diverse populations. They emphasize that improving measurement for diverse populations is needed to develop culturally responsive and relevant intervention strategies.

Basic Ethnography at the Barricades

We did not see them growing up. We did not think these jaded middle-class boys and girls would one day be resilient and hold their ground. We did not realize that they would be brave, supremely articulate, and driven by aspirations beyond our dreams. The whole thing started with the desperate act of self-immolation by a young Tunisian man. His death sparked a wave of rage against poverty, social exclusion, and corruption. Almost overnight, young men and women created spaces in squares, streets, and alleys where we could imagine new Arab countries. Enraged yet nonviolent, they used technology and the vocabulary of democracy to connect and mobilize ordinary Arab citizens of all walks of life and capture the attention of the world. In Egypt, Tahrir Square became the epicenter of the people's demands for bread, dignity, and social justice. Without leaders or a timetable, but with unconditional demands for immediate change, online activists provided us with physical and social grounds to imagine a new country. We all brought something to the square: blood, medicines, bandages, food, water, blankets, generators, diapers, mobile-phone chargers, garbage bags, wipes, and our own personal notes to the regime (and the world) written in bold letters. Mine just said: “Leave.”

Texts about Girls, for Girls and by Girls

Perhaps it is more obvious in the present day, surrounded as we are by cell phones and other electronic devices transmitting information and messages in images and words instantaneously, but for over a hundred years the lives of girls—middle class girls in particular—have been mediated to a large extent by the plethora of texts that surround them. Th ese texts are largely fi ctional narratives in diff erent formats such as novels, magazines, television shows and fi lms, many of which appear as digital media. Some of these texts are composed by adults, often women, and are directed at girl readers and viewers in an eff ort to establish a direct or indirect pedagogical relationship with them. Th en again, depending often on how fantasy and desire is constructed in the narrative, other texts have no apparent pedagogical function, serving instead as sites (some adult-sanctioned and some not) of escape from reality. Other texts are created by the girls themselves and are directed at members of their own age group either as texts of peer education or of entertainment. We have divided this issue into two parts: the fi rst consists of articles that deal with novels of one sort or another, and in the second we have placed those that deal with media texts and, in the case of Stephanie Troutman’s article, with media literacy/ies. Here, too, appear a visual essay and two book reviews. In “Doing Her Bit: German and Anglo-American Girls’ Literature of the First World War,” Jennifer Redmann looks at diff erent works of girls’ literature published in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and Canada during or immediately after the First World War. She is interested in what these novels reveal about the gap between girls’ expectations and the opportunities available to them at this time. On the one hand, girls were being exhorted to show patriotism in serving their country but, on the other, they were constantly being reminded of the gendered limitations of such service. Redmann recognizes that when

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”: Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”:Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper Kristine Moruzi (bio) and Michelle Smith (bio) Under Charles Peters’s editorship until his death in 1907, the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP, 1880–1956) reflected and responded to its readers’ needs for practical information about employment opportunities. Articles such as “On Earning One’s Living,” “Female Clerks and Book-Keepers,” and “Nursing as a Profession” all appeared in the magazine’s first year. The correspondence sections likewise discussed issues of employment. For example, in response to her letter, “Isolated Hetty” is asked whether her elderly relatives would be inconvenienced by her seeking employment and, if not, she is advised “to apply to some hospital for nursing” and directed towards other numbers of the GOP, where “much has been said about”1 nursing as a profession. Alongside these informational articles and advice columns were fictional stories depicting working girls in their struggles to support themselves and their families while also remaining virtuous and pure. Despite this overt support for working girls, however, the popular Girl’s Own Paper contains a curious ambivalence towards girls’ employment. Although it was ostensibly targeted towards working- and lower middle-class girls, most of whom would have worked, the GOP reinforces a traditional feminine ideal discouraging middle-class girls from working outside the home, while also reaffirming the necessity for working-class girls to earn income through paid labour. The magazine presents middle-class girls’ employment as admirable and acceptable only when such work is inspired by necessity and only when it remains within the bounds of respectable femininity. This idea of girls’ employment is complicated by the GOP’s fiction, which attempts to contain working girls by portraying them as victims of circumstance with few opportunities to express themselves. The freedoms of employment emerge most obviously in the frequent first-person evidence in the correspondence [End Page 429] sections, which suggests girl readers are more concerned with the practicalities of employment than with perceived notions of femininity. Mediated by the middle-class editor and contributors to the magazine, working-class voices appear as novelties, enabling the presentation of urban working girls as needing middle-class intervention. By including articles and stories about the lives of working-class girls, the GOP allows middle-class readers to gain vicarious insight into the world of employment beyond the home, yet the magazine’s depiction of urban work is narrowly defined, and the frequently negative renderings of such work not only promote an outlet for middle-class girls to channel benevolent impulses but also form part of the editorial strategies that contain middle-class girls’ work within the home. When the Religious Tract Society first began publishing the Girl’s Own Paper in 1880, it was responding to two troubling trends it perceived in the publishing industry. The first was the popularity of inexpensive, weekly penny dreadful magazines full of lurid stories of murder and intrigue. The second was the frequency with which girls were reading magazines intended for their brothers including, but certainly not limited to, the Boy’s Own Paper, which the RTS started in 1879. Flora Klickmann, editor of the GOP from 1908, describes how the GOP was originally intended “to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood of England,”2 highlighting the magazine’s focus on femininity and morality. As a weekly one penny magazine the GOP was intended to compete with the penny dreadfuls. It was aimed at working- and lower-middle-class girls, and it tried to hide its evangelical origins by publishing the magazine under the auspices of “The Leisure Hour Office,” a popular family magazine, rather than explicitly identifying its RTS origins. As Aileen Fyfe explains, a magazine published by the RTS would have been viewed with suspicion by working-class readers, for many of whom “the name ‘RTS’ would be more likely to suggest patronising middle-class interference than trustworthy information”3 because of its long history of publishing and distributing improving evangelical religious tracts to the working classes. Situating Work in the Girl’s Own Paper While the GOP’s purpose was to instruct readers presumed...

Perfect Little Feminists?

Girls' studies has emerged as a dynamic area of scholarship that examines the cultural construction of girlhood, the role that girls play in society, their identity formation, and their representation in media. This paper extends previous research by interviewing young girls aged 6 to 12 years old about their interactions with each other as they view animated cartoons. Expanding claims that Girl Power media empower young viewers, I showed clips from The Powerpuff Girls and other cartoons during the interviews to elicit girls' interpretations of popular culture, explore their views on gender equity, and examine the role of female friendships in their lives. Results from my interviews suggest that the middle-class girls I talked with simultaneously embrace both gender-role differences and gender equality.

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

The deviance of women: a critique and an enquiry

"Write a little bit every day": L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer

"Write a little bit every day":L.T. Meade, Self-Representation, and the Professional Woman Writer Janis Dawson (bio) In the autumn of 1898, the readers of the Girl's Realm (1898-1915), a new middle-class girls' magazine, were given an opportunity to win a "£20 Lady's 'Swift' Bicycle" by submitting a list of "the six most popular living writers of stories for girls, given in the order of their popularity" ("Grand Prizes," Girl's Realm 1: 89). As Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig observe, "The bicycle was a happy choice for this prize, suggesting modernity and liberating athleticism to girls on the threshold of the new century" (55). L.T. Meade, the competition's favourite, was herself a happy choice for similar reasons. Arguably, no writer of her day made a greater contribution to the development of girls' culture and the idea of the "New Girl" than Meade, the author of close to three hundred books and countless short stories and essays, and editor (1887-93) of the highly regarded middle-class girls' literary magazine Atalanta. In the same year as this contest, Meade was ranked by the Strand Magazine as a literary "celebrity" along with H.G. Wells; she was described as one of the magazine's most popular contributors and "one of the most industrious modern writers of fiction" ("Portraits" 674). Eight years later, Meade was still ranked among the top five authors in a survey of girls aged fifteen to eighteen (Low 278-87). By 1929, however, Meade's name appeared on the "not to be circulated" lists of public libraries, and her books, once given as school prizes in Britain and North America, were removed from the shelves because they were believed to lack literary value (Mitchell 14). Despite Meade's considerable literary presence in her own time, the subsequent devaluation of her work has contributed to a lack of interest in her life and career. Although Sally Mitchell's New Girl has done much to rehabilitate Meade's reputation, critics have, with a few exceptions,1 disparaged Meade's work, citing her "feminist shortcomings" (including her tendency to give more attention in her school stories to cocoa parties and dormitory furnishings than to academic studies), and even her commercialism (she produced as many as eleven books a year) as her offences.2 Nor have critics explored the other genres that Meade exploited so successfully.3 Despite her remarkable versatility as a writer and editor, Meade is now primarily remembered for her girls' fiction. To date, there is no full-length biography, no published collection [End Page 132] of letters, no documented collection of papers, and no comprehensive bibliography of her work. Significantly, almost everything known about Meade is derived from her writings and from information she provided about herself to numerous interviewers. I argue in this essay that Meade, as one of the nineteenth century's most popular authors, carefully constructed and controlled her public image as a professional woman writer. By focusing on the ways in which Meade represented herself in the literary marketplace, I argue that Meade was a savvy professional who legitimized her claim to professional authority by drawing on earlier models of Victorian authorship like those of Harriet Martineau and Anthony Trollope. She also took advantage of sensational incidents and current debates in the periodical press—such as baby farming and infanticide—to frame her work for a popular audience.4 Meade also exploited popular genres, from the New Journalism to science fiction and detective fiction. Indeed, my analysis of Meade's career not only reveals her professionalism and canny market sense but also suggests how fin-de-siècle women writers exploited current debates and popular literary genres to build professional careers. Presenting the Literary Woman Although Meade left no memoirs, she offered autobiographical "tit-bits" in her interviews and writing. Notably, much of the information she provided centred on her methods of work and her views on writing, editing, and professionalism; what information she revealed was shaped to enhance her public persona. In this respect, Meade's carefully constructed autobiographical revelations reflect the professionalization of women's writing in the nineteenth century. As the expansion of...

Progressive Era Girl Scouts and the Immigrant: Scouting for Girls (1920) as a Handbook for American Girlhood

The publications and activities of the Girl Scouts offer a fruitful site for examining shifting notions of female citizenship and American identity. This essay considers the home-making and physical fitness passages of Scouting for Girls (1920) in the context of early twentieth-century maternalist activism and women's efforts to Americanize immigrants. Linking concerns about immigrants' health and cleanliness to a brief interval of Girl Scout Americanization efforts, the essay finds that Girl Scouting empowered middle-class girls to impart the doctrines of municipal housekeeping, scientific mothering, and vigorous good health that middle-class women promoted among in their clubs, colleges, and settlement work.

The Wounded Woman and the Parrot: Post-feminist Girlhood in Alan Warner's The Sopranos and Bella Bathurst's Special

The essay reads two British novels about teenage girls – Alan Warner's The Sopranos (1998) and Bella Bathurst's Special (2002) – within the context of recent sociological Girls' Studies research. Particular attention is given to processes of self-formation, group dynamics, and twenty-first-century girls' attitudes to both traditional femininity and feminist politics. Contrasting a group of working-class girls with a group of middle-class girls, the essay explores the discourse of ‘girl power’ by pitting the post-feminist ideal of the ‘can-do’ girl against the Ophelian spectre of the ‘at-risk’ girl, thus raising issues of low self-esteem as well as the politics of girls' anger and young female ‘re/sisterhood’. Comparing Bathurst's image of wounded femininity to Warner's carnivalesque symbolism of a parrot on the loose, the essay also interrogates the feminist commitment of both texts, especially in relation to Warner's novel as an example of male ‘cross-writing’.

Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid- Nineteenth-Century England Jutta Schwarzkopf (bio) Helen Macfarlane: A Feminist, Revolutionary Journalist, and Philosopher in Mid- Nineteenth-Century England, by David Black; pp. vii + 179. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004, $80.00, $22.00 paper. Helen Macfarlane, who briefly enlivened radical debate in Britain around 1850, is an intriguing figure, not least because she has proved to be highly elusive. Not many will know that, at the invitation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, she produced the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto (1848), which was serialized in the Red Republican, edited by Chartist George Julian Harney, in November 1850. David Black is to be highly commended for devoting the first book-length study to this enigmatic figure. Unfortunately, his diligent research notwithstanding, Black has been unable to bring to light anything about Macfarlane's life, except for some rather inconclusive information gleaned from the 1851 census that would confirm her middle-class origin, to which there are several pointers in her writing. Given the paucity of biographical material, Black has turned to her writing, a total of thirteen (not twelve, as claimed in the introduction) articles, some of them serialized, which appeared in publications edited by Harney between April and December of 1850. Except for a three-part article on democracy, in which she subjected Thomas Carlyle's views on that issue to trenchant criticism, the pieces are signed by "Howard Morton," which, as is now commonly agreed, was her pseudonym. As Black himself acknowledges, his book is not a biography of a person, but of an idea (3). He therefore places Macfarlane's writing in both its philosophical and political contexts. She used her command of German to read G. W. F. Hegel, and she sprinkled her articles with quotations from his work. Politically, she moved in the circles of those Chartists like Harney whose socialist leanings had only been confirmed by the defeat of the third Chartist petition in 1848. As Black convincingly demonstrates, Macfarlane's thinking on economics and politics was akin to Marx's, not least because they [End Page 527] shared the grounding of their ideas in Hegel's philosophy. Throughout, Black makes good use of Macfarlane's oeuvre to elucidate her thinking by tracing the influences under which it developed, foremost among which are Hegel and Auguste Blanqui. Black makes no attempt to conceal his sympathy with her revolutionary views, which extended to her brand of Christianity. Macfarlane proposed a blend of socialism and Christianity in which Jesus figured as a prototypical proletarian. This aspect of her thought was first explored by John Saville in a 1968 article in The Christian Socialist, but Black, who reaches similar conclusions, does not appear to know this article. It is in Black's historical contextualizing of Macfarlane's thought that fault with this study can be found. Black's presentation of Chartism as having been delivered up to defeat by middle-class leaders shying away from any radical solution to the ills of society is shaped as much by his highly selective use of out-of-date literature on the movement as by his own normative concepts of class and class consciousness. Black's sketch of economic developments in a Britain on the threshold of becoming the "workshop of the world" is equally marred by his arbitrary selection of facts and by his attributing agency exclusively to employers. Furthermore, a number of statements reveal the author's lack of familiarity with nineteenth-century social history, such as the claim that women textile workers were not unionized (137) or that middle-class girls were brought up to be teachers or governesses (44). These errors are closely connected with an obvious lacuna in the book. Although rightly calling Macfarlane a feminist, Black fails to explore her special brand of feminism, a move that would have further underlined the outstanding quality of her thinking. Not only was she one of the very few marxian socialists in Britain at the time, but her notion of oppression encompassed gender as well as class. The book concludes with two appendices, the first of which lists all of Macfarlane's...

Active participation or just more information?

Given increasing calls for children and young people to participate via the Internet in civic and political activities), this article examines how far, and with what success, such participation is occurring among UK teenagers. Findings from a national survey conducted by the UK Children Go Online project show that young people are using the Internet for a wide range of activities that could be considered ‘participation’, including communicating, peer-to-peer connection, seeking information, interactivity, webpage/content creation and visiting civic/political websites. The findings are closely examined using path analysis techniques to identify the direct and indirect relations among different factors that may explain how and why some young people participate more than others. The results suggest that interactive and creative uses of the Internet are encouraged by the very experience of using the Internet (gaining in interest, skills, confidence, etc.) but that visiting civic websites depends primarily on demographic factors (with older, middle-class girls being most likely to visit these sites). Finally, cluster analysis is used to identify three groups of young people – interactors, the civic-minded and the disengaged – each of which is distinctive in its social context and approach to the Internet.

Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body

This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, but because the structure of affect in the immigrant present resembles an earlier crisis of the emergent middle class under British colonialism. In this situation, the patriarchal universe of the immigrant requires wives and daughters to magically function as phantom limbs, providing an unstable and illusory impression of continuing to enjoy a grip on the world. The paper interrogates this impression from the perspective of young Indian women deeply involved in Indian dance.

Disordered eating and disordered schooling: what schools do to middle class girls

This paper focuses upon relationships barely explored in the sociology of education either in the UK or elsewhere that lie between the practices and processes of formal education and the aetiology (the ‘causations’) and development of eating disorders, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN) in young women and girls. In so doing, it also touches on other relationships relatively under explored in the sociology of education, between formal education and ‘the middle class’. Our analyses point to the ways in which social trends outside schools relating to ‘the body’ and health generate and intersect with what we refer to as performance and perfection codes following Bernstein (2000) and Evans and Davies (2004). These create conditions of school work that, while increasingly difficult for many students, may be deeply damaging to the identities and health of the vulnerable few, especially if they coincide with other problematic features of their lives. Our request, as articulated through the voices of the young people in our study, is for greater understanding of the ways in which formal education and schooling may be implicated in the production of disordered eating and ill‐health. Such understanding might better equip teachers and others to help young people, irrespective of their class and cultural background, avoid falling prey to conditions that may damage or even potentially destroy their young lives.

White western teenage girls and urban space: Challenging Hollywood's representations

This article explores fictional cinematic representations of the world of white female adolescents in the USA. It argues that Hollywood has disseminated an oversimplified image of teenage girlhood that reinforces the notion that girls participate only peripherally in the daily life of exterior urban spaces. An analysis of nine Hollywood teen movies, from the 1980s and the 1990s, reveals a limited palette of spaces appropriated by predominantly white middle-class American adolescent girls. The analysis, within the broad categories of retreat space, liminal space, and interaction space, suggests alternatives for understanding how adolescent girls use urban space.

Uneasy Hybrids: Psychosocial aspects of becoming educationally successful for working-class young women Correspondence : Helen Lucey, South Bank University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, London Road, London SE1 0AA, UK. E-mail: Luceyh@sbu.ac.uk

Drawing on a longitudinal study of middle-class and working-class girls growing up, this article focuses on those few working-class young women who managed to get to university and face the prospect of a 'professional' career. The authors examine the concept of 'hybridity' as it is used to understand shifts in the constitution of contemporary feminine subjectivities and argue that although hybridity may be a social and cultural fact, in this psychic economy there are no easy hybrids. The authors explore some of the more difficult emotional dynamics in their families that have nevertheless helped sustain their success; of 'never asking for anything', of parents as burdened, of envy, love and pride. Moving into the intellectual domain is a massive shift for working-class young women who do well at school, requiring an internal and external 'makeover'. It is therefore essential to explore the complexities of the losses as well as the gains involved in educational success and upward mobility for working-class young women if we are serious about the project of equality in education. Without a consideration of the psychodynamic processes involved, the deep and enduring failure of the majority of working-class girls and boys will continue unabated.

Girls from Good Families: Tony Buddenbrook and Agathe Heidling

Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Madchens (1895) and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901) were two of the best-selling novels in Imperial Germany. However, as their titles suggest, these novels share more than sales figures. Each family chronicle traces the negative life trajectory of a girl from a middle-class family, beginning with her education into gender- and class-appropriate roles and ending with the picture of her shattered adult life. The thematic contiguity of the novels and their enthusiastic reception by the reading public invite a side-by-side reading. They are connected in other ways as well, ranging from the fact that both were written at the turn of the last century to Thomas Mann's discussion of AMS guter Familie in an early essay.1 In his reading or, more precisely, misreading of Aus guter Familie, Mann employs a critical vocabulary to talk about Reuter's novel and its heroine Agathe Heidling, a lexicon that I intend to use to take a fresh look at Mann's own girl from a good family, Tony Buddenbrook.2 Presenting insights gained from recent scholarship on Aus guter Familie, I hope to move toward a fuller understanding of Buddenbrooks and to underscore the connections between Tony Buddenbrook and Agathe Heidling as they are both formed and deformed by gender politics.3 At the end of the 19th century, men and women shared a sense that the world they knew was rapidly changing. Technological advances and increasing urbanization were physical markers of this change. Darwin and his German popularizer Haeckel were read for their theories of evolution and survival of the fittest, Schopenhauer for his cultural and philosophical pessimism, and Nietzsche for the primacy he gave to Life writ large. In this social landscape, the gender-based theories of character advanced at the end of the 18th century by male theorists were coming under scrutiny. The ideology of a dichotomous Geschlechtscharakter held sway throughout the 19th century and was reinscribed in countless novels, etiquette manuals, popular magazines and, of course, schools and families. This ideological framework relegated middle-class women to a private sphere where they were to evidence a selfless devotion to family. Theirs was a realm marked not by intellect but by a natural physicality and piety. Educational and professional opportunities for women were extremely limited. Middle-class men lived under no less stringent gender-appropriate codes that defined a polar-opposite realm. Since middle-class men were to act rationally in the public sphere, their education aimed at developing a well-defined, autonomous, energetic, and rational self. By the late 19th century, these gender-based prescriptions for the middle classes came under scrutiny by different groups for different reasons. At this juncture the asynchronicity in the history of men and women with respect to the ideal of an individuated, autonomous self surfaced in stark relief. The continued viability of the reigning middle-class construct of an independent, integrated (male) self active in the public sphere began to be questioned. Authors such as Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal pictured a state of cultural development in which men's nerves and sensibilities had become so over-refined as to preclude the continuance of the Enlightenment ideal. The self, the subject, began to be viewed as something fragmentary, incomplete, conflicted and unreliable. Other authors-very often women-had markedly different concerns. Although these authors may also have experienced the world of 1900 as one of change, what merited change in their view was the self-less lives of women at home in the family, heteronomous lives formed by a patriarchal society. What had been the ideal for the middle-class man around 1800 became in varying degrees the ideal of women reformers: middle-class girls were to be educated to develop an autonomous self, able to function in the public sphere as well as at home. …