Growing Up Girl: Psycho-Social Explorations of Gender and Class - Softcover

Walkerdine, Valerie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033364784X ISBN 13: 9780333647844

Publisher: Palgrave, 2001

Synopsis

Set against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, rising male unemployment and the feminisation and casualisation of the labour market, Growing Up Girl graphically explores the complexities of gender and class during a period of massive social change. It tells the story of today's 'I can have everything' girls who face unprecedented shifts in the organisation of family, education and work, and yet who continue to struggle with the not always visible but always palpable pressures of wealth, poverty, class and ethnicity.

Drawing on data spanning nearly twenty years, the authors of this ground-breaking study provide a sobering antidote to commonplace platitudes about 'girl power' and a feminine future. They reveal the hidden price of middle class girls' apparently effortless achievements - obsessive hard work, guilt and devastating feelings of inadequacy - and they trace how the labour market cruelly sets material limits on the disappointed hopes and ambitions of working class girls.

Vividly illustrating their arguments with quotations from the research participants, they show how young women's practices of self-invention are regulated both by unconscious processes and real social and economic constraints. Their insistent conclusion is that class is far from dead. Indeed, it is centrally important to our understanding of what it is to be a young woman in today's complex and challenging world.

This important and grippingly written book is essential reading for students and scholars alike in sociology, cultural studies, women's studies, education and psychology. It will also be of interest to anyone else struggling to make sense of the position of women in society today.

About this title

Review:

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Synopsis:

Throughout the de-industrialized world, huge transformations are taking place in the social fabric, leaving few lives untouched. The shift from a manufacturing base to service and communications industries is accompanied by the decreased participation of men and the increased number of women in the labour market. Girls growing up today face huge changes in the organization of family, education and work. This book explores the lives of girls who have grown up in the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st examining the complex ways that wealth and poverty, class and ethnicity are forever changed but terribly present in their experiences and life chances. Providing an antidote to platitudes about "girl power" and a feminine future, this book is essential reading for all those concerned with the lives of girls and women.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 033364784X
• ISBN 13: 9780333647844
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252