Girls, Single-Sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies

Stephanie D. McCall, Stephanie McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351969598
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bringing together feminist theory, girlhood studies, and curriculum theory, this book contributes an in-depth critical analysis of curriculum in single-gender schooling for girls in postfeminist landscapes of "unlimited choices" and resurgences of proper girlhood. The arguments challenge the mainstream assumptions and promotions about the guarantees of female success via small school supports, tailored curricula, protection, school choice and class advantage.

Single-gender schools are not homogenous; they have different histories, student populations, finances and organization. Recognizing this diversity, Girls, Single-sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies draws on rich data collected in two US secondary schools over a two-year period to identify and explore the ambiguities of success in single-sex schools for girls. Rich classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students reveal the resounding message delivered to girls - that they can "have it all" by going to college. By exploring students' imaginings, hopes, and doubts around college, the text illustrates how this catalyzes girls' critiques of their futures and of the schooled storylines of female success. While teachers might trumpet college, career, and limitless horizons, girls seek to understand their social positions and try to make sense of family, passions, and future happiness.

This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers, libraries in secondary education, girlhood studies, sociology of education, gender and sexuality in education, single-sex schooling, and feminist theory.

1 The Education of “Successful” Girls in Single-Sex Schools

Many girls and young women today are freighted with gendered expectations of unlimited capacity for success in postfeminist desires of empowerment. In these discourses of “girl power,” girls and young women are indiscriminately celebrated as feminine subjects who can do anything and be anyone. Postfeminist-inspired girl power in schools and media irresistibly boost these uncritical ideals of female success and happily constitute new, shifting and competing feminine subject positions. As the position of “girl”¹ changes in culture, society, government, politics and economy, the knowledge needed to fully participate in the public sphere that has historically denied her must also change. The expectation of girls as the ideal neoliberal subjects of success (McRobbie, 2007) today calls into question the knowledge needed to enact those expectations and achieve the desires that this new feminine subject is seemingly guaranteed. One knowledge system worthy of interrogation is the intended and enacted academic curriculum in school. As a project of knowledge and self, all-girls schools’ curricula are often obsessed with these hopes and guarantees for girls.

School curriculum—academic and social, hidden and planned—can be understood as public and political territory where competing ideas of gender and knowledge are played out on and in the lives of students, particularly girls, who historically have been excluded from the public sphere of education and work, being positioned as those who do not, should not and could not know. Historians have shown that girls in the U.S. were once excluded from public school and had limited access to knowledge taught outside the home (Graves, 1998; Nash, 2005; Tyack & Hansot, 1992) and even less access to higher education (Bank, 2003; McDonough, 1997). Research across the world has broadly explored the highly contested exclusion of girls from education (Unterhalter & North, 2018). Cast in this history, the relationship between gender subjectivity, knowledge and destiny has been pronounced and strained. This history matters for girls’ lives today in the way that the loudest discourses of “girl power” and future success have been ahistoricized and depoliticized.

Postfeminism has been described by some as the current political era and a set of discourses that suggest that gender equality has been achieved for girls, collectively, and that feminism is no longer needed to activate the rights of girls and young women (Gill & Scarff, 2011; McRobbie, 2009; Ringrose, 2013). This myth of gender equity circulates widely through education in schools. This myth animates my arguments, concerns, questions and confusions about the education of girls in this book. While many girls and young women all over the world are being charged with and achieving the current gendered expectations of “having it all,” the access (or lack thereof) to the knowledge to enact those desires continues to be limited to some girls and to specific parts of the world.

School is just one place where we learn; and, as a project of the future, produces both optimism and anxiety. School is particularly tricky as a place to learn where social relations and structures of knowledge are often considered neutral and taken for granted (Young, 1971). Despite the history of ideological battles over what counts as knowledge (Kliebard, 1986), school curriculum is considered “legitimate knowledge” (Apple, 2001). Knowledge acquisition in school is considered fundamental to achieving rationality (Foucault, 1995; Smith, 1990) and, therefore, “success.” This emphasis on rationality discounts the complexities of power in gendered social relations involved in knowledge transmission processes. When knowledge is conceptualized as a commodity (Apple, 2001; Young, 1971), the acquisition of skills and ideas for credentials is emphasized. When knowledge is considered a social practice (Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), the conditions of the transmission of knowledge are emphasized. An emphasis on the conditions of knowledge transmission opens up an examination of discourses and practices that make subjectivities possible (or impossible) (Foucault, 1995).

All-girls schools are remarkable spaces for explicitly promoting female success and the knowledge towards that desire and thus make a good proving ground for understanding the tenor of postfeminist fantasies and girls’ affective attachments to such fantasies. All-girls schools have historically claimed to “empower” girls by providing the conditions for academic advantage over the more masculinized coeducational school environment (Ivinson & Murphy, 2007, Tyack & Hansot, 1992) and “protection” from boys (McCall, 2014). Thus, I argue that all-girls schools are complicated and contradictory theoretical spaces for the intentional investment in the education of girls. The collection of girls in a segregated school environment allows for an overt commitment and purpose to “claim an education for women” (Code, 1991; Howe, 1984; Martin, 1985), as many feminist scholars and activists have suggested should be done. This is an important claim to stake if girls and young women are to understand, interrupt and undo the invisible ways in which social, political and economic processes structure gender relations (Ivinson & Murphy, 2007). However, single-gender schools are not homogenous; they have different histories, organizations, student populations, finances and accountability structures. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in two schools, detailed observations of classrooms and interviews with students and teachers, this book brings to life the ambiguities of success in two different single-sex schools for girls.

The postfeminist atmospheres of these two different all-girls schools uncritically assumed that girls no longer have barriers to their success based on gender, race, social class, sexuality, ability or religion and that futures are no longer gendered. This is the complicated political moment that girls are finding and losing themselves in now. Postfeminism, as a collective social imagination and condition (Anderson, 2014), is a noteworthy influence on how girls imagine and plan how to live their lives. The figuring of girls in this social imagination as powerful and capable of limitless success is not the problem. What knowledge is accessible to them and what that knowledge does is the problem that I address here. School knowledge has historically been devised by the power of the dominant gender ideology and “differential relations of power” (Apple, 2001, p. 410) that transpire through school curricula. I entered into this research with a conviction about how school curriculum presents knowledge and structures systems of knowing as an objective and benign social process (Ivinson & Murphy, 2007; Young, 1971). While girls and young women can enact a broad range of responses to power and ideology in school, their responses are limited and expanded with/in historical and political systems of “relations of ruling” (Smith, 1990) and gender regimes (Connell, 1987), which are inherent and different for each school (Arnot, 1995). These social systems and relations contribute to the discursive production of the normal ranges of femininity,² a dominant conception of “femaleness” or what it means to be female (Jones, 1993).

Using empirical data in education research and interdisciplinary theoretical sources from Curriculum Studies and Girlhood Studies, this chapter provides an introduction to the broader argument of the book about the feminization of success in single-sex schools for girls and describes the contemporary contexts of postfeminist fantasies (McRobbie, 2009; Ringrose, 2013) that intensify the attention paid to single-sex schools and female success.

Postfeminist Discourses of “Girl” and “Having It All”

Girls are positioned today in a new socio-political landscape as postmodern subjects with unlimited potential. The availability of new subject positions has instigated various analyses of the effects of the contemporary demands of femininity on the lives of adolescent girls and young women (Allan, 2010; Baker, 2010; Gill & Scharff, 2013; Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2009; Pomerantz & Raby, 2013; Renold & Allan, 2006; Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001). One example of these new subject positions³ is the current girl power discourses in media and education that celebrate how girls can “have it all.” This may sound like good news, and it is for the girls who can adequately manage the regulation, scrutiny and navigation required to enact their potential. Harris (2004) referred to this girl as the “can-do” girl, while her counterpart is the “at-risk” girl. The at-risk girl fails to enact her potential and seemingly cannot (or chooses not to) manage and navigate as well as the can-do girl.

An important problem is that the can-do girl is often positioned as the “normal” girl (Harris, 2004). This position has been discursively constituted as the most desired and “rational” subject position through the promotion of guarantees for success. Outside of the normal can-do girl, there seems to be little space in school discourses for rewarding additional or alternative subject positions. In her book Spectacular Girls, Sarah Projansky (2014) delineates which girls’ stories are celebrated in the media and which girls’ stories are thought to be not worth telling or outside of “normal” girl. She writes (p. 1),

Girls who are large, differently abled, queer, of color, and/or poor; make “bad” or “dangerous” choices; feel depressed; or even just act silly (1) simply do not exist in media culture; or (2) appear in marginalized representations, on the periphery, with sidekick status; or (3) populate ubiquitous disparaging, disdainful, anxious, and/or protectionist depictions that shore up a narrow version of acceptable girlhood; the impossibly high-achieving heterosexual white girl who plays sports, loves science, is gorgeous but not hyper-sexual, is fit but not too thin, learns from her (minor) mistakes, and certainly will change the world someday.

This view of girls as can-do/successful or at-risk/failed are produced by and produce discourses of inclusion and exclusion (Søndergaard, 2002), which are not without rewards and consequences. This does not mean that female subject positions are not created somewhere between can-do and at-risk. Girls are continuously making themselves from a range of available discourses in social media culture (Kearney, 2011; Projansky, 2014), family, peers, religion, cultural institutions and school knowledge. Mainstream discourses of gender and knowledge in school coalesce with discourses of success to suggest to girls that normal can-do femininities are more likely to guarantee future “success.”

Knowledge is significant for girls’ status as can-do and at-risk. Conventional wisdom tells us that knowledge is to be achieved for credentials towards “success.” In this way, it is a commodity commonly linked to power. The logic undergirding this link is that knowing confers achievement, and achievement guarantees power. While overly functional, this belief in the deterministic nature of possessing knowledge can be seen. This view of knowledge is characteristic of a market ethos⁴ in which competitiveness, individualism and rationality are necessary for credential building (Apple, 2001). Yet the gender politics of knowing and knowledge are eclipsed in the “knowledge is power” mantra, and many epistemological complications related to gender and knowledge are missed.

Seemingly, the “smart girl” is where the right knowledge and the right femininity intersect to produce “success.” Angela McRobbie’s (2007) seminal article about top girls argued that new subject positions have been opened but within the limits of expected and regulated forms of femininity. This creates a new political condition of gender retrenchment and re-stabilization. Similar to the concern about the double-bind expressed by Walkerdine et al. (2001), McRobbie (2007) described the subject position as “the contours of the new dangers for women” (p. 734). Given the limits of women’s participation in the public social processes historically, the dangers of this new position, according to McRobbie, are the seductions of guarantees and consumption associated with success. In their recent book, Smart Girls: Success, School and Myths of Post-feminism, Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby (2017) draw from interviews with many girls to interrupt the ease of the subjective position of “smart girl” and expose a postfeminist discourse through which girls construct themselves as this kind of girl.

Girlhood Studies literature about these neoliberal discourses of girls as subjects of unlimited potential reveal many constraints and critiques (Aapola, Gonick, & Harris, 2005; Arnot & Mac an Ghaill, 2006; Gill & Scharff, 2013; Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2007, 2009; Pomerantz & Raby, 2017; Ringrose, 2013; Walkerdine et al., 2001). I highlight two constraints here: the double-binds or paradoxes of everyday life (McRobbie, 2007; Walkerdine et al., 2001) and the stratified access to resources based on racial and social class differences (Harris, 2004; Nairn & Higgins, 2007). Walkerdine et al. (2001) argued that neoliberal discourse positions girls in a double-bind or paradox. Neoliberalism “demands a psychological subject who is capable of bearing the serious burdens of liberty” (p. 2). The double-bind is that girls are discursively produced and positioned as subjects of capacity but then must manage themselves well enough to “live up to” the demands of that capacity. One example is the demand in the social imagination of “being everything to everybody,” with feet planted in both productive/public and reproduction/home spheres of social life (Martin, 1985). Achieving this rational female subject position requires a great deal of mastery of knowledge, self/selves and the body.

In a market ethos of neoliberalism, the assumed purposes of acquiring knowledge are for “success,” and success in this ethos often means “having it all.” There are, however, some problematic assumptions with this s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Education of “Successful” Girls in Single-Sex Schools
• 2 A Curriculum of Girlhood
• 3 A Place for Girls
• 4 High Hopes and Curriculum as “Makeover”
• 5 High Hopes and a Pedagogy of Privilege
• 6 Cruel Futures, and Other Postfeminist Failures
• 7 A Critical Education for Girls
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Index