Future Girl

Young Women in the Twenty-First Century

Anita Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135938710
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Anita Harris creates a realistic portrait of the "new girl" that has appeared in the twenty-first century--she may still play with Barbie, but she is also likely to play soccer or basketball, be assertive and may even be sexually aware, if not active. Building on this new definition, Harris explores the many key areas central to the lives of girls from a global perspective, such as girlspace, schools, work, aggression, sexuality and power.

CHAPTER 1
THE “CAN-DO” GIRL VERSUS THE “AT-RISK” GIRL

The new generation has arrived. Meet the Can-Do girls: confident, optimistic and enthusiastic.

—Liz Deegan, “Girls with the World at Their Feet”

Welcome to the new teen generation—Alienated, Cynical, Experimental and incredibly Savvy. Members of the ACES generation lose their virginity at 13, start smoking and taking drugs about the same age and are binge-drinking at 15.

—Tina-Marie Morrison, “Teen Angels Bite Back”

Since the early 1990s young womanhood has become a topic central to debates within Western societies about cultural and economic change. Popular culture, public policy, academic inquiry, and the private sector are now interested in young women in ways that are quite unprecedented. Recent times have seen a fiery generational contest within feminism, sociological interest in young women as the new professionals (and speculation about consequent changing family patterns), criminological concern with girls’ violence, health alerts about their sexual behavior, and educational discourse and policy preoccupied with girls outperforming boys. Teenage girls are supposed to be more confident and resilient than ever before; they have “the world at their feet.”¹ At the same time research, journalism, and popular debates suggest increasing fears about young women’s low self-esteem and risk behaviors. The Body Shop-sponsored U.K. research report entitled Can-Do Girls finds that young women who do not expect to succeed in life manifest their low ambitions in mental health problems such as depression and eating disorders, and are more likely to become teen mothers.² The construction and separation of these two kinds of girlhood occurs around some key motifs. The “girls with the world at their feet” are identifiable by their commitment to exceptional careers and career planning, their belief in their capacity to invent themselves and succeed, and their display of a consumer lifestyle. They are also distinguished by a desire to put off childbearing until “later.” The others are more likely to suffer from what youth researchers Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson describe in The Ambitious Generation as “misaligned occupational ambitions,” a lack of a sense of power or opportunity, and inappropriate consumption behaviors, for example, of drugs or alcohol. These young women are also more likely to become pregnant at a young age.

How are we to make sense of these opposed positionings of young women as exemplars of both success and failure? The issues facing young women are deemed to be new and specific to their historical location. In both of these images, young women’s fortunes are linked to the particular historical circumstances of their generation. That is, in both cases it is the features of current times that render young womanhood a site of either new possibilities or problems, that fill young women with confidence and optimism or, conversely, leave them alienated and self-destructive. The shifting labor market, the expansion of higher education, cultural and economic globalization, and changing notions of female identity, the family, citizenship, and the state create new choices for them. These opportunities and challenges are now available to enhance the life chances of those who can seize them. However, at the same time that young women’s fortunes are seen as intricately interwoven with late modernity, the fortunes of late modernity are equally interwoven with young women. This intense interest in them, and, specifically, the new depictions of girls as either can-do or at-risk, suggests that what it means to prevail or lose out in these new times has become bound up with how we understand girlhood. Their public presence indicates that both actual young women and the symbolic value of girlhood have been deeply invested in and that they have come to stand for a number of hopes and concerns about late modernity. As noted girls’ studies scholar Angela McRobbie argues, “‘Girls,’ including their bodies, their labour power and their social behaviour are now the subject of governmentality to an unprecedented degree.”³ This chapter explores why the regulation of young women has come to matter in quite the way it does currently and how this is enacted through the construction of the can-dos and the at-risks.

Investing in Girls

There has been a series of historical moments when this same phenomenon of symbolic and material investment has occurred in relation to youth in general. Nancy Lesko argues that from its invention at the turn of the century, the notion of adolescence as a life phase has become “institutionally ordained and reduced to stereotypes, commodified and malleable as a sign of futures, pasts, fears and hopes.”⁴ As has been well documented, young people have become the focus for a variety of moral panics during social change and economic crisis. Paradoxically, they have also been traditionally perceived as “the future” and held up as fearless pioneers who will show the way forward in uncertain times.⁵ Young people have also been invested in materially, insofar as their labor has always been important in maintaining and reproducing class relations. For some commentators the emergence of youth as a recognized life phase can be mapped onto the emergence of industrial capitalism.⁶ The need for young people to take up their appropriate roles in the labor market has generated particular images of youth. For instance, the invention of “juvenile delinquency” occurred at a time when young working-class men were gaining power and threatening to disrupt the socioeconomic order by moving out of their class positions.⁷ However, these kinds of symbolic and material uses have more typically been applied to young men, or youth in general, than young women.

It is far less common that young women as a category have been the subjects of these kinds of investments. This is not to say that the construction of young femininity has not mattered to the social order. Growing up “right” has always been a highly managed process for girls in order for particular forms of gender relations to be maintained. Female adolescence has typically been represented as a risky business that must be carefully navigated, usually with the help of professionals, to ensure that girls make a successful transition to normative adult womanhood.⁸ However, young women of quite specific populations have been used symbolically: particular kinds of young women have been constructed as a problem for society, namely young mothers, the sexually active, and Black and Indigenous girls.⁹ Others again, such as the well-integrated and upwardly mobile migrant, have been used as symbols of social success.¹⁰ Material investments in young women have also been deeply class and race stratified. The work performed by young working-class women, both paid and unpaid, has received little recognition, although it has always been the subject of a great deal of social control. Similarly, colonizing societies including the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand/Aotearoa have established their nations on the indentured labor of young Indigenous and enslaved peoples, both women and men, although this is little discussed.¹¹ By contrast, the emergence of white, middle-class young women as workers, as the “New Women” or “New Girls” of the early twentieth century, was heralded as a moment of important cultural change.

However, the idea that young women in general and young womanhood itself actually hold the key to imagining the social and economic fu ture is new. As Angela McRobbie suggests in her book Feminism and Youth Culture, “Young women…have replaced youth as a metaphor for social change…[and] are now recognised as one of the stakes upon which the future depends.”¹² This is evidenced by the investments in them as new kinds of workers, consumers, and citizens. Their relationship to the labor market, their patterns of consumption, and their sexual lives are all of increasing interest to the state, the private sector, researchers, and the media. They are imagined to be those most able and likely to prevail and succeed in a risk society. However, the emphasis on the resilience and achievements of young women is matched by a concern, even a moral panic, that at least some of them are not succeeding as they should be. This dual focus on young women is played out in the attention to and regulation of their attitudes and behavior. The construction of the can-do girls and the remaindering of the others in the at-risk category is the purpose of this regulation. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore these two categories of contemporary young womanhood through the issues of work, consumption, and motherhood. I discuss the normative ways in which young women are expected to relate to these experiences. These new ways of being a worker, a consumer, and a mother are supposed to show how young women are best able to enact the subjectivity required by late modernity. Successful achievement of these new subject positions is constructed as a mainstream experience for young women, and failure is deemed to be the consequence of an individual limitation. Although the socioeconomic conditions of late modernity have created unequally distributed opportunities and impediments for young women, it is the idea that good choices, effort, and ambition alone are responsible for success that has come to separate the can-dos from the at-risks.

Meet the Can-Do Girls

As we have seen, the ideal late modern subject is one who is flexible, individualized, resilient, self-driven, and self-made and who easily follows nonlinear trajectories to fulfillment and success. Young women play a critical role in this remaking of subjectivity. As argued by scholars in the field, flexibility and self-actualization are now expected of young women because they are perceived as those most confident, resilient, and empowered of all the demographic groups affected by risk.¹³

Girlpower

One of the most important words in the new lexicon of young female success is girlpower. The concept of girlpower has been highly significant in the image of young women as independent, successful, and self-inventing. Originally, girlpower or grrrlpower was the catchword of an underground young radical feminist movement that advocated for the improvement of girls’ lives.¹⁴ Emerging in the early 1990s as a blend of punk and feminist politics, it became the first powerful youth movement or political subculture to be organized entirely around young women’s concerns. The rewriting of the word girl into grrrl was intended to communicate anger (the grrr stood for growling) and rejection of patronizing attitudes toward young women. Those using this word and driving the movement were largely involved in alternative music cultures in the United States, the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and elsewhere, and used music and writing to develop a political platform for younger feminists. However, its punk philosophy of DIY (do it yourself) and individual responsibility for social change lent itself easily to its transformation into a discourse of choice and focus on the self. Since this reinvention, it has become a catchphrase for young women’s new style of display and attitude. This is a sexy, brash, and individualized expression of ambition, power, and success, neatly captured, for example, in the image of Britney Spears.

This kind of girlpower constructs the current generation of young women as a unique category of girls who are self-assured, living lives lightly inflected but by no means driven by feminism, influenced by the philosophy of DIY, and assuming they can have (or at least buy) it all. The evidence for these new ways of being is drawn from a wide range of areas: girls’ educational success; their consumption, leisure, and fashion practices; apparent rejection of institutionalized feminism; sexual assertiveness; professional ambitions; delayed motherhood, and so on. Nowhere is girlpower more evident, though, than in popular culture, particularly in the promotion of certain pop stars, comic book heroes, TV and film characters, and advertising icons. Girlpower celebrities include such diverse subjects as Lara Croft, Tank Girl, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Courtney Love, and the Spice Girls (whose own girlpower heroine was, famously, Margaret Thatcher). They are deemed to embody girlpower because they are outspoken, not afraid to take power, believe in themselves, and run their own lives. Cultural studies theorist Susan Hopkins argues that “‘girlpower’ is a provocative mix of youth, vitality, sexuality and self-determination. The story on offer here is one of power through and control over one’s own identity invention and re-invention.”¹⁵ The idea of girlpower encapsulates the narrative of the successful new young woman who is self-inventing, ambitious, and confident.

Success at Work

Can-do girls are notable for their high ambitions with regard to their employment and their commitment to elaborate planning for success in their careers. They seize the opportunities made available within the new economy and make projects of their work selves from an early age. New resources and efforts are required for young people to succeed in the new economy, and these can-do girls are represented as particularly able in applying themselves to maximize their future chances in the changing world of work.

In The Ambitious Generation Schneider and Stevenson discuss the importance of young people developing a plan, with the help and support of family and school, to realize their professional ambitions. They describe the case of “Elizabeth” the child of professional, highly educated parents, attending a well-regarded school in a Northeastern U.S. town, who planned for a career in journalism or politics from her early school years. In high school she took higher-level science and mathematics classes (in spite of disliking these subjects) as well as extra university-level classes in economics and history at a competitive private institution. She was fluent in French, edited the school newspaper, was selected for the decathlon and debating teams, and held various leadership positions in the school. She completed a college course in government studies at a highly competitive summer school and worked for several summers as an intern for a local senator. She prepared intensively for college entrance exams and applied to fourteen prestigious institutions. At her college of choice she maintained an A average, worked for the Department of Justice, learned Danish, and undertook a traveling scholarship to Paris. She says, “In terms of having created the tools for success in the workplace I am confident about them…”¹⁶ “Elizabeth” is clearly on track to realize her professional ambitions through these extraordinary efforts to work on herself to maximize opportunities for success. She is an example of a can-do girl in her ability to fold in together ambition, professional intentions, success, and her DIY project of the self.

Angela McRobbie’s discussion of young women’s place in the “new meritocracy” illustrates the ways in which new modes of young femininity have been bound up with success and striving for success, particularly in the context of work. She argues that in the United Kingdom, the Labour government has built a campaign about bright prospects for success and generation of wealth in the new economy almost exclusively around the potential of girls. With the stripping away of gender-based barriers to participation in education and the labor market and the development of a more open, meritocratic system, young women are perceived to have risen quickly to the top in terms of educational attainment, aspirations, and job prospects. The signs of their success are glamorous careers and luxurious consumer lifestyles, financial independence, and high standards of physical beauty and grooming. She suggests that political, media, and advertis ing interests have converged in the construction of young women as “standard bearers for the new economy, as creators of wealth.”¹⁷ Government policy and agenda setting is squarely focused on young women’s economic independence by placing them on a path of success at school and then at work, in the process creating docile good girls who can un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The “Can-Do” Girl versus the “At-Risk” Girl
• Chapter 2 Jobs for the Girls? Education and Employment in the New Economy
• Chapter 3 Citizenship and the Self-Made Girl
• Chapter 4 Spaces of Regulation School Halls and Shopping Malls
• Chapter 5 Being Seen and Being Heard The Incitement to Discourse
• Chapter 6 Future Girl Politics
• Conclusion
• Appendix Who Is a Girl?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index