Reviews
Stephanie McCall takes us on an eye-opening journey through two all-girls schools to show how girls are positioned differently while still understood as subjects of infinite capacity. McCall’s engaging book brilliantly explores how ‘girl power’ rhetoric about girls’ optimistic futures does not account for oppressions, privileges, and the sexism that permeates our culture. Instead of understanding single-sex schools as bastions of female empowerment where girls can freely thrive in a supportive female environment, using rich ethnographic data, McCall deftly shows how girls are produced within curricular knowledges shaping them in profound, demanding, and invisible ways. Far from ‘genderless’, all-girls schools operate through carefully crafted notions of girlhood that are mobilized differently in public and private educational settings. This book is necessary reading for anyone interested in gender and education, particularly as these topics intersect with a culture that promises girls equality and achievement but delivers little more than ‘postfeminist fantasies’.- Shauna Pomerantz is Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University, Canada. She is co-author or Smart Girls: Success, School, and the Myth of Post-Feminism
Many books have been written about single-sex schooling. This one takes the discussion to an especially timely level. Here Stephanie McCall offers a clear-eyed view of all-girls’ schooling across the spectrum of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and social class that draws on both empirical research and insights from practical experience in coeducational and single-sex institutions. This is a must-read for anyone interested not simply in all-girls’ schools, but in the larger context in which they operate, including current discourses on knowledge, the myth of “having it all”, social and economic barriers to success, and what it means to be “female” in a world in which gender fluidity is a reality to be recognized.- Rosemary Salomone is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St John’s University School of Law, USA