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

Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, June Melody

NYU Press, Nov 1, 2001 - Social Science - 272 pages

Throughout the Western world our social fabric is being transformed, leaving few lives untouched. Girls growing up today face huge changes in the organization of family, education, and work.
Growing Up Girl explores the lives of girls who have grown up in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It explores the complexities of class transformation as young women approach a radically altered labor market and examines the profound but different regulation to which young women of all social positions are subjected. Tracing three groups of girls from their early childhood to young adulthood, the volume sheds light on the social, cultural, and psychological dynamics confronting young women today. It highlights the fragility and the fiction of the "I can have everything" girls, providing a ground-breaking and sobering antidote to platitudes about a feminine future. Growing Up Girl is essential reading for all those concerned with the lives of girls and women today.

About the author

Valerie Walkerdine is Foundation Professor of Critical Psychology, Centre for Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney. Her books include Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, and Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies.

Helen Lucy lectures in the School of Education, King's College, University of London.

June Melody lives and works in west London.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Growing Up Girl: Psycho-Social Explorations of Class and Gender; Volume 16 of Qualitative Studies in Psychology
• Authors: Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, June Melody
• Publisher: NYU Press, 2001
• ISBN: 0814793835, 9780814793831
• Length: 272 pages
• Subjects: Psychology / Psychotherapy / Child & Adolescent; Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory