Girlhood Studies

The publishing of the articles in this issue of Girlhood Studies coincides with the global events related to the First International Day of the Girl—11 October 2012. Th is is a day formally declared by the United Nations as the one set aside to articulate the challenges girls face and to promote girls’ empowerment and the fulfillment of their human rights. The actual process of gaining official recognition through the United Nations for a specific day is no small feat. The efforts of organizations such as Plan International and even government bodies such as the Status of Women in Canada were key in making this happen in order to address the need for greater understanding of girl-specific issues. In the global context, for example, girls are three times more likely to be malnourished than boys. Of the world’s 130 million out-of-school youth, 70 percent are girls. In the Canadian context, as the Minister responsible for the Status of Women highlighted in an International Day of the Girl message, young women from the ages of fifteen to nineteen years experience nearly ten times the rate of date violence as do young men. Close to 70 percent of victims of internet intimidation are women or young girls, and girls and young women are nearly twice as likely as young men and boys to suffer certain mental health problems such as depression, and anxiety about body image and self-esteem remains prevalent among girls. Th us, while October 11 is a time for celebration, it is also a time for reflection and a reminder about how much work there is still to do.

When we are growing up, how might the narrative practices of our family members shape our understanding of the world we are coming to know? How might narrative desires and allegiances to formal storytelling conventions affect how individuals are represented and positioned within family discourse? In this paper, I analyze the narrative practices of characters in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971); specifically, I turn to Del Jordan's first encounter with a family member's death and to her tentative understanding of the body's aberrations and complexities, which bumps up against, competes with, and is ultimately overwhelmed by, the narrative practices of the adults in her life. When considered in relation to the bourgeoning field of narrative ethics, Lives of Girls and Women provides a compelling avenue for a rich understanding of how narrative privilege can have an impact on adult-youth relations in general, and the female coming-of-age experience in particular.

In 1692, the Salem witch trials introduced perhaps the most famous early American girls-girls notoriously lambasted for instigating the death of twenty people. During that same year, Cotton Mather published Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion (hereafter referred to as Ornaments) and A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning (hereafter referred to as Brand). Ornaments served as a moral guidebook for Puritan girls to follow, while Brand details the possession of Mercy Short, an adolescent not directly involved with the witch trials but whose story represents the most thorough recorded account of possession that we have. These two works document the pressure exerted on colonial girls to remain silent, and help to reveal how possession gave them an outlet for the expression of their feelings. In examining them, it becomes possible to ascertain how the Puritan roots of girls' coerced silence and repressed aggression have endured into contemporary America.

A perceived rise in girls' physical aggression is alarming the public as it collides with dominant views of femininity. Existing research focuses on either boys' violence or girls' non-physical aggression, leaving the realm of girls' physical aggression relatively unexplored. Using data from ethnographic observations and interviews, this study examines young adolescent girls' experience of their and their peers' fighting. Findings indicate that girls participate in fights to stand up for themselves and others, to show they are not afraid, and for fun. This study calls for continued in-depth research into girls' perspectives on aggression and violence in order to provide insight into how gendered, raced, and classed structures affect girls. It seeks, too, to address the problems that arise from girls fighting.

Girls who use violence are marginalized as the worst of the mean girls, disrupting conventional femininity codes and causing panic in the streets. Twenty two girls participated in a qualitative study in Nova Scotia about what it means to be a girl and use violence. Interpretations presented here suggest that their reasoning can be contextualized through an analysis of neoliberalism, racism, heterosexism and classism, as they navigate discourses of choice and experiences of constraint.

The tradition of religious clothing for children is relatively unexplored: this article develops the premise that debates about the links between the sacred and the market go deeper than concern about consumption, and bring to the surface issues of identity. Through exploring the historical development of the First Communion, not as religious ritual but as Catholic consumer culture, the article turns to analyse girls' communicant dress in Spain between the 1940s and 1960s which were the early decades of a dictatorial Regime (1939 to 1975) marked by an ideology of National-Catholicism. General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, leader of the military rebellion against the elected government in 1936, ruled Spain until his death. One of my aims is to correct a tendency to make the little girl dressed in bridal wear the most visible sign because to do so disregards the cultural practice of wearing clothing to perform piety, signal a vocation or express gratitude for religious intercession.

Abject female intergenerational poverty is a systemic issue which denies girls the opportunity to access a higher quality of life because of poor health that results in under-development. The article focuses on the root cause-gender inequality-that is responsible for their inability to access adequate nutrition, particularly during their critical period of physical and intellectual growth and development. Their resulting sub-standard health has a bad impact on their school attendance. This article follows the lives of a group of ten girls between the ages of ten and fourteen years living in a peri-urban community outside Maputo. It outlines the importance of engaging girls, through participatory methodologies, and giving them the opportunity to express themselves, their challenges, strengths and ideas for possible resolution of the problem.

Most young females, particularly in Western contexts, are all too familiar with the traditional structure of the love story: the female protagonist embarks on a journey that ultimately leads her to fulfil her romantic goal of uniting with the male object of her desire. Throughout the history of Western society and beyond, this discourse has been prevalent in many mass media outlets, pervading the content of movies, television, and novels aimed at entertaining young adult females. In this classic narrative, women are presented as being dependent on males for their personal happiness. Whether this narrative is explicitly presented or camouflaged by an intricate storyline involving a seemingly strong and independent female character, this ubiquitous depiction of women in the mainstream media cannot be ignored.

Kathleen Sweeney. 2008. Maiden USA: Girl Icons Come of Age. New York: Peter Lang.

Beatrice C. Mosionier. 1983. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications.

Carolyn Carpan. 2009. Sisters, Schoolgirls, and Sleuths: Girls’ Series Books in America. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.