Girls, Single-Sex Schools, and Postfeminist Fantasies

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

As leaders of an all-girls school, we must see every single member of our school community as connected agents of change. Our work is to learn together to do two things: first, recognize the systems and symptoms of paternalism and white supremacy; second, build concrete strategies to replace those systems in tangible ways. Doing this work requires a learning space where we can examine the complexities of identity, we each bring with us, understand the stories we tell ourselves about what girlhood means, and re-envision our roles in shaping and enacting this definition. Stephanie's passion for this work is rooted deeply in her knowledge of the seriousness of the stakes and of the purpose of theory: to inform and inspire action. Because she rolls up her sleeves and does the work alongside schools, she brings unique perspective and a clear commitment to action throughout this book. This should be a foundational text not just for all-girls schools, but for all schools.

- Tara Haskins is the School Leader and Tom Krebs is the CEO of Kansas City Girls Preparatory Academy, Missouri, USA

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.