Gathering for a closer look at girlhood

karen herland

A crowd filled the basement of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute on Feb. 16, despite the cold, for a little girl-talk. The occasion was the launch of Girlhood: Redefining the Limits.

The book’s introduction acknowledges the range of meanings in the word “girl,” from the sense of community contained in “you go, girl,” the insult of “you throw like a girl,” to the condescension of “the girls in the office.” What is simply a period in the lives of women has numerous connotations.

The collection unites the work of over two dozen activists and academics. Chapters cover violence, citizenship, race, exclusion and innocence. A conscious effort to represent girlhood in Canada resulted in texts on aboriginal and French-Canadian girlhood and Canadian television shows like the Degrassi series.

The task of compiling and editing such a broad range of work was undertaken by Yasmin Jiwani, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, Candis Steenbergen, a part-time faculty member at the Institute, and a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program and Claudia Mitchell, of McGill’s Education Department. Mitchell is currently working in South Africa and was represented by her daughter, Sarah.

Lillian Robinson, Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir, introduced the editors with an anecdote. In the 1970s, she checked out a copy of A New England Girlhood, from the University of California, Berkeley, library. The librarian laughed aloud at such a trivial-sounding volume.

The book was the account of an 11-year-old girl’s experiences as a factory labourer in the first generation of industrial workers. Far from describing pets and picnics, the story depicted the race, class and gender relationships of the period. In other words, Robinson said, girlhood matters.

The editors of Girlhood were involved in a conference at Concordia in 2003 that was co-presented by POWER Camp National. This allowed girls aged 10 to about 15 to participate in the discussions.

Jiwani said at the launch that putting the book together was shaped by the editors’ own girlhoods. Certainly memory was a major element of the piece read by Hourig Attarian at the launch.

“Survivor Stories, Surviving Narratives” explored her efforts to record the survivor stories of women who had been girls during the Armenian genocide. It prompted her and co-author Hermig Yogurtian to recall their own girlhoods, which were spent in Beirut during a civil war.

But the collection is most powerful when it allows girls to speak for themselves, describing the power relationships they negotiate in school on a daily basis or the ways the clothes they wear identify them to their peers.

At a time when the popular media get lots of sensational mileage raising moral panics about girls’ wardrobes, sexual activity, and violent behaviour, it is refreshing to read Abby’s words: “I hate the fact that people judge without having talked to all teenage girls.”

The editors of Girlhood took the time to do so.