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A world apart: Privileged schooling for teenage girls

Anderson, Haithe, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1993

UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 A WORLD APART: PRIVILEGED SCHOOLING FOR TEENAGE GIRLS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

By

Haithe Anderson, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1993

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

P. Lather

S. Damarin Advisor The College of Education Department of Educational M. Leach Policy and Leadership Copyright by Haithe Anderson 1993 For Zoe and Tyhimba VITA

EDUCATION

1983 B.A., The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington/

1987 M.A., The University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: Education Minor Field: Gender and Education, Patti Lather. TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ii VITA iii

PREFACE 1

CHAPTER I. The world of single-sex schooling: Legends, myths, unicorns and teenage girls 9 Introduction 9 Me/tho(d): The technologies of my story telling 13 Marking my words 18

II. The schooling of girls: Stories about single-sex versus coeducation 26 Introduction 26 Surface Readings: The pros and cons of single-sex schooling. 27 Stories from tradition literature on single-sex schooling 32 Stories from the critical feminist literature on single-sex schooling 36 Alternative storylines about single-sex schooling: A feminist postmodernist approach 42 Concluding re/marks 48

HI. Contractions: Dis/graces, dis/guises, dis/sembling feminisms. 57 Introduction 57 Others speak Other feminisms 59

IV Sur-fictioning feminist methodology: Beyond epistemological questing to ontological uncertainties 68 Introduction 68 ‘ A fielding we will go, Hi-Ho the dairy oh, a fielding we will go 69 You can take these words, but my thinking cannot stop here 87

V. Writing women in/to the social: Narratives about single-sex and coeducational schooling in Ohio, 1850s-1880s 94 Introduction 94 Writing class boundaries: ‘Women’ as the handmaidens of science 96 Writing the ‘social’: ‘Women’ as the caretakers 102 Writing the ‘sex’: ‘Women as medical objects 108 Concluding re/marks 116 VI. Legendary beginnings: Origin stories from a single-sex school for girls 123 Introduction 123 The glory of dawn in every thought: Kelly Smith recounts the founding of AGS 124 Reading between the lines: Take two 129 Reading between the lines: Take three 136 Legend power 141

VIL Signifying unicorns: myth-making in an all girls school 148 Introduction 148 An all girls school 150 The alicom of unity: The myth of one big happy family. 152 Private stories: myth consumption/myth resistance. 160 Concluding re/marks 170

VIIL Teenage girls enclosed in school: Architecture, the body and woman-making 177 Introduction 177 An all girls school 179 The gaze: folding inward toward the self 182 Relaxed bodies/performing bodies: bourgeoise bodies well made 189 Concluding re/marks 199 IX.Implying Possibilities 203

LIST OF REFERENCES 223

v PREFACE INACCESSIBLE REACHES: TRAILING UNICORNS, TEENAGE GIRLS AND THE SELF

[W]hen we discuss others, we are always talking about ourselves. Our images of '"them" are images of "us." Our theories of how "they" act and what "they" are like, are first of all, theories about ourselves: who we are, how we act, and what we are like. This self-reflective nature of our statements is something we can never avoid (Krieger, 1991:5).

My name is Haithe and I am a storyteller. Throughout these pages I have woven multiple stories and much more has been left unsaid. The purpose of my story telling is to think about the schooling of girls and to contribute to the theorizing of gender and education. I do this from one particular schooling site, one that has traditionally been under-studied in the United States, single-sex schooling. I chose this site largely because I was dissatisfied with what was being said about girls in these types of schools. While much of the literature on single-sex schooling, reviewed in chapter two, suggests that these school have positive academic and social consequences for girls, many assume that this accomplishment is accounted for simply by the absence of no boys. I began this study by asking what else besides the absence of boys was going on..

Using a postmodern lens of social construction, my goal was to think about some of the ways in which girls at single-sex schooling are discursively written via the variety of educational discourses that circulate through single-sex schooling. I began this project by taking a historical look at the issues that surrounded the birthing of coeducation now taken for granted by educationalists with the goal of thinking about how girls were constructed historically via educational discourses that circulated between various educational reformers. Then, using this same discursive lens I turned my attention; to one contemporary single-sex school. My goal in this part of my study was to steer away from

1 2 the academic and social achievement focus that dominates the literature on single-sex schooling and, via a focus limited to students only, to think about how teenage girls were being shaped into young women. What I found is that the absence of boys does have important consequences, but so do other discourses, particularly the discourses on social class associated with elite private schooling. After several visits to the school I began to focus on some of the most obvious parts of this, and other schools, bodies and architecture.

From my own discursive positionings, then, I speak T-witnessed accounts of other's stories. My speaking, always localized, is only partially named. The questions that guide my narratives circulate through my desire to theorize the bodies of teenage girls in the space and time we call school. My interpretative activities, always already outside that space and time, seek some reconfigurations among the multifarious threads that frame academic interpretations of gender and education. Writing from unstable fragments, co­ constructed through my encounters in a single-sex school for girls, I tell unexpected stories about unicorns, myth-making, architecture, bodies and woman-making. From fleeting accounts of how some teenage girls negotiate/resist/comply with the discourses of privilege they encounter in this elite educational setting, I tell stories about gender, class and race in school.

Above all else, these are stories about myself. Stories about how I have sorted through 'others' stories so that I could retell them from where I stand. In body I stand, always changing, only sometimes re/membering myself as 'woman'. In identities I stand in flux, multiply situated across races and classes. Institutionally, I claim a homespace with/in the world of academia, though I continually feel unsettled by what I find here.

Politically, I reenact feminist resistance to androcentric, eurocentric and other unicentric ways of being. This partial naming of my discursive positionings is one way to 3 foreground my fabricating activities. Simply naming, however, feels inadequate to the task of trailing the self through my storytelling. By way of prefacing this work I mark what follows with my own signature.

Selves with/in Selves: Stories with/in Stories

The fantasy of mastery is directly related to the fantasy of the possibility of representation; it is to presuppose that it is possible for a subject of knowledge, a consciousness, to have direct access to a world which is given, to know and to represent an object (Game, 1991:7).

Abandoning older authoritative devices of omni/science and surfacing my selves in my stories is a move that will make some uncomfortable. In particular, I am thinking about those who are invested in maintaining a form of transcendental academic authority derived, in part, by vanquishing the self from the text (Krieger, 1991). This invisibility contract, whereby we agree to write ourselves out of our scholarship, is part of a more complex economic system. In this academic market the self, conceived in liberal humanistic terms as unitary and coherent, is exchanged for 'professional authority'. A healthy return on investments is guaranteed by training acolytes, marked as unitary subjects, to internalize these self-regulating silences. In this story the bodies of academics are legitimate only when they produce goods that are verifiable 'neutral', 'objective' and free of self. From the ivory tower, written against the 'real' world of commitments, single authoritative visions flow 'representing' what others can only glimpse.

In such an economy the person who would speak her selves is viewed as ill/legitimate. In refusing that naming I take up postmodernist assumptions about subjectivity to rework the technologies that manage academic authorities. Bronwyn

Davies (1989a, 1989b, 1990, 1992a, 1992b), has been most influential in helping me articulate this position. She notes that "who one is is always an open question with a 4 shifting answer depending upon the positions made available within one's own and others' discursive practices and within those practices, the stories through which we make sense of our own and others' lives" (1989:229). Since we take ourselves up in a variety of storylines, where the rules that guide the narration can shift dramatically from story to story, we each occupy a number of possible selves which often rub up against each other in disaffirming ways.

As an academic I am taken up in academic discourses which form the basis of much of my storytelling activities. But am also I constituted through other storylines, such as my mothering stories, that would often as not disallow my academic telling.

When several of the girls in my study asked me rather or not I would send my daughter to their privileged schooling site, I could only hesitate between my academic self and my mothering self. As an academic observer I find critical things to say about the educational practices at their school. As a mother I recognize that theirs is probably among the best of schooling options available to girls and I yearn for the best when it comes to the interests invested in my daughter. And then I must also ask, how would I educate my son? These selves are very much in conflict.

In refusing omni/scientific stories of transcendental academic authority, I am refusing the hierarchy it would impose on my variously constituted selves. Instead, I am seeking new ways to authorize my speaking, investing in a retooling of academic management technologies /economies. The repercussions of this gesture, motivated by the desire to increase my responsibility toward the girls who enable my livelihood/my writing, are still unfolding in my thinking. Mobilizing my discursively bounded selves, and thereby communally bound selves, to live more openly in my text-making activities seems like one habitable strategy. If, as Naomi Schor (1987:6-7) suggests, "all literary methodologies, all critical theories and histories of critical theory serve to validate 5 idiosyncratic relationships to the text" then the theory I spin out from my discursively bounded positionalities and the interpretations I speak from those positionalities emerge from my "personal storehouse of myths" and the "hieroglyphs" of my unconscious. I trust that my understandings are sufficiently reflected in others that my speaking will illicit traces of recognition and response.

In naming my strategy as story telling I am dreaming an economy no longer governed by the fact/fiction and history/myth binaries that has given so much power to transcendental academic authority. As Donna Haraway (1989) has observed, academic identities are intricately woven on the warp of fact and the woof of fiction. So much so she notes that "we feel morally obligated, to oppose fact and fiction" (Ibid.: 3. Also see

Rorty, 1980; Walkerdine, 1990; Game, 1991). In this oppositional construct we feel obliged to mark 'facts' as the original and fiction as the fabricated. In deconstructing the binary, however, we recover the human action that underlies both fact and fiction. As

Haraway says, the important difference has been that "fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning, while fact is a descendant of a past participle, a word which masks the generative deed or performance" (1989:4). She goes on to note that "a fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings of life" (Ibid.).

By claiming the name of storyteller, rather than as researcher, I am bringing the activity of fabrication from the margins of academic scholarship to the center. What falls between these pages are not facts but art/facts - artful facts shaped through my body, being, dreaming and ways of knowing. As a traveling re/cording ob/server what falls between my fingers are currents of un-duplicable stories within stories within stories. If I can only touch, never fully understanding, then my saying is always already unreliable.

Starting from my unreliability, I loosen the bounds of social realism, slowly internalizing 6 the philosophy that I can not access an extra-cultural 'real' outside my crafting activities.

In shattering "established reality" multiplicity surfaces continually reaffirming different ways of being/knowing. In this multifarious flow our bodies, imaginations and artistry become the more fitting tools for 'validating' our work as academics. With them we reread the 'facts’ as they have been closed down by others only to be reread by others.

The stories written here, then, are not simply juxtaposed against dominant storylines. They also resist counter-discourses as they have been written elsewhere. In this resistance I find myself among a smaller number of feminists who are beginning to raise critical questions about the doing of feminist research (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Fine, 1993; Patai, 1991; Riessman, 1989; Stacey, 1988; Strathem, 1987). If storytelling, as it has been taken up here, does not necessitate stopping time, uncovering and representing

'facts', it also means leaving behind notions of 'giving voice' so popular within feminisms and marxisms (c.f. Fine, 1993). Thus, those who position themselves as speaking for other people and uncovering the hard 'facts' of oppressive social situations and power plays may also find what I say a bit disconcerting. As Susan Krieger (1991) says a "good feminist, like a good social scientist, was supposed to overcome limits of the self...to give others space to speak in their own words and style" (p. 52). If the dominant storyline within feminism is authorized by 'giving voice' to women and about being faithful to their 'realities' then I am left outside asking if there are other ways to authorize my speaking.

The stories I tell are impressionistic illustrations taken from blurred rubbings of moving bodies/moving worlds. I prefer kaleidoscopic illustrations over representational mappings because they allow more flexible ways of speaking about the space and time we call school. Unlike the snapshots of realist representation, illustrations, rendered by one artistic hand, are always already under erasure. As a feminist storyteller, poised 7 against the impossibility of representing 'women' (c.f. Butler, 1990), I have taken up the artful practice of illustrating 'woman', drawn at the messy boundaries of my unreliable knowing and ontological uncertainties. Mobilizing my own unreliability I reach toward inaccessible reaches. 8 REFERENCES Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women & Performance, 5,7-27.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

Davies, B. (1989a). The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings. Oxford Review o f Education, 15(3), 229-241.

Davies, B. (1989b).Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin

Davies, B. (1990). Lived and Imaginary Narratives and Their Place in Taking Oneself Up as a Gendered Being. Australian Psychologist, 25(3), 76-90.

Davies, B. (1992a). The Gender Trap: a Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis of Primary School Children's Talk About Gender. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 24(1), 1-25.

Davies, B. (1992b). Women's Subjectivity and Feminist Stories. In C. Elies & M. Flatrerty (Eds.), Investigation Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience Newbury, C.A.: Sage.

Fine, M. (1993).Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Game, A. (1991). Undoing The Social: Towards a deconstructive sociology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Opie, A. (1982). Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the 'Other' and Empowerment. Feminist Review, 40(Spring), 52-69.

Patai, D. (1991). U. S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible? In S. B. Gluck & D. Patai (Eds.), Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (pp. 137-153). New York: Roultedge.

Riessman, C. K. (1989). When gender is not enough: Women interviewing women. Gender and Society, 1(2), 172-207.

Rorty, R. (1980). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ:: Princeton University Press.

Schor, N. (1987). Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, Inc.

Strathem, M. (1987). An awkward relationship: The case of feminism and anthropology. Signs, 12(2), 276.

Walkerdine, V. (1990).School Girl Fictions. London: Verso. CHAPTER I

The World of Single-Sex Schooling: Legends, Myths, Unicorns and Teenage Girls

The stories I tell between these pages emerge from my encounters with academic literatures, historical archives, school documents, and teenage girls in school. Each source gave me different ways to think about private single-sex schooling for girls, allowing me to read various storylines across and against each other. While my specific focus is on single-sex schooling, my hope is that the themes I take up will stimulate other ways to think about being with girls in other types of schools. It is important to emphasize at the onset, however, that my goal is to offer ways of being/knowing and not broad generalizations that can be lifted and applied elsewhere. I leave that work to others who are comfortable with the assumption that historically bound 'findings' can be held still long enough to extract universal acontextual maxims about gender and education. While the stories I tell are specific, contextual and emanate from a privileged schooling site, available to only a small fraction of teenaged girls, it is my hope that they are open enough to be rewritten by those who are concerned about girls in other schooling sites.

The following chapters are written simultaneously to stand on their own while acting as part of some whole1. In this move I break away from standard dissertation format in a couple of ways, e.g., chapter two contains some data analysis and most chapters involve some repetition concerning the nature of this research. In chapter two I begin by reading/retelling contemporary stories written about single-sex schooling. I write these stories from academic research published internationally in various referred journals from the 1970s up through 1990. It is my contention that established 'research' tells a number of interesting stories above and beyond their surface intentions. As a consequence, they can be pried opened to a number of different readings (Scholes, 1989;

Cherryholmes, 1993). While many of these articles also contain stories about boys in 9 10 single-sex schools and stories about coeducation, I narrow my focus to what is said or left unsaid about girls and schooling. From one perspective these stories can be read as part of the technical and social means of producing different 'facts' about single-sex schooling and coeducation (c.f. Haraway, 1988). In telling different stories about this body of literature, my goal is to ferret out assumptions, often left unspoken, which circumscribe what counts as sayable in the area of girls and schooling. My goal in telling these stories is to open up other ways to speak about girls and schooling.

My own positionings within the story of girls and schooling no doubt effects other closures and I am less clear about what these may be than I am about how I have felt closed out of previous storylines. My own storytelling has been stimulated by recent musings on the possible interchanges between feminisms and postmodemisms, and is particularly influenced by Michel Foucault. My understanding of these intellectual currents is admittedly partial and limited. Indeed, as postmodernism has blossomed across the disciplines, I often find myself in muddied waters, if not whirlpools of confusion.

Reading across disciplines in which I have few footholds, for example, psychoanalysis or literary criticism, I have only been able to harvest certain possibilities, eliding many others. In other words, I can be no more exhaustive in my rendering of feminist postmodernism than I can be in my retelling of anything else.

In chapter three I move in less traditional ways to foreground my own unoriginality. Literature reviews are, in my estimation, always already pastiche, openly imitating the work of other authors/artists. In this chapter I make use of pastiche to retell the stories of those who have come to resist currents with/in feminist methodology (Abu-

Lughod, 1990, Fine, 1993, Patai, 1991 Riessman, 1989; Stacey, 1988; Strathem, 1987).

This chapter, like the one that follows it, is a playful chapter aimed at purposively disrupting established modes of academic writing. In this move I am exploring unknown areas. As Foucault (1980:193) has said about his own work chapters three and four "exist as a sort of prelude, to explore the keyboard, sketch out the themes and see how people react, what will be criticized, what will be misunderstood, and what will cause resentment". In chapter four I use what I have gleaned from feminist postmodernism to raise questions about and offer tentative thoughts on what it means to perform feminist methodology. In this project I begin to feel increasingly uncomfortable with some of the assumptions that drive the literature on feminist methodology and qualitative research. In chapter four I write my own story against the currents of feminist methodology

(c.f.Fonow & Cook, 1991), in which I question the privileging of epistemology over ontology. This is a highly polemical story, one that is grounded in my own uncertainties. It reflects my own attempt to open up other ways to think about our academic activities. It is a thinking piece where, without the aide of philosophical giants, I tread through questions of ontology, representation, time and space.

The ways in which I felt closed out by feminist discourses stemmed, in part, from the questions I was interested in asking about teenage girls in privileged schooling sites framed around the exclusion of boys. In chapter five I begin to grapple with this question by looking back to the stories told about girls and schooling during the nineteenth century. The historical tales I rewrite were gleaned from one journal, The Ohio Journal of

Education. During its years of publication in the nineteenth century I looked at all articles that took the schooling of girls as their central topic. Interestingly, with very few exceptions, the majority of these stories were debating the efficacy of single-sex schooling vis-a-vis the yet established norm of coeducation. The culprit in need of undoing in these stories was always single-sex schooling. The desires played out in these stories, however, were not simply about the gender policies of schools. More importantly, 12 these historical stories were also producing closures around the categories we call gender, race and social class. In particular, they were stories about recasting the category of

'European American middle and upper class women1.

I do not wish to imply that this category of 'women' was, nor is, homogeneous.

Indeed, I find fixed, stable and either/or notions of gender, race and class increasingly untenable, though difficult to leave behind. I continue to rely on these categories because

I find them useful for rereading educational discourses, which are invested in fixing knowable boundaries around the social flux in which we live out our lives. Likewise, legends and myths, through which institutions speak themselves into existence, can be read as mechanisms of power aimed at fixing of certain ways of beings. In chapter six I explore historical stories that come out of the school archives of the the All Girls School in this study (hereafter called AGS). Like many origin legends, those surrounding the beginning of AGS, when read against different historical stories, appear much more tentative and partial than their legendary form would allow one to believe.

In chapter seven, spinning out the myths signified by the ontological shape shifter known as the unicom, the guardian symbol of AGS, I tell stories co-generated from observations and interviews with the girls in AGS. These are stories that speak to how

'woman-making' is mythically invoked in schooling practices. This reading is particularly influenced by Roland Barthes (1957/1972) and his notion of myth as a form of depoliticized speech. Like the historical stories in chapters four and five, these are stories that seek to complicate the educational discourses we take up. As I have argued in chapter four these discourses are as invested in circumscribing the categories we call 'women',

'race' and 'class' as they are about good/bad schooling practices. The closures effected around these categories, however, are never complete and must continually be reasserted 13 in the context of school. Likewise they are constantly resisted at various levels by the girls in multiple ways (c.f. Giroux, 1983).

In chapter eight I tell architectural and body stories about girls as they are

"enclosed in school". In this chapter my aim is to foreground the body and architecture in educational discourses which tend to ignore both (c.f. Lesko, 1988). At the same time I seek to blur the boundaries between architecture and school policies. As with any art form, building or policy, intended design is always out of control. Once a product leaves an artist's hands it has multiple consequences only some of which can be known ahead of time. While I was doing my study AGS went through an architectural transformation by literally tearing down another school building while building a new one. While I had not gone into this study intending to write about architecture I was literally forced. I could not help but think about how this new building reshaped the spatial practices with/in this school. Chapter eight tells the story about my own observations of these changes and then turns to the girls narratives about their life at AGS to see if my telling has any validity.

Me/tho(d): The Technologies of My Story Telling

Breaking with dissertation traditions I speak my method here. I speak it as me tho(ough) d (to the fourth power). That is me constructing research questions, me constructing inter/views through questions, me constructing inter/pretations of answers, and me constructing a final product - one that brings with it a Ph.D. and attendant professional middle class privileges to my un-middle classed body. It also speaks onomatopoeically of how it felt - 'me' 'thoding' through libraries and hallways. And with my 'thoding' came multiple dis/comforts along with the more pleasurable bumps. In many ways my 'research' plans failed, and falling, landed otherwise upright. But, then, that is 14

qualitative research in a nutshell2. And this is a story that relies on the assumptions of

qualitative research3.

This is a book of stories constructed from multiple sources. To a large extent I

rely on document analysis. From history documents I write two 'data' stories. From

contemporary documents, observations and interviews I write two other 'data' stories. The

historical documents I use (primarily in chapters five and six) come from the local

historical library and the school archives of AGS. Most of the documents from AGS have

no title, author, and dates. They were written by various people connected to the school

since its beginning in 1898. To protect the identity of the school the arrival documents from the school are cited simply as being from the school archives. Historical documents from other sources are fully cited.

The contemporary stories I tell are co-generated out of an observational and interview study conducted over two academic school years. Lest, I leave the wrong impression, this is not a deeply immersed ethnographic study. During these two years I also pursued a full course of study, raised two children (who also kept me home with their frequent and various illnesses), worked for money 20 hours a week during the first year,

and lived in poverty during the second year (which is more time consuming than it sounds

- parading before various authorities to certify my poverty). In other words, this project was not the only thing I had going and often lost out in priority battles to the other more demanding parts of my life. Nonetheless, I managed to visit the school several times during each school year. Swimming in 'data', I generate only a few of many more possible

stories. Qualitative research generally involves the in-depth exploration of relatively small

samples that are purposefully selected. There are several different strategies for puiposefully selecting informants. This research started with a group of Juniors who volunteered to participate in the research and followed them through their senior year. I narrowed my initial focus to juniors because they will have graduated by the time this research is published. My initial interviews with this group of girls suggested that they had several different orientations to their schooling. Subsequent interviews captured several central themes that cut across many common patterns - capturing several core experiences and shared aspects or impacts of their schooling. My interviews yielded two kinds of findings. First, it enabled detailed descriptions of the diversity within the student body by highlighting the uniqueness of a few students. Second, it enabled me to get at the important shared patterns that emerge across the differences.

There are no rules of thumb for determining sample size in qualitative research. A small number of cases can provide valuable information if they are "information-rich"

(Patton: 1990). I interviewed seven girls at least between two and half to five hours each. I also spent some time shadowing the girls - going to some of their classes, hanging out with them during lunch and during their free periods. Finally, I spent a fair amount of time 'hanging out1 with the girls of the senior class in their commons. As ideas/insights/hunches/ trends emerged I threw them out to this variously constituted group of girls to get their feedback and assess the credibility of my ideas.

I also searched for alternative explanations for the patterns/trends I describe. As Marshall and Rossman have noted "alternative explanations always exist; the researcher must search for, identify, and describe them, and then demonstrate how the explanation offered is the most plausible of all"(1989:119). People, differently situated will always have different views. For example I may interpret an event differently than a student or staff member would. Rather than assuming the voice of authority and insisting that my interpretation is the correct one I name my research as storytelling and highlight my stories as simply being coeval stories rather than the 'truer' or 'best' story. In other words I 16 don't expect to have the final say. My interviewing technique was collaboration in that I was constantly throwing out my interpretations and getting their reactions. In the jargon of qualitative research this process is referred to as member-checking and is central to establishing the credibility of the study (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Member-checks in this study happened informally, during the course of conversation.

During my visits I observed a few classrooms. My moves through classrooms were aimed more at appeasing school authorities, who initially were uncomfortable with my stance as a qualitative researcher interested only in student perspectives. In particular they had a difficult time understanding that I didn't come in with a clearly demarcated determining set of questions and that I wasn't sure what I was looking for. Taking the perspective of the AGS teenage student also worked to make them anxious. How, they wanted to know, would I know when I had a 'truly' representative student and not one who occupied outlying occasional spots of discontent. To make sure I got a balanced perspective, the person appointed as my school contact generated a list of the adults I should talk to in the school.

However, I wasn't interested in balanced perspectives. I was interested in student stories about AGS, not teacher, administrative, and/or counseling stories. Of course I do read/write dominant AGS storylines in my narratives but I decided to generate these storylines out of the cohesive storylines that are presented to the public via student newspapers, school catalogs/promotional brochures, and alumni newsletters. What I was interested in was reading the private stories told by individual girls against the public storyline of AGS. In other words I wanted to read versions of what AGS schooling was about across visions of what it should be about (Anderson, 1993). From this position, I saw no need to "balance" the girls stories through the corrective lens of school authorities. These are stories about how the girls are discursively constituted through the public storylines of AGS. By reading/writing their private stories I am speaking their complicities and resistances to the public storylines they encounter in school. To get at these private stories I had to get outside the space where the public storylines dominated - the classroom, chapels (assemblies), etc. As a consequence I was more or less invisible to the school authorities. The first year I interviewed seven girls, then juniors, who volunteered to be in my interview study. For most of that year, I hung out in the commons area with these and other students - away from the watchful eyes of school authorities- and listened to them talk. During the second year I did more observations - this time in the senior commons, restricted to seniors, and conducted 2-3 hours of interviews with the seven girls who volunteered.

In the interviews I ask questions, shared my analysis of my observations, and asked for feedback. In other words the interviews themselves were multi-leveled with open two-way questioning, co-analysis/co-construction of 'data', and consecutive member checking. I used the interviews to check out hunches mobilized through my observations and or other stories told elsewhere. In the last interviews, I came prepared with interview transcripts so that the girls could check details. None availed themselves of that opportunity. Indeed, for the most part very few expressed any interest in partaking of any fabricating activities beyond the interview. Due to their time constraints (not to mention my own time limitations) a more mutual collaboration simply did not make sense. They were already giving so much (and with what return, I keep wondering) that I did not feel comfortable pushing the collaborative model of research so prevalent in much feminist methodology. 18

In the end I have used only small amounts of the 'data' I co-constructed in the fields of AGS and the archival fields of history. Taking up my mentor’s mantra - "do more with less" - 1 did less and still ended up with more than I can ever speak. Dipping just below the surface of AGS, with frequent breaks for contemplation, I found much to say about single-sex schooling. Had I immersed myself any deeper I could have easily become paralyzed, weighted down with too much to say, too many perspectives to sort through, too many commitments to understand. As it stands, I am already telling stories with too much left unsaid. With hindsight, I am thankful and hope that AGS authorities, should they read this, will not be too disappointed that I did not attempt to juggle the stories told by girls with those told by other participants at AGS.

Marking my Words:

In this section I frame what follows by defining a few 'key terms’. In deference to the creative reader who, through the lens of their own texts will make various meanings out of my text, I briefly mark my words to impart some sense of my conscious intentions.

By defining, however, I do not seek a final closure around a "centripetal reading", where the reader is encouraged to look for a "pure core of unmixed intentionality" (Scholes,

1989:8). On the contrary, I am more interested in producing a text that invites some

"centrifugal reading" which "sees the life of a text as occurring along its circumference,

[one] which is constantly expanding, encompassing new possibilities of meaning" (Ibid.).

Reading is, I believe, an intertextual act that involves both the closing in of centripetal reading and the opening up of centrifugal reading. Marking my words is a closing down activity. It is also a way of speaking some of the assumptions that guide this work. 19

I begin briefly by highlighting some of the assumptions that I think go along with advocating feminism as a kind of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a term that has been inscribed and reinscribed so many times that it evades definitional clarity. It is perplexedly complicated by the fact that almost every academic discourse has taken it up as a possibility and alternative. Embraced with/in different ways of knowing it has taken multiple shapes. Laurel Richardson (1991:2) claims that postmodernists do have "a unifying vision-albeit one that they do not necessarily apply to their own work. That vision is that the theorist takes a position that one's own work - words, writing - is not outside of or above the tendered critique".

The postmodernist frosting on the feminist cake of politics, contains but is not limited to the following: "distrust of metanarratives", a "crisis in representation1" the

"merging of fact and fiction", the "bending and blending of various boundaries" (Ibid.), the undoing unified subject positions (Davies, 1989a), and the disruption of oppositional constructs (Hekman, 1990). This combination yields more palatable flavors, at least for my taste buds. However, unlike other feminist postmodernists (e.g.. Lather, 1991a), I read many of these ingredients as being historically grounded in multiple sites that have traditionally been marginalized by the anglo/eurocentric and androcentric gazes of the professional classes. That is say I am invested in historicizing postmodernism by appropriating it as a way of thinking and not as a historical marker of time which in turn marks new ways of thinking (c.f. Lyotard, 1979/1984).

This position is also consistent with Foucault's (1972) notion of episteme. Every episteme contains oppositions that are internal to it. Modernism and postmodernism are both internal to the Western modem episteme centered on the figure of the man. In my reading "postmodemity is a rewriting of modernity, which has already been active within modernity for a long time" (Elam, 1992:9). What we are re/working under the guise of 20 postmodernism can best be understood as multiple modernisms, modernisms that are themselves raced, gendered and classed and shaped by different localities in time and space (see Higginbotham, 1992; Lubiano, 1991; Pennington, 1990; Richards, 1980).

Central to the postmodernism project is "a fundamental rejection of

Enlightenment dichotomies and the domination, manipulation and repression entailed by that epistemology" (Hekman, 1990: 133). What is actively being undone in Western postmodern discourses are eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies. At one level other historically familiar ways of being/knowing - ways that were less linear, hierarchical and dualistic - appear as postmodernism alternatives, for example the both/and circular kind of logic endemic to Afrocentric ways of being (Asante & Asante, 1990; Collins, 1990). A both/and approach goes beyond the binaries, acknowledging the complexities of living in/with a world that we all have a part in constructing. It is a move that pushes us to occupy the conceptual space - untheorized space -between the binaries. At another level, however, postmodernism is about exceeding boundaries (c.f. Elam, 1992). It is about the excess that overflows hierachial dualisms. It is about our ontological uncertainties in the face of that overflow.

Naomi Schor (1989) speaks about this overflow in a feminist archaelogy which uncovers the feminization of "detail" in literature. Likewise, Diane Elam (1992) argues that the literary genre known as romance, mapped onto female bodies within modernist discourses that reserve 'real' history for male bodies, is also about the "excess" of postmodernism. In both examples the category of 'women' is inextricably bound to detail and excess - always already read as exceeding boundaries. The figure of the woman is to postmodernism (Ibid.) what the figure of the man is to modernism (Foucault, 1972).

My own historical work can be read in a similiar vein. In nineteenth century educational discourse (reviewed in chapter 5) detail and excess were given the name 21

'decadence' and mapped onto the body of 'women'. Women, tooled up on educational lathes, were sent out into 'social' to cure the uncertainties associated with the overflow of detail. As the handmaidens of science they were to bring the purity of 'nature' to heal the seemingly excessive wounds of modernity. Ironically, they were to cure what they themselves were thought to embody. Women's long association with 'nature' can also be read as an association with uncontrolable excess.

'Nature' is always out of control, gardens are always already exceeding boundaries, and so has modernity always been threatened with overflowing boundaries.

'Women' have been written into the center of that threat. As Elam, has suggested via her focus is on the excess of romance novels, "feminism and postmodernism are implicated in one another: that the figure of woman offers up a feminism within postmodernity, and that likewise romance offers a postmodemity within feminism" (p. 18). If postmodernism is about excess than it is always about onotological uncertainty. Overflowing boundaries incites efforts to secure closures. The work of modernity has been to secure boundaries threatened by excessive overflow. As Donna Haraway (1989) notes the search for facts is a search for ways to close down, and secure the boundaries around the things we desire to know. In chapter four, part of what I wrestle with is what it means to be a feminist academic, in an institution largely devoted to securing the gates of knowledge - to holding back the excess and detail associated with the category 'women'.

Finally, I will speak just briefly about a central category of anylsis to this writing - social class. I have found it exceedingly difficult to let go of traditional Marxist closures around the category of social class. In short I still find social class to be a useful way to mark and understand similarities and differences. The histories and the study of schooling in this dissertation are all focused on the professional middle classes loosely referred to at times as the upper/middle classes. I did not, however, gather demographic information to 22 confirm this class location. In my qualitative study I asked the girls to name their class location. In my thinking their understanding of themselves as socially located persons was more interesting then the amount of education, degree of work autonomy, and amount of money their parents made.

Most of the girls in this study named themselves as belonging to the upper or upper/middle classes. Not all of the girls, however, are from the professional classes. For example one girl is from the working class and attends this private school on full scholarship. Another girl lives within a single parent household. She describes her mother, a K-12 teacher, as making significant scarifies to send her to AGS. As a consequence rather than categorize the girls by class location I name the school as being a socially privileged site. The girls in this study, regardless of their class location, are receiving a designer education which historically was the sole preserve of the upper/middle classes. In this sense they are being trained to take themselves as bourgeoise. Most, if not all of them, will go to college and many will train for well paid professional jobs.

1 My desire to have these stand as separate essays stems from the practical need to 'publish or perish' during my first few years as assistant professor. My goal has been to write chapters that can easy be removed from this book and reworked for publication. Chapter two, the traditional literature review, Is already under review by the National Women Studies A ssociation Journal. In subsequent chapters I selectively touch upon other bodies of literature. I take this opportunity to acknowledge that In reworking these chapters for publication, I will need to read more widely In the divergent bodies of knowledge I touch upon. For example chapter five, a historical chapter needs significantly more citatlonal authority to 'make it' In a history journal. As a consequence 1 present these as thinking papers, reflecting my ability to think across disciplines without being fully grounded In those disciplines In the traditional sense of the word. Feedback on relevant citational authorities overlooked in my philosophical musing Is most welcome.

2 I speak here assuming that postpositivistic qualitative research has established a sure foothold in an otherwise Imperialist economy of posltlvistlc sciences. As a consequence I see no need to echo the victory hymns of the qualitative over the quantitative (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Ely, Anzul, Friedman, Garner, & Stelnmetz, 1991; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 1990; Van Maanen, 1988). 23

3 See Bogdan & Blklen, (1992); Cherryholmes, (1993); Eisner, (1985); Ely, et al., (1991); Glesne & Peshkin, (1992); Jones, (1991); Lather, (1991a, 1991b, 1993); McLaren, (1992); Opie, (1982); Patton, (1990); Polklnghorne, (1988); Popkewitz, (1984); Richardson, (1990); Riessman, (1989); Roberts, (1981); Scholes, (1989); Stacey, (1988); Stanley, (1990); Stanley & Wise, (1993/1983); Strathern, (1987); Van Maanen, (1988); Weedon, (1987). 24

REFERENCES

Anderson, H. (1993). Undoing the Myth of the Unified Classroom: Visions and Versions of Distance Education. Under Review.

Asante, M. K., & Asante, D. W. (Ed.). (1990). African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Treton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc.

Bogdan, R. G., & Biklen, S. K. (1992). Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods (Second Edition ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Collins, P. H. C. (1990).Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Elam, D. (1992).Romancing the Postmodern. New York: Routledge.

Ely, M., Anzul, M., Friedman, T., Gamer, D., & Steinmetz, A. N. (1991).Doing Qualitative Research: Circles Within Circles. Philadelphia: The Falmer Press: Fonow, M. M., & Cook, J. A. (1991). Back to the Future: A Look at the Second Wave of Feminist Epistemology and Methodology. In M. M. Fonow & J. A. Cook (Eds.), Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research (pp. 1-15). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Sheridan Smith, A. M., Trans.). New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality (Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of The Prison (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972- 1977 (Gordon, Colin, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey.

Glesne, C., & Peshkin, A. (1992). Becoming Qualitative researchers: An Introduction. New York: Longman.

Higginbotham, e. B. (1992). African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race. Signs, 17(2), 251-274.

Lesko, N. (1988). The Curriculum of the Body: Lessons from a Catholic High School. In L. G. Roman, L. K. Christian-Smith, & E. Ellsworth (Eds.), Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture (pp. 123-142). Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. 25 Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic Inquiry. Beverly Hills CA: Sage.

Lubiano, W. (1991). Shuckin' Off the African-American Native Other: What's "Po-Mo" Got to Do with It? Cultural Critique, 149-186.

Patton, M. Q. (1990).Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (Second Edition ed.). Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

Pennington, D. L. (1990). Time in African Culture. In M. K. Asante & D. W. Asante (Eds.), African Culture: the Rhythms of Unity Treton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc.

Richards, D. (1980). European Mythology: The Ideology of "Progress". In M. K. Asante & A. S. Vandi (Eds.), Contemporary Black Thought

Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CHAPTER n

THE SCHOOLING OF GIRLS: STORIES ABOUT SINGLE-SEX VERSUS COEDUCATION

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 marks the beginning of American feminism as an organized social movement. One of the least controversial proclamations issued from this convention was the demand for coeducation in public schools. Indeed, most people felt that coeducation was the most 'natural' and expedient way to educate the young. For early feminists coeducation was the only way to guarantee girls access to the educational privileges granted to boys. For others it was simply the most efficient thing to do (Tyack &

Hansot, 1990). However, after coeducational schooling had become quite common, some began to question the merit of educating girls and boys together. In the 1870's intense debates were fueled by the work of Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a Harvard physiologist, who claimed that concerted academic work and competition with boys would harm the growth of a girls reproductive organs and undermine her femininity (Clarke, 1874). Later, during the progressive era, critiques of coeducation shifted from a concern about masculinizing girls to one of feminizing boys. Much to the dismay of many observers, girls frequently outperformed boys academically (Nasaw, 1979; Tyack & Hansot, 1990). Boys poor performance was blamed on what was perceived to be the growing feminization of high schools, as indicated by the higher enrollment of girls and the employment of female teachers. It was argued that this influx of girls and women into public schools created a

'sissy' environment antithetical to the needs of boys (Tyack & Hansot, 1990).

Against these various historical storylines, the bulk of contemporary educational research can be read as contributing to the normalization of coeducation through its very silence on the issue. Nonetheless, with the growing documentation of the ways that

2 6 27 educational practices have 'shortchanged girls' (for a recent summary of this literature see:

AAUW, 1992), a small number of researchers have brought the issue of coeducation under scrutiny once again. In this paper I bring together the academic research that contrasts single-sex schooling with coeducation; my goal is to tell stories about how this research reads and writes girls in schools. From a slightly different perspective, in this case one that focuses on unspoken assumptions, it is possible to read different kinds of stories from academic research (Haraway, 1989, Cherryholms, 1993). Often these are stories about the ways that educational discourses effect closures around the various social categories they evoke.

Obviously gender based policies of our schools affect both boys and girls. Most of my attention in this reading, however, will be focused on the schooling experiences of girls with an interest in how the category of 'girl' is written. In addition, I am largely concerned with reading stories from the research that favors single-sex schooling. This literature explicitly challenges the coeducational bias of educational research as well as problematizes this long standing tradition. It is my hope that stories from single-sex schools will open up different ways for feminists to rethink the schooling of girls. I begin with a brief overview of current literature on single-sex education. Then I move on to review the perspectives that underlie both traditional and critical positions on single-sex schooling. Finally, I offer the possibilities associated with a feminist postmodernist approach to schooling. In this final section, I offer some examples from my own research to highlight the potential of this approach.

Surface Readings: The Pros and Cons of Single-Sex Schooling

James Coleman's (1961) work on adolescent subcultures was influential in refocusing attention on the kind of education that girls receive. He suggested that schools 2 8 were sites for the production of adolescent subcultures that favored physical attractiveness and heterosexual popularity over academic achievement. Girls, he hinted, might find it difficult to compete academically in the face of peer group pressures that privileged attractiveness over academics. This raised questions about the viability of coeducation for girls, stimulating a small but growing body of literature on the value of single-sex schooling versus coeducational schooling (Lee & Marks, 1990).

The debate within this literature centers on whether or not secondary single-sex schools or classes offer a strategy for overcoming gender based differences in educational outcomes and for countering sexist practices in society at large. Proponents of the single­ sex strategy have suggested that single-sex schools or classes can enhance girls academic performance (Carpenter & Hayden, 1987; Finn, 1980; Finn, Dulberg, & Reis, 1979;

Jimenez & Lockheed, 1989; Lee & Bryk, 1986; Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Riordan, 1985,

1990), increase educational aspirations (Lee & Bryk, 1986; Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Lee &

Marks, 1990), decrease their 'fear of success1 (Winchel, Fenner, & Shaver, 1974), decrease sex role stereotyping (Lee & Bryk, 1976; Vockell & Lobonc, 1981; Phillips,

1979, Trickett et al., 1982), and offer greater potential for counter-sexist practices

(Mahony, 1985; Jones, 1984; Sarah, Scott & Spender, 1980; Shaw,1980, 1983).

However, others who have compared single-sex schools or classes with coeducational schools or classes come to different conclusions. For example, it has been argued that the gender composition of schools does not exert an overwhelming influence on sex role stereotyping (Harris, 1986; Rosenthal & Chapman, 1982), that coeducational schools offer greater potential for counter-sexist practices (Willis & Kenway, 1986; Amot,

1983), that coeducational schools are less organized, controlling and disciplinarian (Dale,

1969, 1971; Schneider & Coutts, 1982; Trickett, et al, 1982), that students prefer coeducational schools (Jones, Kyle & Black, 1987; Harris, 1986; Dale, 1969, 1971) and 29 that coeducational schools offer an equal or superior academic advantage (Dale, 1967,

1971; Feather, 1974; Harvey, 1985; Marsh, Smith, Marsh, & Owens, 1988; Marsh,

1989). Thus, while most agree that girls are disadvantaged by existing educational practices, there is a continuing debate over the value of sex-segregated schools or classes for overcoming those disadvantages. Most of the research comparing single-sex and coeducational schooling is from countries other than the U.S. (e.g. Dale, 1969, 1971,

1974, in the U.K.; Jimenez & Lockheed, 1989, in Thailand; Lee & Lockheed, 1990, in

Nigeria; Carpenter, 1985; Carpenter & Hayden, 1987; Marsh, Smith, Marsh, & Owens,

1988; Marsh, 1989, in Australia; Schneider & Coutts, 1982 in Canada). There has been a small, albeit, growing body of literature in the United States (e.g. Lee & Bryk, 1986; Lee

& Marks, 1990; Riordan, 1985; 1990). Ironically, the debate in the United States takes place at a time when secondary single-sex schooling as an option is disappearing rapidly.

Goldberg (1988) argues that we are currently in the 'second wave' of single sex schools converting to coeducational institutions (in Lee and Marks, 1990). The first wave of conversions took place in the 60's and 70's largely for economic reasons. In the mid-

1960's approximately 62% of the 900 schools in the National Association of Independent

Schools were single-sex schools. Today less than 21% are single-sex schools. The major decline took place in single-sex schools for boys. All girls schools during this same time period dropped from 24% to 12%. The Catholic sector also reflects the trend toward of converting single-sex schools to coeducational institutions (Ibid.).

The declining availability of single-sex schooling for girls in the United States has not received much attention from feminist scholars. This is not surprising given the fact that historically coeducation as a gender policy and practice has rarely been central to public debates over education (Tyack & Hansot, 1990). For the most part educational researchers have taken coeducation for granted. As noted above, when early feminists did enter the debate it was usually against single-sex education for girls because they believed they represented an inferior education. Likewise, the fact that single-sex schooling for girls is only available in the private sector and hence not an option for most girls may account for the lack of interest in it. Some feminists scholars may also reject the study of single-sex schooling because for the most part it is concerned with an atypical group of girls. Most of these schools are 'elite' schools in that they are concerned largely with providing an education for the economically privileged families (the exceptions would be scholarship students and some Catholic schools). Feminist scholars in Australia and the U.K., where approximately one-third of state secondary schools and most private schools are single-sex

(Riordan, 1990), have been more involved in debates concerning the efficacy of single-sex education for girls (e.g., Amot, 1983; Jones, 1984; Mahony, 1985; Sarah, Scott &

Spender, 1980; Shaw, 1980,1983; Willis & Kenway, 1986).

The fact that single-sex schooling in the United States is not widely available, financially or geographically, does not mean that this form of schooling is not worthy of feminist analysis. Focusing on the education of girls in single sex schools may highlight, illuminate and magnify the lacunae in the existing theoretical and empirical literature on women in education. Furthermore, while many feminists scholars tend to share the inclination of other social scientists to study "down" -that is to be more interested in studying the obviously disprivileged teenage girls, (c.f. McRobbie, 1991) - it could be argued that there are equally valid reasons for studying "up". For example, Connell, and colleagues argue that understanding why and how elite schools are academically

'successful' is just as important as understanding why other types of schools fail (Connell,

Ashenden, Kessler, & Dowsett, 1982). Furthermore, while there is some feminist work focused on contrasting the schooling experiences of girls from the professional middle class with those of working class girls e.g. (Delamont, 1989; Frazer, 1988; Frazer, 1989; Jones, 1991; Kenway, 1990;

Ockley, 1978), overall, feminists have ignored economically over-privileged girls and women. As I have argued elsewhere (Anderson, 1992), the lack of attention to the education of economically over-privileged girls constitutes a silence with/in feminist discourse on education. This silence works hand in hand with culture-wide silences on systems of privileging - discouraging a critical examination of how schools inscribe those privileges as well as the ways that girls take up/resist those discourses. From this perspective the study of an elite single-sex schooling environment could offer insights into gendered aspects of schooling, as well as insights into systems of privileging.

All of the scholarship on single-sex schooling is framed within modernist discourses. The bulk of it falls within the traditional realm of positivistic science and, cloaked in the language of neutrality, refuses to name itself. Some of the research is explicitly feminist and done in the tradition of critical educational theory. In the following two sections I tell stories largely about the unspoken assumptions that flow through this literature. I situate my work and hence my reading of this literature, with/in the crossroads of feminism, critical theory and postmodernism. In the final section I suggest some of the ways that a feminist postmodernist perspective works to problematize our understanding of single-sex education. As a feminist postmodernist I am wrestling with fundamental tenets associated with Enlightenment epistemology while recognizing that I am not completely outside the widely cast net of liberal humanist assumptions. As a consequence my work both refuses and reinscribes part of what I critique. 32

Stories From Traditional Literature on Single-Sex Schooling

A major strand of literature that contrasts single-sex education with coeducation is guided by what Amot (1983) calls liberal-reformist tendencies with/in education. Stories emanating from this approach have been useful in helping us understand the ways in which gender bias permeates many of our educational practices and in helping us think about strategies that can reduce educational barriers for girls. These types of stories grow out of and contribute to a growing awareness of the extent of gender bias in our schools and consequently have lead more researchers to view coeducation problematically. In the realm of gender and education, however, liberal-reformist narratives have been fueled by the assumptions that underlay sex role socialization theory and face many of the problems associated with this theory. Sex-role socialization theory, extensively critiqued elsewhere

(e.g. Connell, 1987; Leach & Davies, 1990), will not be reviewed here. Instead, the following paragraphs demonstrate how this major strand of single-sex education research relies on the assumptions that circulate through liberal-reformist/sex role storylines.

The similarities between this major strand of single-sex research and the liberal- reformist/sex roles approach can best be understood by examining the values and political assumptions that underlie them. First, this strand of the literature, like sex-role theory, assumes that 'traditional1 role socialization accounts for differences between girls and boys.

In this story the unfolding plot is one where little girls and boys are socialized in a linear manner via a top-down cause and effect link between active adult and passive child. This notion of socialization also fits in neatly with the guiding premise of positivism -that the social world exists as a system of variables that are distinct and analytically separable and can/do operate in a linear cause and effect manner. Given this storyline the notion that the 33 gender policies of schools actively shape students attitudes (Dale, 1969, 1971; Feather,

1974; Schneider & Coutts, 1982), academic orientations (Trickett, et al, 1982), gender stereotyping (Lee & Bryk, 1986; Vockell & Lobonc, 1981; Phillips, 1979; Harris, 1986;

Rosenthal & Chapman, 1982), levels of academic achievement (Dale, 1974; Finn, 1980;

Riordan, 1985,1990, Lee & Byrk, 1986) is held to be straightforward and unproblematic.

Indeed, the notion that adults in single-sex schooling actively 'impart' socially desirable characteristics to girls is central to these narratives (Carpenter & Hayden, 1987;

Finn, 1980; Finn, Dulberg, & Reis, 1979; Jimenez & Lockheed, 1989; Lee & Bryk, 1986;

Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Lee & Marks, 1990; Phillips, 1979; Riordan, 1985,1990; Trickett et al., 1982; Vockell & Lobonc, 1981; Winchel, Fenner, & Shaver, 1974). Moreover, the way they title their research also indicates that these researchers assume that schools produce 'effects' (e.g. Lee & Bryk, 1986, 1989; Lee & Lockwood, 1990; Lee & Marks,

1990; Marsh, 1988, 1989a, 1989b; Riordan 1985). Gender differences are transformed into the division between boys and girls. Girls are taken as a unified powerless/disadvantaged group prior to the analysis. Only by assuming that boys and girls are already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into school relations is it possible to look at the 'effects' of schools. The crucial point is that girls and boys are produced through and implicated in the formation of these very relations.

Second, this literature perpetuates a liberal-reformist storyline because it defines

'equality of the sexes' as 'equality of opportunity'. The set of values that underlie this definition of equality are liberal-reformist because they focus on the individual nature of social mobility and emphasize the role of individual achievement and ambition. The counter-plot becomes one of breaking out of traditional sex roles which are seen to be both the 'cause and effect' of women's subordinate position. According to their proponents, single-sex schools or classes, free from cross-sex competition, and full of positive role 34

models, can be viewed as 'compensatory' strategies that are more conducive to encouraging girls to develop skills in traditionally male dominated areas, notably math and

science.

These assumptions, particularly the emphasis on achievement, are reflected in the explanations offered by those who have found that single-sex schools are advantageous - at least for girls. One popular explanation has been that the lack of cross-sex competition and

the reduction of a adolescent subculture has created environments more conducive to the

academic development of girls (Phillips, 1979 Winchel; Fenner & Shaver, 1974; Riordan, 1985, 1990). Another common suggestion is that single-sex schools provide a greater number of same sex academic role models and thus foster less sexist attitudes and greater academic orientations (Lee & Byrk, 1986; Finn, Dulberg & Reis, 1979; Finn, 1980;

Riordan, 1985, 1990). Still another suggestion is that peers, particularly those who aspire to higher education, also act as role models (Carpenter & Hayden, 1987). Finally, Lee and

Bryk (1986) have suggested that various other aspects of school structure and resources,

(for example teacher pupil ratio, number of courses, and various staff variables), may account for academic differences.

Further the emphasis in this literature on personal achievement and role models places it squarely in a liberal-reformist agenda. It rests on a notion of individualism and the personal power to change oneself through concerted effort given the right circumstances.

Ironically, this assumption may actually lead to the disempowering of girls. If they don't

'make it' in the real world, they may feel that they have only themselves to blame - leaving larger systems of inequalities unchallenged. Likewise, the assumption that same sex role models works to foster less sexist attitudes in students works to divert attention away from larger structures of inequality. The positive weight given to same sex role model storyline in the single sex literature is premised on the notion that it is teaching girls that they can 35 be/do anything. According to Briskin (1990) this is a strategy of non-sexism. By contrast an anti-sexist approach would shift the focus from the realm of morality (I am not sexist) to the realm of political practice (what can I do about sexism?)..." (p. 10). An anti-sexist strategy would require examining the barriers that continue to prevent women from doing anything they want.

Third, this literature clearly begins from the same starting point as do sex roles narratives- that different role outcomes for girls and boys are to be taken as the central problem. Thus the variables for comparison remain the same, as noted above, with an emphasis on achievement and attitudes. The girls continue to be evaluated in terms of male norms even within single-sex environments. This 'deficit model' storyline concludes that girls rather than the boys are deficient in the abilities and skills required for success (Gray,

1984). While most of the researchers in this area recognize that it is unlikely that the

U.S.A. will create single-sex schools in the public sector, they suggest that we might develop compensatory or remedial single-sex programs where girls can learn to be more like boys (e.g. Lee & Marks, 1990).

The problem within this narrative is the underlying assumption that the dominant male culture is intrinsically more valuable. Indeed, one could easily conclude from the literature that the reason single-sex schools for girls are successful is that they encourage girls to act more like boys! This flows from the fact that the literature on single-sex education is too narrowly focused on educational outcomes. It tells us nothing about processes and structures that shape differences in educational outcomes for girls. Without this knowledge we may adopt single-sex strategies that reinscribe male-norms even more successfully than coeducational environments.

In sum, while this kind of story about gender and education has been useful in helping us understand the ways in which gender bias permeates many of our educational 36 practices, there are multiple indicators that mark this research as grounded in liberal- reformist discourses with its attendant notions of sex-role socialization. The result is a story that reduces the interactive complexity of what takes place in our schools to overly simplistic cause and effect models. Moreover, from a feminist perspective this storyline fails to challenge male-centered notions that permeate our educational practices. Nor does has it helped us understand how children, as active agents, interpret/negotiate/mediate the messages they receive in schools.

The focus on role socialization and the internalization of different attitudes and expectations also directs attention away from the structural aspects of inequality and relations of power within and outside of our schools. In these narratives we do not get any idea of 'why' or 'how' schools perpetuate practices that have different consequences for boys and girls. In line with liberal-feminist agendas this approach attempts to redefine the 'truth' of girls abilities within the terms of existing school relations and to establish

'equality' with the boys. This approach accepts the official ideology of schools - that they are neutral institutions - by assuming that schools and the people in them, with a little fine- tuning, can be fixed once and for all.

Stories From The Critical Feminist Literature on Single-Sex Schooling

Over the last couple of decades, in response to the lack of socioeconomic and political analysis in the sex-roles approach, scholars influenced by feminism and critical theories of education have generated alternative stories about gender and education. Weiler

(1988) contrasts feminist critical thought with liberal feminist thought on gender and education: 37 The first assumption is that schooling is deeply connected to the class structure and economic system of capitalism; thus one focus of this work is on the relationship of women's schooling and women's work. The second assumption, again derived from more general socialist feminist theory, is that capitalism and patriarchy are related and mutually reinforcing of one another. In other words, both men and women exist in interconnected and overlaping relationship of gender and class and, as feminists of color have increasingly emphasized, of race as well (p. 29).

Most of the work influenced by these assumptions began in the 1970's. In these narratives scholars argued that schools functioned to reproduce class structures by selectively transmitting skills and attitudes according to class (Althusser, 1971; Apple,

1979; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Early work in reproduction theory continued to share some of the assumptions of sex-role theory as well as the broader assumptions of liberal humanist discourse. For example, it was commonly assumed that schools were agents of unopposed socialization (e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). This work differed from sex role theory, however, in the notion that socialization was related to power. These scholars analyzed how 'what' is learned undergirds the structure of power and privilege in society. Early feminist researchers in gender and education unproblematically appropriated the assumptions of reproduction theory, and its focus on class relations, to write stories about how schools reproduced gender relations (e.g. Anyon, 1981a, 1981b; Deem, 1978). In these stories the schools are blamed for training women for domesticity and hence lower economic achievements.

The small body of literature in the feminist tradition that supports single-sex schooling for girls is largely concerned with schooling as a site for counter-sexist practices.

In these stories some of the ways that educational practices shape our notions of gender are central to the telling. Amot (1983) refers to this literature as having a 'radical' perspective.

This radicalness grows out of the fact that it refuses the 'deficit model' for understanding 38 different outcomes for girls and boys. Instead, these stories are guided by a concept of power and the process of empowering. In particular, the central plot is focused on the ways in which girls are subordinated by educational practices (Mahony, 1985; Jones,

1984; Sarah, Scott & Spender, 1980; Shaw, 1980,1983). Unlike the 'liberal-reformist' stories this research does not begin with the 'facts' of differential outcomes among girls and boys. Instead, it focuses on how school environments devalue being female. Furthermore, in contrast to the positivistic assumption of neutrality, this approach involves a commitment to values - namely that the experience of girls and their feelings are legitimate and need to be explored rather than ignored. Guided by critical educational theories, these researchers tend to be concerned with the ways in which the academic and social relations of schooling, the school environment, the ideology of teachers and pupils reproduce/produce gender relations.

These stories also differ from the 'liberal-reformist'/sex role stories in that their interpretation of 'equality of the sexes' stresses 'equality of power sharing' rather than

'equality of access’ (Amot, 1983). For example, they argue that increasing equality of access to education does not necessarily guarantee equal participation in the educational process. On the contrary research indicates that teacher-student interaction and student- student interaction create environments where girls continue to be disadvantaged

(Spender,1982; Spender & Sarah, 1980; Stanworth, 1983). The main assumption that underlies the critical feminist stories is that one significant function of mixed schooling is to reproduce patriarchal relations of domination. Implicit in this assumption is the recognition that girls educational experiences have been interpreted and assessed within the context of a system based on male experiences and norms. The solution from this perspective, as above, is to segregate the sexes. The argument is that single-sex education is the only way 39 to counteract the 'socialization' patterns of girls which relegate them to subordinate positions.

Despite the different assumptions that underlie this overtly 'feminist' storyline their explanations end up being very similar to those found in the liberal-reformist stories. First, like the sex role storyline, they assume that socialization is a straightforward unproblematic process of teaching/learning 'roles'. For example, they argue that the lack of cross-sex competition and reduction of cross sex socialization creates environments more conducive to the overall development of girls (Mahony, 1985; Jones, 1984; Sarah, Scott & Spender,

1980; Shaw, 1980,1983). Instead of focusing solely on the 'facts’ of academic outcomes and attitudes, as the liberal-reformist narratives do, their explanations tend to highlight the nature of power relations between girls and boys in mixed schools. They argue that the only way to overcome the informal processes that maintain a social division in which girls are subordinated, which persist even if girls have equal access in mixed schools (Shaw,

1980), is to segregate them. From this perspective this is a solution that not only deinstitutionalizes these divisions but is the only way to eliminate the barrage of verbal abuse and sexual harassment girls receive from boys in mixed schools (e.g. Mahony,

1985; Jones, 1984).

Another common reason for advocating single-sex schooling for girls is that single­ sex schools provide a greater number of same 'sex role' models who foster less sexist attitudes. The importance of role models in this story, however, is not simply academic as above. Rather, their importance lies in their feminist values and their ability to cultivate an awareness of a common sisterhood (Sarah, Scott & Spender, 1980). Ironically, as with the liberal-reformist storyline, the assumption that same sex role models works to foster less sexist attitudes in students, works to divert attention away from larger structures of inequality. The positive weight given to same sex role modeling in the single sex literature 40 is premised on a strategy of non-sexism (Briskin:1990). Moreover, this 'feminist' position seems to assume that the staff in all girls schools are by their nature dedicated feminists.

Further, socialization, in this view, is accomplished unproblematically despite the fact that wider-cultural messages in which these schools are embedded are not necessarily feminist.

While this type of story moves toward an understanding how school processes can shape gender relations, it is limited when it comes to helping evaluate the differences between mixed and single-sex schooling. While it is clear that mixed schools can be socially detrimental for girls (Mahony, 1985; Jones, 1984) it is not clear that single-sex schools do or can do what coeducational schools cannot. Like the liberal-reformist story the pro single-sex conclusion from the 'feminist-critical' story is based on assumptions that have not been empirically examined, namely that single-sex schools are less sexist. The observations that lead these researchers to their conclusions are drawn from mixed schools only. We still do not know how the practices of schooling, in single-sex schools, shape gender relations. We still do not know how girls negotiate/mediate the messages they receive. Nor do we know whether the separation of girls and boys actually challenges gender based hierarchies.

There is a feminist literature that urges caution when considering the single-sex option. This story contains two important critiques of both the liberal-reformist and

'feminist-critical' storylines. First, both these stories tend to simplify the argument to its most essential features - that of being coeducational or single-sexed. This focus obscures the historical, sociocultural, and ideological context of schooling. Amot (1983) argues that to understand the reproduction of "dominant bourgeois gender relations, one must also be aware that in different historical periods and for different social classes there may be a variety of modalities of transmission of those gender relations" (p.71; also see Kessler,

Ashenden, Connell, & Dowsett, 1985). At any point in history the impact of gender and 41 class has led to a variety of school structures. In other words, there is not one dominant gender code but rather a variety of forms of transmission that are shaped at least in part by social class origins. For example, Amot (1983) argues that historically, single-sex schooling offered the bourgeoisie "the chance to provide different but equally privileged educations for its sons and daughters, maintaining the appropriateness of a rigid sexual division of labor between public and private worlds, between male paid employment and female family responsibilities" (p. 73, also see Tyack & Hansot, 1991).

Along this same line is the argument that schools do not simply transmit/reproduce traditional gender relations; they are actively engaged in constructing them. Kessler, et al

(1985) suggest that schools are:

characterized at any given time by a particular gender regime. This may be defined as the patter of practices that constructs various kinds of masculinity and femininity among staff and students, orders them in terms of prestige and power, and constructs a sexual division of labor within the institutions. The gender regime is a state of play rather than a permanent condition. It can be changed, deliberately or otherwise, but it is no less powerful in its effects on the pupils (p. 42).

The second critique of both the liberal reformist' and 'feminist-critical' stories about the education of girls is that they ignore the process by which boys are socialized into sexist men. As Amot (1983) has noted, a strategy that focuses on girls does not challenge the overall 'reproduction' of hierarchical gender relations (also see Willis & Kenway,

1986). The solution, like the problem, is girl focused. If girls go to single-sex schools that means that boys must also go to single sex schools. What would this mean for the boys?

Will single-sex schools also provide a mechanism for overcoming the sexist attitudes of men? 42

Available research, all within the liberal-reformist storyline, is mixed on this question of educating boys in single-sex schools. Phillips (1979) concluded that that single-sex schools decreased girls' traditional stereotypes but increased boys' stereotypes.

Lee and Bryk (1986) found little difference between traditional stereotyping attitudes between girls and boys schools, with a favorable difference for girls in single-sex versus coeducational schools. Still others conclude that mixed schools are more conducive for breaking down traditional stereotypes (Rosenthal and Chapman, 1982; Harris, 1986).

'Feminist-critical' storytellers, on the other hand, have simply ignored the implications of single-sex schooling for boys. Assuming that single-sex schooling does benefit girls, without corresponding changes in male attitudes these benefits may be limited.

Alternative Storylines About Single-Sex Schooling: A Feminist Postmodernist Approach

A feminist postmodernist story about single-sex schooling differs from the liberal- reformist storyline in its recognition of the constitutive force of discourses. 'Liberal- reformist' stories see subjectivity as fixed, unitary, noncontradictory, and essentially rational. I use the term subjectivity here to account for the ways that individuals give meaning to themselves and their everyday lived experiences. The appeal of the liberal- reformist storyline lies in its acceptance of the individual as 'naturally' feminine or masculine. What is problematic from this perspective is the taking up of social selves, theorized as roles, and conceived as distinct and separate from the 'natural' self. In particular liberal-reformist positions are invested in extending to girls the kind of social roles already available for boys. Schools, assumed to be agents of top-down socialization, are viewed as sites for extending alternative social roles to 'girls'. 43

The ’feminist-critical’ storyline about single-sex schooling, on the other hand, moves beyond the liberal-reformist stories by focusing on the lived experiences of girls in coeducational schools. They use these accounts to understand the coeducational experience and how it is constructed. In particular they are interested in the 'what' of power relations.

However, in this approach, power gets narrowed down to acts that some people perpetuate on others. This is a move that already assumes a meaning - avoiding the issue of how meaning is produced. Subjectivity in this account, as in the liberal-reformist story, remains unproblematized. As a consequence, they are unable to explain the 'how' of power relations in schools.

Feminist postmodern storylines work to undo traditional discourses of socialization. The goal is to problematize the liberal-humanist notions of a unitary rational actor that underlies both the 'liberal-reformist' and the 'feminist-critical' stories about single-sex schooling. Instead, the focus is on exploring the ways in which girls take up as their own or reject the discourses available to them in their schools. In this story traditional gender, raced and class orders are not viewed as 'natural'. In particular the dualistic and hierarchical nature accorded to these categories through/in liberal-humanist discursive practices is held as highly problematic. The difficult task of feminist postmodernism is to find ways to break and rework the binaries so that they do not take their meaning as hierarchical oppositions.

From this perspective, our subjectivity, including the taking up of the binary pair femininity and masculinity, flows from our positions inside particular discourses. This is a story where discourses make the self thinkable. Schools are located in and structured by a variety of discursive fields. Weedon (1988) describes discursive fields as consisting "of competing ways of giving meaning to the world and of organizing social institutions and processes. They offer the individual a range of modes of subjectivity" (p.35). Subject 44 positions are discursively and interactively constituted. As discourses shift, individuals move through multiple and contradictory positionings.

In the context of schooling students are constituted/reconstituted through a variety of discursive practices with/in their particular schools. As subjects they actively take up or resist the discourse through which they are shaped/reshaped. Understanding how these discursive practices are held in place and how we organize our identities around them will better enable us to resist them. As Davies (1992) says:

In such an interpretation, it is not the individual woman who is at fault It is the culture that has destructive narratives through which identity and desire are organized. The task becomes one of looking for and generating new story lines, it is also one of discovering what the "hooks" are in the images and metaphors of the old story lines that can draw individual women in against their better judgment, (p. 69)

This kind of story can inform our understanding of single-sex versus coeducational schooling of girls in a variety of ways. In what follows I use a feminist postmodernist lens to highlight some of the possibilities. I start from the cautious stance of some feminists toward the single-sex option elaborated above. In the United States single-sex schools are available primarily in the private sector and, for the most part, provide an elite education for the sons and daughters of the upper classes. I believe that evidence for the impact(s) of these types of schools must be understood within the context of the social class origins of the pupils. It may very well be that noted differences take similar forms within elite upper class schools regardless of the gender policies of their schools, e.g. private coeducational schools. Moreover, given their historical role in reinscribing the bourgeois family form we should not automatically assume that single-sex schools are by their nature feminist alternatives to coeducational schools. 45

At best, reworking Amot's (1983) suggestion that they represent different

"modalities of transmission" for gender relations, these schools may make alternatives to traditional discourses on gender more accessible. These alternative storylines are, of course, negotiated by all, accepted by some and rejected by others. In other words, the transmission implied in Amot's notion can never be a straightforward complete process.

Discourse, as used here, implies an ongoing intertextual process through which one reads and is written into positions. Individuals have multiple subject positions that are always partial and often disaffirm each other. Thus girls struggle with the "narratives or storylines that make each discourse a lived reality" (Davies, 1990 in Davies, 1992:4).

Girls, whether located in single-sex schooling or coeducational schooling will be straggling with similar discourses. As Davies (1992) notes female subjectivity "is made possible because 'women' are spoken into existence through the same collective set of images, metaphors, and storylines as other women" (p.62). Categories such as 'women',

'girl' and 'femininity' are not stable and have no fixed existence prior to being discursively articulated. As Judith Butler (1990:143) notes "the culturally enmired subject negotiates its constructions, even when those constructions are the very predicates of its own identity".

Teenage girls are constantly negotiating the category of 'girl'/'women' often through various discourses of femininity. These discourses circulate through (but are not limited to) the following: textual discourses of images, advice, etc. promulgated through girls magazines, television, fashion displays; the social relations that organizes these; the productive processes that produce feminine accoutrements required to create the images; and the work and skills involved in maintaining feminine images (Smith, 1988).

The key question when comparing single-sex versus coeducation as alternatives for schooling girls is whether or not single-sex schools offer girls alternative ways for struggling with the dominant discourses that are not as readily available in a coeducational 46 environment. My qualitative research in an all girls high school, suggests that they might.

At very least girls in these schools have available to them discourses of femininity that constrain them in different ways. For example, part of their construct of femininity is institutionalized in school dress codes that mandate modest uniforms and allow minimal possibilities for dressing differendy. Girls, then are constrained to position their bodies and identities within the mold of these uniforms.

The uniforms can be read from the perspective of the school as keeping with tradition and protecting the schools reputation by assuring that girls dress according to the conventional middle-upper class standards of femininity. In general, dress codes act as a "symbolic connection between dress...and socially acceptable behavior" (Lesko, 1988:

130). In this case the socially acceptable behavior being shaped is professional middle class and upper class. Girls have various ways to resist this encoding. Most individualize their

'unies' by accessorizing them. A small group of girls use excessive accessorizing as a means of rebellion. Some girls refuse pieces of the dress code by not wearing precisely what is mandated or not wearing it in 'proscribed ways', e.g. not tucking in blouses. On one hand, mandated dress codes legitimize certain traditional definitions of femininity. Girls are required to wear traditional skirts, blouses, and sweaters or jackets.

However, while girls are taking up/resisting the uniform and its implied understanding of femininity, they also understand it as 'freeing' them from traditional ways that girls are positioned within discourses of femininity. That is, they do not stand in front of the closet and agonize over what they are going to wear to school. As they describe it they jump out of bed, into the shower, and into their 'unies' and they are off to school without paying much attention to their looks beyond being uniformed. Most girls wear wash n' wear hairstyles and no make up. And several talked about having to wash and iron their uniform every two weeks or so. 47

Thus, when they are in school, they have available to them a discourse on femininity and dressing that decenters the use of many of the traditional accoutrements of femininity that circulate through the mass media. They don't feel the need to wear the traditional badges of femininity when they are at school. Moreover, this 'freedom' gets embodied in other ways. For example they walk down the hall holding hands or with their arms around each other. They sit on the floor in the hallways and in their locker rooms with their legs spread unconcerned that their underwear are on display. They recognize this as

'freeing' because when they are outside the context of school or when their schooling brings them into contact with a coed school they feel more constrained to conform with more traditional images of femininity.

In other words, they are positioned in the discourses of femininity in contradictoiy ways that are made available to them because of their educational context. This is not to suggest that girls in coeducational setting do not also experience contradictions with/in the discourses of femininity. Coeducational environments, however, have not institutionalized alternative storylines in the same way as single-sex schools have. Therefore, access to alternative images of femininity may be more difficult in mixed schools.

Having access to alternative storylines does not guarantee that girls will find the power to disrupt traditional storylines on what it means to take up the category of 'woman'. There are many discursive practices at work in single-sex schools that constitute/reconstitute participants in very traditional ways. Contradictions, however, are more visible in single-sex environments -largely due to the absence of boys. These fissures help the girls see 'the story of femininity' as multiple, contradictory and partial. They are consciously aware that they have access to 'stories of femininities' which are differently valued depending upon the social context As a consequence they have some understanding 48 of how and under what conditions they are drawn into and constituted by femininity storylines.

Concluding Re/Marks

Knowing that girls in single-sex schools may have different educational experiences than girls in coeducational schools as liberal reformist stories have shown us is important. But this knowledge is meaningless unless we know how differences come about. In other words, we can not arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the differences between single-sex and coeducational schooling until we study the discursive practices that help shape those differences. It may very well be that the discourses available in some single-sex schools are also at work in some mixed schools or the other way around. On the other hand, schools cannot simply be vehicles for the transmission of relatively fixed gendered, raced and classed positions as the critical feminist storyline assumes. Nor can we assume that the dominant form of gender relations as they are presented in our schools and in humanist discourses are accepted by students as the way the world really is.

Schools are places where students mediate discursive fields- where power is exercised both on and through their bodies. Through their lived experiences, students learn what positions are available to them. Discourses of femininity cut across various social sites within and between different socioeconomic classes and hence affect girls and women in different ways.

Postmodernist perspectives encourage us to be more attentive to the discursive and textual practices with/in our schools, and to the ways in which we discursively evoke closures around the categories we name gender, class and race. Uncovering the dynamics of these discursive practices as they operate in our schools is essential if we want to change 49 the available positionings for girls. The stories I tell from an all girls high school, suggest that single-sex schooling may magnify certain contradictions with/in available discourses on what it means to become 'woman1. Increased awareness of disruptions in subject positionings increases resources, which when appropriated, may help unlock old discourses and narratives. Being in a single-sex school, however, does not guarantee that these resources will be utilized by the girls who pass through them. At very least the exploration of single-sex schooling for girls may help us locate the ways in which girls take up their storylines in the face of the contradictory narratives available to them in a sex segregated environment. At best it will shed light on how we might begin to disrupt the discursive practices in coeducational schools that continue to constitute girls inside a limiting male/female binary. 50

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Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (1982). The High School Environment: A Comparison of Coeducational and Single-Sex Schools. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(6), 898-906.

Shaw, B. (1983). The Education of Girls Reconsidered. In F. Coffield & R. Goodings (Eds.), Sacred Cows in Education: Essays in Reassessment Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Shaw, J. (1980). Education and the individual: Schooling for girls, or mixed schooling-a mixed blessing? In R. Deem (Eds.), Schooling for Women's Work London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Smith, D. E. (1988). Femininity as Discourse. In L. G. Roman, L. K. Christian-Smith, & E. Ellsworth (Eds.), Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture (pp. 37- 59). Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. 5 6

Trickett, E. J., Trickett, P. K., Castro, J. J., & Schaffner, P. (1982). The Independent School Experience: Aspects of the Normative Environments of Single-Sex and Coed Secondary Schools. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(3), 374-381.

Tyack, D., & Hansot, E. (1990).Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Vockell, E. L., & Lobonc, S. (1981). Sex role Stereotyping by High School Females in Science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 18,209-219.

Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Weiler, K. (1988). Women Teaching for Change. Gender, Class & Power. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

Willis, P. (1981). Learning to Labour: How Working class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Willis, S., & Kenway, J. (1986). On Overcoming Sexism in Schooling: To Marginalize or Mainstream. Australian Journal of Education, 30(2), 132-149.

Winchel, R., Fenner, D., & Shaver, P. (1974). Impact of Coeducation on "Fear of Success" Imagery Expressed by Male and Female High School Students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 66,726-730.

Yates, L. (1984). Comparison and the Limits of Comparison in Working Towards Non- Sexist Education. In R. Bums & B. Sheehan (Eds.), Women and Education (pp. 27- 38). Bundora, Victoria: Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Educational Society. CHAPTER III

CONTRACTIONS: DIS/GRACES, DIS/GUISES, DIS/SEMBLING FEMINISMS

I am a feminist storyteller and here I tell a story about other’s stories. Indeed, it is so unoriginal that I expose my own promiscuousness through the use of pastiche. I offer this story as a contraction to the literature review I produced in chapter two and those produced elsewhere. Still, nonetheless, this is a story pasted together, with the plotlines that I find intriguing. While this story floats on my own imagination and creativity, as did the last story, my own words in this story, purposefully limited to parenthetical statements, are very brief. Nevertheless, I speak throughout this story my own dis/semblings. This is a story about how I have sorted through 'other's' methodological stories so that I could retell them from where I stand. This is a story about my own resistance to the valorization of "a sisterly posture of mutual learning and genuine dialogue" written into much of "feminist methodology" (Patai, 1991:149). Above all this is a story about my own uncomfortable beginnings within the arena of 'feminist research' and my still uncertain endings. This is a story that marks dis/comforts and dis/eases between the boundaries of feminism's world-making activities, which, when the contractions become powerful enough will birth potentially new ways to authorize feminist speaking.

By speaking my own plotlines between paragraphs of pastiche and in claiming the name of storyteller, rather than as 'researcher', I am bringing the activity of fabrication from the margins of academic scholarship to the center. Pastiche is a particularly powerful way of foregrounding my fabricating activities1. Among other things pastiche is a written work composed from elements borrowed from various other writers. According to one dictionary "the term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate lack of 57 58 originality, or more neutrally to refer to works that involve a deliberate and playfully imitative tribute to other writers" (Baldick, 1991).

I use pastiche here, in place of a traditional review, because I am attracted to both ends of this equation. It allows me to overtly foreground my unoriginality. I am always already unoriginal,forever indebted to those who have written before me. And it gives me new, 'deliberate' but 'playful' ways of dialoguing with others interested in feminist research. In this pastiche I juxtapose whole sentences lifted verbatim from seven different writers whose own questioning has resonated with my fielding experiences. Between paragraphs I speak my own brief plotlines. Unlike traditional literature reviews, where representational citational authority is marshaled in various ways to legitimate one's own words, this collage of juxtapositions does not pretend to represent the 'whole' of their ideas. Instead of relying on select representational quotes, which often work to obscure intended meanings and other possible readings, I have lifted some of the sentences which speak meaning outside their original contexts and begin to frame alternative methodological directions.

Put another way these are sentences, that once unbounded, flowed effortlessly into the context of my 'research' experiences. These sentences reflect the 'procreative' strength of their authors. Juxtaposed against each other, so that authors can be read across and against others, the fissures between sentences speak of confusions, ruptures, discontinuities and uncertainties. Simultaneously, with/in the boundaries between sentences, communities of meanings emerge which sustain an alternative theoretical path.

I use pastiche, therefore, as a way to make different meanings, a way to speak one possible storyline that flows through other's projects. 59

Others speak Other Feminisms

(Once upon a time we took ourselves up as even-angels, guardian women on a horizontal plane with all Other women.)

"Recall the claims about empathy and identification between feminist researchers and the women they study and the calls by feminist scholars for an egalitarian research process, full collaboration, and even multiple authorship with which this essay began"

(Stacey, 1988:25-26). "Oakely (1981), quite correctly, identifies the sources of bias contained in interviewing procedures that objectify both the subject of study and the interviewer by 'controlling' the conditions of their interaction" (Riessman, 1987: 189).

"The model of a distanced, controlled, and ostensibly neutral interviewer has, as a result, been replaced with that of sisterhood-an engaged and sympathetic interaction between two individuals united by the fact of gender oppression" (Patai, 1991: 143). "The voice was to be that of a woman ethnographer listening to other women's voices" (Abu-Lughod,

1990:22).

(And then we stumbled as we fell and fallen could never regain our innocence.)

"Yet gender empathy is not enough in this interview" (Riessman, 1987:179).

"The "feminist" research model, in other words, may in its own ways be just as ill- advised" (Patai, 1991:144). "What feminist had to face was that womanhood was only a partial identity" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:25). "But because 'women,' gender notwithstanding, are not a monolithic block, ethical questions about our actions and the implications of those actions are especially appropriate" (Patai, 1991: 138). "Yet, in constructing an analysis which adequately represents the complexity of the experiences in which the 60 which the interview texts are grounded, I have also become conscious of limitations in feminist interpretations" (Opie, 1992: 52). "It is perhaps ironic to highlight a dissonance between feminism and anthropology, for anthropology is sometimes singled out for the extent to which it has been affected by feminist thinking" (Strathem, 1987:277). "But now after two and half years of fieldwork experience, I am less sanguine and more focused on the difficult contradictions between feminist principles and ethnographic method I have encountered than on their compatibility" (Stacey, 1988:22).

(Landing in labial furrows, ordered through linear gardening activities, we saw academic feminism growing as a privileged flower.)

"An individual telling her own story can be construed to be in possession of raw material, material without which the entrepreneurial researcher could not perform the labor of producing a text" (Patai, 1991:146). "What cannot be so self-consciously shifted,

I shall argue, is the nature of investigators' relationship to their subject matter that particular scholarly practices create" (Strathem, 1987:284). "It can also make clear our relationships, since it is a pretense to think that we do not live in one interconnected world, a world that brings us together in fieldwork but also a world in which my privilege of being able to have written this lecture on a computer and to answer the Bedouin girls' question about the computer they heard about on a radio soap opera depends on underpaid women in southeast Asia spending long hours in multinational electronics plants assembling these computers" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:27). "White, privileged, and at

Penn, I am simply not sandwiched between the same forms of institutional oppressions they are" (Fine, 1992:218). 61 (Looking up, we saw ourselves, as feminist gardeners working our tools to feed soils of our own privileges.)

"What does it mean to write critically but less authoritatively when the act of writing is so strongly associated with authority and centrality" (Opie, 19992:57)? "In the last instance an ethnography is a written document structured primarily by a researcher’s purposes, offering a researcher's interpretations, registered in a researcher's voice"

(Stacey, 1988: 230). "But it is not enough to address these specifics, for however subtle the guidelines we might develop for appropriate ethical behavior at these different stages, we must not disregard the very facts- and these are material ones-that determine who gets to do research on whom; who has access to research grants, travel funds, the press; whose words, at the most basic level, are granted authority in representing others" (Patai, 1991:146). "For women interviewing women about their lives, such barriers to understanding are particularly consequential, for they reproduce within the scientific enterprise class and cultural divisions between women that feminists have tried so hard to diminish" (Riessman, 1987:173). "Even our common status-motherhood-is raced and classed" (Fine, 1991:218).

(Suddenly struggling wondering groping we were left with our own abilities to/be/also oppressors.)

"I find myself wondering whether the appearance of greater respect for and equality with research subjects in the ethnographic approach masks a deeper, more dangerous form of exploitation" (Stacey, 1988:22). "The dilemma of feminist researchers working on groups less privileged than themselves can be succinctly stated as follows: is it possible-not in theory, but in the actual conditions of the real world today-to write about the oppressed without becoming one of the oppressors" (Patai, 1991:139)? "We, as 62 feminist psychologists, report women's stories, girdled in by ‘professionalism’ notions of objectivity and positivism, denuding the role of power in their stories and in their telling"

(Fine, 1992:207). "The interviewer tried to impose white, middle-class standards about how a narrative should be organized on Marta's episodically structured account, producing not coherence but confusion" (Riessman, 1987:190).

(Constructing, imposing, enclosing nonfeminist others.)

"The (imaginative) setting up of the divide between East and West went hand in hand with the domination of the newly defined other and was a way of creating a separate self' (Abu-Lughod, 1990:27). "Necessary to the construction of the feminist self, then, is a nonfeminist Other" (Strathern, 1987:288). "Although feminist researchers have questioned many aspects of the construction and management of these relationships within mainstream social-science research, there is a need for further, more reflexive analysis to avoid textual appropriation of the researcher; and to focus attention on difference as a means of more fully representing the complexities of the social world"

(Opie, 1992:53). "Precisely because ethnographic research depends upon human relationship, engagement, and attachment, it places research subjects at grave risk of manipulation and betrayal by the ethnographer, as the following vignette from my fieldwork illustrates" (Stacey, 1988:22-23). "In the end, even "feminist" research too easily tends to reproduce the very inequalities and hierarchies it seeks to reveal and to transform" (Patai, 1991:149).

(And then we knew our work to be always already with/in ourselves.) 63

"They attempt to bring to their research an awareness that ethnographic writing is not cultural reportage, but cultural construction, and always a construction of self as well as of the other "(Stacey, 1988:25). "That we are human inventors of some questions and repressors of others, shapers of the very contexts we study, coparticipants in our interviews, interpreters of others' stories and narrators of our own, are somehow rendered irrelevant to the texts we publish" (Fine, 1992:208). "What feminist ethnography can contribute to anthropology is an unsettling of the boundaries that have been central to its identity as a discipline of the self studying other" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:26). "This and other fieldwork experiences forced my recognition that conflicts of interest and emotion between the ethnographer as authentic, related person (i.e. participant) and as exploiting researcher (i.e. observer) are also an inescapable feature of ethnographic method" (Stacey, 1988:23).

(With all of our lochial possibilities.)

"Other researchers, in their texts, assume a dis-stance, importing to their work the voices of Discarded Others, who offer daily or local meaning in contrast with hegemonic discourse and practices" (Fine, 1992:211). "It defines itself primarily as the study of the other, which means that its selfhood was not problematic" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:24).

"Either way, they give off their own aroma of fraud, for the underlying assumption seems to be that by such identification one has paid one's respects to 'difference' owned up to bias, acknowledged privilege, or taken possession of oppression-and is now home free"

(Patai, 1991:149). "In the last instance an ethnography is a written document structured primarily by a researcher's purposes, offering a researcher's interpretations, registered in a researcher's voice" (Stacey, 1988:23). 64

(And there we began to re/imagine intersubjective communities sustained by disrhythmic chaos.)

"The lack of rhythmicity between narrator and interviewer about meaning is evident at numerous points in the text (Riessman, 1987:1830). "That means that we work from fragmented selves and we must work together as different selves who only partially intersect" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:25). "The bond between the woman interviewer and woman interviewee is insufficient to create the shared meanings that could transcend the divisions between them" (Riessman, 1987:188). "Is there no alternative, then, to insuperable distance on the one hand, and mystifying chumminess on the other" (Patai,

1991:149)? "To take a static picture of these schools at one point in time and call it research would be absurd" (Fine, 1991:229).

(From our own re/Imaginations we could only speak our ontological uncertainties.)

"The interviewer is totally lost; she interrupts and hesitates" (Riessman,

1987:184). "Some distance may well be inevitable, perhaps even biologically ordained by our enclosure within our individual nervous systems, but it is not at this level that feminist research practices can seem self-serving" (Patai, 1991:139). "As an emancipated woman herself, the interviewer hears the significance of Marta's struggle for independence, but she misses the importance of kin and culture in the martial history"

(Riessman, 1987:186). "Neither monolithic voices of critique nor single voices of institutional praise" (Fine, 1991:217). 65

(And recognizing that we can never be outside the webs of power, we saw ourselves both/and oppressors/oppressed.)

"This occurs, instead, when feminists imagine that merely engaging in the discourse of feminism protects them from the possibility of exploiting other women, while their routine research practices are and continue to be embedded in a situation of material inequality" (Patai, 1991:139). "Both the lack of cultural understanding and the lack of temporal form contribute to the interviewer's inability to follow the narrative"

(Riessman, 1987:186). "A romantic reliance on these voices-as though they were rarefied, innocent words of critique- represents a sophisticated form of ventriloquy, with lots of manipulation required" (Fine, 1991:216). "We must look to the social constitution of both feminist and anthropological practice" (Strathren, 1987:284). "This reflexivity and self­ critique of "postmodern" ethnographic literature parallels and has much to contribute to feminist methodological reflections" (Stacey, 1988:25).

(So it is that we search for new ways to authorize our work.)

"The world will not get better because we have sensitively apologized for privilege; nor if, from the comfortable heights of the academy, we advertise our identification with the oppressed or compete for distinction as members of this or that oppressed group" (Patai, 1991: 150). "As author an ethnographer I cannot (and, I believe, should not) escape tasks of interpretation, evaluation, and judgment" (Stacey, 1988:24).

"This critique of voices is by no means advanced to deny the legitimacy of rich interview material or other forms of qualitative data" (Fine, 1991:219). "The next step for feminist anthropologists is to think seriously about these possibilities" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:17). 66

"Such a focus points to the fissures between our theory and our practice" (Patai, 1991:

145).

(We keep on singing our songs, for this we must.)

"There also can and should be feminist research that is rigorously self-aware and therefore humble about the partiality of its ethnographic vision and its capacity to represent self and other" (Stacey, 1991: 26). "Confusion and misunderstanding ensue"

(Riessman, 1987:188). "Their agony is not how to communicate across a divide but how to theorize the experience that moving back and forth between the many worlds they inhabit is a movement within one complex and historically and politically determined world" (Abu-Lughod, 1990:26). "Perfect congruence between interviewer, interviewee, and interpreter is probably not possible, not even always desirable" (Riessman,

1991:191).

(Never concluding in certainty, for all well spoken conclusions are collusions with the powers we seek to resist.)

"I conclude in this Talmudic fashion to leave the dialogue open, believing that an uneasy fusion of feminist and critical ethnography’s consciousness may allow us to construct cultural accounts that, however, partial and idiosyncratic, can achieve the contextuality, depth, and nuance I consider to be unattainable through less dangerous, but more remote research methods" (Stacey, 1988:26). "As the gag orders move forward on abortion, Affirmative Action recedes, and the Right stomps through the academy, I wish us all the collective outrage and the political will to produce disruptive feminist research"

(Fine, 1991:231). 67

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, L. (1990). Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Women & Performance, 5,7-27.

Baldick, C. (1991).The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fine, M. (1993).Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Opie, A. (1982). Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the 'Other' and Empowerment. Feminist Review, 40(Spring), 52-69.

Patai, D. (1991). U. S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible? In S. B. Gluck & D. Patai (Eds.), Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (pp. 137-153). New York: Routledge.

Riessman, C. K. (1989). When gender is not enough: Women interviewing women. Gender and Society, 1(2), 172-207.

Stacey, J. (1988). Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women's Studies International Forum, 11(1), 21-27.

Strathem, M. (1987). An awkward relationship: The case of feminism and anthropology. Signs, 12(2), 276-.

1 For a more traditional review of these works see Vickie R. Shields and Brenda Dervln (1993). CHAPTER IV

SUR-FICTIONING FEMINIST METHODOLOGY: BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTING TO ONTOLOGICAL UNCERTAINTIES

This is a methodological story about my own uncertainties. Above all else this is a story with uncomfortable beginnings and unforeseeable endings. It is a story about positionality - about my struggles around the category of academic feminism and the possibilities of doing 'transformative' research from this position. In choosing to name my practice as story telling I am dreaming an academic institution no longer governed by the fact/fiction and history/myth binaries that has given so much power to transcendental academic authority. As Donna Haraway (1989) has observed, academic identities are intricately woven on the warp of fact and the woof of fiction. So much so she notes that

"we feel morally obligated, to oppose fact and fiction." (Ibid.: 3. Also see Rorty, 1980;

Walkerdine, 1990; Game, 1991).

In this fact/fiction oppositional construct we feel obliged to mark 'facts' as the original and fiction as the fabricated. In deconstructing the binary, however, we recover the depth of human action that underlies both fact and fiction. The important difference, as Haraway (1989:4) has noted, has been that "fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning, while fact is a descendant of a past participle, a word which masks the generative deed or performance". She goes on to note that "a fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings of life" (Ibid.). By claiming the name of feminist

68 69 storyteller, rather than as feminist 'researcher', I am interested in bringing the activity of fabrication from the margins of academic scholarship to the center1.

What falls between these pages are not 'facts' but art/facts - artful facts shaped through my body, being, dreaming and ways of knowing. Storytelling, as an always 'on' artform, is perceptually open to rewriting. This is a mischievous story. It is playful, teasing, threatening, and potentially dangerous. The story begins in an empirical garden of my own sowing. Digging around as a feminist researcher, I became increasingly uneasy. In this paper I begin the uncomfortable task of problematizing the category of feminist researcher. I end this story by offering tentative ways to rethink feminist authority and validity (c.f. Lather, 1993). This is a story that occupies the hazy spaces between feminism and postmodernism2.1 write as a person trained in women's studies, sociology, education, and qualitative methodology. It is my hope that those similarly situated on this onetic landscape would want to read this, though I recognize that many may find discomfort here. Part of my intention is to destabilize and contest dominant strands with/in these discourses.

A fFelding We Will Go, Hi-Ho the Dairy Oh, A Fielding We Will Go

(I was following a road map, but got lost at the boundaries of my feminist understandings.)

I was uncertain then, and still am. It was with uncertainty that I embarked upon a

'research' adventure into hallways of an elite private single-sex school for girls. This adventure was disconfirming on multiple levels. Unlike most of the critical and feminist scholars concerned with schooling I was not dealing with the educationally dispossessed.

On the contrary, I was entering a schooling environment rich in material, academic and psychological resources, a schooling environment where girls excelled academically, an 70 environment that propels girls into higher education - indeed, into what are considered the best of colleges. In other words, I had entered a world which, while not completely uncharted, is certainly positioned in the hinterlands of critical and feminist maps of schooling.

Well, there I was in this relatively unexplored area dressed as a qualitative researcher. Taking up the tools of observation, interviews, and document analysis I set out- with my theory stuffed backpack - to swath some pathways - to learn what it was that

I didn't know about single-sex schooling for girls. While reaching for the roses I landed in the brambles and got tangled up in all sorts of thorny issues - not least of which was how to study a privileged schooling site, let alone why I, driven by feminist desires, would study girls who had it all. Unlike other feminists who dedicate themselves to "giving voice" to women who occupy marginal spaces with/in our culture, I had adopted a project where the idea of 'giving voice* to the educationally privileged - those who accrue multiple educational benefits because of their parents ability to pay - seemed like a bit of an oxymoron. Indeed, some might even designate my project as politically incorrect.

Was I being politically incorrect? Well I spent a few weeks in denial. And then I ravaged the library looking for feminist models that would tell me how and why I should study a privilege schooling site. I found a few models for studying girls in elite schools, but they weren't particularly stimulating (c.f. Frazer, 1988, 1989; Delamont, 1990;

Kenway, 1990). And of course, there are sociological models for the study of the educationally and economically advantaged (c.f. Cookson & Persell, 1985; Domhoff, 1979). But on the whole this work does not mesh with my feminist sensibilities.

Particularly unsettling is their 'spy and tell' mode, wherein the researcher, as detective, does research 'on' the rich and then tells on them. If I didn't want to perform the 'I am going to tell on you' game that my children are so fond of, what would I do? 71

I could retreat to the comfort of 'giving voice' to the obviously dispossessed (Fine,

1993). But I just couldn't let go of the notion that there were other stories to tell, stories that could provide different cues about our gender, class, race, and schooling. So I found myself letting go of the binary either/or notions of oppressor/oppressed and powerful/powerless. I accepted the uncertainty of having no clear means for marking who is and who is not oppressed. Along the way I also found myself letting go of the Marxist and feminist notions that privilege consciousness or contemplation as the source of social change (c.f. Game, 1991).

What else could I do? I simply could not see the girls in my study in such stark, clear cut terms. In their daily lives they did not experience themselves as "oppressed" and indeed, they exercise a fair amount of social power and influence. As female social subjects many of them occupy positions that are not as clearly circumscribed by 'gender' as much with/in feminism would suggest. Nor could I see them as class oppressors- as much with/in critical theory would suggest. To put it more simply the stories that I was gathering up at this privileged schooling site were not so neat. They were messy. They were tangled stories - neither hegemonic nor counter-hegemonic - but more like an interweaving of both. They were stories where girls were both the targets of power moves and the vehicles for power (c.f. Foucault, 1972; Foucault, 1978; Foucault, 1980). In other words, it became impossible for me to see these adolescent girls as either oppressed or oppressor/with power or without power. They were both/and - multiply situated with perspectives that were interwoven in ways that were far more complex than a conflict feminist model would lead one to assume. 72

(Loitering at the blurred intersections of my confusions, confessing my multiplicities, I began imaging the refolding of feminist vaginations.)

Stuck between my field experiences and dominant feminist research methodology discourse I am mobilized to rethink academic feminism. In particular, I want to unsettle the easy feminist storyline where conflict is written between the sexes, power written as patriarchy and where feminist consciousness-raising is privileged as the source of 'true' liberation. And in this undoing the cozy notion that as feminist researchers we can

'empower' and 'give voice' to the obviously dispossessed is unraveled. Both these storylines assume the "myth of the unitary person" spun throughout liberal humanist tales

(Davies, 1989a). Both storylines assume that the researcher and the researched are unproblematically stabilized in fixed either/or positions.

If identity is not so stable, nor easily fixed, as feminist postmodemisms would suggest (e.g. Butler, 1990; Davies, 1992b; Game, 1991; Hekman, 1990), what happens to our feminist methodologies previously authorized by 'liberating' others (c.f. Fonow & Cook, 1991)? Feminists have only recently begun to take up the challenge of rethinking the ontological constructions of identity that underlie our analyses. For example, with respect to the category of gender, Judith Butler (1990:4) argues that:

The premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the construction had been elaborated for emancipatory purposes.

Just as feminism has been woven on a stable unified warp of gender, so too has it been over-stitched with stabilizing notions of class and race identities. Taking women's identities as fixed or foundational not only obscures our understanding of power differences between women but also works to generate hidden normative rules that 73 govern our research topics and practices. If "the aim of feminist research is liberation"

(Fonow and Cook, 1991: 6), then we are compelled to enclose 'women' in fixed categories that need liberating. In this light the relative silence on girls in resource rich schools makes sense. The more socially privileged the category of 'women' becomes the more difficult it becomes to justify ourselves as liberators.

At my research site I could not take myself up as a liberator because that reads me as a woman always already outside of power relations (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Fine,

1993; Opie, 1982; Patai, 1991; Riessman, 1989; Stacey, 1988; Strathem, 1987). Nor could I read myself as the sole purveyor of women's emancipation - I was not at all certain that I had more adequately grasped the situation than the girls in my study. Nor can I read girls in school as bodies ready to be acted upon, shaped, and perfected by feminism. One need only think historically to understand that well intended emancipatory efforts -feminist or otherwise- have unexpected consequences - not all of which are pleasant (e.g. Stansell, 1990). Indeed, I could not locate one obvious source of

'oppression'. Without one obvious source of oppression there is no single way to move beyond 'oppression'. What is 'empowering' for some will be 'disempowering' for others.

(Wrapped in an academic robe woven between discursive onetic threads, I am always already worlds apart from those who have agreed to my questionings.)

If our subjectivities are multiple, partial and always shifting then the notion that

'women' have core identities that can be targeted by feminist emancipatory desires is a fiction. In this myth, constructed to uphold academic feminist authority, discomforts are revealed, shadowed and displaced. When I use the word myth here I am talking about depoliticized speech (Barthes, 1957/1972). If role of the expert is built on permanent asymmetrical power relations (Bauman, 1987,1992), then the fiction of academic feminism as liberating and empowering for Other 'women' is a story about academic 74 feminist dis/ease with asymmetrical power relations. It is a story about conscious and unconscious dis/comforts with academic power and surveillance. Feminist academics are part of a knowledge elite, albeit loculated from the dominant power sources within the institution of higher education. Through theorizing gazes feminist academics write on the bodies of 'women' (c.f. Foucault, 1980). Academic feminism is a form of institutionalized asymmetrical surveillance of 'women' in which the incompleteness of masculinist ways of being and knowing is named, proved and reinforced.

In short, to justify highly paid academics speaking as 'liberators’ sings like a ninconsistent mantra in my ears. The popularity of this mantra makes sense, however, when listened to inside Western enlightenment storylines that write linear space between education and social progress. The myth of 'progress' speaks academic feminists into positions that I name “even-angels” - guardian women who have a horizontal surface with Other women. The fiction of even-angelism eased negotiations between the boundaries of the known - our feminisms - and the unknown - our academic power/positions. This fiction eased the negotiation between feminism and power. In taking up the liberal humanist storyline of progress dreams are spun out into the 'social' where feminist research gets written onto the bodies of 'women' and reread as always already being positive for 'women'. Re/spinning old tales, weaving transformative vestments, we would name ourselves as seamstresses of liberation.

This is a powerful story and it continues to work multiple transformations. In an modernist environment it is a story that continues to make sense and thus should have a place in academic feminism. I dismantle it here not to defeat it, but to suggest that it is not the only possible story. There are other ways to fabricate our comforts and perhaps ways to live more openly with our discomforts. In problematizing this dominant storyline, I only offer vague outlines of what another story might look like. During my 75 research on privileged schooling for girls I found myself straddling two incommensurable worlds, a position which compelled me to rethink feminist methodology. At the site of my research I came face to face with the over-dressed 'women' of feminist theory who, because of their varied socioeconomic privileges, generally tend to be ignored in feminist scholarship. However, as I stood in welfare lines and lived in public housing - strategies that enabled me to do this research and claim a Ph.D. - 1 came face to face with the under­ dressed and naked 'women' of feminist theory. These women, more often the subject of feminist research, forced me to question the depth of feminist transformations.

Taking pause, I came to question the impact of feminist theorizing at the very lived in level of social policy, social policies that frame naked women. When reflecting on the difference between academic theory and social policy Eva Etzoni-Halevy (1985:44) concludes that:

..there is no reason to believe that more social science research and knowledge in recent years has led to improved policy decisions, to more effective actions and hence to the reduction of social problems. On the contrary, although no causality can be shown, it is nevertheless worth noting that the years in which the influence of the social scientists on policy had been growing have also been the years in which policy failures have been rife and which a variety of formidable social problems have been multiplying.

Her reasoning flows from the inherent differences and incompatibilities between theory and policy. Furthermore, in undoing the myth that "the impact of science (and scientists) on society is basically salubrious and that any negative effects it may have are incidental"

(Ibid. :117), she raises many interesting questions about the role of the intellectual3.

Trailing her ideas I find myself concerned about feminist positions that are tied to the ideologically laden notion of Western progress. Cloaked in academic competence, we intend positive changes for 'women'. But if the question is cast in Etzoni-Halevy’s broad 76 sweeping terms and we ask: has the increased number of feminists in academia worked to make life for 'women' better overall, I can only hesitate. For some 'women' the answer is yes, some improvements have been made. For others I am much less certain. What the magnified mirror of feminist theory has enabled is a closer inspection of the blemishes.

The healing, however, has only touched the lives of some.

On a more micro level I know myself to be a multiply situated person through which positive and negative 'effects' flow because of and in despite of my intentions.

Donning the academic robe has not erased my own catastrophic ways of being. As a person who is only sometimes aware of myself as 'woman', I am partially aware of how I am part of the patterns of problems of 'women'. As a well paid woman I generate impoverished women. As a well listened to woman, I silence women. As a semi-liberated woman, I generate semi-oppressed women. Laming away from the prisons of masculinist science we have woven multifeminist stories, but our languet activities are also forked and hence multipurposeful. Only some of these purposes march behind conscious intentions. My aspirations toward academic feminism arise from both my desire to improving my own socioeconomic lot and my concern for the lot of 'women'. Other purposes flow from unconscious desires, and still others are simply out of my reach. This is, I believe, the multiparous bargain we signed up for when we join the intellectual elite.

Daring to interrupt the uninterruptable we often birth more than we care to nurture.

Muffling and misprisioning our own abominations, to the extent that we can touch their outlines, is one possibility. It is one that mimes traditional academic performances where erasing what doesn't fit is a well memorized solution.

That academic feminists have replicated this precoded modernist memory into their bodies is not surprising. In modernist tales academics are tooled to take themselves up as the technological arms of social authority. In this storyline expertise functions 77 largely to arbitrate broader social controversies which block Western 'progress' (Bauman,

1987). In this story experts are read as solving and never construct social problems. The authority to arbitrate, flowing from supposed access to superior knowledge, legitimates social surveillance and intervention. By way of contrast, academics who take themselves up in postmodernist storylines are less self assured. This is a position, reauthorized by the ability to translate and facilitate communications (Ibid.). These newer self-authorizing moves flow from the ability to listen, translate and transmit what are, to my way of thinking, provisional stories gathered from the field.

As a member of the intellectual elite, funded by the public, and hence underwritten by the blood, sweat and tears of 'women' in multiple ways, I find more comfort in authorizing and legitimating my intellectual endeavors as a partial translator/storyteller than as an arbitrator armed with the 'truth' and 'liberation1. In translating I transmigrate another body through my own body, transposing my own logographic specialties and metalanguages onto Other meaning systems. This is more of a parenting than a transparent activity and as such is not innocent, nor always positive.

Instead, my onomatopoeic work is about echoing 'women' into the academic conversations where reverberations have multiple repercussions. In reading and writing

'women' from my own onetic landscapes, hills and valleys shaped by the participatory presumptions of academic feminism, I speak of boundaries around worlds only partially known. When spoken into research 'women' are imaginatively invoked, transported as aliens, shipped from their world to our world - the world of research.

The academic world of feminism is one where, to paraphrase Bauman (1987:121-

122), we are the only category of women which describes and defines itself, and which cannot describe or define itself in any other fashion but through describing and defining women of which it is a part. To put this another way, intellectual pursuits are fabricating 78 activities which are always already impositions without which we could not identify ourselves as feminists in academia. Even-angelism cannot undo the timezone 'effects' between ourselves and the women we champion. Theory always already moves us otherwise (Bauman, 1987). Peter McLaren (1992: 79, his italics) in his thoughts on qualitative research, notes that research fields should be considered as "the site of the researcher's own embodiment in theory I discourse and his or her own disposition as a theorist, within a specific politics of location". In this position we are actively fabricating, co-generating, what we encounter as 'data' in the 'field'. Umbilicated at the boundaries of different worlds, our knowing is already vested in discursively woven onetic marquisettes. In magnifying the fabricating activities of feminism, which modernist mentalities would marginalize, I am folding the multidimensionalities of our work between the uncertain boundaries of different worlds.

In this alternative story coming to terms with our other worldliness, and naming our academic gazing, does not mean that we must give up our feminist projects. It means only that the methodological underpinnings of feminism, as previously constructed, need to be pried open so that our bodies can exist around our visions. Modernists notions that privilege vision, along with its corollary of social change through consciousness-raising, have circulated through our feminisms for many years. In the expansive context of academia, ocularcentrism, with its confidence in the "truth telling capacity of vision" has been the hallmark of Western knowledge’s (Jay,1991:144)4. Ocularcentrism has ridden down through history on the back of Cartesian dualisms where knowing is associated with the mind vision and being is associated with the body. A feminist ontology would seek to position the self as both/and body/mind (c.f. Stanley & Wise, 1993/1983).

In modernist mentalities stories about vision are perspectival stories where neutral three dimensional information passes through the lens of the eye to the brain, to be sorted 79 out into informational bits5. In this storyline the 'eye' enables a mode of perspective where 'reality' objectively awaits us in linear space and subsequent 'perceptions' are subjective. In modernist times this assumption was part and parcel of mimesis, the realist representation of 'nature' in art, literature and science, as the primary mode of human creativity. Metaphorically, scientists focused the lens of their camera (obscura) on a particular spot marked as 'reality' and took a snapshot, which was later reported as representation. In postmodernist storylines it is the embodied 'I' that enables 'reality'. This is a constructivist story where the camera is replaced by the camcorder and the resulting video does not pretend to unproblematically represent. Instead, it self consciously and artistically illustrates one possible construction of 'outside' events. Postmodernism entices us way from visions of mimesis and into the embodied artfulness of our own fabrications.

Zooming in and out of the lives who feed my theory hungry gazes, I perform feminism at the boundaries of obvoluting bodies. Out of respect I am compelled to speak hesitantly. My 'I'-witnessed accounts are blurred and partial. The lights that fall on me are already bent, tied, and framed. I am moved to speak my own unreliability as I touch and rub boundaries between worlds. In naming myself storyteller, I am foregrounding fabrication wrought between worlds. Doing feminism is a world-making activity, "as webs come out of spiders, or breath forms in frozen air, worlds come out of us"

(Thompson, 1989:129). As academic feminist I am building chaotic pathways through the tangled jungles of my own uncertain wondering.

(Juggling uncertainties through patterns of my own world-making activities I began to rethink feminist qualitative methodology.)

Both science fiction and postmodernist fiction are, says Brain McHale

(1992:247), "governed by an ontological dominant, by contrast with modernist fiction or, among the genres of ‘genre’ fiction, detective fiction, both of which raise and explore 80 issues of epistemology and thus are governed by an epistemological dominant.”. I have found it very easy to read this storyline into feminism. Feminist stories about the doing of feminist research have been governed by an epistemological dominant (c.f. Harding,

1987, 1991). Moreover, the bulk of feminist work has taken up the detective storyline, epistemologically questing after the facts of oppression. In their wake multiple masculinist storylines have been disrupted, deconstructed and left dangling. I read this as a vital part of the feminist struggle. Rather than simply being about the uncovering of hard facts, however, I read it as the much needed business of transforming discursive material that otherwise disappears 'women1.

In misericording masculinist scientisms, undoing already seriously wounded knights, we have ridden onward, under banners celebrating feminist epistemologies.

And, as we cannot help but do, we straddle academic beasts vested in new and old trappings. In the midsts of my epistemological questing, vesicating on the noetic beast I was ridding, I dismounted to redo my trappings. Stepping into the fields of my own ontologies to soothe my blistering body, tamed feminist gardens appeared in disarray. As earlier feminist monocropping activities failed, the fields of feminism burst forth with chaotic complexities, sur-facing multiple internal ontological fragmentations. Though a coeval champion of 'differences' between 'women', once silenced through unconsciously unmarked ontological bodies, I stumble still at the boundaries of my own world-making.

Falling, I let go the possibility of realist representation6. If Re/presenting 'women' has continually worked to deny 'woman' (c.f. Butler, 1990), then I am left with the mythopoetic creations of a metafictioning feminism.

If 'women' is a myth of feminism and feminisms are the sur-fictions of 'women' and life 'events' are but thresholds of emergence exhaled through communally participating lips, then foregrounding our work as kaleidoscopic illustrations artfully drawn from the boundaries of our uncertainties may offer one way to step beyond the violence of realist re/presentations. In this move I am attempting to work the space between realist representation and the impossibility of representation. I am not fully aware of the consequences of this move. In part I understand it as a struggle aimed at undoing the privileging of epistemology. Even in crisis, where realism battles constructivism, notions of representation have been seamlessly bound to epistemological questions, privileging the act of knowing over that of being. By surfacing the provisionally our bodies our selves and the co-fabrication of the art/facts from which we speak, we can begin to speak about our own ontological uncertainties (For feminist ontology see Lugones, 1987; Stanley & Wise, 1993, 1983; Whitbeck, 1989. For talk about bodies see Bigwood, 1991; Brooks, 1993; Gatens, 1988; Irigaray, 1977/1985;

Jaggar & Bordo, 1989; Lesko, 1988; Probyn, 1991; Sawicki, 1991; Smith-Rosenberg,

1989; Whitford, 1991). Ontologies have, of course, always been implicated in our epistemologies, despite omni/scientific attempts to disappear our commitments to being

(Fay, 1987). While a prima facie reading of feminism suggests the obviousness of our ontologies via our overt axiologies, I trouble over the ways academic feminists have registered knowing over being (Stanley & Wise, 1993/1983).

My specific interest is in mobilizing the boundaries between our ontologies while displacing the regulatory force behind the singular integral ontological subject that seeks to reduce other to self7. I am dreaming a universe of surplus - of multidimensional obvoluted ontologies. If we begin with the premise that we are always already there in our storytelling, then we not escape the embodiedness of multiple discursive positionings which circulate on, through, against and with our bodies/worlds. This is not a move toward philosophical solipism, where knowing beyond the body is simply not citable.

Instead, it is a move that seeks to acknowledge that we are all stretched across 82 discursively strung lattices, undulating intersecting nerves, enveloped by the communal safetynets of our own choosing. In other words, we read and write from collective intersubjective mythopoetic communities of world-making. These are the communities that mark our academic positionality, communities already vaginated by their own immunologies. To complicate our understanding of ontologies I name our groundedness in intellectual communities as an 'ontonoetic' world. Speaking of ontonoetic worlds is one way to claim the ontologies generated out of (and in the name of) the intellectual activities that form the basis of our academic endeavors.

By focusing on ontonoetic boundaries, the fissures in feminist world-making activities become more visible. By speaking insecurities into the once reliable academic boundaries between being and knowing I am seeking to problematize common understandings about sociological soundness and reliability. Academically bound speaking takes place in a different timezone, an ontonoetic world circumscribed by theoretical gazing (Bauman, 1987)* When the time and space effects of ontologies is acknowledged we are left with the impossibility of re/searching for 'facts'. Instead, as boundaries between worlds surface, so to do numerous ontonoetic uncertainties. Within this alternative storyline all we can do is re/ach toward uncertainties.

If stopping time to secure realist representations is impossible, and giving up all ways of representing untenable, then working the space between this binary suggests other possibilities. In this space we might begin to speak our uncertainties as we follow trails, marks, traces and scents. In this alternative storyline academic stories could surface as impressionistic illustrations taken from blurred rubbings of moving bodies/moving worlds. I am suggesting the possibility of taking our work up as kaleidoscopic illustrations, rather than realistic representational mappings, because it allows more flexible ways of speaking. Unlike the snapshots of realist representation, kaleidoscopic 83 illustrations, rendered by one artistic hand, are always already under erasure. In stories imaginative transformations of actualities encountered elsewhere surface along with the multiple confusions and conundrums they conjure. As storytellers, encountering the world through our own stories, we are not constrained to see 'actualities’ as 'originals' or

'truths' in need of snapshot representation. Instead, 'actualities' are material acts in constant performance (Game, 1991). If we cannot capture the acts of actualities and hold them still long enough for realist representation, and if we do not want to give up our questioning altogether, then we must work a more tentative space where our desires to read and write the 'social' inter/rupt but can never contain the flow. In this storyline, as traveling re/cording ob/servers what falls between our fingers are currents of un- duplicable stories within stories within stories.

If I can only touch, never fully understanding, then my saying is always already unreliable. Starting from my unreliability, I loosen the bounds of social realism, slowly internalizing the philosophy that it is impossible to have unmediated access to an extra- cultural 'real' outside our crafting activities. In shattering "established reality" multiplicity surfaces continually reaffirming different ways of being/knowing. As the mimetic impulses of omni/science are increasingly opened to our unravelings, we are left with the intense richness of our own fabricating activities. In this multifarious flow our bodies, imaginations and artistry become the more fitting tools for 'validating' our work as academics. With them we reread the 'facts' as they have been closed down by others only to be reread by others. Laurel Richardson (1991:2) names this as the one unifying vision of postmodernism - "that the theorist takes a position that one's own work-words, writing- is not outside of or above the tendered critique". 84

(Riding the borders of feminist ontonoetic world-making, I began to re-negotiate academic currency.)

Without mime, the traditional instruments for judging positivistic sciences - reliability, generalizability, duplicatability - play sweet music only for some ears. The multiplicity and provisionally of those who take themselves up as storytellers, however, does not mean that we can not develop criteria for distinguishing better stories from less good ones (McHale, 1992). I am interested in the messy work of finding new ways of authorizing our work, new ways of reading strength/validity into our feminisms. Between masculinist transcendentalism and alternative feminist 'even-angelism' I write 'alchemic' authority. Alchemy rests on principles of fabricated transmutations, foregrounding both our feminist desires to transform the base metals of patriarchy to golden angels and the very impossibility of such a move. Once associated with medieval magical powers, alchemy speaks our sur-fictioning activities out loud. With alchemic authority what we do is take ordinary and personal stories and transform them into complex and political stories. We pour old male stories through feminist alembics, distilling wines that give us more pleasure. With it we announce our own mythopoetic wonder-working. And, in broadcasting our creative seeds into the labial wrinkles of our bodies, we sow an immensity of possibilities at the boundaries of our involuted world-making.

If we take up alternative forms of authority, we must also take up alternative forms of legitimacy. What makes our work legitimate in the realm of alchemic authority?

I offer here tentative criteria for judging that legitimacy in the hopes of opening up our methodological conversation. To encourage those working elsewhere I retain some trappings of modernist registers and code these criteria as 'validity'. Remains recycled through feminist kaleidoscopes, I speak first of 'procreative' validity. Our work has procreative strength when the stories we tell are capable of generating new stories. The 85 more open, tentative and provisional our storylines, the more receptive they are to the shifting and sifting of other's trans(ex)positions. The procreative text invites, stimulates, and motivates others to rewrite its very speaking. Often as not, stimulating storylines come from academic genres that diverge radically from our own well taught bodies.

Procreative validity is strongest when the storylines spoken can be written across academic 'fields', undoing traditional academic turfs marked by alpha males. As a generative code, procreative validity disrupts pugilistic academic discourse wherein philosophical opponents are clearly marked as winners and losers, (for at least ten seconds!, also see Moulton, 1989).

If our stories are transformations of our own choreographing activities, which if well told procreatively open up other imaginings, then the ontonoetic boundaries of our world making activities are always there. When stories speak of their ontonoetic uncertainties then they can be said to have pericarpic validity. Pericarp is the name given to the wall that envelops a ripened ovary or fruit. If the body we call 'women' is multicellular, moving multidimensionally, pericarp to pericarp, propelled by membranal oscillations, vibrated by our desires to know, then it is at the contractions of our outer most rims that uncertain exchanges spawn new worlds. If, in marshlands of uncertainty, we take ourselves up as mud hens, wading through the messes we co-create with those whose lives write our academic privileges, then we have pericarpic validity. Rubbing, scratching, pushing, the boundaries of our variously constituted selves, we own our pericarpic ontonoetic matronymic bodies and hence are compelled to speak more hesitantly about the empirical gardens we cultivate.

Lochia, the normal discharge of blood, tissue, and mucus that flows from our vaginas after childbirth, always accompanies our world-making activities. When we own the lochial possibilities that accompany our birthing activities then our writing can be said 86 to have lochial validity. It is not possible to feel nor see all of our lochial discharges. We always are looking over breasts and bellies and through the pubic forests of our ontonoetic bodies. Moreover, standing in steady cataracts of knowledge a large part of the multipurposefulness of our creative activities is washed from our intending ways. Our self-awareness, self-reflexivity will never be quick enough, let alone bold enough, to catch all of our lochia. Nonetheless we need not claim innocence, nor pretend even- angelism. With my babies comes the uncertainty of my lochia, but also the uncertainty of how our babes will grow.

If we cannot guarantee certainties we can, nonetheless, offer sustenance, lactescent validity, strength through becoming milky, speaks to the sustaining power of our variously constituted writings. With lactescent strength we do not nurture certain realist representations of 'women'. Instead what we sustain are illustrative questions about

'women' and 'women's' kaleidoscopic questioning. We feed the desire to ask questions through our probing of unknowables. We speak that desire into the multitudinous space of already spoken answers, recycling forever reproductive questioning.

With what intentions are our questions formulated? Multiple spaces reverberate.

The strength of our intentions is answerable in part by mucolytic validity (Irigaray,

1977/1985). Mucus membranes line all bodily channels that communicate with Others.

Through them we breath, speak, eat, excrete, and love. Mucins, some more mucopurulent than others, are forever blocking our breathing, speaking, eating, excreting and loving.

Mucolytic strength, is spoken when our works of art playfully break down old mucin produced where other bodies collided. Unlike the caterwauls of academic pugilists, mucholytic activities can only be playful, teasing, vivacious, and mischievous. We already know that, as mucocutaneious creatures, we are dependent on mucosing. With new mucous always forming new blockages, we can only hope for more open closures. 87

As Abu-Lughod (1990), Fine (1993), Patai (1991), Riessman (1989), Stacey (1988) and

Strathem (1987) might say we must keep on keeping on.

You Can Take These Words, But My Thinking Cannot Stop Here

(This is a story that doesn't end, it just goes on and on and o n .... my friends.)

At a broad level, feminist research methodology is one site to think about the play of myth in 'science' (c.f. (Barthes, 1957/1972; Thompson, 1981; Thompson, 1989;

Wilshire, 1989). I focus on our mythopoetic activities, not to discredit our work but to enable us to become more sensitive to the complexities of our own scientific narratives. By suggesting feminist storyteller, as an alternative to feminist researcher, I am struggling to find more open ways to think about our academic work. In doing so I speak uncomfortable problems into what for me were once easy assumptions about feminist methodology. By focusing on the consequences of our shared, though diverse positionings within the institution of higher education, I have suggested that we are ontonoetically bounded in a world apart and that this has consequences for the work we do. In the end I suggested tentative ways to begin to think about different ways of authorizing and validating our research.

The story written here, then, is not simply juxtaposed against dominant storylines.

It also resists counter-discourses as they have been written elsewhere. This is one feministstory among a few others that are are also raising critical questions about the doing of feminist research (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1990; Fine, 1993; Patai, 1991; Riessman,

1989; Stacey, 1988; Strathem, 1987). When I started studying single-sex schooling for girls I found myself needing to push feminist methodology to a conceptual space - untheorized space - between the binaries. In this doing I began to understand my work as 88 never being fully outside of power relations. At best my writing occupies a space between what is domination and liberation. Into this space I playing around with different ways to authorize my speaking. This is a move that is already effecting closures elsewhere. In my storyline, while the 'sisterly postures' of earlier versions of feminist methodology get reread as impossible 'even-angelism', I would not be here to speak had it not been for the efforts of the feminists who wrote that storyline. In an ironic sense they have given me the place to unspeak their doing. So too will my speaking generate those compelled to speak otherwise.

As a feminist storyteller, poised against the impossibility of constructing realistic representations of 'women', I re/ach toward the philosophical possibility of taking up the artful practice of kaleidoscopically illustrating 'woman', at the messy boundaries of my unreliable knowing and ontonoetic uncertainties. I have suggested that we use the distance that my academic theorizing places between ours and other-made women- worlds, that we attempt to foreground some of the hidden processes behind the constitution of categories that surface in our doings. By privileging ontonoetic uncertainties over the epistemological questing, that typifies much feminist research, I am suggesting that we need to tease apart the threads with which we bind our selves, re/aching otherwise. In these suggestions I effect my own closures, only some of which I am conscious of.

I said in the introduction to this chapter, that I was dreaming an academic institution no longer governed by the fact/fiction and history/myth binaries that has given so much power to transcendental academic authority. Dreams and ideals float easily onto paper. To speak our dreams is a necessary practice, for without visions we cannot challenge the future. My desire to secure my foothold in academia moves me to write otherwise in the reminder of this dissertation. Compelled to act more traditionally, though 89 perhaps a bit more provisionally, only hints of what I have mischievously spoken here sparkle on pages of the last four chapters - some of which, in the name of academic survival, are being geared up for journal publication.

1 This move Is stimulated by: (Cherryholmes, 1993; Davies, 1992b; Game, 1991; Haraway, 1989; Krleger, 1991; Lather, 1991 b; McHale, 1992; Polklnghorne, 1988; Richardson, 1990; Rorty, 1980; Scholes, 1989; Schor, 1987; Van Maanen, 1988; Walkerdlne, 1990; White, 1980, 1981; Wolf, 1992)

2 At the center of this field are (Butler, 1990; Davies, 1989a; Davies, 1989b; Davies, 1990; Davies, 1992a; Davies, 1992b; Ellsworth, 1988; Game, 1991; Hekman, 1990; hooks, 1990; Lather, 1991a; Lather, 1991b; Lather, 1993; Lublano, 1991; Nicholson, 1990; Richardson, 1991; Saw 1cki, 1991; Walkerdlne, 1990; Weedon, 1987)

3 It is not within the scope of this paper to review the large literature on the role of the academic. I raise the Issue briefly because I feel.that It Is an understated part of what It means to be an 'academic feminist'.

4 Foucualt (1972) reads this shift to the visual, away from smell and taste, as part of the "classical eplsteme".

5 Thompson (1989) contrasts this notion of vision on a biological level as well. He notes that modernist mentalities take the eye up as a neutral organ through which information passes. Some scientists have come to question this construct, arguing Instead that the eye "speaks to the brain In a language already highly organized and Interpreted" (lbid:102).

6 It is not within the scope of this paper to review the philosophical literature discuss over the possibility of representation. Instead, I am simply trying to problematlze the realist representation that silently circulates through much of the discussion on feminist methodology.

7 This position is taken up in the spirit of philosophical naivete. For example Young (1990:12) has made me aware that Emmanuel Levinas felt that ontology by Its nature to be violent because It is "the process of knowledge which appropriates and sublates the essence of the other Into Itself" (also see, Hand, 1989 and Bernasconl & Crltchlley, 1991, whom I am still trying to understand). In writing of the alterity of ontologies I am trying to foreground the Impossibility of knowing and the need to respect In all Its alterity the 'Other'. Indeed, It strikes me that 'ontological Imperialism' with which Levinas was so concerned occurs precisely because our ontological underpinnings have been denied In traditional omnl/sclentific ways of being, 90

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WRITING WOMEN IN/TO THE SOCIAL: NARRATIVES ABOUT SINGLE-SEX AND COEDUCATIONAL SCHOOLING IN OHIO, 1850s-1880s The race can make no progress, while each alternate member of it is doomed to the degradation of ignorance. We may rejoice that this fact is at length understood, and that it remains only to adjust the details - to arrange the manner in which the blessings of education shall be secured to woman- and perhaps to determine the extent to which she shall enjoy them1.

In his report to the Ohio State Teachers’ Association (OSTA) in 1852 Professor J.

H. Fairchild, quoted above, expressed a widely held sentiment of his times - that women should ‘receive the blessings of education’. The primary task before educators, therefore, was to ‘adjust the details’ of how they should be schooled. For the next thirty years the discussion within the OSTA over how to educate women was framed almost exclusively in terms of the viability of coeducation over single-sex schooling. While all categories of

‘women’ were implicated in the policies that were shaped by these discussions, those most immediately effected were the daughters of families who could afford the luxury of schooling beyond the primary years. In other words, the dialogue surrounding coeducation set the parameters for the struggle over how one group of women, economically privileged women from the new professional middle classes, would be educated.

In their book on the history of coeducation, David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot review the myriad of ideas and schooling practices that made coeducation an institutional fact in our public schools2. In their telling coeducation arrived as a norm out of complex educational debates aimed at "projecting preferred gender futures for the society as a whole"3. Schools, reflecting the ecologies of surrounding institutions, particularly the

94 95

family and church, adopted coeducational practices without much hesitation. In Ohio

community responses to coeducation during the nineteenth century were, no doubt, very

similar to those raised by Tyack and Hansot. Many families continued to support single-sex

schooling for their daughters out of a sense of tradition and with a desire to protect their

'delicate daughters' from 'ruffian low-life' boys. Still others argued that girls weren't smart

enough to compete with boys or would somehow be physically damaged in the process. As these arguments were systematically undone, Ohio public school officials took up positions

that were overwhelmingly in favor of mixed schools. By the 1890s across the nation "there

was a firm consensus among school administrators that coeducation was best both in policy

and practice"4.

In this paper I will not restate the history of coeducational practices, nor trace their

successive forms. Instead, my aim is to re/analyze the ideas that circulated through the

writings that helped framed coeducation. My reading of these ideas is based on the articles

about ‘female education’ published in the OSTA’s monthly journal, the Ohio Journal of

Education (OJE). I cover thirty years of this discussion from 1852, the first year of the journal, into the 1880s when the nineteenth century debate over coeducation in the journal

came to a standstill. During this time period single-sex institutions for girls flourished in a

variety of forms5. In other words, many parents continued to prefer this kind of education

for their daughters. Their continued existence and the fact that many of them offered an

‘ornamental’ education helped keep the debate over coeducation alive. Interestingly, most

of the articles written in the OJE were advocating coeducation and critiquing single-sex

schooling. Those who wrote about single-sex schooling focused only on girls schools and

how they would reform them.

From a slightly different perspective the discussion surrounding coeducation can be read as a story about the social and technical means of producing gender, race and class. In 96

this paper, deeply influenced by Michel Foucault work on the history of sexuality, I

suggest that the early debates over single-sex and coeducational schooling were as much

about recasting the category of European American middle and upper class ‘women’ as

they were about actual educational practices6. In these debates professional educators, part

of a newly forming and ill defined middle class, were seizing this category of ‘women’ and reshaping it as a tool for circumscribing their own class identity. In this doing they were

propelling the category of middle/upper class ‘women’ into the future and writing them into

the ‘social’ where they would reconstruct public knowledge. In my reading of these

debates I examine their symbolic structures to analyze the different discourses used to

produce the ‘truths’ they would speak. In this paper I shall argue that these middle class

reformers/educators were spinning visionary narratives that deployed religious, scientific,

sexual, and medical discourses in complex and often contradictory ways. Above all else

this is a story about the forging of technologies of control aimed at the self.

WRITING CLASS BOUNDARIES: ‘WOMEN’ AS THE HANDMAIDENS OF SCIENCE It is essential to our young men and maidens that they look out upon life from the standpoint of manly ambition and enterprise, as from the standpoint of womanly aspiradon and sentiment7

Early educational reformers can be viewed as being engaged in a kind of story­

telling practice. Their ideas, laced together with metaphors, both produced and were

embedded in futuristic social visions. In these narratives the ‘proper development of the

female mind’ can be read as a cryptogram for the deployment of ‘women’ into the future

where the progress of civilization is mapped onto them. Women were being ‘tooled’ up to re/produce ‘social’ benefits. Fairchild, quoted above, was the first to start the conversation

about coeducation and single-sex schooling in the OJE. He exemplifies this tendency to 97

read women as social missionaries. For him to educate women was to assure the ‘progress

of the race’. Indeed, he asserted that the education of women was “involved in the choice

of civilization instead of barbarism”8. For him “every kind of socialism, every kind of

monasticism but the setting of 'the solitary in families,' has been prolific of corruption.”9

Underlying his assertions is a clear sense of uneasiness. It would seem that the

‘project of men’ is failing. Civilization, a code for the public world of trade, industry and politics, appears as dis/ease. Men, afraid of the dis/ease, turn the category of ‘women’ into

instrument of deliverance. But first they must be tooled up on an educational lathe - reshaped and tempered. For Fairchild the key question concerning the education of women

is this: “shall separate schools be organized for them, or shall they be conducted together

along the paths of science”? ‘The standpoint of manly ambition and enterprise’ is science.

Science, powering the educational lathe, is to be enscrolled on the body of ‘women’10.

The notion that science is the vehicle that will bring them to their future destinies circulates

throughout these narratives. For Fairchild coeducation was the most effective means for

bringing science to women. Ironically, public schools in Ohio were already

coeducational11. The main justification for this move, according to Fairchild, was

economics - most communities simply couldn’t afford single-sex schooling. However, for

him economics was not sufficient justification for coeducation12. His task, was to outline

the social and moral advantages of coeducation in what he called ‘promiscuous schools’.

Like most of the others who wrote during this time his main justification for coeducation is

that “the most potent influences which operate upon the race, are those which arise from the relationship of the sexes” in the family13.

To overlook cross-sex influences, as ‘misguided religionists’ have tried to do by

segregating the sexes, would undo the ‘family organization’ that is the foundation of civilization. Fairchild’s vision of family, civilization and progress is Protestant and 98 capitalist. Indeed, progress and Protestantism are inextricably bound14. The notion that single-sex schooling, is anti-Protestant and hence unprogressive gets echoed throughout this time period. For example in 1874 another reformer comments that: “in all Catholic countries where the coeducation of the sexes is paralyzed, where the girls of the well-to-do classes are reared to maturity in the convents, and those of the laboring classes are not at all or little educated, domestic happiness and the home education of children are insufficient, and the material welfare and political power of the nation are greatly impaired”15. In a 1886 editorial it was argued that single-sex schooling “was the natural outgrowth of the harem and the monastery and nunnery. Opposed to these is co-education, one of the latest and best outgrowths of Christianity”16.

At the center of this distinctly Protestant vision is family. The elite female-centered world of single-sex education had to yield to the dynamic 'family'. In particular, it is the patterns of new native-born middle class family life, that was being positioned at the heart of all that was good in ‘civilization’17. The new middle class, signified by the man of science and the cult of domesticity, were neither too rich nor too poor18. During the middle of the nineteenth century they were just beginning to develop a self-awareness19.

"Midcentury", notes one historian, "was a sober time for middle class families, a time of special anxiety about the economic prospects of the rising generation and a time, perhaps to withdraw into the private home to assay the prospects ahead"20. The argument for coeducation both read and writes this newly privatized family life. For example, Fairchild argues that schools should reflect the best influences of the ‘natural’ family. Girls and boys, constructed as having ‘mutually elevating and restraining’ influences on each other, are as essential in the school as they are in the home. Fairchild laments as unhealthy families “where the children are all sons; almost equally unfortunate is a family of daughters”. In these families “the sons are prone to be coarse or shy, and the daughters to 99 be prudish or unwomanly”. While he considered coeducation to entail a mutual benefit for boys and girls his examples focus almost exclusively on the benefits that boys will derive from the presence of girls. Benefits include: a “sense of responsibility to society at large”; a more “wholesome discipline”; a “purer moral atmosphere”; a “more correct idea of the character of the female sex”; “a more thorough common sense as opposed to the morbid sentimentalism incident to early life”; a “higher degree of social cultivation”; and a

“wholesome incitement to effort in study”21.

Fairchild advocated coeducation largely because they could ‘socially cultivate’ the boys. The benefit for girls in the coeducational setting for Fairchild was that they would become more ‘womanly’ and make better marriage partners and mothers. This notion also was used to justify the education of girls in single-sex schools. This is clearly what those who advocated the reform of all girls schools had in mind. Samuel Findley chaired ‘The

Association of the Friends of Female Education’ founded in 1853 with the stated purpose of giving voice to those professionally engaged in conducting Young Ladies’ Seminaries.

Its goal was twofold. First they set out to determine whether or not female seminaries were doing “all that ought to be done for the thorough development of the female mind”.

Second, they wanted to assure that there would “be unity of sentiment on the part of the conductors of female schools”. Findley noted that the OSTA, designed to promote the education of the masses, “of course includes the development of the female mind, but extends not to the peculiarities which distinguished seminaries appropriated to females exclusively”22.

The ‘peculiarities’ he refers to are of course those of being European American and middle/upper class women. Unconcerned about the advantages or disadvantages of coeducation, the guiding question for this group of men was how to re/educate the prominent families who continued to find ‘ornamental’ forms of schooling adequate for 100 their daughters. They believed that “many of the evils connected with the education of females, are wholly attributable to female seminaries and colleges, and by them alone can they be removed”. The solution was not necessarily coeducation, though this seemed fine for the ‘masses’. There was nothing inherently wrong with single-sex schooling. The problem was how girls were being educated in these schools. The major ‘evils’ of single­ sex schooling, for these men, were twofold. First there was too little attention paid to the

‘solid branches’ and too much to the ‘ornamental’. Second, they were dismayed by what they viewed as a “universally prevalent rage for early graduation, and early marriage, both on the part of the parents and pupils, that no seminary can have time thoroughly to train the female mind”23. If women were to be wise educators of their children and stimulating companions for their husbands they needed a more thorough and scientific education. In a series of articles titled “Endowed Institutions For Females” written in 1855 an anonymous author notes that “woman was made to be the companion of man” and that “this she cannot be...while greatly his inferior in mental discipline”. The new category of middle and upper class ‘women’ “must be able to participate with him in the pleasures which he finds in his studies and his favorite pursuits, as well as cook a favorite dish or superintend the work of the kitchen”24. Likewise for the ‘Friends of Female Education’ women “would be the companion of the learned; her society would be courted by the man of science, and she would shine as a bright luminary in the galaxy of illustrious women”25.

The notion that ‘the man of science’ needs a ‘woman of science’ as a companion runs throughout these narratives. The ‘man of science’ is a ‘college-bred man’ as opposed to the ‘self-made man’26. Here is a clear attempt to mark off a space for the new middling classes - they are not the laborers, nor are they the ‘self-made’ bourgeois industrialists.

Instead, they are the incipient professional managerial middle classes. The task of the ‘man 101 of science’ was to authorize science, manage an increasingly structured urban-industrial power structure. His companion, however, was written into science but out of its authorship and its power. Most were agreed that there was a “vast deal of senseless talk..about “woman’s rights”. Indeed, for some “woman has been and is, most deeply wronged by the modem would-be advocates of her rights”27. Hence feminists, read as

‘senseless’ and injurious to ‘woman’, are written ‘other’ to the handmaidens of science in these narratives. The handmaidens power is not derived from equal rights, but from nature.

Nature is constructed as pure, unadulterated, guided by universal laws, and untouched by the ‘project of men’. The task of the men of science was to wield the tool of science to build a new industrial and political order. For the handmaidens of science the task was regenerative - to reform spiritually or morally28. As I shall demonstrate further, only women, simultaneously read into and written by nature, could use science to unleash the gifts of ‘nature’ that would heal the dis/ease of civilization. Only they could keep alive the dream of a hygienic pre-industrial society 29.

Women, as newly created scientific vessels, would reproduce, through their mothering and teaching, the scientific - analytical tradition that undergirds the early years of capitalist accumulation. All sides of the coeducation and single-sex schooling question agreed on this. They also agreed that the traditional category of middle/upper class

‘women’, as it had been written in single-sex schooling was inadequate. In other words, in the female-centered world of single-sex schooling 'women' were not maximizing their

'natural' potentials. How women were to be rehabilitated was largely a matter of their class location. Public school educators advocated coeducation for the masses, and for most common schools in Ohio this was an unavoidable economic necessity. But these are not really stories about the masses or about the first eight years of common schools. As we shall see these are distinctly about the ‘higher schooling’ of the middle and upper classes. 102

These are stories where technologies of control were formed and intensively applied by and to economically privileged and politically powerful30. These are stories about how the powerful wrote themselves into privileges and kept themselves under surveillance in their own schools. If the economically privileged wrought new technologies of control and tried them out on themselves first, it was largely the ‘women’ who were their experimental subjects. If their experiment succeeded these women could be deployed, instruments of power and power itself, to reshape their ‘Others' - women of the working and impoverished classes.

WRITING THE ‘SOCIAL’: ‘WOMEN’ AS THE CARETAKERS

In the intuitions of her mind, in her aspirations for the pure, in the center of her heart, she is a sybil-a prophetess. She sees what and where the dull sight of man cannot penetrate. She glances down the promenade of the future, and, with a prophetic eye, beholds the processes of events that march with stately tread on the stage of time.31

On one level the narratives about coeducation and single-sex education trace the story of how schooling became a site for the wedding of Protestant myths of human salvation to science. The new education advocated, however, was not simply about women becoming “the guardians of American morality’ or ‘professionalizing motherhood’32. All of these narratives are projecting ‘women’ into the future - where she becomes a ‘tool’ aimed at fine tuning the ‘social’. The creation of the ‘new woman’, then, is also about the creation of what will become their arena, the ‘social’33. For example, Findley suggests that

“just in proportion as the female mind is enlightened by science....man himself becomes educated, and morally enlightened; society refined, her institutions republicanized, her literature more pure, elevated and sublime, her philanthropy more universal and effectual, and her Christianity more heavenly and divine”34. ‘Science’, as a time machine, becomes 103 the primary mechanism by which women are read and written into the future. They carry with them their ‘natural’ moral attributes which get read into larger more amorphous sphere of the ‘social’. The ‘social’, in turn, becomes the new beneficiary of female education. The

'social' is written as containing the ‘republican’ education of youth, high culture and philanthropy.

In his tirade against single-sex schooling, H.H. Barney, Commissioner of

Common Schools in 1855, mystifies the categories of both ‘women’ and the ‘social’, grounding them in the realm of nature:

when we duly reflect upon the existing circumstances of society around us, we naturally ask, what secret force, what subtle agency has accomplished all this? The answer is, the influence of woman. There is not a department of life from which her mystic power can be safely withdrawn. Stronger than all laws, then all fiery passions, her mild power descends upon man like rain upon the rugged soil.... This potent force, this prolific fountain of good to common life, cannot be dispensed with in the school room. If it be asked, how will it affect the boy, the answer is how has it affected the man?35

Barney appropriates ‘women’, re/presenting ‘nature’, as both a mystery and resource. They are the bearers of a moral future. They inhabit the moral space into which

‘social’ is poured and cast. As with Fairchild and Findley, he maps the pristineness of nature onto ‘women’ who, once wedded to science, will bring their ‘mild power’ to rescue

‘the project of men’. In his narrative, Barney constructs single-sex schooling as ‘nunnery’ and ‘evil’, indeed, as responsible for capping the potential ‘prolific fountain of good’.

Single-sex schooling, he tells us, “as in all other cases where the evident laws of nature have been contravened,... has generated and multiplied in a painful degree the very evils and vices it was intended to destroy”. Single-sex schooling is constructed as anti-nature.

Evil, a code for anti-Protestant, is embodied by the ‘women’ who, if not for their 104 un/natured schooling, would deliver us back to the supposed innocence of pre-industrial

America.

To such an extent has the evil increased that the education imparted in a large portion of our fashionable female seminaries has become proverbial for flippancy and superficiality. Inspired by her estrangement from the rest of mankind, with the false notion that when she does come before the world, it must be for vain display, it is no wonder that she shuns the difficulty, laborious studies which alone can give vigor and strength to her reasoning powers...thus educated, they by necessity imbibe the most false and pernicious views of human nature, and that whatever is truly feminine in them, degenerates into effeminacy, from the want of contact with the sturdy intellect of the other sex.

Women, apparently unable to wield their ‘mystic powers’ in homosocial groupings, function in spiritual/social improver categories only in the presence of men. On one level the arguments against single-sex schooling can be read as the securing of women to men. It is clear that Barney is attempting to anchor women to heterosocial relations, where they can be written as dependent on men for their ‘sturdy intellect’. Here 'women' have potential power only if they are being shepherded. This example also illustrates the uneasiness that runs through out these narratives. It makes clear that the dis/ease that pervades ‘civilization’ is social decadence and idleness36. If allowed to run its full course, it ‘degenerates into effeminacy”. It is a urban social pathology that signals the failure of manhood and threatens the sanctuary of the privatized middle class family. Women, at the heart of the family, are simultaneously read as the pure face behind the mask of ‘civilization’ and the mask itself.

They are being called on to heal what they themselves re/present. The primary concern in these dialogues, then, is not with the control of the exploited classes that writes so many educational histories37. Instead, focused on assuring the vitality and vigor of the ‘ruling’ classes, these are stories about the fabricating of ‘scientific’ technologies aimed at the self.

These are stories about marking and maintaining class boundaries where the first to be 105 tamed are the tamers themselves. Throughout these narratives the category of middle-upper class ‘women’ are positioned at the epicenter of this self-diagnosed dis/ease and self- affirming solution. And single-sex schooling, written as “condemning whole generations of girls to one unvarying round of frivolous accomplishments”, is a much cited source of dis/ease38.

Constructing women as ‘flippant’, ‘superficial’, ‘shunning labor’, ‘lacking in vigor and strength’ and as having ‘unsturdy intellects’ worked to both name the dis/ease and the cure. The old category of middle-upper class ‘women’ was barren - unproductive in the new social order of capitalist patriarchy. In 1858, in the miscellany column of the OJE, an anonymous author echoes this very sentiment:

The Woman of Society is a highly artificial production, got up to a pre-established standard, and to suit a particular demand. She is bred, fed, trained, dressed, schooled and accomplished to fit the supposed requirements of a particular market.... she is less to blame than those who have directed the processes that have made her what she is. The first defect in the education of the young women of America, belonging to the class to which we refer, is that they are not taught to labor. Without the basis of an acquired capacity for consecutive and productive labor for a useful purpose, no reliable character can be built, nor any qualities acquired that will be deemed valuable by such as look for usefulness39.

Sixteen years later the same sentiments are expressed in an article entitled “True and

False Female Education”. Here upper class women are described as being “like the confectioner’s cake, which, though beautifully iced, the figured embossing covered up a deal of badly mixed and badly baked dough”. What is needed instead is an education that

“recognize(s) duty, responsibility, culture...”40. Labor, usefulness, duty and responsibility for these authors, had more to do with marriagebility and companionship than the job market. But this utilitarian and instrumentalist coding, common through out these narratives, works to set ‘women’ up, along side ‘nature’, as objects of capitalist 106 appropriation. ‘Science’, or an ‘education in the solid branches’, became the means of endowing women with compensatory characteristics that would make them more useful to the new industrial order. These include ‘the capacity for consecutive and productive labor’ and ‘reliable character’. The old category of ‘women’, is read as ‘artificial’, man-made and simulated, a cyborg strayed too far from the innocence of ‘nature’. New women, created by the proper education, would bring all that was pure and innocent in ‘nature’, into the

‘social’ to heal the wounds left by capitalist machines41. Only women, simultaneously read as ‘tool’ and ‘other’ to technology, could manage this task. The technology of capitalism, geared to accumulate capital, is ‘othered’ to the technology of women geared to heal the

‘social’.

The technology of both would eventually liberate men from his moral dilemmas and his physical labor. Indeed, this vision of women’s future entry into the ‘social’, perhaps clearest in an editorial written in 1874, is always for the benefit of men. This commentator reviews a report devoted to the discussion of coeducation of the sexes written by Superintendent Harris, of St. Louis. In his review he notes that:

It is conceded that under all circumstances women’s sphere must include a closer relations to family life than the sphere of man, but it is argued that under the different stages of human progress the sphere of women widens, and the vocations of the sexes separate less and less until the epoch of machinery is reached, and man is emancipated from physical labor42

Women, still firmly grounded in the domestic are being propelled into the future as resources for men. The ‘social’, carved out for the reception of underpaid and unpaid

‘usefulness’ of ‘women’, is simultaneously anchored to the domestic and staked out, as

‘other’ to capitalism. Its boundaries, flexible and permeable, gradually will shift to justify and accommodated women’s exit from the home. As the social costs of doing capitalism 107 manifested, ‘women’, retooled, were deployed into the ‘social’, to pick up the bill. One of first social costs of the new industrial era was literacy. Schooling, during this time, is moving into the ‘social’ where ‘women’, positioned as ‘natural’ educators in the family, are rapidly taking up the role of teacher. Women in the leisure classes may have taught before marriage, but after marriage work for pay was actively discouraged. Their

‘usefulness’, then, was largely written as unpaid labor. They formed the backbone of the benevolent and moral reform societies aimed at the rehabilitation of the ‘other’ people, usually women, who had fallen between the cracks into the new industrial order43.

Women, in turn, would also use their societies to write the ‘social’. In other words women were simultaneously the instruments of power and the subjects of power. Their domestic and moral powers, retooled, would enable them to exercise power in a way that their sisters before them could not44. Throughout the ensuing decades they will write a variety of social problems into their special domain and out of the way of capitalists. For example the myriad of problems associated with poverty are divorced from the politics of capitalism and placed in the ‘social’. One large consequence of this is that ‘social’, written in these narratives as an object of women’s moral superiority, also becomes a central ground for the establishment of a new middle-class identity. It would be through their efforts to both read and write the disenfranchised poor that early ‘social’ reformers would discover that which differentiates them from the masses. Middle/upper class women, placed under surveillance with/in their social class, are being retooled to aid in the policing of ‘others’. Through their efforts categories of ‘others’ are enumerated, expanding the

‘social’ and enabling contradictions which in turn restructure possibilities for women. In no small way, women written into and writing the ‘social’, provide the basis for the proliferation of professional/managerial middle class occupations aimed at the surveillance of 'others'45. 108

These narratives about single-sex and coeducation, generated during a time of shifting and ill defined class boundaries, can be read as an attempt to shore up and stake out new boundaries46. More specifically these are stories about forging the ‘handmaidens of science’ into tools that will reinforcement and secure the boundaries of the nascent middle class self-awareness, one built on the deepening and widening gap between the home and the workplace. On one level, then, this is a story about the search for cultural power that is both distinct from the old middle class, whose privilege was tied to master/apprenticeship learning, and from that of the old rich whose privileges were tied to exclusive schooling practices. The power of the new middle class comes through science - it is the forging of a power/knowledge nexus that would soon become the hallmark of the new ruling classes47.

The tirade against single-sex schooling can be read as an attempt to mark the boundaries between the middle classes and the old wealth. The bourgeois, characterized as the ‘self- made men’, used entrepreneurial skills to build his empire, not science. But this is a story that also seeks to rewrite the ways of the rich. These stories are spoken with/in the recognition that science was the key to the new industrial order. The daughters of the rich are to be rehabilitated along with the daughters of the middle classes. Together they will march into the future deploying middle-class values, simultaneously re/writing their classes into existence.

WRITING THE ‘SEX’: ‘WOMEN’ AS MEDICAL OBJECTS

It is a fact, well-known to educator, that the gentler sex ceases to make mental efforts, if a sufficient foundation for self-improvement is not laid before the beginning of womanhood48.

According to Adolf Dopp, single-sex schooling, read as intensifying 18th century notions of femininity by all sides, should either be eliminated or reformed. Which ever 109 option these educational reformers chose they were all agreed that the category of middle/upper class ‘women’ was in need of rehabilitation. These narratives all work to make single-sex schooling as an institution speakable and to make the women inside them visible. These are stories where men use science to politically realize women/nature by propelling them into the future. If their sphere was to be the domestic and their retooling demanded their usefulness in the new industrial order, then let the ‘social’ be their arena.

Domesticated intervention into the ‘social’ eventually worked to make all categories of

‘women’ more broadly visible. The narratives surrounding coeducation and single-sex schooling, then, can be read as one site for the staging of ‘women’ for the public gaze. In the beginning, it was the middle/upper class women who occupied the public eye. As time moves on they would become the stage hands, setting the scene for the fielding of ‘other’

‘women’. One consequence of increased visibility is that the handmaidens of science quickly became scientific objects in their own right. Science, writing them into the future as scientific/social missionaries, also invades their bodies. The driving concern behind this penetrating self-gazing is ‘womanhood’.

The primary instigators of this scientific invasion were medical doctors. Prior to the

1870s discussants in the dialogue over single-sex and coeducational schooling were focused primarily on the ‘proper development of the mind’. Still battling eighteenth century notions that middle/upper class women only required moral and ornamental instruction, these earlier narratives were more about extolling the benefits of science. The guiding question was “what course of instruction is best adapted to the mental constitution of females”49. By the 70s the notion that women would benefit from the intellectual training that science could provide, while far from settled, was more widely accepted. Indeed, from the 1860s onward more and more women sought collegiate forms of education50. At the high school level single-sex options for girl’s schooling continued to flourish throughout 110 this time period - some of them more academic and others strictly ornamental51. Their continued existence functioned to keep the argument for coeducation alive, which in turn provided the context for spinning out justificatory schemes for why, what and how women should be educated.

Throughout most of the 1860s, the exchange over the education of women in the

OJE essentially came to a standstill. The dialogue started again in an article called “ ‘The

Suppressed Sex’ in Education”, written in 1869. Once again the issue of coeducation frames an argument for the ‘common education’ of women. The author begins by asking:

1. Whether there is really anything in the nature of women to hinder them from partaking equally with men in the moral and intellectual processes of society? 2. Whether the supposed evils and dangers of women intermixing in the institutions of higher learning, or in the politics of the State are really so great as to render that intermixing inexpedient?52

In this article the author uses a religious discourse to write women as the same as men and a medical discourse to write them as different. “The human soul,” he tells us, “has no sex. Human nature is not two”. For him this “is enough; it is decisive; for all the purpose of the soul and of its future, human nature is the one”53. From this it follows that women’s minds are also equal in strength. Therefore, he reasons, women and men should receive a common education and it might as well be together. It does not follow, however, that ‘all vocations and all educations’ should be open to women. The economy, dependent on a division of labor for its efficiency, relegates women, as mothers and nurses, to separate spheres. On one level the author is attempting to dismiss what he felt to be “an immense amount of nonsense uttered, on what are called the different susceptibilities and sensibilities of women”. But he proceeds to reinscribing those differences when he tells us that the notion of differences between the sexes “is true only so far as it proceeds from the 111 different bodies and finer nerves of women”54. In other words, he pulls the category of

‘women’ into humanity while simultaneously reinscribing her as different. The differences have simply been recirculated and relocated from the soul to the body.

On multiple levels all of these narratives trace the efforts of men to undo and redo the category of ‘women’ - assuring everyone that they are both human and different. The article just cited, however, marks a shift toward the use of medical discourses to rewrite the differences between men and women. For the first time the ‘nervous woman’ appears. The

‘finer nerves of women’ refers to the abnormal irritability and sensibility to stimulation in all parts of the body - including genitalia. It is no accident that this article also uses the word ‘sex’ to encode the category of ‘women’. By the 70s the use of the term ‘sex’ overtakes the earlier use of the word ‘female’55. On one level, then, this narrative marks the beginning of medicalizing feminine sexuality. In general the dialogues surrounding coeducation tell the story of how schooling became a mechanism for the multiplication of sexual discourses. Indeed, coeducation was one of the devices put in the service of recording and transcribing ’sex'.

The obsession with sexuality runs throughout these narratives. Perhaps the clearest indication of this can be found in the fields of practices that were generated by and through coeducation. Here we find that their obsession with sexuality dictated everything from the architectural layout of schools to the rules of conduct56. For example, in a centennial volume on the history of education in Ohio printed in 1876 we find that in the public high school:

The two sexes are seated in the same room. The halls, or passage ways, however, are at different sides of the room, so that the sexes are entirely separate except in the study and recitation rooms. This is believed to be the rule in all the high schools of Ohio, although there are known to be some in 112 which the sexes are seated in different rooms for study, but reciting together57.

These narratives, then, take for granted that sexuality is present in coeducational schooling. Coeducation for these early educators was strictly about communion in the classroom under the watchful eye of the teachers. Some even suggested that coeducation was more ‘de-sexualized’ than its alternative. “That the sexual tension be developed as late as possible, and that all early love affairs be avoided is the desideratum, and experience has shown that the association of the sexes on the plane of intellectual contest is the safest course to secure this end” 58. If there was no sex in the soul or the mind none doubted its existence in the body. If, in eighteenth century Europe, one locus for the proliferation of medical advice was ‘the sex of the schoolboy’, his nineteenth century North American counterpart was the schoolgirl59. Indeed, the narratives that are writing coeducation into existence are also writing educators as qualified to speak ‘sex’. In their talk sex is being

“driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence”60. Coeducation, then, becomes one of the mechanisms for institutionalizing sexual discourses. What is distinctive about the 1870s is that adolescent girls, sexualized in the discourse on coeducation, become medical targets for scientific invasion.

This is not to say that medical discourses were absent from narratives prior to the

70s. For example, in the first volume of the OJE there is a commentary about the ‘physical education of females. The author, suggesting that girls are “inferior to their predecessors in point of strength and health”, makes a plea for more rigorous exercise in open air61. This call for physical education echoes throughout this time period. In 1870 the first mention of girls health, outside the context of exercise, appears in the OJE. While it is not framed within the conversation about coeducation and single-sex schooling it is aimed at girls. The author provides a short critical review of a “little volume entitled “Wear and Tear”, written 113 by a Philadelphia physician”. In this volume “over-study is declared to be one of the chief causes of the nervous irritability and ill-health of school girls”62.

The notion underlying this argument is that the brain could be ‘over-used’ and cause ill-health. It is suggested that men should not use the brain more than six hours and children no more than three hours. The author notes with some humor that “we do not see how anyone can help using the brain while awake” 63. And proceeds to suggest that the problem is really too much homework. While the notion of brain over-use is dismissed the notion that there is a problem -a girl problem- is reinforced. The ‘nervous’ school girl, whose sexuality is medically appropriated by educators, is also a symbol for another kind of middle class uneasiness. If economically privileged ‘women’ re/presented social decadence they also re/presented the potential pathology of sex. It is not surprising, in this context, that they become the first targets of the ‘new technologies of sex’64.

On the national level the most famous exemplar of this fear of sexual pathology was

Edward Clarke’s small volume entitled Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for the, Girls published in 1873. This book, republished seventeen times, received a great deal of public attention and had profound impact on many families who had academic ambitions for their daughters. Clarke focused public attention on the possible effects that intellectual development had upon maturation and puberty. In particular, he felt that ‘over-study’ would channel blood away from the development of the reproductive organs creating over­ developed brains and underdeveloped bodies. In Tyack and Hansot’s words this was a case of “mastery of algebra at the expense of the ovaries”65. For Clarke only single-sex education would allow the proper development of female reproductive organs.

This book prompted five editorial responses in the OJE during 1874. None of them accepted Clarke’s solution of single-sex education. One person did note that it had “given fresh impetus to the discussion of the question of coeducation”66, and then proceeds to 114 dismiss it as absurd. Another notes that if Clarke is right, then his findings necessarily impact single-sex schooling and not just ‘mixed’ schools. Hence we would have to adopt

“a system of individual instruction for all girls..utterly impractical”67. The remaining editorials, however, are guardingly supportive of parts of what Dr. Clarke advocated. They tread cautiously, not fully accepting his conclusions, but each suggests that there is a ‘the girl problem’, and it requires attention. One suggested that perhaps schools should

“recognize her sex organization and permit an intermission, if not an abstinence, of severe study or effort during the catamenial period of each month”68. Another, hoping that

Clarke's book will work to “bring about some needed reforms in the education of girls”, supports Clarke's position on the need for improving girls diet and exercise. They are, however, more cautious when it comes to Clarke’s position on too much study. The fear is that “making of overstudy a scape-goat for the many much more harmful errors which fashion favors”69. Yet another berates those who critique Clarke as lacking in knowledge of ‘physiological facts’. How, they ask, can the “experience of ten or twenty years as a teacher of mixed schools... enable any one to say that continued severe study is not injurious to many girls. So far as we have observed teachers as a class know very little of the effect of their school regime on the health of pupils”70.

In 1874 an article entitled “Sex or no Sex in Education” takes Clarke’s concerns and rewrites them into coeducation. The author agrees that ‘physiological’ differences should be considered:

...a physiological fact to be considered in coeducation: After sexual maturity has appeared, woman lose about one-forth of her time by bodily indisposition, which reacts on her mental power. During these periods she should not be compelled to the same regularity in her studies as in the rest of her schooling time, or great mischief may result to her constitution71. 115

This, the author makes clear, was not an argument against coeducation but against its

‘faulty methods’. After all “that women can not be otherwise educated than by private

instruction,... is at war with all pedagogical experience” He suggests that ‘doing away with

the formal memorizing of text-books” would be a first step to reorganizing coeducational

practices.

The unwillingness to reconsider coeducation ties together all the stories written in

the 1870s. Indeed, everyone knew that only coeducation was economically feasible - at

least for the masses. Most of these writers do, however, accept Clarke’s concern with sexuality. But their focus on women’s health and their reproductive capacity was not

simply a medical concern. It can be read, in part, as being driven by fears that women were

vacating their proper domestic spheres. It can also be read as being driven by a concern

about ‘race suicide’ which would fuel the eugenics movement. But these stories are

distinctly pre-eugenic in that they are about the self-gazing of the middle/upper classes.

Middle/upper class ‘women’ are being sexualized and put under surveillance by

middle/upper class men. Coeducation was one of the tools used by the privileged classes to

produce truth about their sexuality. In consideration of their own sex they appropriate

women as fragile treasures whose health is essential if they, as a class, are going to

reproduce. If the nuclear family was replacing religion as the overseer of sexuality72, then

coeducation, as a mirror of family life, should replace single-sex schooling as the

institutional support for sexuality. And the fact that the amplifier of all this was science is

significant. The role of coeducation, then, is to anchor sexuality - to provide a scientific

support to emotional and moral support provided in the family.

It is not surprising in this context that science would be used to invade the educational body. Science, primarily concerned with anomalies and policing normality, targets girls sexuality because they are clearly the aberration with/in androcentric education. 116

In the name of science, medicine and education are joined to produce a new technology of sex aimed at girls. Out of this alliance the ‘nervous’, ‘over-studied’ and ‘potentially barren’ girl is bom and disengaged as a site for technological intervention. The narratives surrounding coeducation worked to make sex more secular and to raise it as a demographic concern for the ‘survival of the race’. In other words, these narratives helped write sex into the ‘social’. The racism in all of this is obvious. But it is not just a concern for the survival of peoples of northern European descent. These stories are specifically about assuring the health and hence reproduction of middle/upper class European Americans. The first targets that flow from the desire to reproduce their privileges are the 'self. Later, as the eugenics movement intensifies, the underprivileged will become the targets of their self-tested technologies of sex.

CONCLUDING RE/MARKS

Educational reformers concerned with single-sex and coeducational schooling practices were forging gender policies for schools. Their responses, however, were not simply about finding practical solutions to the problems of schooling women. They were embedded in and creating categories of gender, race and class. These are stories where complex, unstable and contradictory discourses are woven together to read gender, race and class. As with all educational discourses, these narratives functioned as both instruments for and as effects of the powers inherent in the discourses they deployed. The production and transmission of power, simultaneously reinforced and exposed women’s subordination. They wrote her into the ‘social’ where she would become both subject and object of science. The ‘social’, written into being in the same moment, admitted women, 117 reestablished them as sociological/scientific categories and restructured their possibilities. Under public gaze women were to become both the reformer and the reformed.

Above all else the story about the birthing of coeducation is an uneasy story - full of middle/upper class anxieties. Unlike much of educational history it is a story about one class deploying new technologies of control on itself. It is a story about one class speaking itself into existence through self control rather than the control of ‘others’. More specifically the anxiety, written as social decadence and then sexualized is located on the feminine self. Women’s reproductive role, both cause and effect of her positioning, is central to the telling of this story. From her morality to her ovaries she is being retooled both by and for new technologies of control. It is her reproductive power that is being harnessed and advanced from the biological to the ‘social’.

Her mission, however, was not simply to bring her domestic skills - education, hygiene and health, to soothe over the growing sores of early industrial capitalist accumulation. The new technologies of power, aimed at the feminine self, were designed to ensure the protection, cultivation and preservation of the middle/upper classes. In this context the obsession with their progeny and in particular with women’s health and sexuality takes on new meaning. Their bodies, of course, were essential to reproducing the class. So was her sexuality. As she was being written as mentally and spiritually the same as men her body was being isolated from men so that it could retain its differential value.

As science was rewriting her social decadence by propelling her into the future as ‘social’ caregivers, it was sexualizing her, gearing her up to reproduce a ‘class’ body with its health and hygiene under control. In the end the narrators of coeducation, economically privileged men, were a class preoccupied with marking their own identity both through shaping the middle ‘class’ body and its home - the ‘social’. 118

1J. H. Fairchild, “The Joint Education of the Sexes, ” Ohio Journal of Education (OJE), 1(1852):354.

2 David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New York: Yale University Press, 1990).

3Ibid.: 279.

4Ibid:100.

5 Haithe Anderson, “ The Schooling of Girls: Columbus Ohio, 1806-1900,” Unpublished Manuscript.

6 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of The Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Also see Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts Advice to Women. (New York: Anchor Books, 1978); Riley, Denise. "Am I that Name?": Feminism and the Category of Women' in History. Minneapolis: (University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Ryan, Mary P.Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. Interdisciplinary perspectives on Modern History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

7 Anonymous editorial “Coeducators,” OJE 23(1874):491.

8 Fairchild, “The Joint Education of the Sexes, 353.

9 Ibid., 353-354.

10c.f. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good.

11 As Tyack and Hansot have noted this did not necessarily look like the coeducation of the sexes today. Their were a number of practices for separating boys from girls in the classroom e.g. separate seating arrangements, separate hallways and doors for entering the classroom, etc.

12 Fairchild, “The Joint Education of the Sexes,” 355.

13 Ibid.

14 Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

15 Adolf Dopp. “Sex or no Sex in Education,” 23(1974):275.

16 Unknown author, Untitled editorial, OJE, 35 (1886): 585. 119

17 Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class.

*8 Ryan names the 'self-made man' as the male counterpart to the cult of domesticity. However, in the documents that I am dealing the man of science is written as other to the college bred man. This may be a marking off of the professional upper middle classes from the newly forming white collar middle classes.

19 Ibid. Also see: Christine Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City,1850-1860,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women’s History, Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds, (New York: Routledge, 1990):92-108; Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in American. (New York: W.W, Norton & Company, 1976); Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. (Pantheon Books. 1984).

20 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 153.

2* Fairchild, “The Joint Education of the Sexes, 356.

22 Samuel Findley, “Female Education” OJE, 3 (1854):77.

23Ibid., 78.

2^ S. N. S. “Endowed Institutions For Females: Number I.”, OJE 4 (1855): 114.

25 Findely, “Female Education”, 78.

2 6 This distinction is set out most clearly in an article lamenting the fact that more girls than boys were graduating from high school. The authors suggests that one reason is that society places too much value on the ‘self-made man’ and denigrates the ‘college-bred man’, hence boys don’t value a higher education. William Frost Crispin, “Where are the Boys?,” OJE 36 (1887): 113.

27 S. N. S. “Endowed Institutions For Females: Number I.”,114.

28 Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18.151-174 (1966).

29 Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Shi, David E. The Simple Life. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Shi notes that by the turn of the century the urban middle and upper classes became obsessed with nature. Nature offered a symbolic release from the pains of urban modernity which 120

literally mobilized these classes to abandon the city and move to the countryside or smaller villages (p. 194).

30 Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class.

31 H. A. M. Henderson “True and False Female Education,” OJE 23 (1874): 358.

3 ^ For important treatments of the ideology of domesticity and education see: Glenda Riley, “Origins of the Argument for Improved Female Education, “ History of Education Quarterly 9(1969):455-470; Sklar, K. K., Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976); Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood.

33 This discussion of the ‘social’ is stimulated by: Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?".

34 Findley, “Female Education,” 77.

35 H. H. Barney, “Report to the State Commission of Common Schools,” (1855): 58.

36 Also see Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. (New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987), who connects this with a history of detail.

37 e.g. Cremin, Lawrence. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. (New York: Random House, 1961); Karier, Clarence. Shaping the American Educational State, 1900 to Present (New York: Free Press, 1975); Nasaw, David. Schooled To Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Spring, Joel. Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

38 Henderson, “True and False Female Education,” 360.

3^ Cincinnati Commercial, “Education of Women”, OJE 7 (1858):211-212

40 Henderson, “True and False Female Education, “ 360-361.

4 * These pastoral yearning and antimodernist tendencies were common during this time and coexisted in contradictory ways with the lure of wealth and individual materialism competitively won in urban battles. See Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. (New York Pantheon Books: 1981). Marx The Machine in the Garden; Shi, The Simple Life.

42 Editorial, OJE 23 (1874): 254. 121

43 Numerous histories have been written about the public activities of middle and upper class women during this time period. For example see: Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780- 1920,” Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women’s History, Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds, (New York: Routledge, 1990):66-91.

44 Baker, “The Domestication of Politics 1780-1920,” 74.

43 For example: teachers, social workers, public health workers, a predominantly female labor force overseen by a predominantly male bureaucracy.

46 c.f. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class.. Debates over these boundaries have been defined as modemist/antimodemist in Lears, No Place of Grace. And on a pastoral/technology continuum by Marx, The Machine in the Garden.

47 Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good.

48 Dopp, “Sex or no Sex in Education,” 271.

49 Untitled column, OJE 1(1852): 152.

59 Solomon, In Company of Educated Women; Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together.

51 Anderson, “The Schooling of Girls”.

52 E. D.. M., “ ‘The Suppressed Sex’ in Education,” OJE 28 (1869): 1

53 Ibid., 2.

34 Ibid.

55 The exception is Fairchild’s article is entitled Fairchild “The Joint Education of the Sexes,” 1852.

56 Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together.

57 Anonymous, A History of Education in the State of Ohio, (Columbus, Ohio: General Assembly, 1876): 176.

58 Editorial, OJE 23 (1874): 254.

59 This insight is inspired by Michel Foucault. For his eighteenth century reading of this see: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 122

60 Ibid.: 33.

61 Anonymous, Untitled, OJE 1(1852): 144.

62 Editorial, OJE, 19(1870): 512.

63 Ibid.

64 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

65 Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston, 1873; reprint, New York, 1972). Quote from Tyack and Hansot, Learning Together, 150. For Clarke's impact on college education: Sue Zschoche, “Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education,” History of Education Quarterly 29(Winter 1989):642-569 and Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good.

66 Editorial, OJE, 23(1874): 25.

67 Editorial, OJE, 23(1874): 216.

68 Editorial, OJE, 23(1874): 63.

69 Editorial, OJE, 23(1874): 102-103.

70 Editorial, OJE, 23(1874): 178-179.

71 Dopp, “Sex or no Sex in Education,” 274.

72 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, for this history. CHAPTER VI

LEGENDARY BEGINNINGS: ORIGIN STORIES FROM A SINGLE-SEX SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

In the years since then our tiny seedling of a school has grown to be a great tree of knowledge! (Founder of AGS, 1951).

A legend is a "quasi-historical tale of ordinary or fantastic events, regarded as true history by the audiences" (Scholes & Kellogg, 1966: 219). In this essay I read, write and retell the legendary beginnings of an all girls school hereafter referred to as AGS. The legend and its subsidiary storylines circulate through this privileged schooling site as potent 'artifacts' enclosing that which is spoken as 'truth'. As Valerie Walkerdine

(1990:120) says the truths spoken through educational discourses are often fictions that

"embody powerful fantasies which try to produce the social world as a calculated and also a safe space". Given its historical location as a school for upper class 'women' of European and Protestant descent it is not surprising to find that the legends passed down through the years at AGS are spoken for and hence enclose 'truths' about similarly situated 'women'.

Origin stories are spoken into existence for multiple reasons. On one level the public story about the founding of AGS springs innocently from the desire to speak its history. However, this publicly told story, written by the founder on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the school, was one of several drafts compiled by the author. Each draft a little different tells a different story while much more is left unsaid. In other words, the author and founder of the school could not find one 'true' fixed or stable way to speak about the beginnings of AGS. Her solution was to leave all of her drafts to the school. In the first section I rethink the public origin story of AGS, parenthetically interrupting the founder's personal account with my own thoughts generated from her other accounts and other materials in the school archives. To protect the identity of the school these sources are

123 124 cited as simply school archives1. Her words are directly quoted from a school pamphlet entitled The Way of a School, only names of people and places have been changed. The title of the section is the title of her story in this pamphlet. I have duplicated the entire public story.

In the second and third sections I read between the lines of this story contextualizing and complicating the scene a bit more. Here I use school arrival stories and other historical studies about single sex schooling to rethink the fashioning of this legend.

In these retellings I am not claiming a 'truer story' but rather that I have an account that is in coexists as an alternative story to the public story told by AGS. Nor am I suggesting that the founders story is 'untrue'. Instead, I believe that her story reflects her 'true' understanding of her life. In deconstructing her story what I am interested in is "what kind of meaning is absent or refused" (White, 1980, 1981:2). In the final section my goal is to think, in less innocent ways, about the framing power of school legends.

The Glory of Dawn in Every Thought: Kelley Smith Recounts the Founding of AGS

(Legendary Beginnings: Rewritten: Take one)

In the spring of 1898 I was 22 years old and in need of a job. (Is Kelley Smith's

(1876-1952) 'need of a job' a financial need?). My own education had been completed in

[midwestem city] at Miss Sigourneys' English and Classical School for Young Ladies and

Children, so my first requisite was to find an associate who was a college graduate interested in teaching. (Miss Sigourney's school was characterized by Smith as a finishing school. Smith had originally asked Miss Sigourney for a job but was turned down because she lacked the proper credentials. In other words, Miss Sigourney was not in the business of training her successors! Miss Sigourney is reported at saying that Smith's idea of 125

starting a college prep school was “preposterous”. By several accounts she was rather

upset by what she perceived as the "audacious" behavior of her former student).

A friend suggested a former [State] university classmate, Jane Bole. (Having

attended a finishing school, Smith accepted Miss Sigourney's notion that she did not have

the training needed to teach older children. Her first move, therefore, was to locate

someone qualified to teach the upper levels of the school. The woman she was boarding

with recommended someone she had gone to school with, Miss Jane Bole (1876-1936).

Bole, the same age as Smith, had been teaching in a private school in Cincinnati before it

closed in the middle of the school year due to lack of funds). I had never met Miss Bole,

but accepted the glowing recommendation and immediately telephoned her with my

proposition. She was interested, and within an hour she came over to see me. We sat and

talked on my front porch, and before she left we had decided to launch [AGS] and had

even drawn up plans for our prospectus and made a list of people to ask as patrons. (In

other words, they were creating a school that was aimed at a certain segment of the

population).

My mother agreed to rent a house on East Town Street and to sublet to the school

what rooms we might need. We spent that summer riding the [City] trolley cars in our

starched white high-collared shirt-waists, soliciting pupils. Many of the families we approached were friends of mine and my mother's, and all wished us well, but only a few

had the confidence to send their children to us that first year. (Moreover, since they were recruiting among family friends we can conclude that they were designing a school for the

social circles they were most familiar with. Indeed, this circle of friends must have been all

they needed - between the years of 1898 and 1907 AGS appears only once in the 1903 city directory). 126

I have always felt grateful to those parents who did agree to trust us with their daughters' education. (As she stated in other renderings of this history, Smith was very conscious about gaining the confidence of these people. She stated that she was aware that she needed to prove herself if her school was to attract the clientele she had in mind.

Indeed, by reaching out to Bole that she was consciously seeking external source of legitimacy). I also spent apart of my time that summer studying under Miss Bole's sister, who was then a teacher in the [City] Public Normal school. She was a great help and from her I received the fundamentals of teaching. (Because she understood herself as lacking the necessary training, Smith spent three summers studying "the fundamentals in teaching."

During the Summer of ‘98 she studied under Bole's sister, Miss Belle Bole, a teacher at the

Public Normal School. Then she spent two summers in Chautauqua, where she studied under Dr. John Dewey. Her second year at Chautauqua Dewey offered her a job teaching pre-school and first grade children at his experimental school- an affirmation of her ability to teach young children. On the whole, however, she confesses to finding Dewey interesting but felt that she "got better grounding under Miss Belle Bole" (Quote from another draft)).

When we opened our school in September 1898, we had, much to our surprise and delight, 25 pupils enrolled instead of the 14 we had expected. It became necessary to sublet an additional room of my mother’s house. (During the early years of AGS some of the pupils in the lower school were young boys. It remained coeducational until an Academy for boys opened its Lower School in the fall of 1916. On the whole, the school, with the word 'girl' in its name, can be seen as reflecting the conventions of upper/upper-middle- class Victorian culture by separating boys and girls. This separation, however, was considered essential only for postpuberty girls. The fact that the coeducation of young girls and boys was not considered problematic may be a reflection of the norms which simply 127

did not consider coeducation during young years to threaten established sex-roles. Or it

may be a reflection of wider cultural assumptions about coeducation which was widely

practiced during this time in most public schools).

The school that first year was a success in every way except financially. (She does

not talk about how they recovered from this financial loss. For the first four years AGS

was housed in rooms leased from Smith's mother in the home they lived in. Clearly they

were either subsidized by her mom, or they had other personally available financial

resources - an indicator of their own class standing). We had made our terms by the

month, lest our patrons might fear making so large an investment in so new a venture.

(This appears to have been a common practice in private schools during the 19th century. Lee (1892: 518) notes that irregularity of attendance was "encouraged by the practice of

exacting pay only for the time of actual presence in the school"). But when, after

Christmas, a measles and mumps epidemic swept through the school, our budget was

shattered and we were persuaded that hence forth tuition should be paid by the year. (Only

upper class families would be in a position to pay a years tuition in advance).

Our regular staff that year consisted of Miss Bole for the high school classes, Miss Winona for the grammar grades, and myself for the primary. Teachers of French, German,

art and gymnastics came in by the hour. (Elsewhere she calls gymnastics physical culture.

The German teacher was a man of German descent. Smith makes no mention of the core

curriculum taught by Bole and herself). The school assembled each morning in the big downstairs school room for opening exercises. We were like one big family. (The invocation of one big happy family continues today). We gave plays and entertainments on

a precarious stage supported by carpenters' horses and stacks of books, and pupils entered into these projects with great enthusiasm and school spirit. 128

Our first commencement, in the long downstairs school room, was a great event for

Miss Bole and me. Our two graduates, Miss Kurtz and Miss Davis, were to enter Wellesley

in the fall, a vindication of our ambition to be a college preparatory school. (According to

the school story written in other documents, AGS was the only private all girls school in

this large midwestem city that offered a college preparatory curriculum. It is not clear

whether or not there is a connection - but Miss Sigourney renamed her finishing school by

placing collegiate in the tide, shortly after AGS opened. That the first two graduates of

AGS did go to Wellesley, is a certain indicator of their social class standing. According to

Lynn D. Gordon (1990) the tuidon and residence costs of colleges like Wellesley were so

high that attendance was limited almost exclusively to women whose fathers were

professionals and businessmen. It seems fair to surmise from this that they were creating a

school for upper/upper-middle class girls and that they had been successful in attracting

wealthy clientele).

(There were five students who graduated the second year and none of them went on

to college. Smith is quoted elsewhere in the school archives as having said that "they were a group of attractive and alert girls whose parents were following the customary pattern in

girls' education". It took many years for the idea of college education for girls to become popular. A subsequent history of the school talks about the existence of a non-degree program at AGS which had been part of the curriculum from the beginning. "This program had allowed girls to be on a non-college preparatory program" (School archives). This non­ college program was not discontinued until 1965. Smith notes that in the early years "AGS continued to provide the necessary preparation [for college], but in the six years Miss Bole and I headed the school, there were only a few of our girls who went on to college" (Ibid.).

This contradicts the assertion made above that there was a non-college preparatory curriculum available at AGS. It seems more probable that AGS did not have separate 129 educational tracks until it grew and had enough students to justify separate tracks within each class. At any rate it is clear that AGS was not immediately successful in preparing and/or encouraging girls to go to college.)

After four years we had out grown the old house and we took our next big step....[moved to an] old family mansion. Stately and imposing behind its surrounding trees, it had stood vacant for several years. We were able to lease it for the next six years, though many of our friends and patrons questioned the wisdom of such a move. (The school moved one more time, again into a stately mansion. Paraphrasing one woman with historical ties to this school historically it was always a neighborhood school for the elite).

But perhaps our courage and daring in undertaking this greater responsibility made people have confidence in our ability to guide the future of the school. Numbers of new pupils flocked to us. When, at the end of two years ....Miss Bole and I both retired (I to be married, she to travel abroad) the school numbered almost two hundred. (A later history in the school archives says that there were 100 students at this time). The school and its success meant a great deal to me, of course, and it was a special joy when Miss Ladden and

Miss Pearl decided to take over its operation. I knew that under their administration it would grow in stature as it never could have done under Miss Bole and me. (It did grow).

In the years since then our tiny seedling of a school has grown to be a great tree of knowledge

Reading Between the Lines: Take Two

This rereading was pieced together from other written histories of the school. Here

I read between the lines of several drafts of the public narrative/speech by Smith duplicated above. Another history was written as a series of lectures given to AGS students during the 130

1989/88 school year on the occasion of their 90th anniversary. Yet other histories were written at other times. All were available in the school archives. All documents are descriptive and tend to paint a rosy picture of life at AGS. I use these documents and other educational histories to interrogate these self told origin stories of AGS. I do not claim that my story is any closer to the truth than other stories that could be generated out of these legends. Instead, this is simply another possible reading. This particular reading, as partial as all others, is focused through the lens of social class. In this context the particular legend that interests me is this: AGS was always a college preparatory school. Through this larger legend smaller storylines are scattered that operate as powerful cloaking devices obscuring the social class location of this school.

I begin by asking this: why did Kelley Smith, a European American women, start this school? What motivated her? She states simply that she was in need of a job. According to another historical story of the school she was a “well-brought-up girl” and felt that teaching was the only avenue open to her. She had applied to Miss Sigourney's school, her alma mater, but was turned down, ironically for lack of credentials. She couldn’t go into public school teaching because her finishing school training had not prepared her for the world of work. Interestingly, instead of applying for college, she decided to open a school. It is probable that her decision to open this school was not strictly tied to financial need. After all she had just graduated from Miss Sigourney's finishing school at the age of 22, was living at the time as a paying guest in a private home rather than in her parents. That she viewed starting up a school as a viable solution to her ‘need’ to work suggests that she came from an upper class family and probably had alternatives to

'outside work' available to her. Her desire probably stemmed from the search for something meaningful to do before marriage. On a broader level this can be read as one 131 story about the posidonings available to European American women situated in the upper/professional middle classes.

In her search for meaningful work it is clear that Smith was not driven by some strong commitment to an educational philosophy or religious conviction - so common to many who started schools during the 19th century (Tyack & Hansot, 1982). Even her commitment to starting a college preparatory school seems to have been based more on a need to differentiate her school from Miss Sigourney's school rather than some strong philosophical commitment to higher education for women. Indeed, not only did she not go to college but she is reported to have been surprised when some of her friends chose the college route. In those days the finishing school education was thought to be adequate for a girl of her social standing. Clearly since she would have been content to teach at the finishing school, had Miss Sigourney agreed to have her, she did not have ideological objections to that type of schooling for girls.

Finally, it is clear that she saw the school as a temporary place for herself before marriage. She retired after six years of teaching to marry a prominent businessman in the area. In sum it seems that Smith opened AGS because of the way she took up and was constituted through various discursive formations of her time. For example, she was negotiating discourses on what it meant to be a 'woman' particularly an upper class woman in a class segregated culture. Likewise she was taking up and resisting in part the discourses surrounding what it meant for a 'woman' to be a teacher in an occupationally segregated work world. In this historical moment one of the few legitimate occupational avenues available to upper class women was teaching. The category of teacher, however, also appeared attractive to women from other class locations who had traditionally engaged

"laundering, sewing, cleaning or working in a factoiy" (Apple, 1988: 66). During this time the primary route into teaching for working class women was normal school (Tyack & 132

Hansot, 1982). Smith, however, had the resources to resist the closures effected through this discourse on teaching. With the knowledge that she was seeking a temporary place for herself, she decided she could do the job without the full bag of educational credentials.

She entered the job without the credentials in hand. However, concerned about appearing legitimate in the eyes of her patrons, she spent two summers studying the art of teaching.

In other words, Smith working within and between various discursive constraints and constructed an alternative route into teaching in this mid western city where, the category of teaching was increasingly circumscribed by the normalizing gaze of 'Normal Schools'.

In one history of the school written by one of the next head mistresses the author notes that:

As Mrs. John C. White, Miss Smith now returned to the life for which Miss Sigourneys School for Young Ladies had prepared her, and became one of the popular young matrons of [City] at a time when there was in the city but one recognized “social set”, which continued to maintain traditions of the previous century, derived largely from the south (School Archives, 1952).

It is interesting that Bole also left the school when Smith decided to marry. We don’t really know why - other than that she wanted to travel. No matter the reason we do know that neither of these women became involved in education again. We don't know what else

Bole did after her travels. Smith became involved in local clubs and charities and only returned to AGS when she entered her daughter in the first form several years later (Ibid.).

In the end it seems that AGS was more a product of serendipity than philosophical commitment. Within this context the common understanding of why Smith gave away

AGS needs to be rethought. In the schools self-telling Smith left because it was “not considered proper for a married women to continue to teach school". Instead, "a married woman’s place was considered to be in her own home” (School archives, 1987). 133

However, the year was 1905 and teaching and marriage were no longer incompatible.

Indeed, as early as 1854 pioneer women in the west were teaching after they married, sometimes teaching with their husbands (Schwager, 1987). There are even earlier references to married women teaching in this city, most often as a partner to their husbands. On the national level, by 1900 there were 286,274 women teaching around the country - constituting 71.1 percent of the total number of teachers. Every year up through the 1930’s women occupied more and more of the teaching slots. Indeed, the trend was so significant that it was labeled as the ‘feminization of teaching’. By the time Smith retired

“hundreds of thousands of married women had begun to work outside the home” (Apple,

1984: 42). Since the labor market was highly segregated by gender and teaching was one of the few occupations open to women, there is little doubt that women in Smiths time and place were both teaching and married.

The difference between Smith and other area teachers who continued teaching after marriage was largely a class difference. Teachers, as suggested above, were not recruited exclusively from the middle and upper classes. It should not be surprising then that class dynamics did shape teachers experiences. Indeed, a study completed in 1911 suggests that a large number of the women who became teachers were from working class backgrounds

(Apple, 1988). In the 19th century social class tended to shape the kind of teachers training available to girls, as well as the teaching opportunities they would have after they left school. Women from the upper/upper-middle classes tended to teach in secondary, private and single-sex schools which catered to the educational needs of upper/upper-middle girls

(Ibid.). Teachers from the lower/lower-middle classes taught in state-supported elementary schools -schools that were largely working class and coeducational2.

Furthermore while the rhetoric from the mid 1800s concerning women and teaching tended to emphasize the correlation between teaching and child rearing, through this time 134

period women increasingly came to the teaching profession out of economic necessity

rather than out of love of children (Ibid.). Indeed, given the options available to working

class women in this city- domestic services and manufacturing especially sewing, or

working in the factory - teaching offered numerous attractions (Local Census, 1900). The

dominant ideology, however, continued to privilege the bourgeois family norm or

domesticity and economic dependence. Smith, as a teacher, had the option of complying

with the strictures of that norm. Lower/working-class women, teaching in this midwestem

system of public schools, did not have this option.

It would be tempting to argue that the contradictions and tensions underlying the

choices that Smith made in her life help account for the fact that few girls during her tenure

at the school actually went on to attend college. And they no doubt did on certain levels.

Smith's main sphere of influence, however, was in the lower school. So it is unlikely that

her own ambivalence toward higher education directly impacted students, at least in the

classroom. Instead this is probably a reflection of more general attitudes toward the higher

education of women at this time. The women who went to traditionally male colleges

during this time are characterized as the "second generation of pioneers", braving a still unfriendly territory (Soloman, 1985).

The available women's colleges tended to serve the more elite classes. According to

Barbara Soloman (1985) much of the general population was reluctant to send their

daughters on to higher education for a couple of reasons. First, it was more expensive to educate daughters. Women rarely had access to the scholarships or fellowships that helped men pay tuition. Second, it was difficult to justify the expense of college, particularly for lower/lower-middle class families. After all, women's salaries after college were not

significantly different than their prospects after high school. Probably the greatest barrier, however, was simply that people couldn't figure out why women should go on to higher 135

education. If a woman's only long term commitment in life was to be wife and mother -

why go on to college? Given these parameters Smith probably also wrestled with these

issues.

There were, nonetheless, many single-sex colleges for women at the time. One of

the main functions of these colleges was to prepare women for marriage and motherhood

through their overt curricula. They also helped to facilitate the courtship and marriage of

upper/upper-middle class men and women. In other words, they "fulfilled a maintenance or

cultural-transmission function, making educational credentials for women valuable cultural

currency in the marriage market" (Durbin & Kent, 1989). These functions were probably

much more important in the large cities of the eastern seaboard where most of these

colleges were located. In a smaller cities, like that where Smith opened her school, an

education at a school like AGS was probably adequate to fill the cultural-transmission and

status-maintenance requirements of the local elites.

When Smith lamented the fact that most of their girls did not go on to college she

observed that their families were "following the customary pattern in girls' education". It

seems probable that the credentials/cultural capital offered by AGS was considered to be

enough to maintain their daughters' social status. However, she also asserts that the school

was not to blame for this. In other words, she saw her school as offering something that

the girls simply did not take advantage of. It seems unlikely, however, that the school itself

could have acted outside the cultural norms of the time, let alone the controversy surrounding the higher education of girls.

AGS, once established, became popular with the local elites at the turn of the

century. In other words by this time the notion that girls could benefit from a high school education had gained much currency. However, the public coeducational high schools

available at this time, open to all who could pass the entrance exams, were not as effective 136

in maintaining social status distinctions. Credentials beyond high school, in a city

characterized as having "one recognized "social set", were not necessary at this time.

Unlike elite families living in the larger cities on the eastern seaboard, these families and

their daughters probably had enough local visibility to find suitable marriages for their

daughters without the additional expense of paying for a higher education.

Reading Between the Lines: Take Three

Another way to read between the lines of the stories emanating from the early years

of AGS is by looking at it from the broader educational context where the categories of

'women' and 'higher education' were deeply contested, confounded and confused.

Without more detailed information about their curricula and policies at the time it is difficult

to know the degree to which AGS complied/resisted the normalizing gazes of 'proper

womanhood' and 'proper education'. If one focuses on outcomes, however, it is easy to

conclude that they can be characterized as complying with the strictures against the higher

education of women, however resistant their philosophical overtones may have been. In

Smith's telling the parents are more to blame for the fact that girls did not go on to college.

However, as a private school, they must always meet the needs of the families who pay

their fees. In this sense it would not be surprising to find that they performed the

conservative function of maintaining the values, norms and status of the upper/upper- middle class families they served.

This was, of course, a self conscious purpose of private single-sex schooling during this time period. By the middle of the 19th century coeducation seemed to be generally accepted in public schooling while many private schools retained their single-sex policies (Tyack & Hansot, 1990). Put differently the public schooling option for girls was 137 coeducational while the private options for girls were largely single-sex. According to

Tyack and Hansot (1990) this was a common pattern of school development particularly in the eastern, midwestem and southern states. It is likely that people offered single-sex schools because these had traditionally been popular with the elite. For example, in 1880 a

Boston school superintendent made the following observation: “The civilized upper classes everywhere chose separate sex schools. It is precisely among those classes that the education of the sexes always has been, and continues to be, most exclusively unmixed”

(Ibid:79). In other words single-sex had traditionally been an important part of elite identity, influenced by Victorian notions of femininity. In general prosperous families and others who advocated single-sex education for girls appealed to the need to protect girls against the sons of poor and immigrant families.

In other words single-sex schools were not simply about sex separation - they were also a conscious strategy for preserving class and ethnic boundaries. The rhetoric that focused on the “coarse natures” of the boys “was a euphemism for the targets of class and ethnic prejudice among [upper class] parents (Ibid.: 95). Some school districts, for example San

Francisco, justified the separation of the sexes in public grammar schools on the grounds that “placing delicate and refined daughters in the same class with rude and depraved boys”

(Ibid.) would be damaging to their daughters. In the end it seems likely that the families who sent their daughters to AGS probably were more concerned about maintaining class boundaries than gender boundaries.

However, elites were not homogeneous groups and they took up notions of gender in contradictory ways. The 19th century can be characterized by a struggle over the meaning of the category of 'woman' - a movement toward and falling back from republican concepts of the 'new woman'. Another important point, therefore, concerns the ideological underpinnings of schools like AGS. While tradition, class and ethnicity motivated elite 138

families to support single-sex schools, my research in a local archival library suggests that

single-sex schools did not all have the same ideological underpinnings. For example many

of the female academies that existed prior to AGS were influenced by the writings and

speeches of Catherine Beecher, Zilpah Grant, Mary Lyon, and Emma Willard. They

provided the ideological underpinnings and rationale for the separate education of women

which was taken up by the new middle class reformers.

While somewhat different in their orientations, their works:

Contain many of the central themes that characterized Victorian educational leadership more generally: a fervor for moral homogenization, as effective use of oratory and writing to mobilize voluntary action, a blend of apocalyptic fear and millennia hope so characteristic of religious and political evangelism, and a commitment to use nongovernmental associations to promote "national" purposes (Sklar, 1976: 63).

In essence these women thought that female seminaries should become permanent institutions with careful standards of admission and a curriculum/ pedagogy aimed at

making women academically proficient and morally superior (Ibid.).

Catherine Beecher developed "a detailed account of female education tied directly to the wife-mother role" (Martin, 1986: 103). She depicted women as elites, who, because of their special access to moral resources, should become fully engaged in the building of a

Christian nation. She believed that God had "designed woman to be the chief educator of our race" (Sklar, 1976: 96-97). They were educators inside the context of their own families and, if they chose, were the ideal educators in our schools. Schooling for women, therefore, should be a preparation to carry out these duties. She believed that the only way to deal with the "degraded foreigners and their ignorant families" was to recruit women to seminaries and train them to be educators. For her single-sex schools would become places where women received specialized training that would enable them to successfully perform 139 their domestic duties and child educative roles. For Beecher this entailed more than a vocational education. It required that women be given the same liberal education that was given to boys in all boys schools. Women needed to "exercise the abstract, theoretic, deliberative reason we value most" (Martin, 1986: 132). In other words Beecher was arguing that men and women require the same kind of education to be successful in their different but equal social realms.

It seems likely that Miss Sigourney's school was a reaction or even backlash to this kind of training3. Her school de-emphasized the liberal education in favor of religious/moral education and a more 'ornamental education' traditional to the elite classes. By all accounts it was strictly a ‘finishing’ school. Smith, a graduate of this school, said that it “offered within its limits a sound education for those who applied themselves. For those who did not, the way to graduation was often made too easy” (School archives,

1987). AGS as noted above, took up the theme of college preparatory education largely to differentiate themselves from Miss Sigourney's school. But AGS was not the only college prep school in town. Clearly girls were being prepared for college elsewhere in town. Miss

Bole went to a local university and acquired a college degree. So the distinction surrounding AGS had more to do with its status of being a private single-sex institution than with its status as a college prep school.

If there was something novel about AGS that distinguishes it from other single-sex schools in this city during the nineteenth century, it may have more to do with who was running the school than the type of education it enabled. Archival data gleaned from a local historical library suggests that private sector all-girls schools in this city were run by two distinctive social groups. Some were run by men, most often accompanied by their wives or other family members. Others were run by women only who were trying to establish an independent income for themselves. Most historical research, as well as contemporary 140 research, has tended to focus on the gender composition of schools rather than who controlled girls education (Schwager, 1987). My search suggests that all-girl schools founded by women differed significantly from those run by men. In general when men were involved there was more emphasis on a liberal education and less attention to imparting 'feminine skills' associated with needlework, artwork, etc. Indeed, the earliest private schools were often coeducational until single-sex alternatives became available. In many of the single-sex schools girls received different educations - more instruction in needlework and less reading, writing and arithmetic.

Single-sex schools run by men and their wives were aimed at providing young women with the serious education they would need to fulfill their roles in the creation of a virtuous republic. In other words these men and women had taken up with the newer discourses of femininity - republican motherhood - with its attendant notions of gender and middle-classness. Writers like Beecher, Grant, Lyon and Willard, probably influenced these people to rethink the education of girls. The goal of their kind of education, however, was to better prepare young women to be efficient and effective wives and mothers - to socialize them into a kind of scientific motherhood - not to educate them beyond the traditional spheres of femininities.

The majority of the schools run solely by women, on the other hand, most often emphasize the imparting of showy artistic skills. They no doubt were responding to the demands of parents for the kind of more superficial and ornamental education that writers like Beecher, Grant, Lyon and Willard so deplored. In other words, they were taking up and responding to competing definitions of femininity. The discourses associated with a showy education were those traditionally associated with upper-class femininity - where women were trained to be fashionable status symbols fluttering on the arms of men.

Ironically the single or widowed women running these schools were asserting their own 141

independence, supporting themselves by turning what may have been their own upper-

class training into marketable assets. Thus they taught what they knew best - the

educational basics of reading writing and arithmetic along with more ornamental forms of knowledge.

In the end it seems that local elites, by patronizing one type of school over the

other, were taking up or rejecting historically traditional discourses of 'womanhood'

associated with their class stations. Thus the diversity of schooling available to girls in this

19th century city was built on a contested class bound terrain of gender. If the founding of

AGS marks anything new it would be that it was the first academically inclined school

controlled by women in this city. By the time AGS was established the basic ABC and

ornamental education once associated with the upper-class was slowly disappearing from

this locality. Interestingly another part of the AGS legend has to do with the disappearance of Sigourney's finishing school. In their telling finishing schools are undone. Specifically,

Sigourney is reported as having closed her school shortly after AGS was established. A quick perusal through the local city directory, however, revealed that she advertised her school through 1910 -12 years after the founding of AGS.

Legend Power

Reading between the lines of the self-told origin stories of AGS has motivated me to write other plausible tales. In this retelling, foregrounding the discontinuites, gaps and ruptures, I have deconstructed an otherwise comfortable story. I do not claim a higher status for my partial retellings. Instead, I simply offer an alternative view - one that digs below the surface in other ways. I am interested in generating alternative stories because they can provide different ways to think about this academic area we call gender and 142 education. In this paper I retell legends which, while not necessarily 'truer' than old ones, provide new signposts that can guide us through the historical complexities surrounding the schooling of girls. If legends help produce 'truth effects' in schools, as suggested in the introduction, than their retelling can give us ways to rethink our schooling activities. Others stories, perhaps generated through a rereading of my stories, will provide different signposts. In this section I conclude by telling a story about how legends function as power mechanisms that shape present moments.

The school legend, deconstructed above, tells a comfortable story that goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a nice woman who started an all girls school so that girls could go to college. She called her school, now our school, AGS. After six years as head mistress of AGS she was forced by custom to give up her project when she married a local business man. Back in those days 'women' could not work after they married, so she didn't return to AGS until her daughter was ready to go to school. AGS was so successful that the local finishing school closed its door shortly after our school opened. And here we are today, almost 100 years later still sending girls to college.

What is silenced, obscured and written out of this legend is the social class location of this school. This was and is a school for only some 'women'. Moreover, historically this school catered to a specific segment of the local elite: those who were Christians of European descent. Today it is more diverse in terms of race and religion and has a few scholarship students from other class locations. Nonetheless it remains predominantly a school for the economically privileged. The unmarked positions in this legend can be read a number of different ways. I tend to read them as an unself-reflexive, as a move presupposing social class, race and religious locations, rather than as a manipulative move, or social conspiracy. For those who occupy socially privileged positions, their class, race 143

or religion are not central to their own self understandings. Instead what gets marked in the

legends of the privileged, if anything, are its defining 'others'. In this particular legend

what gets marked as 'other' are girls in public coeducational schools and girls in private

finishing schools, neither of whom are thought to appreciate the college experience.

Above and beyond reading intent into the legend, I am interested in telling a story

about the power of legends. I use power as Michel Foucault (1978:136) does when he talks

about mechanisms of power "bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering

them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying

them". In this view power is relational, exercised from a variety of points, including

historical points, rather than something that is possessed by some individuals. Power, then

circulates through schools via a number of mechanisms, only some of which have to do

with relations between people. From this position one can read the story about the

legendary beginnings of AGS as one of several power mechanisms for generating silences

on social privileges.

This power of the legend is never secure and must constantly be re-negotiated. If

we understand schools as places "in which certain truths have constantly to be proved"

(Walkerdine, 1990:63), then we can also think of them as spaces where other 'truths' have to continually be hushed. When girls hear, read and are otherwise reminded of the

legendary beginnings of their school they are given permission to forget about their social privileges. In refusing to mark its privileged locations, this legend whispers silent meanings into the present that enable girls to depoliticize their privileges (Barthes,

1957/1972). The silence on the privileged nature of their schooling reflects a cultural wide

silence in which people hesitate to speak any of their 'unearned privileges' (McIntosh,

1988). Elite schools are one place where socially privileged people are trained to take up unmarked bodies. In this training, never complete and always negotiated, some will forget 144

to see themselves as fundamentally constituted by the marks they are taught to inscribe on

their socially constituted 'Others'.

Put another way, Walkerdine (1990:63) says "the school is a place in which the

fantasy becomes inscribed in fact, a truth which is to be proved". The 'truth' produced and proved by robbing social privileges of their history, is a 'fantasy' of normality. Where the

surrounding community marks girls at AGS as "rich white snobs", the legend of AGS

forgets both 'rich' and 'white' so that the girls can take themselves up as 'Normal'. This is

just one among many mechanisms that speaks them into normalcy. In this speaking the

slate of social privileges is simultaneously wiped clean and secretly inscribed onto the

bodies/beings of teenage girls so that they can appear to themselves as unmarked. Others,

resisting the 'truth' of normalcy to varying degrees, wrestle with the nature of their

privileges. Sanctioned by AGS authorities, within the limits of a new multicultural

curriculum, some girls speak to differences generated along racial and religious lines.

These differences, however, appear transient alongside the common universal 'woman' spoken through its legendary beginnings.

Social class, as an economic fact, is named without much difficulty. It is already

announced through the near $8,000 tuition and numerous other financial obligations over

the course of one year. It is the political power of money, so central to the privileged

schooling girls receive at AGS, that remains hidden, normalized and finally naturalized.

Naturalizing the political power of economic privilege is the ultimate power of this legend

(Barthes, 1957/1972). In this school, rich with material and psychological resources, economically privileged girls (and those few 'others' on scholarship) are being trained to take up unmarked political positions as economically privileged women. By not naming the power of their privileges girls are discursively made to appear natural and normal. 145

In contemporary discourses of privileged education, their school is invested in

cultivating life-long learning, nurturing self-confidence, and helping girls learn 'to serve

others' through community service programs4. Historically the parameters of the

educational discourse through which economically privileged 'women' of European

descent were constituted were very similar. What has changed, however, is the content -

today economically privileged 'girls' need a college education and career to make her an

attractive marriage partner. In other words, economically privileged girls have increasingly

taken themselves up in and been constituted through the discourses of bourgeois

individualism characterized by desires for autonomy, choice, and 'becoming somebody'.

In Smith’s time credentials from finishing school were sufficient to mark her status and

make her somebody. Her unsalaried career was constituted through social privileges respoken and naturalized as family duties and charitable acts of community service. Today this same category of 'women' requires more to uphold her status. Today she needs the unsalaried career of Smith's time and a salaried career. Today her social privileges are respoken and naturalized as family duties, charitable acts and career.

th a n k s to the school archivist who helped me access these documents and talked me through some of them. Most of these documents were untitled and many have no date or author.

^ This is not to imply that the majority of working class women in this mid- western city were teachers - they weren't. They tended to work in 'domestic services' (44%), 'manufacturing' (29% -disproportionately as milliners, seamstress, etc) and 'trades and transportation' (17%, largely as bookkeepers, clerks, saleswomen, etc. (US Census: 1900).

3 This archival search suggests that schools close to Beecher's notions existed prior to Miss Sigourney's school. Most of these were referred to as Female Seminaries and many of them, run my men, had liberal arts curriculum.

4 Taken from a pamphlet describing the current school philosophy. 146

SCHOOL DOCUMENTS USED

All Girls School: The Power of Discovery. (1992).

The Way of a School: All Girls School, 1889-1989. (1989).

All Girls School Newsletter. (1991-1993), Volumes 15-17.

REFERENCES

Apple, M. W. (1988). Teachers & Texts: A Political Economy of Class & Gender Relations in Education. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc.

Barthes, R. (1957/1972). Mythologies (Annette Lavers, Trans.). New York: The Noonday Press.

Lee, A. E. (1892). History of the City of Columbus. Unknown:

McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to see Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College.

Scholes, R., & Kellogg, R. (1966). The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tyack, D., & Hansot, E. (1982).Managers ofVirtue.Public School Leadership in america, 1820-1980. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.

Tyack, D., & Hansot, E. (1990).Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press. 147 White, H. (1980,1981). The Value of narrativity in the Representation of Reality. In W. J. T. Mitchell (Eds.), On Narrative (pp. 1-23). Chicago: The university of Chicago Press. CHAPTER VII

SIGNIFYING UNICORNS: MYTH-MAKING IN AN ALL GIRLS SCHOOL

Then God told Adam to name the animals. All the creatures gathered around....They were all equal, and Adam had always been one of them. Yet as he began to name them, he drew himself apart. And the first animal he named was the unicom. When the Lord heard the name Adam had spoken, he reached down and touched the tip of the single horn...From That moment on, the unicom was elevated above other beasts (Hathaway, 1980:29-30).

The lore of the unicom, spanning centuries and cultures, has ridden across worlds

spoken into existence through theological, metaphysical and positivistic discourses.

Tracing it through history we are left with the impression of an ontological shape shifter

able to adjust to the demands of new worlds yet always already signified as a world apart.

As such it is a fitting mascot for an all-girls school whose own history spans nearly a

century. Throughout its history this school, referred to here simply as All Girls School

(AGS), has also found itself adjusting to different worlds - signified by shifting

discourses on what it means to become 'woman'. Like the unicom, AGS has existed as a

world apart. Imaged against the schooling of the masses it exists in a time and space

marked by multiple privileges.

I use the unicom here to signify myth-making at AGS at several levels. First, the

unicorn symbolizes the common sense understanding of the word myth and as such

speaks to the power of myths. For most people myth is a category of story usually

containing some reference to goddesses, heroines, creation, spirits, etc. Those with a

more anthropological orientation, such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), see myths

as "part of the functional, pragmatic, or performed dimension of culture-that is, as part of

activities which do certain tasks for particular human communities" (Strenski, 1992:xi).

Myth, in his view, "expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces

148 149 morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of men...a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom" (Malinowski,

1925 in Strenski, 1992:82). For him the meaning of myths is given by its particular context and must always be read in that context.

Roland Barthes (1957/1972), by way of contrast, sees the power of myth as ceaselessly reproducing itself across contexts. While myths, in his semiological view, are bounded by social geographies, their boundaries are always shifting. As a consequence myths cannot be so easily contained, they spread via "waves of implantation" (Ibid.: 150).

In general he understands myth as a type of speech, a second-order semiological system, in which 'metalanguage' appropriates, defaces and then restores action. Myth has a

"double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us" (Ibid.: 117). Hiding nothing, myth is the technology of our distortions.

In myth presence and actions are tamed, robbed of their history, destabilized, depoliticized and confused.

In this paper I reread Barthes' notion of myth into a specific context as

Malinowski would have me do. The context is a private elite single-sex school and the myth making in this school is produced by the rich, through their endowments, for the rich. This is a stoiy about the deployment of myth as a technology of control aimed at the self (Foucault, 1978). It is a story about how girls are spoken into/through and comply/resist upper-middle class myths. Signified by the single horn of unicom, the myth whispered and spoken out loud at AGS is a myth of unity - a myth of school as one big happy family. Barthes says myths are the "process through which the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature"

(1957/1972:141). Speaking through the myth of unity AGS undoes its class bound history 150

simultaneously speaking itself into normalcy yet always as a world apart. Through the

myth of unity AGS speaks its economic reality with a depoliticized tongue.

If the myths of the Bourgeoisie are statistically stronger than myths produced

elsewhere, as Barthes suggests, then a private elite school is an excellent site for the study

of myth and schooling. In this paper I stretch the epistemological status of the category of

myth, renaming common school experiences as depoliticized speech and hence as myth.

This move, stimulated by Barthes and Foucault, calls forth what otherwise appears

innocent and natural. However, because my speech is always already a metalanguage it is

itself susceptible to myth. As William Thompson (1981:3) notes "science wrought to its

uttermost becomes myth". What I am doing is problematizing one story by creating an

alternative story1. Mine is not necessary the best story. Instead, it is only a partial telling

spoken otherwise. If successful I hope that my story will heighten sensitivities to the way myth circulates through schooling and to the way we, as academic commentators, recirculate myths through our own writing. I begin by telling a story about this study.

An All Girls School

Historically AGS, founded in 1898 in a prosperous midwestem city, served only

wealthy European American families from Protestant backgrounds. Today the school is more diversified in that there are some students on scholarship and students from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Nonetheless the school continues to cater to local elites, primarily of European descent, with varying degrees of wealth and income, all of which enables them to pay $7,755, along with numerous other fees, each year to keep their daughters in private school. Several of these families have more than one child enrolled at AGS or enroll their sons in other private schools. AGS runs an all 151 girls pre-school/kindergarten program through to the end of high school. The campus is located in the section of town where the old wealth settled. Historically they were a neighborhood school. Today they serve 600 students, from within a forty-mile radius of the campus.

AGS is a privileged schooling site. Like other private school they are rich in academic, material, and psychological resources. Classroom sizes are small and are characterized by enthusiastic dialogues between teacher and students. Students get a lot of one on one time with teachers in open classroom periods designed for that purpose. By all academic standards, such as S.A.T. scores, academic scholarship awards, etc., girls in this school excel. Most, if not all, go on to college, often to the 'best colleges' in the country. This study takes all of this for granted. Unlike those currently studying single­ sex schooling for girls, I was not interested in whether or not girls do better in this type of school (c.f. Lee & Bryk, 1986,1989; Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Lee & Marks, 1990; Marsh,

1989a, 1989b; Riordan, 1990). Instead, I was interested in finding out what it is like to be a girl in an all girls school. What follows is only a small part of how I would begin to answer that question.

I begin by telling what I call the public story of AGS. It is taken from materials that AGS publishes and sends out to prospective students (simply cited here as school pamphlets), and alumna (cited here as school newsletter). In these sources AGS actively constructs, negotiates, and maintains a public image which in turn works to read and write the myth of unity which I speak into existence. This myth is then written on to the bodies of girls who consume and resist it in various ways. The students I speak about here have now graduated from AGS. What I write is reconstituted from the context of my interviews, conducted over a period of two years. From transcripts of interviews I construct stories about myth consumption and rejection. In this study I was interested in 152

single-sex schooling from the perspectives of students and purposively avoided contact

with school authorities so that the girls would feel freer to tell me their stories.

To protect the identity of these girls I trace the contours of their demographic

characteristics with broad strokes. Within the group of 7 girls the following number of

positionings were spoken into existence: 5 different racial/ethnic identities, 4 different

national backgrounds - though all currently citizens of the United States, 4 different

religious affiliations, 1 working class position, 1 middle class position, and 5 professional

upper class positions. These were the categories that were co-generated between us. For example, while I was less interested in religious affiliations the girls asserted this

category enough times in our conversations to make me aware that this was a meaningful

category for them- particularly for those who occupied religious positionings 'Other' to

Christianity. Likewise, my interest in making meaning around the category social class

was often meaningless for girls who were privileged in this category, while being very

meaningful for girls without these privileges.

The Alicorn of Unity: The Myth of One Big Happy Family

While thescholastics, following in the footsteps of their master Aristotle, were arguing over the precise academic portrayal of the unicom, mysticism renamed the

unicom as the sacred token for Christ. In this doing the unicom shifts worlds, discarding

the world of naturalism and scholasticism, and is written up in ecclesiastic theory of universals. Sanctioned in earlier bibles, the unicom, christologically imprinted, signifies the future redemption of 'the family of man’. While there are many ways to read this story, one tradition speaks of peaceful communions between maiden and unicom -Mother and Child- the unicom and holy women, signifying the feminine embodiment of virtue, chastity, and purity. In this meaning the unicorn, as school mascot, speaks to unity 153

through the virtue and goodness of AGS women. Unity is an ideal and at AGS it is

spoken as a central plot of the public story as it is told through various publications. In

following some of the threads of this storyline I hope to demonstrate its mythic qualities.

In the end it is a economically profitable myth. In the next section I will think about how

the girls take up and resist various aspects of this myth.

Being a student at AGS, so the public storyline goes ,is like being part of one big

happy family. That all the girls I spoke with evoked this idea in one way or another

demonstrates the power of this story. Unity through family, is spun out from the

legendary beginnings of this school and into its future. It is spoken through the public

storyline in multiple ways. Starting from the statement made by the founder of AGS that

"we were like one big family" (Statement made in 1949, historical school pamphlet,

1989), we can follow this storyline throughout AGS's newsletters where alumna are informed of current school happenings, current status of former students, and current status of AGS endowments.

One primary mission of this newsletter is to keep the sense of 'unity' going.

Through their newsletter, listing the what, when and wheres of former students, members of the AGS family keep tabs on each other. Recently more than 1,250 AGS alumnae participated in a family 'networking system' that culminates in another school publication entitled 'AGS Network Book'. Published yearly, this book lists geographic and career status of AGS alumnae as a means to enhance family connectedness (School Newsletter,

May 1993). Along the way family rules of proper conduct are spelled out. This technology, as we shall see, culminates in the rule of charity toward the school. Aimed at the self it is a technology of control that insures the maintenance of a world apart for the economically privileged. 154

New members in this world apart are recruited through admission related materials which include overt and more hidden messages that invoke a sense of family.

For example:

Family-style dining allows teachers and students to share informal moments at lunch (school pamphlet, 1992).

Enduring school traditions, and the bonds of friendship they engender, provide a supportive background for the educational program. These friendships are not limited to peers; AGS students also enjoy close relationships with a knowledgeable, enthusiastic faculty (school pamphlet, 1992).

Sensitive and dedicated faculty members take pride in their work and in the positive and long-lasting relationships developed with each student (school pamphlet, 1992).

The Upper School is not just a college preparatory school. It is a place of learning and living - a place where young women may develop a love of learning, intellectual curiosity, aesthetic understanding, a desire for health and fitness, and a sense of social responsibility - all of which will remain with them the rest of their lives (school pamphlet, 1992).

All of these statements reflect a romanticized version of 'home' environment. By invoking family-style dining, close relationships, sensitive and dedicated members, positive long lasting relationships, and a place where young women develop love, the public storyline at AGS mobilizes the romantic ideal bourgeois family form. Their self descriptions affirm the supreme value of love and intimacy, the need for nurturance and guidance. But the bourgeois family is always already 'at risk' in a rationalized, masculinized, and rough society, susceptible to multiple epidemics and other social ills.

Stolen out of the home, 'family', is respoken into AGS, which is simultaneously written as the last refuge for family. It is in this move that we have the semiological makings of myth. As Barthes (1957/1972) says myth is a second language in which one speaks about the first language. AGS is metalanguaging family, and in this signification meaning is 155

already complete, postulating "a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative

order of facts, ideas, decisions" (Ibid.: 117).

Speaking family into the more or less homosocial world of women, AGS cloaks

itself with the normalcy of heterosexuality. In this speaking AGS cleanses the

heterosexual 'family' of all its historical pathologies, neutralizes, naturalizes and glorifies

it as the center of school life. As Barthes notes "myth prefers to work with poor,

incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a

signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc." (Ibid.: 127). If the rationalized

world has attenuated the romanticized heterosexual family, AGS boils it down to its

essentials and resurrects skinnier versions of family. This is a school that offers an idyllic

refuge from the unpleasant but 'real' world of men by evoking men. This is a family of

girls, which can't really be a family without boys, so boys are mythically evoked through

the myth of family and given invisible presence.

This is, however, not the romantic family of yesteryear. The form remains the

same, but the content has shifted. This is a newer version of the romantic bourgeois family, where close friendships, intuition, and emotional security is coupled with mathematical reasoning and scientific technologies. This is a school where the older versions of ideal bourgeois romantic forms, which tied women to the home, are undone.

In the new form, the romantic family is harnessed to the rationalistic powers of science which, written onto the bodies of women, sends them out into professional careers.

Seeking legitimacy outside the world of coeducation they name themselves as experts, backed by the progressive power of science (Ehrenreich & English, 1978). This, then, is a story about moral force harnessed with the progressiveness of science and fueled by the myth of unity. 156

To keep the myth of unity through family alive AGS actively works to reproduce some home-based semblance of itself. In doing so they assure unity at school and between school and family. Once admitted to the AGS family the alumnae newsletter produces and writes on family life at home. The most direct avenue into home-based family life is through numerous events sponsored for mothers and fathers. Starting at the very earliest age they help parents parent by sponsoring a national program called

'Parents as Teachers"2. This program is "designed to help parents teach their children during the critical period from birth to age three and at the same time, to make parenting less stressful and more fun" (School newsletter, Jan. 1993). With birth to three viewed as

'the critical period' mom gets written as staying at home and as too stressed out to have fun.

Once your girl is admitted to preschool the school sponsors a number of school based activities for parents many of which continue to teach parenting. If you happen to miss one of these events the newsletter carries summaries highlighting key points. For example AGS runs Box Lunch Talks (BLT) for parents on a regular basis. At these and many other events parents encounter parenting ala AGS. For example, here is some advice from the head mistress of the school, who is billed as having a Ph.D. in psychology: "... a mother or daughter must first define her self-image and understand her expectations of herself, her mother or daughter, and the relationship between them and that listening is the most significant personal skill available to a woman seeking the support growth within her relationship" (School Newspaper, Summer 1991: 5-6). In this example mother and daughter are being read and written simultaneously. The skills being praised are those very skills taught at AGS, skills of relationship/family.

In educating parents they are claiming the authority of a specialized body of scientific knowledge, marked by the head mistresses Ph.D. in this last example. This is a 157 specialized technology tooled up, geared, and aimed at the upper class women. Through this the ideal family is naturalized, rules governing relationships within the AGS family are inscribed on the bodies of girls. I will focus on three of the most important rules, given weight by the number of times and ways they are repeated over the last two years of the school newsletter. The first rule is that of "showing consistent interest in and loyalty to the school" (school newsletter, May, 1993:1). This rule is very clearly and repeatedly spelled out each year as AGS students are honored through various academic awards and trophies. Each of the following examples are taken from different awards descriptions. Awards are given to the students who: "showed an unmatched devotion to the welfare of AGS"; "has contributed the most of herself and her energies in service to her school"; "best exemplifies the qualities of friendship, responsibility, and a continuing loyalty to the school"; "through her leadership ability, creativity, dedication to the school, and conscientious efforts, has made an outstanding contribution to one of the school's publications"; "demonstrated outstanding scholarship, leadership in the service of the school, and good citizenship"; "through her leadership, loyalty and musical ability..."; and

"has demonstrated intellectual leadership and has made a significant contribution to the extra-curricular life of the school" (School Newsletter, Summer, 1992).

Spoken into loyalty the second most important rule is to live out one's life in the name of AGS. As a school who names itself for college bound girls only, this means that a successful family member will be "making outstanding contributions in her area of endeavor, either career or community, and demonstrating the value of a AGS education"

(school newsletter, May, 1993: 1). At the level of career this rule circulates through the award and trophy descriptions by speaking repeatedly to academic success. It is also announced throughout the newsletter by focusing on alumna of distinction. Since 1983

AGS has honored one or more of its members at an annual alumnae meeting. In their 158

speeches these women credit AGS in numerous ways for their own success (School

Newsletter, May 1992, May 1993). The idea of success, as being owed to AGS, is also

reinforced through chapels and career days when successful alumnae come to tell the

girls about their careers. The message is that as a result of AGS you will get a career.

At the level of community service, the school newsletter reports on the various

service activities of both alumnae and current students enrolled in school. Service is a

central plotline at AGS - one that folds neatly back into the myth of family. Community

service is an institutionalized and required part of the school curriculum. In a recruitment

pamphlet they state their philosophy very clearly:

A renewed emphasis on community service fosters personal growth and self-discovery by giving students a measure of responsibility in a service situation. They learn to serve others by being members of a community that serves (School pamphlet, 1992).

References to service are liberally sprinkled throughout the school newsletter. "Education

at AGS goes", we are told in numerous ways "far beyond the classroom, reaching out to

serve the community in many ways...our school works with others in many areas"

(School Newsletter, Summer, 1991). Students have a service club through which they

harness direct community service programs. In addition, each class has specific community service projects, e.g. being in charge of recycling or going out to food banks,

etc. Students are expected to perform several hours of community service each year.

Service is a very important part of this storyline. Through it they appropriate their own actions as neutral - in the spirit of giving. It is in the name of community service that they write their own extra schooling activities. Service to parents through parenting workshops. Service to alumnae through AGS 'networking'. Service to the community through the 'extra-curricular' activities of students. Service is always progressive, beneficial, and done in the name of knowledge. Indeed, service occurs at every turn. And, 159

as we shall see, teaching service is also central to keeping dutiful daughters loyal to AGS

as family. Indeed, service is vital to the health of that family.

The rules of loyalty and demonstrating the value of AGS schooling through

successful career and community service both work toward the actualization of the third

rule - namely 'never forget that you owe us'. This is, of course, a traditional family rule,

one where the children take care of elderly parents. Spoken with ease, the school

newsletter announces repeatedly, that AGS women are women of wealth and charity. In

the school newsletter numerous articles speak to the amount of pledges received from

alumnae during phonathons. Every year reunions are held where AGS becomes the

recipient of numerous 'reunion' gifts amounting to thousands of dollars. A recent article

entitled 'AGS has received more than $30,000 in reunion gifts and pledges' begins like

this:

Each year when the reunion classes return to AGS there is in the air the delightful sense of homecoming, of joy and revival of old friendships. Old memories are laughed over and new ones are made while everyone, old and young, enjoys the party. In addition to the fun, there is a lovely benefit, not only to the past, but to the future of AGS. This benefit to the future is the substantial giving which is an extension of reunion (School Newsletter, May 1993).

Here, once again the image of family is invoked and linked explicitly with economic benefit. Homecoming, ritualized through yearly reunions, speaks the loyal and dutiful daughter into sustaining the economic lifeline of AGS. Mythical significations, as

Barthes notes (1957/1972:126), are "...always in part motivated, and unavoidably contains some analogy". Here we see that the motivation of AGS's family myth of unity is financial - 'family' is analogous to 'money' is analogous to world apart.

Having established the connection between unity, family, wealth, and worlds apart we begin to see the power of the signifying unicom. Read simply, the unicom 160

signifies as myth. The bronze unicom before the doors of AGS is simply an example of

mythology. She is the symbol of myth itself. But she also announces myth. Through her

alicom she stands as an alibi of unity, oneness in heterosexual family, signified further

through the feminine embodiment of virtue, chasity, and purity for invisibly present men.

As I listened to girls take themselves up in a 'unified family' storylines, living the myth of

the unicom as at once true and unreal, I was motivated to look for the constituting

mechanisms of unity. There again I found the unicom, no longer a mere symbol, nor an

alibi but enacting the very presence of unity, family, men. Her presence is of course

individualized by the girls but very much alive. It is to their stories that I turn now.

Private Stories: Myth Consumption/Myth Resistance

Zoe: We were founded by two women. And our mascot is the unicorn. Well, as you must know, that is an international symbol for lesbianism. Or, it is a story about a woman searching for a unicom and her virginity. One of two extreme ideas. Me: What does it symbolize here, at AGS?

Zoe: It's just a unicom.

In marking the story of unity through family at AGS as myth I am saying that the

unicom its not just a unicom. In this speaking I am reversing the common assumption that through our stories we simply re/present a nondiscursive reality. Unicorns and worlds come into being through our discursive activities. What appears on the surface are always myths disguising but never erasing the depth of our fabricating activities. There is no deep 'truth' beneath the surface of myths, instead there are only more discursive formations. The unicom crosses worlds shifting shapes as it is spoken through different discourses. If it is now an international symbol of lesbianism, as Zoe suggests, this is only 161

its newest discursive guise. Outside of discourse it is never just there. Inside the registers

of AGS the unicom signifies a great deal.

By attending to the surface of myth making activities I can focus on what could be

called the technologies of disciplinary micropower in schooling (c.f. Foucault, 1979).

AGS, like any private institution, is deeply invested in self-maintaining discursive

practices. As a private school AGS depends on signifying itself as a distinctive world

apart, united through family. Here girls are provided a designer education and framed to

become economically successful women, who will, of course, take themselves up with

economically successful men. But this framing, this world making activity, is never fully

accomplished. Like all stories in school it must continually be proven and imposed

(Walkerdine, 1990). Taken up through a variety of strategies and techniques, aimed at surveilling and controlling the self, the bodies of generations of upper class women have

been read and written into the AGS family. But women write back, as they have always

done. Taking the stories told to me by a small group of high school girls at AGS I think

about how they simultaneously consume and resist the myth of unity.

These are private stories that can be read against the public story of AGS. In them

the story of unity is rewritten otherwise. Every girl spoke about AGS as through it were a world apart, set off from other schools by its family type relations. And all of them are

living by the family rules, more or less. For example all will demonstrate the value of

AGS schooling by going on to college. And all aspire to professional careers. In their

speaking several girls, following the rule of loyalty, were concerned about the image they were giving AGS. Much of their talk was sprinkled with cautionary hesitations like: "I don't want to give my school a bad reputation" (Laura). Or "I am afraid I'll hurt the school" (Samantha). I suspect that at least a few of them will actualize the third rule - namely 'never forget that you owe us' - and turn some of their profits back into AGS. 162

All the girls talked about their experiences at AGS as those they were living in a

different world. Often this happened when they marked life outside of AGS as the real

world. Here are two examples of their understanding of themselves as living a world

apart: This isn't the real world. The real world has guys in it. The real world isn't as accepting of aggressive knowledgeable intellectual women (Sidney).

Because we are all so familiar with each other. It is funny, like friends of mine say, 'oh, all those people are snobs up there', or 'you go to an all girls school'. I used to be able to see why they said that, but in other ways it's like, I don't know, it's sort of like an artificial world, where we do sorta accept one another here. But it is really within the context of here (Aisha).

So in a way AGS is good, AGS is bad. Because, in one way, they have just locked everybody inside and let us see just what is in here, which is a pretty picture of everything. They are not exposed to the real world (Samantha).

If AGS students understand their school as a world apart they also see it as an artificial world. And they do not accept this constructed world uncritically. Some are more troubled than others by the lack of connection to the outside "real world" than others. Samantha, a student of color, with national roots elsewhere, is from the working class and is the only student in this study on full scholarship. She, as we will see, has one of the most critical takes on AGS. Here she is the most critical about the lack of correspondence between the 'real' world and AGS. She distances herself from this experience by saying 'they are not exposed'. This signals her class distance from the bulk of the student body. In her way of thinking 'they' don't know how lucky 'they' are.

In general, however, AGS students know that they are not getting the whole picture and they believe that there must be a whole picture somewhere else - out there. In this sense they reject the public storyline that says they are getting the best of all worlds. 163

They know, instead, that they have a good world but it is an incomplete world. If they

recognize the limitations of this storyline, girls at AGS nonetheless take themselves up in

the naturalized family that characterizes this world apart. For example:

We are like family. Now that we have got senior privileges and can leave campus, they keep telling us that they are going to miss us and how they need our class to ..um...give a sense of everyone together....A lot of girls leave (Lisa).

There is a lot of bonding between us as girls. I don't know if it's like that in every class, but in my class, even though we may not like each other, it is like we are sisters (Zoe).

We could not come to a decision. We were also so, like, we can't break down tradition. Saying, like, we were being exclusive and this is supposed to be like a family (Lana).

Through these statements girls simultaneously mark AGS as unity through family

but also unspeak the myth of one big happy family. In Lisa's story, where she reiterates

what occurred when school authorities talked to her class, we see how the school evokes family to both give them the privilege to leave campus and to say that what they really want them to do is stick around. The girls leave anyway. In Zoe's story AGS students are sisters but not all happy sisters. Zoe is a particularly unhappy sister and spends much time talking about the racism she feels in the AGS family. In Lana's story, about the exclusion of some voices from the student newspaper, she is uncomfortable when her feelings of family get shifted by what she marks as exclusion. In all of these statements, all made by girls of color, the notion of family is simultaneously accepted and rewritten. In their telling we get a more pathologized version of family than the one written in the public story. AGS is a family, but it is not always a happy family; it is sometimes a deeply troubled family.

In other instances girls openly reject specific technologies aimed at creating a sense of family. One such tool is called 'Little sister, Big sister'. This is a school program 164

that requires all upper school students to partner with lower school students. Here Lana

talks about how she and others view this tool: Through Litde sister, big sister we are supposed to have the integration and learn from each other. A lot of people are saying "I am so bored, I have nothing to say to them, they don't want to see me". And it is something that is being forced on us and we don't see it as a value anymore (Lana).

In this, Lana understands the intent of the technology and reads it as impositional and

unvaluable.

The tool of 'Little sister, Big sister' comes out of a larger bag of technologies of

control called 'school tradition'. Various traditions serve to unite the school on multiple fronts. The power of tradition to unite is acknowledged by one student who is particularly

critical of those who would undo any traditions. Sidney represents the history of the

school in that she is a native European American, Christian and upper class. She says:

Why should it be any different now? Just because there is one girl in the junior class who might not be able to graduate with her class because it's in a church....Why should they change 90 years of tradition just because of one girl Does that mean you should compromise all of the standing tradidons?...If you take the traditions away from the school all you have left are a bunch of people just going to classes everyday. Like there is the May program that is tradition. Uniforms, chapel, the prayer we say at lunch...If you took those away - those things unite the school. Like 'Big sister, Little sister' if we didn't have that...it would more or less be like a public school, everyone going their own direction (Sidney).

Sidney speaks at once to the power of tradition to unite and her own fear of falling apart if it is undone. Elsewhere in her story she is hypercritical of the school's attempt to attract girls with different racial and ethnic backgrounds. She doesn't see why scholarships go only to girls of color. Moreover, she thinks that the fact that AGS now announces itself as having a multicultural student body is preposterous. "I don't think it is 165

diverse", she says "five minority people in our class out of forty is not diverse". Instead, she thinks nothing will ever "change this school from being a rich white school". "The

community", she says "sees it as an elite private girls school and in my opinion that gets

understood as an all white school" (Sidney).

Lana, a girl of color who is not Christian and is from a wealthy family of

immigrants, also owns this school as being for the wealthy but tends to see it in terms

completely opposite of Sidney. For her AGS is a "melting pot, you couldn't come closer"

(Lana). Also unlike Sidney, she has a more critical take on the power of tradition. Like

several other students she comments on the raced and religious nature of tradition:

We graduate in a Protestant little church on Broadway. Well, what was the basis of this? It is because the majority of kids that went here at one time were all those white females. Guess what, I am [other religion] and I don't want to be there (Lana).

She feels written on by the technology of tradition and resists how it would construct her.

In rejecting both 'Big sister, Little sister' and the traditional graduation ceremony, she rejects unity through some school traditions which she reads as unity through 'whiteness'

and Christianity.

If the power of some school traditions is being unspoken in a multiracial student

body a more subtle technology of unity is being rewritten through multiculturalism.

Recently the school has placed multiculturalism and gender equity issues at the center of its curriculum. Here again, in unexpected places we see the power of the myth of unity - the myth of one big happy family. Multiculturalism, as it is generally written in school curriculums, asserts different human morphologies, eroticizes them, fits them into neat categories on the basis of skin color. Then from this already reduced neatly categorized pluralism unity is spoken through the myth of the family of man (Barthes, 1957/1972).

Racial differences can only be formal differences if AGS is to maintain a sense of family. 166

The discursive formation under this family, however, is essentialism disguised as

multiculturalism. At AGS girls are essentially all the same. Differences robbed of their

history and naturalized give birth to the romantic family that AGS would write onto the

bodies of girls.

Some girls buy into this storyline where the myth of one big happy family serves

as an alibi for the human 'community' of liberal humanism (Ibid.). Here is Sidney again

talking about race relations at AGS:

It is always been like that for me, it is not a problem at all. Lisa is Lisa. It doesn't matter. She is my friend, it doesn't matter that she is black, it never has. Why should that make a difference (Sidney)?

Here we see difference robbed of its alterity and spoken into sameness. Unity surfaces

and provides comfort to Sidney, for whom "racism isn't a problem". Unity allows her to

dismiss her unearned white skinned privileges (McIntosh, 1988), and to speak herself out

of racism. When asked if she thinks racism is a problem she responds that "it doesn't

concern me, it is none of my business" (Sidney).

But not all girls accept this myth of unity. Here is a statement from Samantha, the

student that I have marked as being particularly critical of AGS. When discussing multiculturalism and the racism Samantha has felt at school she says:

A lot of people say that we all can become one. That we can work this out. I don't think so. That's a dream. A long goal that I don't think we'll get to because we are all from different backgrounds, countries, religions. Everything is different about us. There is no way we can like each other for who we are. There is always going to be that conflict. Those differences between us - we can like try to say we can work it out (Samantha).

In her speaking Samantha rejects unity and understands it as a myth of the school. A lot of people talk about unity. But that is all it is. She names it as a discursive practice of her 167 school. When she says "we can try to say we can work it out" she is suggesting that it is all just talk and that we can try to talk ourselves out of it but that's not going to accomplish unity. Unity is a myth.

Elsewhere, however, Samantha complains that there isn’t enough unity. She complains that girls don't wear their uniforms properly. She is not the only one upset by this. Here is Lana talking about the uniform:

We don't look neat now. It has gotten very sloppy around here. The social appearance of the school. The teachers are upset about it but don't have the power to do anything about it (Lana).

This particular tool of tradition, the dress code, even with lax enforcement, is nonetheless one of the most powerful technologies of unity. In voicing their desire for looking neater they are in part yearning for safety through unity.

The power of the uniform works on multiple levels. It is a technology that all the girls in this study readily accept. While some would undo the 'Little sister, Big sister' tool of tradition, none would undo the uniform. Here are some other comments about the uniform.

We are so protected within this environment. A lot of people are uncomfortable here [referring to the fact that they still wear their uniforms on normal clothes days]. I mean when they have their uniform on they are fine but when they don't they are not (Samantha)

There is more integration here... There is more linking... There is more tradition here. People aren't ashamed to say that they are on scholarship here. People realize that, here, there is less importance on money. ..I think the uniform has a lot to do with it. (Lana)

Without them we would all go out and buy the most expensive clothes and come to school wearing them. It's not a competition of clothes. I think the uniform is a big deal. We all look the same. We are all comfortable with looking the same (Laura). 168

Uniforms act as a safe place. They structure security through unity. However, it is

a certain kind of security. When asked what purpose the uniform serves all girls

responded in one way or another that it serves an economic purpose. Here is a particularly

rich example:

Lana: We are getting more colors for our sweaters. And girls wear sweaters that have different shades of green. We are getting too much variety. It is undermining the whole purpose of the uniform

Me: What is the whole purpose of the uniform? Lana: I think it is to divide class. So that class doesn't have to do with who you are. I don't go around saying that I am the daughter of so and so. ...And I am so extravagant, look at me, ha ha. That's not what AGS is all about. It's like internal purification. Internal perfection as much as you can get it. [By bringing in more uniform options] somehow we are mixing back in the materialism. And I think that is unfortunate.

The uniform appropriates social class, and from the perspective of critical semiology it is naturalized and depoliticizes. The safety in uniforms, without which girls are otherwise uncomfortable, is a safety where social class is rendered innocuous.

Disabled, removed from history and politics, but never fully hidden, class bound bodies are given permission to forget their privileges. As Laura notes, in the previous example, without them girls would have to constantly announce their class position through competitive dressing. In her speaking she announces her ability to "buy the most expensive clothes", owning her class position as an economic fact. The uniform is "a big deal" precisely because it depoliticizes wealth.

With depoliticized speech comes normalcy under one guise or another:

I am just myself. I am nice, and they think, if she is like that maybe everybody else [at AGS] is. Maybe they are not snobs (Laura). 169 I feel that it is mean to say that money can buy you morals and values and that kind of stuff. But what comes with that money, is a lifestyle, a social setting that is conducive to normal morals and values. It just goes with the turf (Sidney).

That is the fiction of AGS. The fiction is how AGS girls are daddy's little rich girls. One person doesn't represent all of us (Zoe).

I think we naturally will be more educated than the average person. I guess there is a tendency to go further with education because we come from AGS. ...Therefore I think there is a tendency for us to look for the more elevated or more educated person. I don't think that necessarily has to do with money. It has to do with education. We look for the person that is of our same stature. And if we become an MD, well lawyers and doctors go well together (Lana).

With normalization and naturalization comes anonymity. "The flight from the name 'bourgeois'," says Barthes (1957/1972:141), is not "an illusory, accidental,

secondary, natural or insignificant phenomenon: it is the bourgeois ideology itself. For

Barthes the anonymity of economic privilege becomes most pronounced when in envelops the intermediate classes. He cites as an example the big wedding, which in originating "in a class ritual (the display and consumption of wealth), can bear no relation to the economic status of the lower middle-class: but through the press, the news, and literature, it slowly becomes the very norm as dreamed, though not actually lived, of the petit-bourgeois couple" (Ibid.). By spreading its image around, class differentiations mythically appear otherwise.

If upper class myths, as a technology of depoliticized speech that continually defaults social privileges, is aimed at other classes, it is aimed first at the self. The elite must be taught to naturalize their own existences, their own excessiveness. Normalizing myths, performed on the bodies of girls, dances through rituals and traditions that already embody anonymity. Erasing social complexities, displaced by naturalized essences, AGS 170

attempts to organize a world without contradiction. It is a world where romanticized

family is harnessed to "marketplace psychology" (Ehrenreich & English, 1978), where

each person is seen as solely responsible for her own condition. It is a world that

pronounces autonomy and opportunity via technologies of control that work to build

confidence and self-reliance while un-naming class privilege. With anonymity there are

no justifications or incentives for social change. Mutuality through economic family

extinguishes mutuality through politics.

If this is the world at AGS, it is a world that is never secured, it must be

continually proven. It is a world that girls will always resist, accomplishing varying

degrees of undoing. Within the limits of this study it does seem that the girls who

occupied social positions most in line with the historical position of the school found it easiest to believe in the myth and erased their class position. Those who were not from the wealthier classes were the most resistant to AGS technologies of control. Samantha, whose body was furthest from those traditionally educated at AGS was the most resistant.

In the end however, along with the rest of her classmates, she will prove the value of an

AGS schooling and go to elite private college to finish up her 'education'. If she returns to this city as she intends to do, she may very well attend an Alumnae Career as an example of a working class girl of color who made it because of AGS and its designer education.

Concluding Re/Marks

By naming the unicorn as never simply "just a unicorn", I unravel simplicity to reweave more complex understandings. Since its dim beginnings the lore of the unicom has signified 'truth' and 'myth' as they have danced hand in hand across multiple worlds of discourses. Multiple books have been devoted to the ontologies of this shape shifting beast. Shepard Odell (1930:274) wrote of the unicom that it was a symbol that "expanded into myth and this myth was debased into fable". "The unicom", he tells us, "next became 171 an exemplar of moral virtues, then an actual animal, then a thaumaturge, then a medicine, then an article of merchandise, then an idle dream, and last stage of all, an object of antiquarian research" (Ibid:274-275). Setting the last stage as his own writing up of the beast could not stop this great beast from signifying. In my rewriting of the unicorn, appropriating it as a symbol of unity, and in calling that unity a myth, I have read the unicom back into thraumatology - a discourse on miracles.

By naming educational activities as myth making activities I am saying that educational discourses are technologies of distortions through which we read and write the world we call school. Myths are distortions, thaumaturgically evoked stories, that help us understand the world we live in. The story at AGS is about private schooling. But myth making is not limited to private schooling. Public schools are simply places where similar myths perform otherwise. My reading of myths and schooling is itself a work of thaumatology, one where I filter Other meanings through academic discourses. All discourses transform, produce, and impose and mine is no exception. In translating the world of schooling through the lens of myth, I have imposed a language of academia, transposing the bodies of girls into an alien world called research that they might not recognize. The girls might also have difficulty negotiating the alterity of my academic metalanguages. Laden with my own theoretical onetic robes, I also reside a world apart.

It is also quite likely that school authorities at AGS will not recognize themselves in what I have written. Indeed, they might even take offense because I call into question their liberal humanist narratives wherein women progress toward ever freer and independent social lives. Academics who study single-sex schooling may also find this work uncomfortable (c.f. Lee & Bryk, 1986,1989; Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Lee & Marks,

1990; Marsh, 1989a, 1989b; Riordan, 1990). Some of their imagined anxiety would arise 172 from the immensurability of our methodological discourses - the divide academics frame as quantitative versus qualitative.

Others may see this as a critique of single-sex schooling. For example, there are those who have argued that single-sex schools are not necessarily more beneficial for

girls because they are more controlling (c.f. Dale, 1969,1971; Schneider & Coutts, 1982;

Trickett, et al, 1982). By focusing on the technologies of social control, as they get played out in micropower relations at AGS, I have shown that this school is invested in controlling students. However, I have not shown that single-sex schools are more

controlling than coeducational schools. I believe that all schools mobilize technologies of

social control that help shape the life chances of their students, who in turn resist and comply with these technologies. The questions that need more asking are those concerned

with the types of controls, how students resist, comply and negotiate them, and with what results.

Michelle Fine (1991), in a recent book on urban public high schools, used a different metalanguage to demonstrate the devastating impact of technologies of control.

This study stands in sharp contrast with hers. Unlike the high school dropouts in Fine's

study, girls at AGS excel academically and are propelled into the 'finest' of colleges.

Nonetheless, AGS is still also a place of intense social control. Unlike the students in Fine's study, these girls embody all that is traditionally praised in educational discourses as 'success'. Just as dropout girls don't become welfare mothers without training, so too, upper class girls don't become 'superwomen' without training. Both educations require technologies of control. Both technologies are harnessed to the power of science via educational discourses in the name of progress. At both sites these are technologies wrought by the hands of privilege, one aimed at 'Others', one aimed at the self. It is disquieting to think that at the very moment that AGS girls are receiving the designer PLEASE NOTE:

Page(s) not included with original material and unavailable from author or university. Filmed as received.

UMI 174

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Carpenter, P., & Hayden, M. (1987). Girls' Academic Achievements: Single-sex versus Coeducational Schools in Australia. Sociology of Education, 60,156-167.

Cowell, B. (1981). Mixed and Single-sex Grouping in Secondary Schools.Oxford Review of Education, 165-172. Dale, R. (1971). Mixed or Single-Sex Schools: Some Social Aspects. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dale, R. R. (1974). Mixed or Single-Sex Schools: Attainment, Attitudes, and Overview. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Deem, R. (1984). Coeducation Reconsidered. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press.

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Fine, M. (1991).Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban Public High School. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Finn, J. D. (1989). Sex Differences in Educational Outcomes: A Cross National Study. Sex Roles, 6,9-26.

Finn, J. D., Dulberg, L., & Reis, J. (1979). Sex Differences in Educational Attainment: A Cross National Perspective. Harvard Educational Review, 49, 477-503.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality (Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of The Prison (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Harris, M. (1986). Coeducation and sex roles. Australian Journal of Education, 30, 117- 131.

Harvey, T. J. (1985). Science in single-sex and mixed teaching groups.Educational Research, 27(3), 179-182.

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Jimenez, E., & Lockheed, M. E. (1989). Enhancing Girls' Learning Through Single-Sex Education: Evidence and a Policy Conundrum. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 11,117-142. 175

Koesnik, W. B. (1969). Co-education: Sex Differences and the Schools. New York: Vantage Press.

Lee, V. E., & Bryk, A. S. (1986). Effects of Single-sex Secondary Schools on Student Achievement and Attitudes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 381-395.

Lee, V. E., & Bryk, A. S. (1989). Effects of Single-sex Schools: Response to Marsh. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 647-650.

Lee, V. E., & Lockheed, M. E. (1990). The Effects of Single-Sex Schooling on Achievement and Attitudes in Nigeria. Comparative Educational Review, 34, 209-231.

Lee, v. E., & Marks, H. M. (1990). Sustained Effects of the single-sex Secondary School Experience on Attitudes, Behaviors, and Values in College. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82,578-592.

Marsh, H. W. (1989a). Effects of Attending Single-Sex and Coeducational High Schools on Achievement, Attitudes, Behaviors and Sex Differences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81,70-85.

Marsh, H. W. (1989b). Effects of Single-Sex and Coeducation Schools: A Response to Lee and Bryk.Journal of Educational Psychology, 81,70-85. Marsh, H. W., Smith, I. D., Marsh, M., & Owens, L. (1988). The Transition From Single- Sex to Coeducational High Schools: Effects on Multiple Dimensions of Self- Concept and on Academic Achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 25(2), 237-269.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to see Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College.

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Riordan, C. (1985). Public and Catholic Schooling: The Effects of Gender Context Policy.American Journal of Education,519-541. 5 ,

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Walkerdine, V. (1990).School Girl Fictions. London: Verso. CHAPTER VIH

TEENAGE GIRLS ENCLOSED IN SCHOOL: ARCHITECTURE, THE BODY AND WOMAN-MAKING

Admission into school is literally admission into a time and space marked by a variety of discourses. It is a time spoken through educational discourses aimed at breaking learning into smaller digestible pieces. It is a space spoken through architectural discourses aimed at housing student bodies as they are fed and sustained. Traditionally our understanding of the time and space we call school has been guided by liberal humanist discourses. Educationalists, faithful to Cartesian dualisms registered on a mind/body split, have written curriculums to shape the mind and curriculums to build the body. Thus circumscribed, math and science education are written for the mind, and physical and health education are written for the body. In this Enlightenment story the mind is privileged as the primary target of education and the body figures only incidentally. This is a story where children are sorted, written into various socioeconomic roles according to their mind power. Disciplining the body is thought to stop when children exit physical and health education classes.

I chose to write a different story. This undoing is motivated by my dissatisfaction with liberal humanist understandings that situate minds and bodies as separate and unequal. Instead, I begin with the premise that mind and body are conterminous and thus equally affected by this processing we call education. Put simply, as we train minds, so too do we mark bodies. Through my discursive lens, variously feminist and postmodernist, I spin out an alternative storyline where sociocultural activities of schools are reinforced through spatial practices in schools. This is a story where the lines separating educational and architectural discourses are blurred, a story where the architecture of educational discourses and spatial practices get written onto the bodies of

177 178

students (c.f. Lesko, 1988. Also stimulated by Bigwood, 1991; Brooks, 1993; Burroughs

& Ehrenreich, 1993; Dallery, 1989; Gatens, 1988; Irigaray, 1977/1985; Jaggar & Bordo,

1989; Probyn, 1991).

Students, of course, write back (Giroux, 1983). While the story I tell is bounded

by the particular contents of the school I studied, if it is a powerful story, others will find ways to shift my meanings into their own contexts. I work with contents which can be

named, though never fully pinned down, as a single-sex private and hence elite school for

girls. Spun out of observations and interviews with girls, this is story about disciplined

gazes are built into the walls of school - gazes that synchronously control and free (c.f.

Foucault, 1979). This is a time and a space where comfort is paradoxically produced by

the pretendedly antagonistic constructs of control and freedom.

In writing from the nexus of architecture, the body and narratives of teenage girls,

I am suggesting that school environments, built through words and walls actively write

on the bodies of their students. Walls and bodies are both sites of signification and

signifiers. In this sense this is an archi(text)ural "epistemophilic project" (Brooks,

1993:5). Just as the architecture of our curriculums orients students toward knowledges,

so too does the architecture of buildings orient perceptual information through the creation of spaces. Here I am taking up some of Elizabeth Grosz's (1992) architectural notions which she applies more broadly to cities and bodies. She notes that "the city's form and structure provide the context in which social rules and expectations are internalized or habituated in order to ensure social conformity, or position social marginality at a safe or insulated and bounded distance (ghettoization)" (p. 250).

Likewise, school buildings produce specific conceptions of spatiality which work to 'habituate' student bodies. 179

In my study the sociocultural environment of the school is aimed at turning young girls into academically successful 'superwomen'. These are the new bourgeoise prepared for the new bourgeoisie marriage market - where a women's career counts. In other words bourgeoise are not simply bom to their social positions. Instead, they must be made to fit their position. This form of woman-making has been around a long time. The content of that form, however, has shifted. The new bourgeoise is written as a superwoman, capable of family and career, without concomitant social changes to support that combination.

Both the sociocultural practices, and the spatial practices built through architecture, are actively involved in this woman-making process

I begin this story with a word about this school, concealed here under the guise of

'All Girls School' (AGS), and the nature of my study in this school. In the next section I tell a visual story, constructed from my observations. This is a tale about the power of architecture, the inward gaze, the disciplinary and normalizing gaze, and the spectator's gaze. In the third section, relying on interview data, I think about how these gazes gets written onto the bodies of young women. Using their words, I think about how they simultaneously comply with and resist the powers that be. Despite their various resistances they all leave AGS to go to some of the top liberal arts colleges in this country to take themselves up as women well made.

An All Girls School

Historically AGS, founded in 1898 in a prosperous midwestem city, served only wealthy European American families from Protestant backgrounds. Today the school is more diversified in that there are approximately 13 percent of the students on scholarship and 17 percent of the students from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Nonetheless the school continues to cater to local elites, primarily of European descent, 180

with varying degrees of wealth and income, all of which enables them to pay $7,755,

along with numerous other fees, each year to keep their daughters in private school.

Several of these families have more than one child enrolled at AGS or enroll their sons in

other private schools. AGS operates an all girls pre-school/kindergarten which culminates

in a high school they call the upper school. The campus is located in the section of town where the old wealth settled early on. Historically a neighborhood school, today they

serve 600 students, from within a forty-mile radius of the campus.

AGS is a privileged schooling site (c.f. Kenway, 1990). Like other private school

they are rich in academic, material, and psychological resources. Classroom sizes are

small and are characterized by enthusiastic dialogues between teacher and students.

Students get a lot of one on one time with teachers in free classroom periods designed for

that purpose. By all academic standards, such as S.A.T. scores, academic scholarship

awards, etc., girls in this school excel. Most, if not all, go on to college, often to the 'best

colleges' in the country. This study takes all of this for granted. Unlike those currently studying single-sex schooling for girls, I was not interested in whether or not girls do

better in this type of school (c.f. Lee & Bryk, 1986, 1989; Lee & Lockheed, 1990; Lee &

Marks, 1990; Marsh, 1989a, 1989b; Riordan, 1985, 1990). Instead, I was interested in finding out what it is like to be a girl in an all girls school. What follows is only a small part of how I would begin to answer that question.

I spent two years visiting this school during the academic year. During this time period the school was shifting from one architectural form to another. It was this movement that forced me to consider architecture. During these years I observed hallways, classrooms, dinning rooms, and student commons. During this time I spoke casually with a number of students. The students whose voices speak here were part of a core group of seven students who I interviewed in greater depth. Those who speak here 181 graduated from AGS in the spring of 1993. Their identities have been altered so that school authorities will not easily recognize them. Four of them picked their own pseudonyms, I chose the rest. In this study I was interested in single-sex schooling from the perspectives of students and purposively avoided contact with school authorities so that girls would feel freer to tell me their stories. What I write about AGS is constructed from my observations and from documents that AGS uses to present itself to the public.

Therefore when I say AGS does this or that I am speaking about the public time and space of AGS into which any visitor can enter. My understanding of AGS as time and space may be different from that of school authorities or other visitors.

When I speak about the girls at AGS my writing is reconstituted from the context of my interviews. From transcripts of interviews and my observations I construct stories about architecture, bodies and woman making. To further hide the identity of these particular girls I trace the contours of their demographic characteristics with broad strokes. Within the group of 7 girls the following number of positionings were spoken into existence: 5 different racial/ethnic identities, 4 different national backgrounds - though all currently citizens of the United States, 4 different religious affiliations, 1 working class position, 1 middle class position, and 5 professional upper class positions.

These were the categories that were co-generated between us. For example, while I was less interested in religious affiliations the girls asserted this category enough times in our conversations to make me aware that this was a meaningful category for them- particularly for those who occupied religious positionings 'Other1 to Christianity.

Likewise, my interest in making meaning around the category social class was often meaningless for girls who were privileged in this category, while being very meaningful for girls without these privileges. 182

The Gaze: Folded Inward Toward The Self

I begin by spinning an architectural story that relies on my own observations guided by my theoretical musings. School buildings wrought in stone and hewed from wood appear innocently authentic, stable and fixed. But as history has taught us and as

Robert Harbison (1991:13) has reminded us: "all art is perishable: the canvases, languages, and customs on which it is built are slowly decaying", and in this constant undoing, "gardens disappear faster than the others". In this unstable view, a school building occupies a middling space on a continuum of decay. On one end of a perpetual architectural line we find gardens, which can never be fully tamed and are always already shifting. At the other end we find monuments, which "are more or less monstrous exaggerations of the requirement that architecture be permanent..." (Ibid: 37). In a middling space, schools architecturally speaking, appear as decorated shifting gardens of children planted on solid monuments to education.

School buildings are not simply architecturally demarcated spaces, fixed, stable and empty of meaning. Instead, buildings have many forms, only a few of which imitate stability. David Kolb (1990:122-123) has delineated five distinct forms which provide a useful introduction for thinking beyond, more utilitarian appropriations of school buildings. First, there is what he calls the 'operative form'. This form is concerned with the structural aspects of the building, with the engineering aspects, e.g. keeping a building erect, providing light, ventilation, etc. Then there is the 'geometric form', concerned with the precise and exact total volume of the building, including interior, exterior details. The third form he calls the 'presented form'. This is any snapshot of the geometric form, always taken from a particular angle, and hence is always already a distorted view of the geometric form. The forth form is the 'perceived form'. This form is concerned with how 183 the presented form is appropriated by the person interacting with it. This form is always a historically and discursively bound form. Finally, there is what he calls the 'lived form'.

As Kolb notes this form "belongs to the inhabiting body and its movements". This is the form that is "present in our habitual patterns and ways of interacting with the building".

A building has only one operative and geometric form but can have several presented, perceived and lived forms. Put another way, constantly decaying operative and geometric forms cannot stabilize the other forms of architecture, despite their own facade of stability. At the level of the perceived form a building has multiple features and hence many different signifiers. As a consequence building are always out of control, always beyond the intentions of their architects and those who authorized them. In this section, while I will make some comments about geometric form and presented forms, I am much more interested in the perceived and lived forms of school buildings. Clearly the perceived form discussed here is based on my perceptions which are historically bound in my training in sociology and education and discursively bound by the discourses I take up in those disciplines. In particular, I am deeply influenced by feminist postmodernist theories, and in this particular reading my perceptions take a Foucauldian slant. I am but one body and hence this is but one possible reading, which by its nature is always already partial.

While I stand alone at AGS, I nonetheless make my meanings in a community of academia - among others who "abandon the traditional thought of architecture as object, a bounded entity addressed by an independent subject and experienced by a body"

(Colomina, 1992a:Introduction). Through these shared understandings I have come to see school buildings as illustrations, which like other art forms, speak meaning into context.

The context they speak meaning into is space. But space is not an outcome of architecture, it is not a given. It is always negotiated by bodies and hence by social 184 practices (Morris, 1992). In this sense AGS is a space produced through, with few male exceptions, the homosocial spatial practices of women1. Indeed, in naming school space a practice we are immediately mobilized to speak gender. Within the specific content of

AGS, we are also motivated to speak of economic privileges. This is an elite private school, and hence is a space marked by multiple economic privileges. In an educational market, framed by scarcity for many, AGS stands a world apart, a spatial practice floated by elite currency aimed at a designer education.

Starting from this point I was moved to ask what meaning does the newest rendition of AGS space speak into school experiences? How has it reframed the educational experiences of the girls there? Historically, AGS has always occupied what, in their own words are 'stately homes' (School Pamphlet, 1992). Since their beginning in

1898, they have moved through a of couple 'stately homes' before securing their current location in 1953. There they came to occupy a 'stately home', which is surrounded by a neighborhood built with the old established wealth of this prosperous midwestem city.

Large 20 room mansions and neatly manicured lawns line the streets in every direction.

Entering school each day, through a parade of wealth, girls are not allowed to forget the economic dreams, traditions and needs of wealthy. With every step they are reminded by location, size, look, style, and design that they are being trained to take up the reins of the economically secured professional upper and middle classes.

Architecturally, AGS grew and changed over the years but has always maintained the core of their own 'stately mansion'. With its high ceilings and circular marble staircase, this core signals tradition and respectability and is meant to inspire both. This building speaks AGS as a world apart from its more plainspoken relatives in the public sector. Around it they built various extensions, filled with classrooms, libraries, gyms -all meant to house the busy bodies of girls. With each architectural historical move AGS was 185

dismantling old orders and installing new regimes. I speak here only to the newest order,

one which is not yet completed, though in my two years there I witnessed the major

transformations which evoke this story. In particular, as the outlines of the new school

building became more visible I was overwhelmed by three distinct differences. These

differences are tied to the geometric shape of the building and the way it is repositioned on the plot of land. In this renovation, practically all of the old wings were tom down and

replaced with new ones. As it previously stood the school occupied one side of the

landscape. In the old design the school had horizons that bordered on the 'outside' world.

With the new architectural uprisings horizons shifted in dramatic ways. In its new

guise not only did it consume more landscape, but it also shifted the remaining landscape

inward. Shaped like a giant U, with a border of trees at the top of the U, the school now

encloses one large interior courtyard. In this shift, phenomenal change was written in

stone. With this structural change came the three social, psychological and technical ramifications that I grapple with here. The most significant difference these changes brought is simply this: horizons once bordered on the 'outside' world disappeared and all attention is focused inward toward the self. The traditional standards of respectability, not substantially altered by the outside appearance of new building, though overlaid with palatial notions of modernity, act toward self-speaking and hence a new kind of self­ legitimation.

If geometrically it stands as rich, regal, massive and powerful to the 'outside' world, inside the building whispers grandeur, hints at opulence, and suggests repose. Students, wrapped in a blanket of well being, are sheltered from prying eyes that once bordered on more open horizons. The new building simultaneously answers the question of who is who in this midwestem town while providing a deeper sense of security from the 'outside' world. Focused inward, folded towards itself, AGS announces itself as a 186 world apart. Facially altered, marked by growing sophistication and materialism, signified by palatially vaulted domes and arched windows, they become both an emblem of 'good' taste (read upper class) and a vehicle for social ambition. If a post-capitalist economic market characterized by global contractions and multiple insecurities have left upper professional class families uncertain, they can find refuge here as they live out their lives through their children (c.f. Foucault, 1978).

As the gaze from the 'outside' world was more tightly controlled in this new building, internal surveillance concomitantly increased. This marks the second important shift. The following description is concerned largely with the upper school building, which is connected to the lower and middle schools by long hallways lined with windows that turn the look inward to the self - toward the inside courtyard. One enters the upper school via a wide spacious foyer. Stepping through an outside wall of glass doors your attention is immediately narrowed as you approach a second set of doors which guides you down an administrative hallway. Both sides of the hallway are lined with interior windows that look into busy office spaces. The message spoken through these windows is that it is not possible to enter or abandon the school without being seen by the authorities.

Beyond these offices the building opens up into an area known as the upper school commons. Bounded on four sides with glass walls, surrounded by hallways that lead to other parts of the school, this glass walled student hangout functions as the hub of the upper school. It has a two storied ceiling. The second floor, bounded by railed hallways, looks down into the commons. The second floor is full of upper school classrooms and miscellaneous offices. Over second floor railings students and faculty easily observe and communicate anyone in the upper school commons, occasionally throwing objects back and forth. To one side of the upper school commons is the school dinning hall. This room is also opened to viewing through an interior wall of glass. 187

Leaving the commons are various hallways that lead to the lower school, library and

other upper school classrooms. Most walls that face the interior of the inner courtyard are

covered with glass. The overly exposed courtyard, still under construction at the time of

this writing, pulls the look inward. With each visit, as I awaited students in the upper

school commons, I found myself compelled to gaze inward, to approach these windows,

turning my back to on the 'outside' world. Only later did I begin to think about the power

of this pull. This new building provided little incentive for outward gazing.

The library, a dome, also has glass walls enabling visual access from both the first

and the second floor. As a dome it also enables audio access - a whisper is easily

overheard. Ironically, without the expected reservoir of quietness several students noted

that they no longer went to the library to study. Inside the library are a number of media

and meeting rooms with glass walls that face into the library. At times the students use

these rooms for study. Where classrooms have windows that face the exterior, the look of

the students, are nonetheless pulled inward to face the teacher. In the dining hall and elsewhere, where windows faces outward, the horizon is bounded by parking lots, and protected by landscape architecture.

A prima facie case could be made that this new upper school space is simply more open, inviting, light, airy. It could be read as being warm, close and nurturing environment. Indeed, this account would probably resonate with school officials who are

invested in educating "its students, from girlhood through young womanhood, and to

educate them well" (School Pamphlet,1992). But by its own outlines, nurturance through openness creates visibility. And heightened visibility lends itself to tighter more effective control. As Foucault (1972) has convincingly suggested, disciplinary technologies and

strategies enclose time and space so that spaces can be defined, differentiated from the rest of the world, organized and controlled. Schools, and by way of my example AGS, are 188

never innocent of such controlling activities. Through new architecture AGS has

instituted new spatial practices that effectively control the behavior of students. This

control works to minimize physical policing on the part of the teachers and

administrators2. Thus as Foucault has noted, "discipline produces subjected and practiced,

'docile' bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility)

and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)...disciplinary coercion

establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an

increased domination" (Ibid: 138).

Disciplinary observation, or surveillance, of the upper school commons, for

example, descends literally and metaphorically from above - from higher authorities. This

observational technology does not require that the actual bodies of the administrators be

physically present staring through the windows. In other words, the power of surveillance

is not dependent on sense experiences, nor is it neatly tied to conscious intentions of

administrators. Regardless of architectural intentions, this building permits a more

coercive observation and hence better controls girls bodies. Girls can't help but be aware

that they are visible and hence adjust their behavior accordingly. When I asked some girls

in my study if they behaved the same way in their own senior commons, tucked away,

out of sight, in a comer of the old mansion, as they do in the upper school commons, they

reacted with a horrified 'NO WAY'. While they couldn't relate to my language of surveillance and social control, they understood themselves to be far more visible in one

location, and shaped their behavior accordingly.

Surveillance does not simply prevent unsanctioned behavioral patterns. It also permits evaluation and judgment. For Foucault (1972), what distinguishes a disciplinary regime is that it is organized via a technology that differentiates the normal from the

abnormal. It is a technology whose power derives from the ability to rank. It works to 189

normalize the student body through systems of reward and punishment. Students are

rewarded with the judgment of normalcy when they are carry out the prescribed rules. For

example those girls in proper uniform, and who put their backpacks in the proper place,

are visibly complying with the rules, and are automatically accorded an honorary place

in the hierarchy of normalcy.

If spatial practices, mediated by interior windows, works to make bodies more

visible and hence deepened the technology of surveillance and normalization, it also

works to privilege the visual which in turn speaks students as performers. This is the third

impact of this new building that I found so engaging. Between windows and over railed

hallways students can see but cannot touch each other. Colomina (1992b:86), names "this

strategy of physical separation and visual connection" 'framing1. One result of this

architectural framing is that some rooms, particularly the more open rooms like the upper

school commons, become a stage. And on this stage, glass, or other means of producing analytical distancing, separates the spectators from the performers (Ibid.). Not only is the

gaze directed inward, but the inhabitants, teenage girls, become the primary focus. As we

shall see in the next section, the teenage girls at AGS understand themselves as living in a

world apart and of being staged in that world. While they are less aware of technologies

of surveillance and normalcy, they are well aware of the technologies of spectacle that require them to perform for teachers, administrators, lower and middle school students,

and a variety of visitors and guests.

Relaxed Bodies/Performing Bodies: Bourgeoise Bodies Well Made

All buildings have multiple 'perceived forms'. The architectural stoiy told above is

but one possible account- one that is discursively bound by my own noetic preoccupations. It is unlikely that school officials at AGS would claim my version as 190 their own. Indeed, they may very well feel repulsed by my story. After all, my various academic discourses position me as a person invested in theorizing power relations and control mechanisms. Their discourses, on the other hand, positioned as they are in a competitive educational market, move them to sell themselves. As a consequence, their architectural story is motivated by a need for positive presentations of the self. From this perspective the new building appears simply as lighter, brighter, more open and airy, while simultaneously securing warmth, receptivity, and nurturance. As the building and landscaping approach more completed forms, and they move in more furniture and decorate, these nurturing sentiments will guide their lived practices within their new space.

My alternative story is not necessarily a 'truer' story. It is simply one 'presented form' -a snapshot taken from a different angle. As one possible angle in a 'geometric form' it coexists with the official 'presented form' of nurturance. Indeed, love and nurturance, as any mother can testify, do not cancel out power and control in the geometry of our families. Of course, if the reception of architectural spaces is always out of control of the architects (read also educational policy makers), then we can also expect that students have varied perceived accounts through which they comply and or resist the official account and/or my alternative story. In this section I use pieces of student narratives to think about how they position themselves vis a vis space and other architectural discourses with/in AGS.

I will begin with two observations about student bodies at AGS. These observations are directly tied to two school policies, which, like other architectural discourses, shape spatial practices and hence write on the body. First, the bodies of students are uniformed. Uniformed in white shirts, sweaters (with several optional colors), skirts and, since fall of 1993, an optional knee length short, girls come to school 191 more of less looking alike. The uniform is one mechanism, one architectural/policy used for inscribing the bodies of girls. And it inscribes them within a discourse concerned with what it means to look feminine. Indeed, as Nancy Lesko (1988:123) has noted becoming

"feminine involves learning sets of attitudes and actions conceived and completed upon and through the body. Secondary schools routinely establish dress guidelines for student, thus directly impinging upon that process of bodily identity construction". Through its dress code AGS both reads and writes gendered identities onto the bodies of girls. Their understanding of what it means to become 'woman' and occupy a 'female' body is socioculturally bound -a construct whose history has changed through the years. Short pants are the most recent adjustment to their construct of femininity.

When I asked girls if or how the uniform constructs their sense of femininity they found it difficult to respond directly to the question. They were unable to think about how gender might be constructed by clothing. As one girl said "I've worn a uniform since I was six, how would I know" (Sidney). Instead, they all talked about how the uniform made them feel. Here are some typical examples:

We are all comfortable with looking the same ....The uniform gives us a sense of acting more mature. When you are dressed up in skirts you are more mature (Laura).

With the uniform, there is the thing about we can all be comfortable (Aisha).

We wear uniforms, no one wears makeup, the teachers are really open, everyone is really nice. It a very safe environment (Sidney).

In your uniform you are safe. Nobody is judging you when you are in your uniform (Samantha).

The safety they speak of comes from sameness, being able to signify as unity. In this unity, social differences that might otherwise surface, especially class differences, are always already under erasure (see chapter seven). When asked if they resisted the 192 uniform in any way, most responded no, and then proceeded to talk about why they liked wearing uniforms. Most commented in one way or another that the uniform was easy. For example, Sidney says "you wake up, put it on, go to school". Nor do you have to worry about how clean it is. As Laura notes, she could "wear it five times a week and nobody would ever know. I could never wash this thing and nobody would ever know". Nor do girls spend much time on other grooming activities. Most wear no make up. Many wear wash 'n wear hair styles, often with hair pulled back into pony tails.

In the same interview, however, Laura notes that she is not wearing a regulation white turtleneck because it has 'Niki' written across the collar. Then she proceeds to demonstrate what she would do if she encountered an authority figure who might call her out for breaking the dress code. "See", she says "I can just roll it down and it looks regulation". She does not take herself up as resisting the uniform. Instead, which was typical of many girls, she sees herself as simply introducing a wee bit of individuality into the AGS uniformity. This is a move that receives unspoken approval from AGS via laxly enforced dress codes. In my interviews some girls talked about consciously altering little part of the code because it didn't fit their personal needs. Their shoes, for example, might be brown but not the proscribed penny loafers. In addition, many girls accessorized their uniforms, often with a lot of jewelry. Observations suggest that this was a common practice among AGS girls, though several others named this practice as unfortunate and sloppy.

The second thing that was striking about bodies at this school was that they were very relaxed and carefree. Indeed, it was this initial observation that compelled me to think about how schools write on bodies (c.f. Lesko, 1988). The girls in this school walk/run down the hallways doing any of the following: laughing, yelling, holding hands, arms around each other, carrying each other, tickling each other, kissing each others 193 cheeks. They sit in the hallways with their legs spread apart or their knees up, not caring that their underpants are on display. In the upper commons I have observed girls wrestling with each other, chasing each other around, massaging each other. In the senior commons body behavior is even most relaxed. This commons, unlike the upper school commons, is tucked away out of sight, off limits to other students and all school personnel, and therefore less amenable to surveillance. This is a space of ultimate relaxation, written up by the AGS as senior privilege. Here I have observed girls lying on the couch, one on top of another, deep in conversation. I have seen girls sitting on each others laps talking nose to nose. Almost, without exception, a card game is going on in the senior commons. Everyone says they play cards to relax.

If the uniform constrains girls to embody a certain definition of femininity, it also frees them from the labor intensive job of displaying their individual identities through competitive dressing. Likewise, the institutional fact that this is an all girls school, a place without cross-sex competition, seems to be freeing and more relaxing for girls. Single­ sex, as a policy, contradicts sociocultural demands that women display their bodies and otherwise perform for the attention of boys3. More relaxed in school, they are less afraid to be seen touching other girls, or otherwise display their affection for same sex school mates. However, girls are not unaware of the heterosexual demands placed on them in broader society. On the contrary, much of their peer talk is focused on boys, romance, and after school events where they dress in street clothes and otherwise dress themselves up. At best AGS provides a respite from this world, a place where girls can get on with other things, especially academic things.

These relaxed bodies appear to validate the official view where AGS provides a loving, nurturing environment where girls are free to grow into women. Of course there are the technologies of control exercised through uniforms, but these appear relatively 194 mild - to all concerned. I never heard a girls complain about having to wear uniforms. If the more subtle mechanism of power and control discussed in the first section have some validity, then we would expect to find other signs of bodies/minds more deeply marked by the inward gaze of normalization. We would expect to find consciously performing bodies along with these relaxed bodies. On the level of student/teacher at AGS, we can easily rewrite a familiar story, where students are always performing for teachers.

Students come to know teachers through their own experiences and from others have told them and they adjust their behavior accordingly. Here is one lucid example:

There are certain teachers..we formulate what ever we have to say for them...There is one teacher here, she is the ultra feminist, and you have to be careful how you formulate things for her, what you write, what you say (Lana).

This is a classic example of how students critically adjust themselves to the demands of teachers in return for good grades. But if the power of normalization architecturally permeates the whole of AGS, via spatial practices and educational policy, then it functions independent of any particular presence or body. As a consequence students are negotiating a power-over that is less marked, hence less easily named.

Needless to say, my own Foucauldian bound formulations of power, did not resonate with students own self understandings. (Thus what follows marks my own imposition.) What did register with students, however, was the idea that they were upholding an image of AGS that wasn't always in line with their own self-identities. Here is a particularly telling exchange between me and Samantha, a student of color in this study that is on full scholarship:

Samantha: Just a couple days ago we had an academic dean come and evaluate the school. So, you know, before he comes they say "every one give you best dress, you know , and be nice, be friendly, answer his questions the best that you can, welcome him to this warm family". 195

Me: And you had to be reminded to do this?

Samantha: Yeah. Sometimes you can't be yourself. You have to be what the school wants you to be.

Me: And that level of awareness is always with you?

Samantha: Yeah. Represent your school. Where ever you go you are a part of AGS. Don't embarrass the school.

Me: Is this like having a double consciousness - 1 am me and I am an image of AGS?

Samantha: Yeah. Proper woman, educated, clean, friendly.

Me: So you play a part in maintaining that image?

Samantha: Right. I am even part of the ambassador society. A group of five students that go into the community and talk about AGS to provide the proper image of AGS.

Remarkably I had a similar conversation with Sidney, who represents the majority of students at AGS in that she is a Christian of European descent and from the upper class. Here is her story:

There was somebody visiting, something to do with money, and they were talking about it two weeks beforehand. They said "we have to present a positive image here". We had to do all the bulletin boards. They told us - "keep you back packs off the floor, look nice, smile, be congenial, wear proper uniform". I just thought it was quiet amusing (Sidney).

In one way or another all of the girls in my study expressed an awareness that they always had to be 'on', reflecting a proper image of AGS. This performance was not simply for visitors it was one that constantly had to be maintained. Here are some other examples:

One teacher brought up the issue of - 'you guys don’t realize how much influence you have over the younger kids'. And I think it is true. And while we might not be thinking of what we are wearing, [i.e. how they wear their uniforms], the younger kids are also looking up to us (Aisha). 196

In a sense we are always on. Oh, it is like we are supposed to be in proper uniform. Especially if we go out, if we go to another school, for example. We have to be proper young women. That is what they want, what they want us to represent. Tennis shoes? You need a letter from a doctor to wear those (Zoe)!

There is definitely a message about everyone having to go to college...they really look down on you if you don't go. Not because it is your choice, but because you ruin their image (Lisa).

Normalizing gazes are not just aimed at bodily images of girls. Here are some particularly telling examples from Samantha, who seems constantly aware that she is not normal in the context of AGS:

It's great being on scholarship, but then again inside of you, you always feel like you have to be on top of things.

Sometimes there are things on my mind that I can't say because I am afraid I'll hurt the school, hurt the teacher or something...because I do get full scholarship ...they do help me a lot.

She is well aware that she is marked differently by her scholarship status. This difference compels her to do what AGS wants. For example, she is always in proper uniform and berates other girls for not complying with the dress code. She is in the ambassador society where her body stands as a physical exemplar of all that is wonderful at AGS, even for girls of color from working class homes. That Samantha understands herself as deviant in a world where the norm is that, as Sidney notes, "the majority of people, undeniably are white and pay full tuition", is further revealed by the fact that she often marks the AGS student body as 'they' and only rarely as 'we'.

While bits and pieces of AGS are reinforced by one teacher or another, the overall image circulates more broadly through normalizing gazes. No one person is sitting down and telling them exactly how to behave. There is a school image and that image is written 197 on their bodies. That image is spoken through school policies that frame college bound girls and is only semi-policed by teachers. Girls are also framed by spatial practices that enable more subtle forms of surveillance and normalization. The new school building, with all its glass walls, makes their bodies more visible and keeps them performing on the stage of AGS' image.

Girls simultaneously comply and resist this framing (c.f. Giroux,1983). Here is one telling example of resistance:

The head of the school always reminds us [that seniors represent the school to girls in other grades] or says something to make us feel guilty. They will always say something like 'we are the best class'. Which is a false image of us. We always laugh when they tell us something like (Samantha).

Like Sidney above, Samantha thinks the situation is amusing. They all know that this is a perfect image, one that they can't possibly meet. More important, they all seem to have a sense that this is being imposed on them and that it is not 'really them' and therefore it is laughable.

Nonetheless, they will all go on to college, upholding at least part of the AGS image. What else might be involved in this image? Here is one observation from a student, a girl of color from the upper class, with national and religious roots elsewhere:

This school goes from one extreme to another. We have someone coming in to teach the lower school how to eat properly with forks and spoons. And then you have someone coming in to tell us how to scream obscenities at invisible attackers. So I think we are caught. We are trying to change but we have to have all the qualities of upper class (Lana).

This awareness, that this is an education for the upper class circulates through all the girls understanding4. As Sidney would say "this is a little rich white school and no school wants that stereotype, so they go out of their way to change that image". If the 198 school does not announce itself as rich and white, they do provide an image of how rich white girls should be trained. And the image, as AGS girls understand it, is one of superwomen. The bourgeoise, well made, is a superwoman. Here are some examples:

There is a certain way to act and there is definitely a push towards a career. But that is not as great as the push to go to college. They want you to go to college. The word superwoman comes to mind (Lisa).

Superwoman? Yeah, it is forced down our throats. Like they have alumnae career day. They invite back all the alumnae... And they are like - look what these alumnae did - doctors, lawyers, Realtors, interior decorators, etc. (Sidney).

The mission of the school is to make us strong. And when we are off to college, make sure we are prepared...Everybody goes to college and makes it (Laura).

We realize we can't have it all...You have to set your priorities. And a career is one of your priorities at AGS. You must have one if you are to survive (Lana)

Interestingly what is missing from the woman-making formula is an essential equation for the reproduction of the bourgeoisie -marriage and children. AGS is not exactly silent on the issue of family. It is an assumption that rides on the back of becoming a superwoman. Here are two girls, who acknowledged that AGS doesn't talk about family out loud, but they get the message anyway:

They always have examples about being superwomen at the Alumnae career day. You know..."I am a doctor and oh yes by the way I am going to have a baby" (Zoe).

They are superwomen. Of course, they have families, great families. Of course, they are not divorced. Of course, their kids are little perfect children (Sidney)

Both girls spoke these sentiments with a bit of irony. They refuse AGS's formulation which silently constructs the possibility of career and family as unproblematic. Both acknowledge that becoming 'superwoman' won't be quite so easy. 199

Nonetheless they, as all the girls in this study, yearn for college, career and children of

their own. Despite their various forms of resistance, they have been well made,

bourgeoise superwomen. Prepared for the bourgeoisie marriage market, many will no

doubt go on to have power careers of their own5.

Concluding Re/Marks

Schools are times and spaces marked by multiple discourses. Into schools students bring bodies. Their bodies, like chalkboards, are inscribed in multiple ways through

educational/architectural frames. At AGS, the school policies that structure and a

uniformed single-sex environment, architectonically projected, position girls in relaxed

bodies. These are bodies that are open and free, safe and unafraid. These are bodies that

are playful and daring. School policies aimed at producing upper class college bound

women, architectonically projected, position girls in performing bodies. These are bodies

that dance aware that they are being watched, aware that their bodies are being used to represent the 'best education’. These are bodies that feel the imposition and resist via

individualizing moves, slight variations. But dance on they must, nonetheless, compelled

by normalizing gazes, they must perform, and most enjoy the performance.

The technologies that produce their performances are both overt and covert, spoken through public policy goals and silent glass walls. In this framing the distinction

between educational discourses and school buildings collapses. We see both the

architectural power of educational discourses and the academic power of architecture. In

this framing the distinction between curriculums written for the mind and those written for the body is undone. In unraveling Cartesian dualism we find bodies shaped along with minds. And it is there that we find the compatibility of nurturance and discipline, the coupling of pretendedly opposite constructs - freedom and control. 200

*ln this sense all schools are largely spaces that are produced through the daily practices of predominantly female labor as they are controlled by a predominantly male supervisory core. What is unique about AGS Is that It is headed by women. And while there are a few men teaching, particularly In the middle and upper schools, the majority of faculty are women. All of the students are female.

2 Teachers are also surveilled through these technologies.

3Th1s Is not to say that all girls In coeducational environments feel compelled to perform for boys. Nor Is It to say that AGS girls outside their school environment do not dress and otherwise display themselves for heterosexual consumption. Only that AGS, as a single­ sex environment, overtly offers this possibility.

4 Unfortunately, as I demonstrate In chapter seven, there Is a depolltlclzed understanding of elite education. For example here is something else Lana says: "Let's face It, getting a good education often requires a lot of money. We pay almost close to $9,000 our senior year. Who except the upper middle class can afford that? And I think that is not the fault of AGS. It Is just a fault of the society. That education has somehow been exclusive to this segment of society. Because it's expensive".

5 As I have suggested elsewhere (chapter 7), this Is a particularly depoliticized version of bourgeoise womanhood. For example here is how Lana responded to this question:

Me: Is this about the reproduction of women for bourgeoisie marriage?

Lana: I would qualify that. A few months ago there was a picture of so and so person graduated In so and so year, married this person, who happens to be a lawyer. I think we naturally will be more educated than the average person. I guess there Is a tendency to go further with education because we come from AGS. ...Therefore I think there is a tendency for us to look for the more elevated or more educated person. I don't think that necessarily has to do with money. It has to do with education. We look for the person that is of our same stature. And If we become an MD -well lawyers and doctors go well together. 201

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IMPLYING POSSIBILITIES

As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me to be a very important one; I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist, that is, "fictions' it. One 'fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one 'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth (Foucault, 1980).

Between these pages have fallen art/facts - artful facts shaped through my body, being, dreaming and ways of knowing. By claiming the name of story teller and naming all academic research as stories, I have sought to bring the activity of fabrication from the margins of academic scholarship to the center. This does not mean, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, that facts are therefore absent. Instead, it is a move geared toward mobilizing facts as social constructions. Facts are art, always already being shaped by the frames we place around them. The act of concluding is a final artist attempt to hermetically seal away the facts framed by the writer before they finally escape her hands.

In this dissertation I write stories, constructed on onetic landscape variously influenced by Foucault and feminist postmodernism, which are spoken outside frames that would be easily recognized by those who participated in my study. In addition these are stories that are written outside research frames adopted by others who study single-sex schooling. Their work, both that of the traditional and critical 203 theorists reviewed in chapter two, tends to focus on the academic and social advantages of single-sex schooling for girls. What distinguishes these stories from those ways of understanding single-sex schooling for girls is my focus on the technologies of social construction that help frame schooling activities in a private school for girls. In particular the strength of this study lies in its focus on discursive networks typically taken for granted in educational settings. Starting from the space that disrupts one of the most taken for granted educational assumptions -coeducation-

I use qualitative data to think about.the technologies of gender, the socially constructed body, the spatial power of architecture and the mobilizing power of myths and legends in a single-sex school for girls.

I began this study, however, by thinking historically about the early debates over coeducation and single-sex schooling during the 19th century. Unlike other stories told about the history of coeducation I use the lens of social constructivism to argue that early educational reformers concerned with single-sex and coeducational schooling practices were not simply forging gender policies for schools, instead they were invested in creating categories of gender, race and class. In chapter four my focus on the ways that complex, unstable and contradictory discourses were woven together in the educational discourse of early school reformers offers fresh insight into the history of women and education. My use of historical data is intended to invite a debate over the power of historical educational discourse, which I argue functioned as both instruments for and as effects of the powers inherent in a number of different discourses they deployed. Central to my thesis is the suggestion that the debate over the education of 'women' was one of the sites where 'women' were propelled out of the 'domestic' and into the ‘social’ where she would become both subject and object of science. The ‘social’, written into being in the same moment, admitted women, reestablished them as sociological/scientific categories and restructured their possibilities. Under public gaze women were to become both the reformer and the reformed.

Above all else I argue that the story about the birthing of coeducation is an uneasy story - full of middle/upper class anxieties. Unlike much of educational history, focus on the upper and middle class control of the working classes through educational moves, my historical reading offers insight into how one class deployed new technologies of control on itself. It is a story about one class speaking itself into existence through self control rather than the control of ‘others’. More specifically the anxiety, written as social decadence and then sexualized is located on the feminine self. Guided by a focus on the social construction of gender in education this history offers a more complex story about the history of education. In it I suggest that women’s reproductive role, both cause and effect of her positioning, is central to the history of education. From her morality to her ovaries she is being retooled both by educational reformers and for new technologies of 'social' control.

In chapter five I tell another historical story about the origin stories told at the school where I did some qualitative research. Reading between the lines of the self­ told origin stories of AGS, I found another kind of story about class. In this chapter I retell legends which provide different signposts that can guide us through the historical complexities surrounding the schooling of girls. This is a story, which once focused through the lens of social construction, is about how legends help produce

'truth effects' about current schooling practices. I argue that what is silenced, obscured and written out of this particular school legend is the social class location of this school. This was and is a school for only some 'women'. Moreover, historically this school catered to a specific segment of the local elite: those who were Christians of European descent. Today it is more diverse in terms of race and religion and has some scholarship students from other class locations. Nonetheless it remains predominantly a school for the economically privileged. The strength of this story lies in its focus on the power of legends. I use power as Michel Foucault (1978:136) does when he talks about mechanisms of power, "bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them". In this view power is relational, exercised from a variety of points, including historical points, rather than something that is possessed by some individuals. Power, then circulates through schools via a number of mechanisms, which have to do with relations between people. This position offers fresh insight into how legends function as one of several power mechanisms. In this school I argue that in this case legend works to generate silences on social privileges.

This power of the legend is never secure and must constantly be re-negotiated. If we understand schools as places "in which certain truths have constantly to be proved" (Walkerdine, 1990:63), then we can also think of them as spaces where other

'truths' have to continually be hushed. When girls hear, read and are otherwise reminded of the legendary beginnings of their school they are given permission to forget about their social privileges. In refusing to mark its privileged locations, this legend whispers silent meanings into the present that enable girls to depoliticize their privileges (Barthes, 1957/1972). The is an important story because it reflects a cultural wide silence in which people hesitate to speak any of their 'unearned privileges' (McIntosh, 1988). It suggests that elite private schools are one place where socially privileged people are trained to take up unmarked bodies. In this training, never complete and always negotiated, some will forget to see themselves as fundamentally constituted by the marks they are taught to inscribe on their socially constituted 'Others'.

This legend is just one among many mechanisms that speaks them into normalcy. Social class at AGS, as an economic fact, is named without much difficulty. It is already announced through the near $8,000 tuition and numerous other financial obligations over the course of one year. It is the political power of money, so central to the privileged schooling girls receive at AGS, that remains hidden, normalized and finally naturalized. Naturalizing the political power of economic privilege is the ultimate power of this legend (Barthes, 1957/1972). In this school, rich with material and psychological resources, economically privileged girls (and those few 'others’ on scholarship) are being trained to take up unmarked political positions as economically privileged women. By not naming the power of their privileges, girls are discursively made to appear natural and normal. In contemporary discourses of privileged education, their school is invested in cultivating life-long learning, nurturing self-confidence, and helping girls learn 'to serve others’ through community service programs1. One of the threads that ties these historical chapters with die chapters generated out of a contemporary single-sex school is the fact that ,historically, the parameters of the educational discourse through which economically privileged 'women' of European descent were constituted were very similar. What has changed over time, however, is the content - today economically privileged 'girls' need a college education and career to make them an attractive marriage partners. In other words, economically privileged girls have increasingly taken themselves up in and been constituted through the discourses of

1 Taken from a pamphlet describing the current school philosophy. bourgeois individualism characterized by desires for autonomy, choice, and

'becoming somebody'.

In chapter seven I call on the school mascot of AGS to think about the power of myth in schooling. Since its dim beginnings, the lore of the unicorn has signified

'truth' and 'myth' as they have danced hand in hand across multiple worlds of discourses. Multiple books have been devoted to the ontologies of this shape shifting beast. Shepard Odell (1930:274) wrote of the unicorn that it was a symbol that "expanded into myth and this myth was debased into fable". "The unicorn", he tells us, "next became an exemplar of moral virtues, then an actual animal, then a thraumaturge, then a medicine, then an article of merchandise, then an idle dream, and last stage of all, an object of antiquarian research" (Ibid:274-275). Setting the last stage as his own writing up of the beast could not stop this great beast from signifying. In my rewriting of the unicorn, appropriating it as a symbol of unity, and in calling that unity a myth, I have read the unicorn back into thraumatology - a discourse on miracles.

By naming educational activities as myth making activities, I am suggesting that we can gain additional insight how schools socially construct their occupants. In other words, I am arguing that educational discourses are technologies of distortions through which we read and write the world we call school. Myths are distortions, thraumaturgically evoked stories, that help us understand the world we live in. The story at AGS is about private schooling. But myth making is not limited to private schooling. Public schools are simply places where similar myths perform otherwise.

The implications of the reading of myths in schooling suggests that their are a number of ways that meanings are filtered through academic discourses, all of which help shore up social relations within schools. My discussion about myth in schooling is not intended as a critique of single­ sex schooling. For example, there are those who have argued that single-sex schools are not necessarily more beneficial for girls because they are more controlling (c.f.

Dale, 1969, 1971; Schneider & Coutts, 1982; Trickett, et al, 1982). By focusing on the technologies of social control, as they get played out in micropower relations at

AGS, I have shown that this school is invested in controlling students. However, I have not shown that single-sex schools are more controlling than coeducational schools. I believe that all schools mobilize technologies of social control that help shape the life chances of their students, who in turn resist and comply with these technologies. The strength in this study, therefore, lies in its ability to stimulate new ways to think about schooling regardless of the particular type of school. The questions that need more asking are those concerned with the types of controls, how students resist, comply and negotiate them, and with what results.

In chapter eight I talk about other parts of schooling that are so visually accessible that they have become invisible in educational discourse. In this chapter I suggest that schools are times and spaces marked by multiple discourses, and using the lens of social constructivism I focus on architecture and the body. At AGS, the school policies that structure and a uniformed single-sex environment, architectonically projected, position girls in relaxed bodies. These are bodies that are open and free, safe and unafraid. These are bodies that are playful and daring. School policies aimed at producing upper class college bound women, architectonically projected, position girls in performing bodies. These are bodies that dance aware that they are being watched, aware that their bodies are being used to represent the 'best education'. These are bodies that feel the imposition and resist via individualizing 210 moves, slight variations. But dance on they must, nonetheless, compelled by normalizing gazes, they must perform and most enjoy the performance.

The technologies that produce their performances are both overt and covert, spoken through public policy goals and silent glass walls. The strength of this framing lies in its disruption of taken for granted distinctions between educational discourses and school buildings. In my telling we see both the architectural power of educational discourses and the academic power of architecture. In this framing the distinction between curriculums written for the mind and those written for the body is undone. In unraveling Cartesian dualism we find bodies shaped along with minds.

Overall the intent of this study is to open up different ways to think about educational practices. More modestly it is hoped that my focus on postmodern notions of social construction will provoke debate both about the history of education and current educational practices. By focusing on single-sex schooling I have used an untraditional schooling site to open up several taken for granted assumptions about schooling. In particular I have focused on the social construction of the categories of

'women', 'class' and 'private schooling'. However, the theory with which I constructed these stories can be used to inform studies of differently situated schooling. In particular it is hoped my findings will stimulate other ways to think about gender, class and schooling. 211

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