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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9401201 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.