In "Inventing Gendered Childhoods" I examine memoirs written by women in
the 1990s who came of age in postwar America in order to trace how girlhood
developed as a separate category from childhood. Although girlhood is often posited in
scholarship and everyday life as the time-bounded period of adolescence, I argue that it
is better understood for the purposes of Education research as a cultural space and
identity that girls are compelled to occupy, and in which they are trained through
various means. I demonstrate that the meaning of childhood as a gendered experience
emerges in a range of cultural locations and institutions, including but not limited to
schools. Through memoirs such as Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Dorothy
Allison's Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, and bell hooks' Bone Black, women make visible a range of surreptitious cultural lessons and in the process re-read and counter the repressive girl-rearing practices that framed their own coming-of-age. In particular, women memoirists offer alternative pedagogies that blur the line between adulthood and childhood, tutor us about the insufficiency of the time-bound and gendered identities that the school imposes, and finally disperse the work of "pedagogy" throughout the culture. This project contributes to the debates around girls and education by offering an alternative archive for feminist reflections on girls and schools in the form of women's memoir.