Growing Up Girl

Throughout the Western world our social fabric is being transformed, leaving few lives untouched. Girls growing up today face huge changes in the organization of family, education, and work. Growing Up Girl explores the lives of girls who have grown up in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It explores the complexities of class transformation as young women approach a radically altered labor market and examines the profound but different regulation to which young women of all social positions are subjected. Tracing three groups of girls from their early childhood to young adulthood, the volume sheds light on the social, cultural, and psychological dynamics confronting young women today. It highlights the fragility and the fiction of the "I can have everything" girls, providing a ground-breaking and sobering antidote to platitudes about a feminine future. Growing Up Girl is essential reading for all those concerned with the lives of girls and women today.

"An outstanding contribution to the international debate over breast cancer. Women Confront Cancer not only focuses on exciting new non-conventional treatment options, but allows outspoken women cancer patients to describe their experiences and ordeals in their own words. A landmard in the struggle for patient autonomy."-Ralph Moss, Ph.D., author of "The Cancer Industry", "Without telling us what we ought to do, these women make it clear what we can do: Remember that miracles do occur and that no one, not even orthodox medicine, has all the answers." -Susun S. Weed, author of "Breast Cancer? Breast Health!, The Wise Woman Way", "Women Confront Cancer offers more than case stories of hope triumphing over despair, more than options, alternatives and resources. Its message about individuality, empowerment and leadership makes it must reading for every woman diagnosed with cancer. Its quiet demand for medical freedom of choice and for a patient-driven shift in oncologic policy should be heard by every professional in the cancer field. If ever there was a time for this book, it is now."-Susan Silberstein, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Advancement in Cancer Education

Valerie Walkerdine is Foundation Professor of Critical Psychology, Centre for Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney. Her books include Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, and Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. Helen Lucy lectures in the School of Education, King's College, University of London. June Melody lives and works in west London.