ESSAY REVIEW

Educating girls is one of the most significant yet problematic developments of the last 150 years. A girl, in the process of her schooling, learns to layer the messages of a logo/androcentric culture over the insights born of her lived experience, muffling and silencing the still, small voice within. The ubiquitous, aggressively marketed series romances that a girl reads in adolescence are read not as mere fantasy or entertainment but as a road map for life. This compelling romantic ideology channels girls narrowly toward heterosexuality and marriage. The high price that may be paid for investing in the promise of romance is examined against the backdrop of Virginia Woolf's understanding that intellectual freedom depends on material things. The educated woman who teaches comes to her profession many times divided against herself. She is expected to teach the very values her life may have taught her to question. The solution to these problems (if there can be said to be one), is not simply a matter of changing the stories girls read. In a rapidly changing social world the romance is increasingly fundamental to the maintenance of order, critically embedded in the workings of the economy, and a pathway into the compelling archetypal world. Nonetheless, women teaching in a girl-poisoning culture can begin to mitigate the effects of that culture by listening to girls and by honoring their own memories, thereby hoping to genuinely make room in the classroom for the embodied experiences, voices, and values of women and girls.