The childhood memoirs contained in Ordinary Lessons are intended to complicate the conventional portrait of white middle-class girlhood in the American 1950s. As they look back to their own remembered lives in families, schools, and communities, the authors undermine the popular image of unproblematic «happy days.» Their stories uncover the commonalties as well as differences in the cultural landscape they inhabited and explore the constraints and possibilities of the ordinary lessons girls learned in the 1950s.

Autorentext

The Editor: Susan Douglas Franzosa is Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at the University of New Hampshire. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Professor Franzosa is coauthor of Integrating Women's Studies into the Curriculum and editor and contributor to Civic Education: Its Limits and Conditions. 00

Klappentext

The childhood memoirs contained in Ordinary Lessons are intended to complicate the conventional portrait of white middle-class girlhood in the American 1950s. As they look back to their own remembered lives in families, schools, and communities, the authors undermine the popular image of unproblematic «happy days.» Their stories uncover the commonalties as well as differences in the cultural landscape they inhabited and explore the constraints and possibilities of the ordinary lessons girls learned in the 1950s.

Inhalt

Contents: Susan Douglas Franzosa: Introduction: Reframing the Landscape of the 1950s - Barbara A. White: Foremothers - Judith Fueyo: Apronstring Academic - Jane Hansen: My Geography - Judith Ann Robb: Reflections on a Family Portrait - Betty Smith Franklin: When the Roll is Called Up Yonder, I'll Be There - Katherine Redington Morgan: In Our Places - Lucy Forsyth Townsend: On Sunday I Was a Girl - Susan Douglas Franzosa: Foxen Road - Wendy Reva Kohli: Crossing the Borders: Remembrances of a Class Act - Cinthia Gannett: The Grammar of Memory - Susan Laird: Failing to Learn to See Correctly: Crossed Eyes on Gender and Education in the Fifties.