Gender recipes among young girls
Abstract
Gender recipes among young girls SAGE Publications, Inc.1995DOI: 10.1177/110330889500300207 Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen Monica Rudberg I. Introduction Interviewed in connection with her fiftieth birthday, the well-known feminist pioneer Germaine Greer said that she had but one hope for the future, namely that she would grow up before growing old. Women's access to modernity has in fact been understood as just that, as a sort of arrival at the kind of independence and individuality which will finally give them the status of grown-ups. There have been two main discourses - two stories of awakening (Johnson, 1993) - in this modern feminist project: one says that a woman should grow up by becoming an individual resembling a man, thus implying that femininity is a burden (cf de Beauvoir, 1972, about women lacking transcendence). This view has been criticized for mimicking the male discourse on femininity as the deficient 'other'. The reaction has been to say that there are alternative ways of development: one can become a grown-up in a feminine way, through listening to the 'different voice' of women (Gilligan, 1982; Irigaray, 1993, against de Beauvoir). However, questions about the relationship between such discourses and the desires of women are rarely