Girlhoods and Social Action

Working-class girls make vital contributions to society through social action, yet their efforts are too often rendered invisible or unrecognised. Girlhoods and Social Action confronts the persistent inequalities shaping participation, revealing how intersecting power relations related to gender, class and race both constrain and devalue girls’ efforts.

Drawing on empirical research and an ethnographic study of 17 working-class, mainly racially-minoritised, girls across three schools in London’s poorest boroughs, this book exposes how structural disadvantage influences access to opportunities and shapes girls’ experiences and outcomes.

Offering an original intersectional framework, the book rethinks youth social action through the concepts of the ‘successful girl’, the ‘good girl’ and the ‘authentic girl’. It demonstrates how social action can both reproduce and challenge inequality and proposes new ways to conceptualise participation that foreground girls’ voices, agency and lived realities.