Girl Rearing
1998
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
224
Number of Pages
Girl Rearing is the story of girlhood in the 1950s, the pent-up desire, the isolation by gender, the trials between mother and daughter. The last of four daughters, the narrator grows up in the wake of her sister's tragic death by drowning and under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture, and feminine destiny. The narrator is destined to rebel. Never fulfilling expectations, she enters a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.
Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
28
5 STARS
43%
4 STARS
25%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Marcia Aldrich
Author · 3 books
I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in that very spot by my parents and half sisters, a story told in "Girl Rearing." I graduated from Pomona College, earned a doctorate in English at the University of Washington, and now teach creative writing at Michigan State University. From 2008 to 2011 I edited "Fourth Genre," one of the premiere literary journals featuring personal essays and memoirs. In spring 2010 I was the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in Claremont, California (where I lived in the Hut with goldens Omar and Quin), and in that same year was named Distinguished Professor of the Year by the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan.
