Girl

<b>From the acclaimed author of <i>Little Dancer Aged Fourteen</i> a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl woman and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than.</b> <p/>Born in 1959 to a middle-class family Laurence Barraqué grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age by way of language and her parents' example that a girl's place in life is inferior to a boy's: Asked for the 1964 census whether he has any children her father promptly responds No. I have two daughters. When Laurence eventually becomes a mother herself in the nineties she grapples with the question of what it means to be a girl to have a girl and what lessons she should try to pass down or undo. <p/>Masterful in her analysis of the subtle and obvious ways women are undermined by a sexist society Camille Laurens lays out her experiences of the past forty years in this poignant powerful book. <i>Girl </i>is at once intimate and sweeping in its depiction of the great challenges we face such as equalizing the education system and transmitting feminist values to the younger generations.