Mary-Jane Kehily

New femininities suggest that young women are moving from the margins to the centre. No longer content with subordinate status in the bedroom or on the periphery of youth cultures, young women appear to have found their voice as the ‘can do’ girls of neo-liberalism. This paper charts the social change that has had a dramatic impact upon gender relations and particularly the emergence of new femininities that mark growing up girl as a distinctly different experience for young women in the contemporary period. Familiar tropes of new femininities position young women as agentic, goal-oriented, pleasure seeking individuals adept at reading the new world order and finding their place within it. Has femininity finally found a skin that fits or are there cracks in this unparalleled success story? The paper examines this question intergenerationally by looking at young women’s experience across time. Specifically, the paper will explore the implosion of the public-private spheres in relation to the experience of being a girl as articulated by three generations of women.