The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion

Winner of the Best Book of 2008 from The International Gender and Language Association

In this ground-breaking ethnography of girls on a playground, Goodwin offers a window into their complex social worlds.

• Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other
• Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups
• Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others
• Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She is the author of the now-classic He-Said, She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (1991). Her primary research interests are on the ethnography of communication, human interaction, conversation analysis, language and gender, workplace ethnography, and children’s social organization.