Browsing by Subject "tyttöys"

The ways of gender production are strongly culture specific. The school and school's textbooks reflect our cultural values and norms. Cultural gender biases and stereotypical representations of gender can be observed on the textbooks with ease – the books portray a very traditional and one-sided vision of feminine and masculine genders. There has been a growing attention to cultural gender biases in school's textbooks especially due to the most recent national curriculum. I approach the gender bias in this thesis from the viewpoint of girls' studies and therefore the research subjects are girls and girlhood. Science education textbooks based on the National Core Curriculum (2014) form the research material used in this study. Science education covers themes that are influential in shaping students gender identity. The goal of this study is to answer a question how and what kind of a girlhood are the science textbooks, based on the most recent curriculum, producing? My research questions are how and what kind of girl's agency is produced and how in the most recent textbooks have the ways of producing girlhood changed. My master's thesis consists of a theoretical literature review section of girlhood and production of girlhood in basic education textbooks and of a research section. I focus especially on Finnish research literature even though there is only a limited amount of research on the topic conducted. In the research section I study both qualitative and quantitative production of girlhood. In the quantitative part of the study I quantify the research material i.e. I calculate representation of gender in the textbooks. The qualitative section focuses on girl's agency and on the changes in the production of girlhood. In the light of the research I have conducted I can state that there has been a progress in the gender equality: quantitative inequality does not exist in the new textbooks. However, there was still a very traditional representation of the gender and its agency. There was development in the variety of girl's agency but there were still major deficiencies in especially intersectionality; the girls were still all but white, middle class, and heterosexual.

In this study I examined how descriptions of dressing in the Finnish girls’ literature, magazines and etiquette books written in 20the century has depicted the times they were written in, the current fashion and dress codes. I also studied how and by whom the girls’ dressing was controlled during the same time period. I analyzed how the personality of the character, her social status and attached group comes across from the clothes worn in the books. The data collected for my study consisted of descriptions of dressing included in the Finnish girls’ literature written during the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s. I have also studied articles written in relation to dressing in Finnish magazines Kotiliesi and Suomen Kuvalehti as well as etiquette books written during the same decades to bring wider context for dressing in Finland during the studied period. This study is a historical qualitative study. I have used qualitative data analysis as my method. Current fashion was not apparent in the pages of the books under study which is typical for the Finnish girls’ literature. However, the zeitgeist of the publishing time of the book could be inter-preted from the dressing descriptions. In addition, especially at the earliest decades studied, the dress code of the society was apparent both in the books and even more so in the magazines and etiquette books. How the girls’ dressed was not only controlled by internalized norms but also by their mothers. Girlhood, how to be a girl in Finnish society has been reproduced and dismantled in the dressing descriptions. Dressing is communication, also when the description of dressing is in the written format. Dress descriptions have been used to describe the personality of the character and also the changes or hopes that one has for a change in one. Social status is often readable in one’s appearance which is also true for the characters of the books studied. Dress is one way for a girl to become part of a certain group as well as to differentiate from it if wanted.