ABSTRACT
This is a popularist introduction to chapter 8 which gives the wider ethnographic context of the gendering and class acculturation of some female bodies.
I can still remember a great deal about my years from nine to eighteen at an English boarding school in the fifties. But only now, as an adult and social anthropologist, can I analyse the experience. What I say about the 1950s may be relevant to girls’ bodies at other times and other cultures once subjected to British colonialism, and in some instances regardless of class.1
