ABSTRACT
In this chapter we shall revisit the girls we met with their mothers at 4. We were able to follow up what had happened to 30 4-year-olds, who had originally been the sample for study by Tizard and Hughes (1984). We discuss elsewhere our reading and reworking of these data in relation to arguments about mothering (Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989). Here we examine in summary form some of the issues raised by what happened to the girls at 10 — in particular, the importance of class differences and how these cut across gender. All the girls were white, but Tizard and Hughes defined 15 as working-class and 15 as middle-class. We shall see how these girls fared, their teachers’ views of them and their views of themselves. We also present a case study of two of them to exemplify some of the issues concerning the relationship of early experience to girls’ later educational success.
