ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that the "rhetoric of restrained empowerment" is rhetorically constructed through the application of a postfeminist girl power rhetoric to puberty guidance manuals directed at younger girls. Although postfeminism and girl power are complicated and multivalent discourses, girl power's imbrication with a neoliberal discourse of choice is especially relevant here. In order to create and market products that parents purchase for their daughters, American Girl must speak first and foremost to parents' fears about their daughters' growing up too soon. Ultimately the books prepare girls for puberty in a very limited manner, according to a specific vision of femininity that socializes girls to be cautious and to depend on others' opinions instead of making decisions on their own the very version of femininity that feminist and girls' crisis discourses desired to undermine. Some work in feminist media studies has discussed the difficulty of communicating and maintaining feminist agendas in consumer capitalist spaces.
