Daddy's Girl

“Walkderdine’s...challenge to certain feminist conceptions of today’s problems is both refreshingly iconoclastic and worth considering. She provides a provocative historical analysis of the portrayal of girls in Annie, Lolita, the Shirley Temple movies, My Fair Lady, and Gigi. She also offers her view of the implications of British television programs like Minipops, where young girls, primarily working-class girls, dress up like adult woman rock stars and gyrate provocatively while they sing pop songs full of sexual innuendoes.”—Kathleen Malley-Morrison, Boston Globe

“Well before the Ramsey murder blew [the world of children’s beauty contests] open, British psychologist Valerie Walkerdine was researching the effects of popular culture on preteen working-class girls. She presents the results of her research in Daddy’s Girl...Obviously, this is timely stuff, but there are other reasons for bringing it to a general audience. Preteen girls have traditionally been overlooked in the world of cultural studies, while teenagers have received a fair amount of attention...Yet if the child-pageant world is anything to go by, interplay between girls and popular culture begins far earlier than adolescence. Looking at girls ages 6 to 10, examining their absorption of popular culture, should then yield important data about our cultural production of femininity. It does...Walkerdine’s...research is still probably the deepest, least sensationalist work currently being done in this arena.”—Sarah Coleman, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Daddy’s Girl should act as a springboard for much-needed discussions about the way popular culture influences and reflects both how we view little girls and how they form their own identities...Combining her personal narrative of growing up working-class with studies of icons such as Little Orphan Annie and Shirley Temple and accounts of visits to the homes of working-class families, Walkerdine exposes deep-seated hypocrisies.”—Publishers Weekly