Starry eyes and subservient selves: portraits of 'well-rounded' girlhood in the prospectuses of all-girl elite private schools.

Wardman, Natasha ; Hutchesson, Rachael ; Gottschall, Kristina 等

Introduction

School promotional materials such as glossy prospectuses and brochures are an important dimension of the impression management strategies that have been adopted by schools in the recent decades of a highly competitive education market. In response to increased competition for students in both the public and private sectors, many schools have adopted marketing practices designed to appeal to assumed parental expectations of schooling. As Colin Symes (1998) has argued, such texts are useful for understanding the cultural impact of market influences on educational institutions. Symes cited the introduction of competition into the education system as giving rise to an entrepreneurial culture that relies heavily on school advertising and prospectuses, which have in turn become a fundamental aspect of the 'symbolic architecture' (Synott & Symes, 1995, p. 141) of educational institutions.

In a recent article (Gottschall et al., 2010) we drew on the analytic work that Symes (1998) and others have established over the past decade to consider how the prospectuses of six Australian elite boys schools constructed discursive masculine norms and patriarchal privilege. In this article, we extend that work through an analysis of promotional materials produced by eight Australian elite girls schools (we have adopted a simple A-H identification code for school prospectuses as they appear in the article). While the number of prospectuses in each sample differs slightly, the selection criteria remain the same: independent, single-sex, elite or highly funded (by both government and parent body) schools in the same Sydney region of New South Wales. Further, while most of these schools are Christian (including different denominations), this was not an intentional selection criterion.

Our interest in school prospectuses is, in part, to contribute to dialogue about school promotions and their place in the contemporary semiotics of schooling. We therefore utilise social semiotic techniques (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) as well as feminist and post-structuralist theoretical frames (Butler, 1991, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005; Foucault, 1977, 1988, 2000a, 2000b, 2002; Rose, 1999), to investigate how promotional documents construct schooling and its subjects--students, teachers, principals, parents, benefactors, and so on. Circulated to enquiring parents and families, and displayed at education fairs and promotional events, prospectuses offer insights into how a particular school constructs an institutional identity in the education marketplace (Saltmarsh, 2007; Symes, 1998). Such materials are also sites for the construction of idealised students, and of the gendered, racial and class fantasies perpetuated in normative discourses of schooling (though the focus of this particular paper is on gender construction).

We are also interested in exploring the ways in which gender norms are differentially produced in the materials of all-boy or all-girl schools. We see this as part of the broader discussions concerning gender and schooling and, in particular, the ways that educational discourse reiterates and potentially disrupts idealised versions of masculinity and femininity. In the prospectuses analysed in this paper, there are numerous tensions and contradictions at play in the representation of femininity. As feminist scholars have argued, femininity is a complex, discursively dynamic and context-dependent positioning or performance (Butler, 1999; Gonick, 2006; Reay, 2001). In the images and text of all-girl school prospectuses, we see some of this complexity at work, as schools work to position themselves as providers of education that will meet supposed parental expectations of well-rounded, empowered girlhoods for their daughters, alongside a perceived need to reassure prospective parents that their daughters will nonetheless acquire the necessary feminine qualities and virtues that will guarantee their future success in the dominant masculine 'regimes' (Foucault, 1977) of the patriarchal order.

The promise of well-roundedness

As argued elsewhere (Gottschall et al., 2010), the prospectuses of elite private boys schools construct an impression that one of the educational products on offer is the well-rounded young man. In this study, we found a similar promise of well-roundedness recurring in elite private girls school prospectuses. The impression constructed in the texts we examined is that success in all areas--be they academic, creative, sporting, moral or social--can be guaranteed:

[School A] aims to help each girl develop for herself the highest standards of scholarship, truth, courage and discipline. A [School A] girl is expected to be a participant in the life of the school so that, through her active involvement, she may develop a sense of self-worth, enthusiasm for learning, integrity in all she does and optimism for the future. (School A, p. 3)

Other schools noted 'our strong record of academic achievements, enthusiasm for sports and broad activities, a cosmopolitan outlook and a tradition of truly individual strong-minded women' (School B, p. 8) and that '[School C] is dedicated to ... providing a balanced curriculum encompassing spiritual, academic, cultural, physical and practical areas of learning' (School C, p. 1).

All of the prospectuses we analysed give emphasis to both personal and academic qualities, with a number of these texts seemingly stretching the traditional boundaries of femininity through reference to global outlooks and strong-mindedness. But these boundaries are only stretched so far, as demonstrated in the ways that 'soft skills' such as caring and emotional intelligence are depicted. Like the private boys school prospectuses' promotion of 'soft skills' as commodities that can be acquired by 'clientele' in order to ensure that boys will grow into 'emotionally well-rounded' men (Gottschall et al., 2010; Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004, p. 383), emotional well-roundedness is also a predominant focus of private girls school promotional materials. While the incitements in the private boys school prospectuses constitute soft skills as key to individual self-enterprise, the private girls school prospectuses instead position soft skills as vital for successful relationships. This difference in emphasis reinforces 'essentialist gender identities' (Butler, 1999, p. 176).

Indeed, the idealised female student in the prospectuses we examined is healthily empowered yet simultaneously cares for and serves others, is romantically hyper-feminine (passive, pure and attractive) and natural. As Gabrielle O'Flynn and Eva Petersen (2007) point out, in a 'value-adding culture' (p. 464) where there are multiple expectations from schools, parents and society, students are at risk of becoming over-engineered. In such a culture, young women are encouraged to employ 'disciplinary technologies' (Foucault, 1977) and 'technologies of the self' (Foucault, 1988; 2000b) in order to continuously improve themselves (Gonick, 2006; McRobbie, 2007; O'Flynn & Petersen, 2007), and may be 'judged for their worth, quality or value to an organisation' (Meadmore & McWilliam, 2001, p. 32) on the basis of how well they live up to often unobtainable and exclusionary ideals. Discursive norms of well-roundedness--the evidence for which is depicted in these documents in terms of self-discipline and self-governance, accommodating challenges and change, the cultivation of qualities such as caring and loyalty, and realising one's potential--place considerable responsibility on the individual girl to accomplish herself within these terms (Burman, 2005; Charles, 2008; Gonick, 2006; McLeod, 2009; Youdell, 2006).

The 'well-rounded' girl is depicted as displaying her capacity for 'individual expression, imagination and creativity' (School D, pp. 14-15) through involvement in a variety of group activities that provide a platform for publicly showcasing her talents. School E, for example, pictures students' participation in creative arts--playing musical instruments or dressed in stage costumes--throughout its prospectus and accompanying booklets and brochures. Schools such as this one argue that it is 'imperative that all contribute to our instrumental ensembles, choral and drama groups, debating, equestrian and sporting teams as broadly as possible' (School E, p. 13). The significance attributed to such activities can also be interpreted in light of what scholars in recent years have seen as the increasing influence of neoliberalist discourse on Australian education (O'Flynn & Petersen, 2007; Youdell, 2004). Creativity, in the competitive education market, can be understood as a commodity, a competitive practice, which, if successfully managed, will be valorised as useful, worthwhile and value adding (Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; O'Flynn & Petersen, 2007). For example:

Spirited House competitions in music, drama and debating give every girl the opportunity to participate in a high standard of performance ... Students' love for the Performing Arts can be pursued through extra tuition in instruments, voice, speech and drama with many participating in external examinations and eisteddfods ... Each year our Year 12 students have their works chosen for Art Express ... Creative writing is encouraged through the Morris West Prize for Writing presented on Speech Night. (School A, p. 15, emphasis added)

As Australian cultural scholar Liz Ferrier (2001) notes, repetition of creativity and self-expression is often conflated with a competitive performance ethos characteristic of the late twentieth century. It is a myth, she writes, somewhere between 'Madonna's "express yourself" and Nike's performance slogan "Just do it"' (Ferrier, 2001, p. 58). In the quotation above, opportunities for student participation in creative pursuits are framed within the terms of competition, assessment and selectivity. In such accounts, the well-rounded girl balances her 'love for the Performing Arts' with its utility as a competitive tool for individual advancement.

In addition to creative accomplishments, the 'well-rounded' girl is also constructed as being empowered. As one student quote proclaims: 'Girls can do anything in a girls' school and are not limited by stereotypes or teased about them' (School F, p. 7).Visually, this empowerment is reiterated in many of the close-up portrait images of the girls school prospectuses. On one front cover, the image of a girl is complemented by a tag-line at the bottom-right of the frame, reading 'empowering young women' (School F, p. 1). In all the prospectuses included in our study, the majority of images featuring portraits show girls looking directly at viewers and smiling, often displaying toothy grins that radiate capability and confidence. Such direct eye contact demands a response from viewers (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 118), potentially positioning girls as powerful subjects. However, the camera angles often produce shots in which the girls are seen from above, positioning them below viewers and thereby contradicting the rhetoric of empowerment. Such positioning reinscribes a historically gendered submissiveness, or heterosexual subordination (Butler, 2004, pp. 534); particularly as many of the images of boys in the boys school prospectuses are taken at eye level or above viewers, therefore placing the boys in positions of power (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 140). There are also fewer shots of individual boys directing their gaze at the camera in a 'demand' for viewer engagement (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 118). Instead they are consistently doing something, be it talking to peers, playing sport or working in the science labs. It could be argued that boys do not have to seek or 'demand' the viewer's gaze or engagement like the girls often do, as they are already in a position of social power and are therefore free to get on with the activities that the rest of us can just passively observe. Sontag (2003) asked of the dead in photographs 'Why should they seek our gaze?' and we would extend this question to include any living person who is socially removed from or beyond the 'ordinary' general populace due to their position of power.

Thus, the empowered female subject depicted in elite private girls school prospectuses, does not demonstrate tough girl-power with a hard competitive edge, 'unbound from the constraints of passive femininity' (Gonick, 2006, p. 2) and at risk of being perceived by the dominant patriarchal society as threatening (Ringrose, 2006, p. 415). Neither is she completely Ophelia-like in vulnerability, voicelessness and fragility (Gonick, 2006, p. 2). Instead, the femininity portrayed is a buffered girl-power with no hard edges. Such corseted girl-power creates or emphasises soft curves; while at the same time--in its dependence on others for recognition of independence (Benjamin, 1993, p. 134, in Gonick, 2004, p. 199) as a carefully crafted and managed 'corporeal style' (Robinson & Davies, 2008) or performative 'performance' (Butler, 1999)--limits the ability to breathe freely.

Service with a smile: Teamwork, community and 'giving back'

A predominant theme in the girls school prospectuses is that of service to others, to school and to the community. As discussed in the previous section, images of smiling, happy girls are often juxtaposed with written text that reiterates each particular school's claims that students are 'happy' (School B, pp. 10, 12,18),'supportive of each other' (School G, p. 5), and that any competition is 'healthy' (School D, pp. 1011) and 'fun' (School F, p. 10). Such truth claims (Foucault, 2002b) are particularly noticeable in depictions of sporting activity, and in images and text that promote students caring for others within the school community. The notion of 'giving back' is constructed as both the purpose and the effect of individual student achievement and responsibility.

In the prospectuses we analysed, almost all the images of sporting activities emphasise--both explicitly and implicitly--girls' involvement in sport as promoting fun with peers, teamwork and community. This emphasis contrasts with that of boys school prospectuses, which represent boys' involvement in sport as an individual effort, constitutive of the disciplined, heterosexual and hyper-masculine 'hard bodies' constructed as integral to the 'competitive, self-enterprising, "successful" masculine subject' (Gottschall et al., 2010, p. 23). By comparison, images in the girls school prospectuses tend to focus on group rather than individual sporting shots; and observation of, rather than participation in, sporting activities. This is particularly demonstrated in images of groups of smiling girls wearing school or 'house' colours, who laugh and embrace as they cheer on their teams. In many of these images, photographic effects function to place emphasis on the social, rather than the athletic, aspects of sporting activity. For example, one image of a relay race focuses not on the girls who are running but rather on the passing of the baton, underscoring visually the sociality required for success in this sporting activity (School H, p. 11). In a different prospectus, a group of girls leisurely jogs together in a straight line, not one girl ahead of another, and all laughing and smiling (School G, p. 7). Less about athleticism per se, the sporting images in girls' prospectuses are about 'co-curricular activities' and 'inter-dependence' (School D, p. 10). This interdependence manifests itself in House competitions (School A, p. 15) that encourage 'House spirit'; and inter-school competitions in academic, creative and sporting domains (School B, pp. 12, 14) that encourage school 'spirit'.

One of the few images of a lone sportswoman is located in the School D prospectus where a double-page spread depicts a lone swimmer doing laps in the pool. Large, bold print at the top of the page declares: 'Competitive by Nature', with the text immediately below it reading: Healthy competition, whether academic, sporting or in co-curricular endeavours, encourages our girls to foster their unique abilities and helps produce young women who can make a valuable contribution to society. (pp. 1011)

What is 'naturalised' here is the kind of 'competition' where girls make themselves better through the development of confidence, well-being and organisational skills (School D, pp. 1011) fitness and cooperation. Self-betterment in these terms moves beyond individualistic motivation (O'Flynn & Petersen, 2007) towards a moral obligation to give back to society (Davies & Petersen, 2005, p. 85). This involves competition of a sort that benefits others and not just the self--the whole and not just the individual. Thus, while elite private girls schools encourage individualism and 'confident achievement' (School B, p. 18), where 'diligence is admired and personal achievement is rewarded' (School A, p. 8), all the schools considered in this study place a greater emphasis on teams and teamwork for the purpose of contributing to others.

Another dimension of the depiction of service is seen in the ways that the prospectuses promote girls schools as providing a caring, or family, environment. As Symes (1998) noted, 'time and again the notion of school as a family is a feature of the promotional rhetoric of private schools' (p. 138). In this case, the notion of a caring school family is reiterated in the repetition of smiling girls with their arms around each other in friendly embraces. Wherever they are--the playground, sports grounds, lush green surrounds/nature or classrooms--the girls have company, and are always smiling and having fun together. Images of boarders in particular, often include smiling groups of girls wearing pyjamas, wrapped in fluffy blankets, with arms around each other (in what we have interpreted to be friendship or kinship) and/or hugging objects such as heart-themed pillows and teddy bears. The blankets and toys connote 'feminine qualities' of softness and cuddliness and the 'the naturalness and desirability of women adopting a domestic and maternal role' (Rose, 1999a, p. 211), while the heart-shaped pillows reinforce notions of 'love' and 'care.' This is in direct contrast to the boys school prospectuses, where boys are seldom shown in private living spaces or wearing pyjamas.

'Helpfulness' is another way in which caring for others is demonstrated. For example, at School B Senior School, 'Each new girl is contacted by the New Girls' Committee even before she arrives at the school and every girl is allocated a helpful "[School B] Sister" from her House' (School B, p. 14). In another prospectus, older girls are said to 'befriend and lead' younger girls, particularly 'through the Peer Support program and the House system' (School A, p. 4). Helpful activities, such as older girls reading to younger girls, consistently depict all participants as happy and smiling; and school mottos and hymns often feature notions of helpfulness and caring as symbols of the school's collective ethos. In one prospectus, for example, under the heading of 'Caring' is the following line from the school hymn: 'Star of service, make us dwell on, not our own, but others' needs' (School A, p. 16). Girls' knowledge, skills, creativity and talents are constructed as primarily for the purpose of serving others. In other words, they are 'allowed to have a voice, but the voice must be channelled in particular ways' (Charles, 2008, p. 8--drawing on the work of Harris, 2004) in order to be considered legitimate--an example of governmentality (Butler, 2004; Foucault, 2000a; Harris, 2004, p. 141; Rose, 1999a).

Girls' responsibility for service to their peers is extended further to include service to the wider community. For example:

Perhaps most important to us, we want our girls to be compassionate and understanding. With a commitment to the service of others. [School D] girls have always been encouraged to make a significant contribution to their community. Now more than ever, we encourage our girls to understand that the individual can make a difference and to live their lives with compassion, courage and determination to benefit society. (School D, p. 19)

The star of service beckons the School A family to think of the needs of others. We encourage students and staff to care for each other and there is a strong program which focuses on the needs of the local community and beyond. (School A, p. 16)

We want to acknowledge here that we see caring for one's peers and community service as having an important--and indeed all-too-often neglected--place as priorities in educational settings, and we are not endeavouring to be critical of these schools' initiatives in this regard. Rather, we are concerned with the systemic institutionalisation of traditional gender stereotypes that are perpetually recycled and repackaged in new ways in order to reproduce discourses on femininity as contingent on caring, and that render girls' achievement inconsequential unless it serves broader community needs and purposes.

So while the promotional materials of elite private boys schools construct community and society in terms of providing opportunities for boys to lead (Gottschall et al., 2010); on the other hand, it seems that '[t]he significance and purpose of cultivating leadership among young women is linked to their capacity to be good citizens' (Harris, 2004, p. 79). Thus, elite private girls schools encourage girls to serve the community through 'active social service' (Charles, 2008, p. 8), 'good deeds' and being 'ambassadresses' for global society (Harris, 2004, p. 79, in Charles, 2008, p. 8), as well as 'forging harmonious intercultural connections' (Harris, 2004, p. 71, in Charles, 2008, p. 9). Such positions reinforce gender stereotypes--particularly the feminisation of service or labour (Burman, 2005, p. 362; Gonick, 2006, p. 5)--and the restrictions associated with them. Thus, 'selfless voluntary activities' (School B, p. 4) and the practice of such altruistic ideals as genuine caring, love, integrity and compassion; assist the liberal humanist mission to 'do good' (Burman, 2005, p. 361; Charles, 2008; Harris, 2004) and 'give back to society' (School B, p. 2). Yet, in the prospectuses examined by us thus far, service to others is primarily constructed as 'women's business'. Further, service 'with a smile' is constructed as a normative (Butler, 1997, 2005) condition for female achievement across multiple spheres of endeavour.

Starry eyes and shiny haloes: The purelly romanticised girl

One of the most noticeable features of the elite girls' school prospectuses we analysed, is the overwhelming number of glossy close-up portraits of girls, and the use of soft-focus staging that gives a nostalgic, romanticised quality to many otherwise realist photographs. In contrast to the elite boys' school prospectuses, where the focus is on hard male bodies caught in action (Gottschall et al., 2010), the girls' prospectuses focus instead on pretty, passive, smiling girls posing for the camera. In these images and the texts that accompany them, femininity is constructed as a wistfully anticipating, loving/lovely/lovable, and simultaneously pure and heterosexually attractive state of being. According to Butler (1991,1993,1999, 2004), no such state exists; rather, gender is performative, involving the recognition of self and other in relation to hegemonic norms and expectations.

The romanticised motifs of 'reaching for the stars' and 'fulfilling dreams' construct girls as involved in a personal endeavour of climbing to lofty, romantic heights. For example: 'School E means ... a place that inspires and encourages and helps you to fulfil your dreams while having fun on the way ...' (Year 7 student, School E Girls Only booklet, p. 3).

The school motto is Per Aspera ad Astra, 'through struggles to the stars.' Our motto captures the attitude to life we encourage in our students. The stars represent the highest and best of which we are capable and serve as a beacon to guide us towards truth, courage and service to others. Our girls are assisted in developing responsibility, determination and resilience in their approach to all they do, as the highest and best are not achieved without struggle. (School A, p. 7)

That climbing to these heights is said to involve struggle implies a sense of martyrdom in which female students must overcome obstacles to achieve a purpose already established for them in terms of responsibility and service. Reaching for stars thus acts as a metaphor for achievement, in which the fulfilment of dreams is the reward for appropriate feminine subjectivity.

Other prospectuses make use of similar motifs using images that construct visual narratives of development toward unknown, albeit desirable, futures. For example, the School C prospectus contains a chronology of girls looking beyond the horizon to the heavens. Telling a story of progression, the series of images begins with young girls playing on the ground, and progresses to another of a middle-school girl rock-climbing, and then finally to an image of senior-school girls who look slightly upwards toward the horizon. One holds a travel guide, as they look wistfully ahead in a moment of contemplation toward a seemingly bright yet unknown future ahead. Similarly, the School G prospectus (p. 2) depicts two girls standing in front of an honour board, where their looking off into the distance also suggests the pursuit of future aspirations and leadership roles. In this image, the flash of the camera reflects literal 'stars' in the eyes of these rising stars of the elite private girls school. Looking off into the distance can also suggest a wistful anticipation that is often romanticised and traditionally associated with a love story, or in other words, a 'gender and heterosexually stereotypical narrative of a young woman's search for "lurve"' (Burman, 2005, p. 362). Here the princess awaits the arrival of her knight in shining armour who will whisk her away so that they can live happily ever after (Walkerdine, 1984), thus reinforcing the 'heterosexual matrix' (Butler, 1999).

Meadmore and Meadmore (2004) noted that promotional texts such as these make use of emotions that 'can be harnessed for individual success as well as organisational gain', so that schooling is constructed as a locale for desired and desirable emotions 'to be learned and practised' (p. 381). In comparison to the masculinised emotions of chivalry, leadership, and competitiveness emphasised in boys school prospectuses (Gottschall et al., 2010), girls school prospectuses construct an emotional landscape aligned with desire for love, the giving of love and lovability. In some of the prospectuses, repetition of the word 'love' and a heart motif signals overtly the traditional connection with femininity and love, while others gesture toward the connection through the inclusion of heart-themed pillows and pyjamas (School G, p. 4) in the pages related to boarding. One line of a school hymn extends the notion of love to include that of loveliness: 'Happy is our School surrounded everywhere by loveliness' (School A, p. 27).

While it is unclear whether the loveliness to which the hymn refers is that of the school's physical, social or spiritual environment, or to the students themselves, it contributes nonetheless to the construction of a happy and romanticised school experience. As Burman (2005) argues, nostalgia is drawn on, now more than ever, 'de-radicalizing and domesticating the potential threat supposedly posed by so many highly qualified young women potentially entering high places' (p. 364). An example of such a manoeuvre is seen in yet another school prospectus that goes so far as to contend that girls must also be lovable: 'What the world needs is a wise, lovable and well-educated woman' (School H, p. 1).

In these promotional texts, love, lovability and loveliness are romanticised as desirable feminine qualities of the contemporary woman who has come of age (McRobbie, 2000). The accomplishment of wisdom and education is here punctuated with the accomplishment of successful feminine subjectivity as 'lovable', in other words, as the object of others' love.

In fact, most of the prospectuses use large, close-up images of attractive young girls that function to create a sense of intimacy between the girl and the viewer (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 124). The camera angles often position girls with heads slightly tilted or bowed, looking up through long eyelashes toward viewers. While their relatively young ages and positioning by the camera may be seen as constructing them as innocent and vulnerable (see Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), tilts of the head and flirtatious glancing through eyelashes simultaneously depict them as coquettishly provocative (Walkerdine, 1999). Thus the binary of woman as at once angelic and seductive (Burman, 2005, p. 358; McRobbie, 2007) is maintained.

This binary contradiction is further demonstrated through the promotion of romanticised feminine purity as an idealised feminine quality. As the School A school hymn puts it: 'Star of truth, O make our thinking, so sincere and pure and bright' (p. 11).

School mottos such as 'Let your light shine' (Luceat lux vestra--School D, p. 4) and 'With heart and soul' (Vi et animo--School B, p. 2) draw on Latin that often connotes a timeless mystique and wisdom that 'precious few can translate' (Synott & Symes, 1995, p. 143). Together with grandiose aims to 'ensure that every one of our students has her own chance to shine' (School D, p.16) and to foster each girl's 'creative soul' (School D, p. 14), spiritual connotations align girls with beautiful, even angelic or saintly virtues. According to Meadmore and Meadmore (2004) such 'Spiritual dimensions are sought-after attributes of emotional intelligence that are highly regarded and prized as part of life-long learning skills for future happiness, success, and achievement' (p. 385). Camera techniques such as soft focus, the wide-angle fish-eye lens and the use of streaming natural light accentuate the beauty and ethereal qualities of the subjects photographed (School F, School H, School C). More specifically, in the School A prospectus, the sun shining from behind a student playing the violin creates a halo of light around her head, constructing her as an angelic ideal of femininity. Like the occasional use of a lightweight, frosty, almost transparent paper in some of the prospectuses, girls are thus constructed as an embodied mixture of both modest purity and transparent suggestiveness that tantalises, allures and submits to, rather than contests, the established patriarchal order.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that the promotional materials of elite private girls schools construct notions of success in ways that differ markedly from the prospectuses of elite private boys' schooling. While both boys' and girls' school prospectuses promote an 'elite' and 'well-rounded' educational experience and idealised hetero-normative subjectivities, they do so in vastly different ways. The girls schools whose prospectuses we considered here endeavour to create the impression that the opportunities and educational experiences girls encounter in the school environment will produce well-rounded girls who are both empowered and feminine. In contrast to boys school prospectuses that position emotional well-roundedness as necessary to individual self-enterprise, the girls school prospectuses construct the 'soft skills' of emotional competence as being vital for girls' establishment and maintenance of successful relationships.

Similarly, girls' achievements, be they sporting, academic or creative are framed in terms of girls' perceived responsibility to 'give back', to contribute to others through caring and service. This contrasts with boys school prospectuses that cast achievement in terms of individual accomplishment and the demonstration of hard-bodied masculinities for the purposes of leadership. Femininity, in these promotional materials, is romanticised and rendered nostalgic, and feminine accomplishment relies on a conflation of beauty and virtue, provocative playfulness and purity. By comparison to boys school prospectuses, in which natural innocence is associated only with very young boys, and boys' schooling is seen as a necessary path to masculine authority and patriarchal privilege, the girls school prospectuses construct images of girlhood as both playful and pure, and the purpose of girls schooling as helping girls to romantically reach for stars and fulfil their dreams.

Our aim has been to show how both the complexities and the familiar tropes of educational promotion are implicated in gender norms, and to raise questions about the taken-for-granted discourses of feminine achievement that equate femininity with passivity and subservience in the patriarchal order. Coeducational prospectuses and the increasing move towards the presentation of prospectuses in interactive DVD, CD-ROM and web-page format are potentially rich areas for further study and analysis.

Keywords educational marketing private education femininity gender stereotypes social semiotics service

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Natasha Wardman

Australian Catholic University

Rachael Hutchesson

Kristina Gottschall

Christopher Drew

Charles Sturt University

Sue Saltmarsh

Australian Catholic University

Natasha Wardman is a PhD Student at the School of Education, Australian Catholic University. Email: S00107865@myacu.edu.au

Rachael Hutchesson is a PhD Student at the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University.

Kristina Gottschall is a PhD Student at the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University.

Christopher Drew is an Honours Student at the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University.

Sue Saltmarsh is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the School of Education, Australian Catholic University.