Tag Archives: Pressures of Teenage Life

Praise for ‘What Should We Tell Our Daughters?’

‘What Should We Tell Our Daughters? The Pleasures and Pressures of Growing Up Female ‘ was published earlier this autumn. Here are some of the comments that have been made about the book – and me! I am also doing a lot of festivals/talks and events; please check out this link http://melissabenn.com/2013/08/29/what-should-we-tell-our-daughters-autumn-events/ for accounts – and a few photos! – of events so far, and news of ones still to come. If you are interested in buying the book,you can do so from Amazon, here The paperback will be published early in the New Year……

‘Benn grapples eloquently with character, self, confidence, anger, the unquantifiable but elemental traits that make us human…but it is her call to the mind and the soul that I will outright steal: I believe we owe our daughters curiosity: the chance to be, or become, strangers, even to us, as we inquire of, and show are selves willing to hear, wishes and dreams we may never have imagined.’ – Sophie Elmhirst, Financial Times

‘A Bible for . . . Any young woman who has ever doubted herself, any brilliant mind who has ever felt unworthy for not carrying off the latest faddy fashion trend or sexualised beauty look, any modern-day Goddess who feels destabilised and lost’ – Caryn Franklin, All Walks blog

‘An intelligent and captivating read . . . you’ll want to lock yourself away and devour it from beginning to end’ – Emma Herdman, Psychologies

‘Wide-ranging, thoughtful, even-handed . . . Her forensic approach adds valuable nuance’ – Justine Jordan, The Guardian

‘Benn’s writing is profoundly reasonable, while infused with a spirit of creative rebellion, pleasure and fun. I particularly liked her reflective musings on her own pregnancy when she felt simultaneously ‘dismembered’ and ‘energized’, and her evocative account of repeating with her own daughters her mother’s practice of waving her off to school. This is a good book for daughters, for sons, and indeed for all of us’ – Sheila Rowbotham, Independent

‘In this thoughtful, impeccably researched, well-written and heartfelt book, Melissa Benn celebrates the advance of women’s rights and freedoms won over the last century in the West, reminding us of what we now take for granted, but simultaneously homes in on the outstanding or new issues of today for young women. She explores the nub of women’s lives – work, sex, love and motherhood – and why it is imperative that the future is different for our daughters’ – The Human Givens

‘Melissa Benn…is first rate.’…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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