Empowering or Responsibilising?

This article contributes to the limited body of work attending girlhood in children’s nonfiction, with specific focus on collective biographies about women published since 2016. In recent years, nonfiction books have proliferated rapidly United Kingdom and beyond. proliferation has coincided an intensification academic public interest young people’s engagement feminist ideas, where female empowerment is often marketed as a commodity. The present narratives “empowered” women, implication their framing that readers will consume texts be inspired achieve well. Such discourses are conducive neoliberal subjectivities, self regarded autonomous, self-reliant, responsible. offers critical content analysis Elena Favilli Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales Extraordinary Women (2016), Girls 2 (2017), three Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great (2016–2020). My framed by poststructuralist theories popular feminism theorised Sarah Banet-Weiser. I suggest that, despite important admirable intentions underlying publication, overarching these problematic. Specifically, whilst representation important, there undertones render girls individually responsible themselves, especially aspirations successes. As take responsibility lives, other factors produce maintain unequal status first place eschewed.