Abstract
This article uses material from a large sample of 11-year-old children’s essays about their imagined lives at age 25 to explore the ways in which these children constructed a gendered identity and gendered future. These essays were written in 1969 as part of the National Child Development Study. The article provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the themes within the children’s essays and how these were patterned by gender and social class. It then goes on to consider the ways in which the children used gender as a resource to establish and maintain their own narrated identities. This article, therefore, aims to go beyond a simple description of the differences in the style and content of essays written by boys and girls from different social class backgrounds to conduct analysis which adopts the spirit of recent work on the performance of gender and class.
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