“I see that when I am in school, I will have a good life.”

Abstract

“Producing and Performing Schoolgirlhood,” explores the embrace of girls’ education in the case-study communities by showing how girl-effects logic is localized through Kenyan gender and education policy and then produced and performed in local communities. Although participants had never heard of “the girl-effects dividend” per se, strong faith in girls’ education to create positive social and economic “ripple effects” for individual girls, families, their communities, and Kenya as a nation saturated their perceptions of education as a pathway to development. The chapter shows how Maasai mothers’ and teachers’ expectations for increased household economic security and community advancement worked to shape schoolgirlhood as a normative category and how schoolgirls worked hard to perform the attitudes, attributes, and actions expected for schoolgirls.