Abstract

These questions arise in response to new scholarly and popular literature on girls and to the reported comparatively low status of women in Oklahoma. This culturally and autobiographically situated narrative inquiry, studies fourteen stories of diverse young Oklahoma women preparing to teach school, who emerged into three intuitively clear groups as challenged, protected and supported, with distinctive life-wisdom themes. Jane Roland Martin's concept of "learning to live" provided the framework for Aristotelian golden mean analysis of those themes, with particular reference also to Deborah L. Tolman's theory of adolescent girls' health and the Overeaters' Anonymous theory of body/self.