This paper offers gendered accounts of girls’ schooling and childhood from urban India. It challenges global ‘girl effect’ narratives by grappling with the interplay of poverty and caste patriarchy and how it shapes families’ struggles and concerns and girls’ (re)productive labour, (un)freedoms and classroom experiences. Moving beyond the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ it develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the way the state, the market, economic inequalities and local patriarchies inscribe poor girls’ schooling and work. Drawing upon ethnographic work with Class VIII students in a state school it also unpacks girls’ negotiation of classed and casted patriarchies.

本文提供了印度城市女孩入学和童年的性别描述。它通过解决贫穷与种姓父权制的相互作用，以及它如何塑造家庭的挣扎与关切以及女孩的（生殖）劳动，（非）自由和课堂经历，对全球“女孩效应”的叙述提出了挑战。它超越了“多个童年”的概念，建立了一个概念框架，该框架解释了国家，市场，经济不平等和地方父权制对贫困女孩的学业和工作的刻画方式。借鉴公立学校八年级学生的人种学研究成果，它也揭示了女孩对分级父权制的谈判。