Girl Rearing is the story of girlhood in the fifties, the pent-up desire, the isolation by gender, the trials between mother and daughter. The last of four daughters, the narrator grows up in the wake of tragedy - her sister's death by drowning - and under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture, and feminine destiny. The narrator is destined to rebel. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.