Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia (The American Family)

GIRLHOOD IN AMERICA An Encyclopedia

The American Family The six titles that make up The American Family offer a revitalizing new take on U.S. history, surveying current culture from the perspective of the family and incorporating insights from psychology, sociology, and medicine. Each two-volume, A-to-Z encyclopedia features its own advisory board, editorial slant, and apparatus, including illustrations, bibliography, and index.

Adolescence in America edited by Jacqueline V. Lerner, Boston College, and Richard M. Lerner, Tufts University; Jordan W. Finkelstein, Pennsylvania State University, Advisory Editor

Boyhood in America edited by Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County, and Jacqueline S. Reinier, California State University, Sacramento

The Family in America edited by Joseph M. Hawes, University of Memphis, and Elizabeth F. Shores, Little Rock, Arkansas

Girlhood in America edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, University of Missouri, Kansas City

Infancy in America edited by Alice Sterling Honig, Emerita, Syracuse University; Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Michigan State University; and Holly Brophy-Herb, Michigan State University

Parenthood in America edited by Lawrence Balter, New York University

GIRLHOOD IN AMERICA An Encyclopedia

Volume 1 A–I

Miriam Forman-Brunell, editor Associate Professor of History University of Missouri Kansas City, Missouri foreword by

Susan Douglas

Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England

Copyright © 2001 by Miriam Forman-Brunell All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Girlhood in America : an encyclopedia / Miriam Forman-Brunell, editor; foreword by Susan Douglas. p. cm. — (The American family) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57607-206-1 (set : alk. paper) — 1-57607-550-8 (e-book) 1. Girls—United States—Encyclopedias. I. Forman-Brunell, Miriam. II. American family (Santa Barbara, Calif.) HQ777.G5745 2001 305.23'0973'03—dc21 2001001346 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (cloth)

ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-book. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America

For my own Zoë Gabriella Brunell

Advisory Board Joan Jacobs Brumberg Cornell University Ithaca, New York Wilma King University of Missouri–Columbia Columbia, Missouri Steven Mintz University of Houston Houston, Texas Vicki Ruiz Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Lynne Vallone Texas A&M University College Station, Texas

Contents

A-to-Z List of Entries xi Contributors and Their Entries xv Foreword, Susan Douglas xxi Preface and Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction xxix

Volume 1: Entries A to I Volume 2: Entries J to Z Bibliography 703 Index 761 About the Editor 773

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A-to-Z List of Entries

VOLUME 1, A–I

Clothing Collecting College Girls Comic Books Communication Consumer Culture Cosmetics

A Acquaintance Rape Adolescent Health Adoption Advice Books African American Girls in the Twentieth Century Allowances and Spending Money American Girls Collection Arts and Crafts Asian American Girls

D Dance Classes Dances and Dancing Dating and Courtship Daughters and Fathers Daughters and Mothers Depression and Girls Diaries Disabilities Dollhouses Dolls Domestic Service Domesticity

B Babysitting Barbie Bat Mitzvah Birth Control Body Image

E C

Eating Disorders Education of Girls Emotions Enslaved Girls of African Descent

Camp Fire Girls Captivity Cars Catholic Girls Cheerleaders Chicana Girls Child Abuse Child Guidance

F Fairy Tales Fan Clubs

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A-to-Z List of Entries

Female Sexuality 4-H Free Girls of African Descent Frontier Girls

G Gifted Girls Girl Gangs Girl Power Girl Scouts Girls and Sweets Girls’ Culture Girls’ Fiction Girls’ Magazines Girls’ Rooms Graffiti

L Latina Girls Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls Lesbians Literacy Little Mothers

M Mathematics and Science Mennonite Girls Menstruation Mill Girls Movies, Adolescent Girls in

H

N

Hair Handbags Home Economics Education Hygiene

Nancy Drew Mysteries Native American Girls

I

Orphans and Orphanages

Immigration Indentured Servants

P

O

Jewish Education of Girls Juvenile Delinquents

Pets Pickford, Mary Play Pocahontas Prom Psychotherapy Punk Rock Puritan Girls

K

Q

Kinaaldá

La Quinceañera

VOLUME 2, J–Z J

A-to-Z List of Entries

R

Surfer Girls

Radical Feminism Reading Red Diaper Girls Relational Theory Riot Grrrls Rural Girls

T

S Samplers Saturday Evening Girls Sexual Harassment Slumber Parties Sororities Southern Belles Sports Substance Abuse Suicidal Behavior in Girls Summer Camps for Girls

Tea Parties Technology Teen Pregnancy Teenybopper Television Temple, Shirley Tomboys

W Witchcraft Work

Z Zines

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Contributors and Their Entries

Susan R. Applebaum Independent Scholar Overland Park, Kansas Daughters and Mothers

Amy L. Best San Jose State University San Jose, California Prom

Cecilia J. Aragón Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona La Quinceañera

Carla Bittel Cornell University Ithaca, New York Arts and Crafts

Lori Askeland Wittenberg University Springfield, Ohio Adoption Orphans and Orphanages

Kay J. Blalock Saint Louis Community College– Meramec Saint Louis, Missouri Catholic Girls

Joe Austin Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio Graffiti

Stephan F. Brumberg Brooklyn College Brooklyn, New York and The Graduate Center The City University of New York New York, New York Jewish Education of Girls

Elizabeth R. Baer Gustavus Adolphus College St. Peter, Minnesota Fairy Tales

Susan K. Cahn State University of New York–Buffalo Buffalo, New York Sports

Dale Baker Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Mathematics and Science

Cordelia Candelaria Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Chicana Girls

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Contributors and Their Entries

Silvia Sara Canetto Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado Suicidal Behavior in Girls

Mary Elliott Sonoma State University Rohnert Park, California Tomboys

Marsha Propst Carothers University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Handbags

Miriam Forman-Brunell University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Babysitting Diaries Dolls Domesticity Girls’ Culture Girls’ Rooms Indentured Servants Play Pocahontas Puritan Girls Slumber Parties Southern Belles Tea Parties Witchcraft Work

Barbara J. Coleman University of Colorado–Boulder Boulder, Colorado Barbie Hair Krista Comer Rice University Houston, Texas Surfer Girls Delia Crutchfield Cook University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri African American Girls in the Twentieth Century Rebecca Daugherty Independent Scholar Atlanta, Georgia Punk Rock Rachel Devlin Tulane University New York, New York Daughters and Fathers Hasia R. Diner New York University New York, New York Immigration Gary L. Ebersole University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Captivity

Ruth Formanek, Emeritus Hofstra University Hempstead, New York Sexual Harassment Samantha Yates Francois University of California–Davis Davis, California Cosmetics Susan K. Freeman Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio Female Sexuality Donna Gaffney Pace University Women’s Justice Center White Plains, New York Acquaintance Rape

Contributors and Their Entries Jane Greer University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Diaries Literacy Mill Girls

Lisa Jacobson University of California– Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California Allowances and Spending Money Consumer Culture

Katherine C. Grier University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolina Pets

Kathleen W. Jones Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, Virginia Child Guidance

Anita Gurian New York University School of Medicine New York, New York Depression and Girls Gifted Girls Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls Mary Ellen Hanson University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico Cheerleaders Gina Hausknecht Coe College Cedar Rapids, Iowa American Girls Collection Kathleen C. Hilton The University of North Carolina– Pembroke Pembroke, North Carolina 4-H Rural Girls Kristi Holsinger University of Missouri– Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Girl Gangs Juvenile Delinquents

Judith V. Jordan Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts Relational Theory Mary Celeste Kearney University of Texas–Austin Austin, Texas Television Zines Cherie Kelly Independent Scholar Kansas City, Missouri Comic Books Kathryn R. Kent Williams College Williamstown, Massachusetts Lesbians Kristen Kidder Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio Teenybopper Wilma King University of Missouri–Columbia Columbia, Missouri Enslaved Girls of African Descent Free Girls of African Descent

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Contributors and Their Entries

Kelly E. Kinnison University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Child Abuse

Kristine M. McCusker Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, Tennessee Communication

Melissa Klapper Rutgers University Highland Park, New Jersey Bat Mitzvah

Erin McMurray New York University New York, New York Camp Fire Girls

Greta Grace Kroeker University of California–Berkeley Berkeley, California Mennonite Girls

Julia Mickenberg University of Texas–Austin Austin, Texas Red Diaper Girls

Kate Clifford Larson University of New Hampshire Durham, New Hampshire Saturday Evening Girls

Tara Mitchell Mielnik Tennessee Historical Commission Nashville, Tennessee College Girls

Nina E. Lerman Whitman College Walla Walla, Washington Technology

Mary Miles Cornell University Ithaca, New York Sororities

Alejandra Marchevsky California State University–Los Angeles Los Angeles, California Latina Girls

Natalia Molina University of California–San Diego San Diego, California Latina Girls

Randy D. McBee Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas Dances and Dancing

John Morrow Independent Scholar Overland Park, Kansas Cars

Carole McCann University of Maryland at Baltimore County Baltimore, Maryland Birth Control

Ilana Nash Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio Nancy Drew Mysteries

Michelle L. McClellan University of Georgia Athens, Georgia Substance Abuse

Sharon H. Nathan Menninger Clinic Topeka, Kansas Eating Disorders Psychotherapy

Contributors and Their Entries

Claudia Nelson Southwest Texas State University San Marcos, Texas Girls’ Fiction Rebecca R. Noel Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts Hygiene Fran O’Connor Nassau Community College Garden City, New York Disabilities Jo B. Paoletti University of Maryland at College Park College Park, Maryland Clothing Rita Papini University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Dating and Courtship Temple, Shirley Leslie Paris University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Dollhouses Summer Camps for Girls Jennifer Phegley University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Reading Elizabeth Pleck University of Illinois– Urbana Champaign Champaign, Illinois Kinaaldá

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Sharon G. Portwood University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Child Abuse Heather Munro Prescott Central Connecticut State University New Britain, Connecticut Adolescent Health Menstruation Anita Reznicek St. Teresa’s Academy and University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Education of Girls Joel P. Rhodes Johnson County Museums Shawnee, Kansas Radical Feminism Melisa Rivière University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota Graffiti Kimberley Roberts University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia Girl Power Girls’ Culture Riot Grrrls Elizabeth Rose Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut Little Mothers Mary Rothschild Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Girl Scouts

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Contributors and Their Entries

Barbara Ryan University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Domestic Service

Linda J. Tomko University of California–Riverside Riverside, California Dance Classes

Georganne Scheiner Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Fan Clubs Girl Scouts Movies, Adolescent Girls in

Benson Tong Wichita State University Wichita, Kansas Asian American Girls Native American Girls

Kelly Schrum George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Girls’ Magazines Deborah B. Smith University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri Home Economics Education

Lynne Vallone Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Advice Books Luise van Keuren Green Mountain College Poultney, Vermont Samplers

Rickie Solinger Independent Scholar Boulder, Colorado Teen Pregnancy

Shirley Teresa Wajda Kent State University Kent, Ohio Collecting Domesticity

Peter N. Stearns George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia Emotions

Elliott West University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas Frontier Girls

Rabbi Bonnie Steinberg Temple Beth El Huntington, New York Bat Mitzvah

Wendy A. Woloson The Library Company of Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Girls and Sweets

Kathleen Thompson Independent Scholar Chicago, Illinois African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

Anne Burri Wolverton University of Chicago Chicago, Illinois Pickford, Mary Kathryn J. Zerbe Menninger Clinic Topeka, Kansas Body Image

Foreword

A

and educators about the crash in selfesteem among adolescent girls, asked what this new confluence of quasi-feminism and girl-centered marketing might mean for the future of feminism and for the lived experiences of these future women. Indeed, in the early and mid-1990s, feminist scholars charted out two large areas in the study of girlhood in America. Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown in Meeting at the Crossroads, Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia, and others focused on how girls navigated the shoals of female adolescence in what Pipher called a “hostile media environment.” Millions of parents became aware of the way girls learned to silence themselves and their ambitions once they hit their teenage years, and thus many were happy (at least grudgingly) to have their daughters belt out pop lyrics that affirmed female friendships and that told boys who refused to respect them to buzz off. The other area of research, as exemplified by Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project and Miriam Formanek-Brunell’s Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of Girlhood, began to explore the cultural history of growing up female in America, and how commercial forces powerfully shaped that experience. Some of this research informed government initiatives, like the one promoted

lready it seems like a tintype: preteen girls, dancing around in the den, singing “I’ll tell ya what I want, what I really, really want.” Now disbanded, another piece of 1990s ephemera, the Spice Girls were, in 1997, a mammoth international media phenomenon. They sold ten million albums worldwide; their single “Wannabe” topped the charts in thirty-five countries across four continents. Dismissed by most critics as flashin-the-pan, no-talent, crassly commercial opportunists, the Spice Girls nonetheless evoked enormous passion and loyalty among their largely preteen female fans. More than just another pop group, the Spice Girls enjoyed the success that they did because they were promoting “girl power,” their “freshened up” version of feminism in which, as they said, “you have a brain, a voice, and an opinion,” and get respect even though you’re wearing a wonder bra and fuchsia platform boots. Girls wanted to believe the group’s liner notes, which promised that the “Future Is Female.” They wanted to believe that their pop culture, and their cultural practices, mattered as much as boys’. Marketers for all sorts of products co-opted that desire and sold it back to girls through tee shirts, eye shadow, and athletic gear. Feminist scholars and critics, some of whom had already paved the way for “girl power” by warning parents

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Foreword

by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala titled, you guessed it, “girl power.” Apparently marketers had also been reading Mary Pipher: suddenly, in shops like The Limited 2, targeted to preteen girls, one could find tee shirts that proclaimed “Girls Rule” or “Stand Back Boys—Soccer Is a Girls’ Job.” So what we witnessed in the mid- and late 1990s was an important new confluence of academic interest in girlhood, of new cultural expressions of girls’ feistiness, and of the discovery of the financial potency of the girl, preteen, and teenage market. The Spice Girls’ mega-hit CD both drew from and enhanced these trends, and signaled that girls had indeed become very important, to very different people, for very different, often contradictory reasons. This encyclopedia on Girlhood in America engages many of these interests and concerns, and does so with enormous compassion and rigorous critical acuity. It gives expression and shape to a crucially important yet consistently neglected—if not dismissed—foundation of our society: the study of what it means, and what it has meant, to be a girl in America. For much too long, the history and sociology of children and of youth cultures, when they have been done at all, have focused primarily on boys. What girls did for the first fifteen or twenty years of their lives—baby-sitting, cheerleading, going to slumber parties, working, writing in their diaries—wasn’t on most academic radar screens as mattering at all in furthering our understanding of the anthropology and sociology of everyday life. But if we don’t understand how girls grow up, we cannot possibly

appreciate how their everyday practices during their formative years shape so much in our society, from workplace dynamics to family life to the struggle for social justice. What you will also find especially striking and welcome in this collection is its refusal to consider only white, middle class, heterosexual girls. Entries on slavery; on Latinas, Asian American, Native American, and African American girls; and on lesbians emphasize how the lives of girls have differed powerfully depending on race, locale, class, and/or sexuality. And yet, we are also reminded of what can still unite girls in their experiences of marginality—and of bonding because of that marginality—in a society where, still, more than three decades after the women’s liberation movement, women make seventy-five cents to a man’s dollar, are still the primary caregivers to children and aging parents, and suffer ongoing violence at the hands of men. But this collection also insists on reclaiming the exuberance of girlhood, and on reclaiming what girls have done and still do as culturally significant. You will be sobered by what we yet have to accomplish for our daughters—all of them. But you will also be buoyed by how far we have come, by girls’ refusal to turn back the clock, and by their ingenious, inventive, joyful, and defiant games, rituals, and strategies that help them survive and advance the struggle for equality in what someday may not be primarily a man’s world. Susan J. Douglas Professor of Communication Studies University of Michigan–Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, Michigan

Running Head

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Preface and Acknowledgments

G

irlhood in America: An Encyclopedia examines American girls’ histories and cultures over more than 400 years of our nation’s past. Written by nearly 100 established scholars and rising stars in the academy, the 120 comprehensive historical entries in these two volumes consider many aspects of a diverse population of girls of different races, classes, genders, religions, regions, ethnicities, ages, abilities, and sexual orientations. The variety of girls considered here— African American, Native American, Asian American, Latinas, Chicanas, Caucasian girls—those of privilege and those with challenges, make it clear that American girlhood has been far more heterogeneous than the dominant white, middleclass model that has shaped our popular imagination. The differences and the similarities in girlhoods across race and class lines can be attributed to such profound historical transformations as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization in addition to other forces and factors critical in framing girls’ lives: dominant race and gender ideologies; socioeconomic contexts; religious and ethnic traditions; family life, schools, and other institutions; consumer and popular culture; and girls themselves. All of these factors along with standard historical markers are included here, but the sustained focus is on girls. In this A-

to-Z reference work, students, scholars, researchers, and writers can expect to find the prevalent and the particular in the everyday lives of American girls, beyond the scope of what one might expect to find in a work that is part of a larger series on the American family. This work aims to provide a solid basis for understanding American girls who have been an unrecognized part of the national past by examining their families, organizations, methods of socialization, education and vocation, their forms of work, and their types of play. This preface serves to highlight only some of the many prominent topics in the history of American girlhood that follows. A variety of institutions have assumed a salient role in shaping girlhood in America. We examine many of the most influential, beginning with the family and the culturally constructed role of daughters. “No matter what the individual differences may be, the motherdaughter relationship plays a central role in the lives of both daughters and their mothers.” In her entry, Rachel Devlin explains how historically a girl’s relationships to men, family, society, and to herself have been shaped by the defining relationship of daughters and fathers. According to Katherine C. Grier, “When Sarah Josepha Hale, author and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, published ‘Mary’s

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Preface and Acknowledgments Lamb’ in 1830 [better known as ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’] she offered her young readers a concise story that connected little girls, kindness to animals, and keeping pets in a manner that reflected changing attitudes toward all three subjects.” In entries like these that privilege the role authoritative ideologies about gender and race have played in shaping families, we consider the vast differences in girls’ childhood experiences. We also explore the shifting boundaries between the socialization and vocation of girls within the context of family life. For example, entries such as Carla Bittel’s on girls’ arts and crafts activities demonstrate how “the meaning of craft production for girls has changed over time, evolving from work that was part of the family economy in early America to a leisured activity rooted in peer culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” The entry on the history of girls’ work; others on enslaved, indentured, and domestic servants; and an entry on babysitters reveal that girls have assumed, expected, and accepted domestic roles and feminized employment whether raised on a farm or plantation, in the city or in suburbia. Such was often the case among Asian American girls and those of other ethnic groups who helped support family economies by doing housework and providing child care. Entries on Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, Mennonite, and other girls shed light on the distinctive ways in which families’ religious beliefs and faith-based institutions have generated both obstacles and opportunities for girls. For example, while Catholic education has served to contain girls within traditional patriarchal roles, it has also provided girls (especially inner-city African American and Latina girls) with significant educational

advantages. The gender differences in religious rituals, beliefs, customs, curricula—as well as access to them—are addressed in entries on Catholic and Jewish education. Such sacred and secular markers of the passage from girlhood to adolescence include communion, the Navajo puberty rite of Kinaaldá, cosmetics, and proms. The quinceañera, a Mexican-American girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, also “celebrates the transition to womanhood, with [an] emphasis on her conventional feminine qualities and potential value as a wife.” The context and content of girls’ formal education is the focus of entries on schools, colleges, and curricula (e.g., math, science, and sex education). Entries on literacy, gifted girls, and learning disabilities address the pleasures as well as the problems that many female students have faced in their intellectual development. Other institutional agents of socialization include the Girl Scouts, 4-H, the Saturday Evening Girls, and summer camps. Like many others, the Camp Fire Girls combined traditional notions of hearth and home with more modern values about girls. Though many clubs excluded African American girls or provided segregated facilities before integration, clubs, organizations, and sororities are nevertheless noteworthy for engendering community support and racial pride among the African American girls they did serve. Hornbooks, handbooks, and “texts” of all sorts have served to socialize girls. Lynn Vallone’s entry on advice books, which have been prominent since the early 1800s, demonstrates how recent Internet sites still provide proscriptions and prescriptions about acceptable feminine behavior. Samplers (a common feature of girlhood education in early America) can also be read as texts that promoted

Preface and Acknowledgments xxvi gendered ideals (e.g., industry, femininity, virtue, piety, and friendship), and taught literacy and mastery of domestic skills. The extensive history of girls’ domestic education is also addressed elsewhere in entries on domesticity, arts and crafts, home economics, and tea parties. Whether learning how to sip tea or sew textiles, girls’ bodies have served as powerful sites of socialization, sexuality, sickness, and stress. These themes are explored in Heather Prescott Munro’s entry on the role of medical and psychological experts for whom the sexuality and reproduction of adolescent girls were at the forefront of their thinking and their treatment. The historical and psychological dimensions of girls’ bodies are also considered in entries on the Barbie doll, body image, eating disorders, hygiene, menstruation. Scholars also consider the cultural meanings and social uses of clothing, cosmetics, and hair. Struggles between social services (e.g., clinics, courts, and prisons) and girls over the control of the female adolescent body are the focus of entries that examine discourses about abortion, lesbians, sexuality, and teen pregnancy. As for birth control, Carol McCann explains that “throughout U.S. history, anxiety about the sexual activity of adolescent girls has played a central role in public debates about contraception.” Violence against girls has also harmed their bodies, influenced their identities, and shaped their behavior. Thus, we examine sexual harassment, acquaintance rape, and child abuse as well as girls in colonial and Victorian captivity narratives, sermons, and sentimental literature. Also examined are the ageand gender-specific dimensions of girls’ psychological lives in entries on child guidance, depression, psychotherapy, substance abuse, and suicide.

Other entries focus on the commodification of girls, especially since the burgeoning of the consumer culture in the early 1900s. The role of consumption and financial autonomy in the lives of girls and female adolescents is explored in regard to allowances and spending money, girls’ magazines, shopping, and teenyboppers. Entries on consumer goods—and over 100 archival and artifactual illustrations— shed light on the seemingly antithetical values marketed to girl consumers. “Through shopping,” writes Lisa Jacobson about consumer culture, “many girls have discovered a new brand of independence that comes from making their own consumer choices. At the same time, however, consumer culture has also steered girls toward prescribed gender roles and culturally acceptable aspirations.” This is readily apparent in the Pleasant Company’s American Girls collection encoded with positive messages about females as well as more traditional notions about domesticity, maternity, and consumption. Though geared toward older adolescents, car advertisements similarly emphasize how girls behind the wheel can achieve independence, identity, self-expression, control, equality, and romance. The changing context of ideals about girlhood and female adolescence in American social and cultural history is clarified in numerous entries. The eroticization of girls—and the exoticization of Asian American females—have led scholars to examine the ethos and ideology that have informed a variety of tropes about girls in the popular culture. Scholars demonstrate how representations of cheerleaders and babysitters among others in movies reveal larger anxieties about adolescent female autonomy. The fashioning of girls’ imaginations, fantasies, and desires is further explored in

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entries on dating, emotions, and teenybopper culture. Essays on fairy tales, girls’ fiction, and girls’ magazines similarly deconstruct misogynist, racist, and stereotyped representations of girls in the print culture. Comics produced by the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers Studios, for example, “encouraged girls to be nurturers and represented female characters in typical domestic situations” in postwar America. Other writers analyze the music, cartoons, and sitcoms that have also played a role in establishing, reflecting, and maintaining ideals. Entries on the performative nature of cheerleaders, prom queens, and southern belles also provide insight into these prominent patriarchal cultural constructions. Barbie, Nancy Drew, Mary Pickford, and Shirley Temple are the focus of entries on pop culture icons of girls. What has all of this meant to girls? What role have they played in shaping their own girlhoods? In the many socializing sources and sites they encounter over the course of their upbringing, girls have often read oppositional meanings. Making meanings other than the preferred ones has enabled girls to negotiate, resist, and contest dominant cultural values that trivialize girls and render them powerless. For example, although their mothers often read the diaries that charted the path of their daughters’ self-discipline and moral development, “Victorian girls nevertheless used diaries in order to nurture an identity separate from family.” In other venues, girls have transformed cultural products like clothing and dolls for purposes other than what they were originally intended. Although dollhouses encouraged girls to learn consumer habits and homemaking, they were also symbols of girls’ power and control over their miniature domain.

Other studies of girls’ play (especially among enslaved girls), sports, and reading shed light on some of the many ways in which girls have subverted the ideals of normative female identity embedded in American culture. Movies, too, have been reappropriated for girls’ use as fantasies of agency. Scholars who study American girls’ history agree that, to one degree or another, girls have played a role in shaping their own girlhoods. Across cultures and classes, races, regions, and religions, girls of all ages have challenged the restrictions that have contained them. Although commercialized girls’ cultures have aimed to instill socially acceptable notions of gender, girls have forged more rebellious versions by transforming commodities and contexts. The research shows that even such cultural practices as slumber parties can be transformative, at least for a night. “Through their fan activities” as well, explains Georganne Scheiner, “girls have found cultural authority, agency, and a uniquely creative voice.” The underground communications culture of note passing, phone calls, and talking has nurtured girls and provided them with feelings of sorority and protection. Adolescent feminists, female juvenile delinquents, girl gang members, girl surfers, lesbians, and tomboys are some of the many girls who have used more public spaces and more radical cultures to explore alternatives to feminine ideals. Defiant African American girls like Linda Brown challenged racial segregation in the streets, at schools, and in the courts of postwar America. Entries that consider girls’ explorations of other masculine methods and arenas include those on graffiti and punk rock, which opened up new spaces for successive generations of young women in popular music. Other girl cul-

Preface and Acknowledgments tural producers are included in the history of girl bands, the riot grrrl movement, zines, and the multivalent girl power ethos. Grrrls’ comix have also addressed feminist issues rather than offering advice on boy-catching and husband-getting. Entries such as these elucidate girls’ most recent efforts at reconstructing girlhood along explicitly feminist lines. There are still many girls about which we know very little. “Not enough is known about the experience of black girls in this society,” writes feminist scholar bell hooks in her autobiography, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. According to Hasia Diner in her entry, “To understand what it meant to be an immigrant girl must be cobbled together from studies of other aspects of immigration.” “Few, if any, scholars have analyzed the complex role disabilities have played, either in fictional or cinematic representations of girls with disabilities or in the lives of real American girls,” writes Fran O’Connor. Like others, “It remains an area ripe for historical and literary study.” It is our hope that this work will serve as a useful reference to researchers as they continue to trace the paths of more girls and chart the history of other girlhoods in America. Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Marie Ellen Larcada of ABC-CLIO, the best acquisitions editor I have known. Marie Ellen offered me this project and I cannot thank her enough for the opportunities it has provided me. First, I have been privileged to work with a wonderful team of editors: Jennifer Loehr organized the encyclopedia’s massive databases, sent out contracts, and sent gentle reminders to contributors about approaching deadlines. Karna Hughes’s good cheer, enthusiasm, faultless organization, and tireless prod-

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ding kept me and this project on schedule. This project would not have become a book without Beth Partin, the copy editor, who edited more than 320,000 words. Melanie Stafford—a fellow feminist traveller—skillfully shepherded this work through copyediting, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, and assembling the volumes you now hold in your hands. Editing is an opportunity to learn, and I have learned about the history of girls from reading and rereading the excellent essays written by the nearly 100 contributors chosen for their expertise. I deeply appreciate the bevy of scholars—such as Anita Gurian and Sharon Nathan—who took time out from their hectic careers and personal lives to research, write, and rewrite the outstanding entries that have made this work possible. I owe special thanks to my good friends Jane Greer, Barbara Ryan, and Leslie Paris, who wrote entries drawn from their own pathbreaking research. Youth studies scholars Joe Austin and Michael Willard put me in touch with other talented contributors like Ilana Nash whose e-mails I still relish. My thanks to Kitty Sklar, who led me to dance historian Linda Tomko and to Eileen Boris for Kimberley Roberts whose own wonderful work on girl power has enabled me to better understand the recent history of babysitters in my current research. Advisory Board members— especially Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Wilma King, Steven Mintz, and Lynne Vallone— provided useful assistance and fruitful leads. My thanks to Darlene Clark Hine for Kathleen Thompson, a goddess-send. And if someone ever coins a feminist equivalent to “Mensch” or “the Dude,” Susan J. Douglas deserves such a title. This work would have taken much longer if not for the support of other colleagues, administrators, and students.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Some of my colleagues—especially Gary Ebersole, Jennifer Phegley, and Kristi Holsinger—wrote fascinating entries on varied aspects of girls’ issues. Pat Peebles, chair of the history department at the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC), calmly tolerated the dwindling of office supplies (e.g., reams of paper and boxes of ink cartridges) that enabled me to print and reprint entry after entry until they were perfect enough to send off to ABCCLIO. Undergraduate and graduate students (especially Anita Reznicek, Rita Papini, Greta Kroeker, and Joel Rhodes) and those in my Girlhood and Boyhood in America course provided me with the opportunity both to learn from them and to teach what I love. I received a generous faculty leave from James Durig, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, before the corporatization of academic life threatened the integrity of the humanities. My deepest thanks are to my family. As always, my mother’s copyediting expertise enriched my writing and clarified my thinking. Claude, Perry, and Zoë Brunell

made room for this project at home, on vacations, and in their lives in general. My husband, Claude, edited my prose and did more than his share of washing dirty dishes and scrubbing grubby faces. He also provided me with much needed encouragement when I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of my tasks: editing a two-volume encyclopedia while raising two children, tending five pets, teaching full-time, and directing UMKC’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. My seven-year-old daughter, Zoë, to whom this work is dedicated, listened to rough drafts of entries about the history of girls’ dolls, tea parties, slumber parties, and play with some interest and enormous patience. Still, it is from her that I have learned the most about girls and their girlhoods and I thank her for that. Miriam Forman-Brunell Associate Professor of History University of Missouri–Kansas City Kansas City, Missouri

Introduction

U

ntil recently, the history of girls and their cultures had been largely subsumed within fields that categorized girls more generally as children, adolescents, daughters, or young women. But this undifferentiated lumping neglected not only knowledge of girls, but also the processes by which womanhood developed out of girlhood. Building on the work of Angela McRobbie in the 1970s and Joan Jacobs Brumberg in the 1980s, girls’ culture emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry in the 1990s with such outstanding works as Susan Douglas’s Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994).1 Scholarly anthologies such as The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (1994) and Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures (1998) highlighted the new scholarship on girls’ cultures, but unfortunately could do no more than provide an introduction to the subject.2 Picking up where collections on “girls’ culture” have left off, this two-volume encyclopedia includes 120 topics that examine the everyday lives of girls of different ages, races, classes, sexualities, religions, ethnicities, and abilities as well as discourses about them. What has made it possible to chart the terrain of America’s girls, adolescents, and young women—the portion of the female life

span this work broadly encompasses— has been the outpouring of the conceptually creative and methodologically rigorous scholarship based on the information about girls that is everywhere woven into the tapestry of our nation’s past. One only need look for girls to find them. Whether working, writing, playing, or protesting, girls have shaped American history and culture in indelible ways, though only some achieved the status of national myths. Pocahontas, the teenage daughter of a powerful Native American chief, is still very much at the center of one of our nation’s most cherished—and regularly reinvented—historical legends. Girl accusers of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, provoked one of our country’s deepest cultural crises. But immigrant and migrant girls also played a crucial part in the life and labor of the American frontier where Native American girls had been thriving for millennia.3 Enslaved girls were important to the economy and culture of the plantation South, and free girls in the industrializing Northeast. For centuries, girls have contributed to agricultural, domestic, industrial, service, informal, and underground economies and made history by laboring in fields and factories. In the twentieth century, our popular culture has been shaped by adolescent girls who have played a formative

Introduction role in the history of American movies just as teenyboppers, “with more economic capital at their disposal,” have influenced trends in pop music since the 1960s.4 What music, movies, legends, and letters reveal is that girls served the needs and enriched the cultures of families, communities, and the country while also carving out their own history and shaping their own distinct cultures. Although girls from Pocahontas to punk rockers have been integral to American culture, most have been overlooked, their lives undervalued. Perceived as insipid and insignificant, and essentialized as passive and pretty, girls have been judged as undeserving of serious scrutiny, critical analysis, and hence scholarship. Fortunately for those of us who study girlhood, fathers like Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about their daughters. In fact, references to “good girls” and “bad girls” appear often in letters and other primary sources written by the little known and the reknowned. Colonial historian Mary Beth Norton recently observed in Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) that “daughters . . . appeared in Locke’s and Filmer’s political writings solely as disruptive influences.”5 Nevertheless, perceptions of girls as pliant left them embedded within broader historical fields of study. As a result, retrieval of information about them has been one of the central challenges facing researchers. Arthur W. Calhoun’s A Social History of the American Family, vol. 1 Colonial Period (1917) was the first scholarly book that privileged girls’ historical experiences with an index listing, but most works did not, and do not still.6 A less practical matter than indexing, however, has been teasing out girls’ experiences from those of others. In part, this has been due to the scholarship on the

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history of childhood that emerged from Progressive-era reform, which centered on child study and child welfare. Over one hundred years ago, Alice Morse Earl was surprised by “how little is told of child life in history.”7 Using letters and diaries, portraits, and other primary sources, Earle documented the ordinary lives of EuroAmerican children in Child Life Colonial Days (1899), though from a largely Eurocentric and ungendered perspective. Native American girls, for example, are conspicuous by their absence. The republication of Arthur Calhoun’s A Social History of the American Family in the 1960s, along with Edmund S. Morgan’s revised 1944 classic on New England family life, led to a wave of outstanding studies on families, childhood, and adolescence.8 But the “new” social histories generated by postwar permissiveness and the rise of 1960s youth culture perpetuated the use of age as the only tool of analysis. Though the new scholarly approach to studying the past “from the bottom up” opened up opportunities for the study of nations’ youngest populations, most works overlooked the gendered dimensions of children and adolescents: girlhood was subsumed within childhood, childhood within family life. Many insightful works provided little more than a glimpse into what experiences could clearly be discerned as particularly girls’.9 Although more recent works on the history of children have tended to incorporate girls into narratives, analyses of how gender has worked and how girls destabilized gender systems still remain largely undeveloped. One might have expected information about girls to be abundant within the “new” women’s history scholarship.10 But the influence of second-wave feminism on women’s history scholarship,

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Introduction

which shaped the field’s research agenda for decades, posed surprising challenges for those interested in younger females. Adult women remained very much at the center of most studies despite the focus on the “private side” of women’s lives. Girls and adolescents were integrated into Mary Beth Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters (1980) and Christine Stansell’s City of Women (1987), but these early works remained notable exceptions and did not initiate a new scholarly direction as far as girls were concerned.11 In general, the vast number of women’s history monographs that focused on womanhood yielded little about girlhood. Instead, women and “women’s culture” obscured the existence of girls, an analysis of “girls’ cultures,” and the acknowledgment of the decisive role that girlhood as an ideological construct played in shaping women’s roles in particular and American society in general. Fortunately, the more recent scholarship on women has proven to be more fertile, especially for the study of female adolescents. Pathbreaking works by historians such as Barbara Sicherman and Jane Hunter have drawn upon reader response and other postmodern theories to examine girls’ reading and writing.12 Studies such as Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s and Heather Prescott Munro’s on the diseases and treatment of girlhood and female adolescents have led to a revision of girls as an age category within the literature on the social history of medicine.13 The pioneering studies of historians such as Kathy Peiss, Mary Odem, Regina Kunzel, Ruth Alexander, Rickie Solinger, and others have led to the development of a viable narrative about how notions about female adolescent sexualities ebbed and changed along with definitions of delinquency and deviance.14

Though “youth studies” has generally favored boys’ experiences over girls’, studies of “girls’ culture” have leveled the playing field.15 By placing girls at the center of historical inquiry, scholars of U.S. history and culture have now broken new ground by examining girls’ agency as well as their accommodation.16 Scholars who study girls and female adolescents have drawn upon the theoretical insights of feminist theory and cultural studies and made use of a wide variety of methodologies. They “read” or interpret popular culture17 as well as girls’ bodies as texts.18 Some researchers have used interdisciplinary approaches including ethnographic methods.19 They synthesize prescriptive sources such as advice manuals with subjective ones like diaries and letters. They problematize girlhood activities, athletics, and events, and privilege primary sources previously regarded as historically insignificant.20 Many are reexamining the ways in which girls of all kinds have been educated.21 They utilize “material culture” sources as legitimate historical methodologies and bodies of evidence.22 These two volumes aim to summarize and synthesize the scholarly literature and to analyze and contextualize numerous primary sources. New books, movies, and magazines about girls and by girls are everywhere in movie theaters and bookstores today.23 Because not everyone burned the letters “filled with the chat of young girls” as suggested by the author of The Young Lady’s Friend (1837), there is also no shortage of extant sources that document girls’ subjectivities. Sermons, advice books, magazines, and other cultural scripts that proscribed and prescribed gender roles are everywhere in archives and attics. It is my hope that the research on girls and female adolescents presented in 120

Introduction different historical contexts will prove useful to those currently mapping the material worlds and cultural terrain of girls. In schools across the country, a wide variety of child-centered classes and gender-focused courses are taught in departments of history, sociology, psychology, English, education, women’s studies, family studies, and media studies. What we uncover about girls, I hope, will lead to the reconceptualizations of the history of childhood, adolescence, women, and the family upon which this work draws and to which it aims to make its biggest contribution. Already museums and historical societies are revising standard historical narratives as they reorganize their toy collections and mount interpretive exhibits. The goal of this work is to make the information gathered here about American girls accessible to everyone: from researchers to writers, students to scholars, teachers to curators, and girls to women. Notes 1. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). 2. Sherrie A. Inness, Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 5; Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, eds., The Girls’ Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 3. Elliott West, “Frontier Girls” entry. 4. Kristen Kidder, “Teenybopper” entry; Georganne Scheiner, “Movies” entry.

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5. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 99. 6. Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family, vol. 1 Colonial Period (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), first printed in 1917. 7. Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. vii. 8. Robert A. Bremner et al., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970–1974); Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family, vol. 1 Colonial Period (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Glen H. Elder, Children and the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament (New York: Meridian, 1979); Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1944); Danill Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), chap. 2; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968, reprinted in 1972). See also Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Steven Novak, The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 9. Essays in N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, Growing Up in America: Children in

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Introduction

Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Anthologies continued to be organized around the concept of childhood. See Elliott West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992). 10. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love/Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1986); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 11. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 12. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov, Rediscovering Nancy Drew (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995); Shirley Foster and Judy Simons, What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995); Jane Hunter, “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late Victorian America,” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 1992): 51–58; Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997); Shirley Marchalonis, College Girls: A Century of Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Barbara Sicherman, “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text,” pp. 245–266 in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, edited by Linda Kerber et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 13. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1988); Heather Munro Prescott, “A Doctor of Their Own”: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 14. Ruth M. Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Carole McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992). 15. Joe Austin, Taking the Train: Youth, Urban Crisis, and Graffiti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Joe Austin and Michael Willard, eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in 20th Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 16. Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Sherrie A. Inness, Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century Girls’ Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, eds., The Girls’ Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Lynne Vallone, Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Cul-

Introduction ture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 17. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet, Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994); Sherrie A. Inness, Tough Girls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 18. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997). 19. In addition to Angela McRobbie, see Amira Porweller, Constructing Female Identities: Meaning-Making in an Upper Middle Class Youth Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 20. Amy L. Best, Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); Susan Cahn, Coming On Strong: Gender and Sexuality in 20th Century Women’s Sport (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 21. Dale Baker and Michael Piburn, Constructing Science in Middle and Secondary School Classrooms (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1997); Stephan F. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (New York: Praeger, 1986); Sherrie A. Inness, Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995). 22. Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900 (Boston: Northeastern Univer-

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sity Press, 1992); Miriam FormanekBrunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 23. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Chelsea Cain, Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture (Seattle: Seal Press, 1999); Carol Cassidy, Girls in America: Their Stories, Their Words (New York: TV Books, 1999); Ophira Edut, ed., Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write about Body Image and Identity (Seattle: Seal Press, 1998); Andrew Garrod, Janie Victoria Ward, Tracy L. Robinson, and Robert Kilkenny, Souls Looking Back: Life Stories of Growing Up Black (New York: Routledge, 1999); Lori Gottlieb, Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Pamela Haag, Voices of a Generation: Teenage Girls Report about Their Lives Today (New York: Marlowe, 2000); Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (New York: Random House, 1997); Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls around the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Turtle Bay, 1993); Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Mimi Nichter, Fat Talk: What Girls and Their Parents Say about Dieting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine, 1994); Sara Shandler, Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write about Their Search for Self (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999); Katherine Tarbox, Katie.com: My Story (New York: Dutton, 2000); Niobe Way, Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

A Acquaintance Rape

nonstranger or acquaintance rape. Acquaintance rape is a broad category that can include any type of relationship in which the victim knows the perpetrator. Date rape is very specific to social or dating situations, that is, it is sexual assault occurring within the confines of a social or date situation. Many adolescent girls do not report the assault because they believe, on some level, that they are responsible for the occurrence. However, it is impossible to comprehend the nature of acquaintance rape and understand its impact on the lives of adolescent girls without exploring the history of sexual assault in Western civilization, the evolution of dating and courtship customs, and the revolution of the women’s movement. Although this brief entry cannot do justice to the importance of the topic, it will serve as a launching point for those who wish to study further.

The statistics are numbing. The number of females sexually assaulted at a young age is shocking and almost too frightening to believe. Yet the figures are supported by study after study: 54 percent of completed or attempted rapes were experienced by women age seventeen and younger (Tjaden and Thoennes 1998); 96 percent of women forced to do something sexual were forced by a nonstranger (Laumann 1996); 77 percent of completed rapes are committed by nonstrangers (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1994); and in sexual assaults of older girls who are between the ages of twelve and seventeen, the assault is more likely to be perpetrated by twelveto twenty-four-year-old acquaintances (Snyder and Sickmund 1999). The Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Justice define rape as forced oral, vaginal, or anal sex (Tjaden and Thoennes, 1998). However, it is crucial to remember that this is not consensual “sex” but an assault resulting from coercion, physical force, or any number of related maneuvers that can include verbal and nonverbal threats, pressure, deception, and harassment (Byers and O’Sullivan 1996). Often the term sexual assault is used interchangeably with the word rape; in fact, some jurisdictions no longer use the word rape in their statutes. Rape can be further classified as stranger or

A Convergence of Historical Events More than twenty-five years ago Susan Brownmiller wrote her landmark book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). The journalist concluded from her historical research that cultural acceptance of sexual force gives rise to a pervasive process of intimidation that affects all women. Her book was published a mere five years after the first “speak out” against rape in New York City. Just when

1

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Acquaintance Rape

Alcohol and drugs have been identified as a factor in some acquaintance rape situations, especially with the advent of “date-rape drugs” added to girls’ drinks, which are sometimes lethal. (Shirley Zeiberg, 1996)

women were achieving sexual independence and control over their own bodies with the advent of the birth control pill in 1960 and the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in 1973, women also stood up and asserted that rape, the unspeakable secret filled with shame and guilt, would no longer be silenced (Brownmiller 1975). The year Brownmiller’s book was published was also the year the Vietnam War was coming to a close. Veterans returned home and raised the public’s consciousness regarding the psychological effects of war. Their grassroots efforts resulted in

the first wide-range research on the effects of trauma among combat veterans. Simultaneously, women’s groups began to address the effects of another kind of trauma, that caused by sexual assault. In 1974, Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom published their research on the psychological effects of rape, or “rape trauma syndrome.” The women’s movement served as the thread joining these significant sociopolitical events of the 1970s. Not only did the movement raise public awareness, but it initiated new social responses to survivors of sexual assault: the rape crisis center and the rape crisis advocate.

Acquaintance Rape However, it was not until 1980 that the issue of acquaintance rape moved onto the national agenda. Although Brownmiller was the first to introduce the term date rape, it was not addressed in the popular literature until Mademoiselle ran an article nearly five years later. In 1985 Ms. magazine ran an extensive story based on Mary Koss’s (1985) research on young adults. The author suggested there was a date rape “epidemic” on college campuses (Sweet 1985). This story also marked the beginning of a deluge of articles focusing on the topic of date rape that continued into the twenty-first century. The question remains, is this a new “epidemic” or an old problem unearthed? Rape, sex crimes, and sexual assault were not addressed in the professional or the public press until the last half of the twentieth century. In 1955, the first articles began to appear, although they were infrequent and primarily written from a legal perspective. Two decades later, the first research studies on the psychological consequences of rape were published (Burgess and Holmstrom 1974). By 1985, nearly three dozen scholarly publications appeared each year on the effects and causes of rape. In the popular literature, the word rape first appeared in 1956. Articles on rape were far outnumbered by the dozens on “sexual ethics,” which advised young women on how to protect their reputations and self-respect, the evils of the sexual revolution, the double standard, and how to stay “out of trouble.” From those first magazine articles, the citations in the popular press multiplied each year; in 1985, nearly forty-eight articles appeared, and in 1999, almost 100 articles. The publishing trends moved from the effects of rape to the causes of sexual assault and finally to prevention. In 1996 a new topic emerged: date rape

3

drugs. This new subject outnumbered nearly all other articles on sexual assault by the beginning of the twenty-first century. The media introduced the threat of acquaintance rape to all young women. They were warned to watch out for the “boy next door” and to be wary of going places and doing things that would put them at risk. The first public service campaign to highlight this issue was initiated by the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. Posters flooded college campuses. The goal was to educate students on the dangers of sexual assault, especially among their friends and acquaintances (Abarbanel 2000). But surely, since girls and boys had been in intimate contact for as long as time itself, how is it that acquaintance rape was finally “revealed” at the end of the twentieth century? Perhaps Emily Post can best answer this question. The Disappearance of Courtship In a 1965 issue of PTA magazine, the noted sex educator Mary Calderone wrote: “We have done away with chaperones, supervision, rules, close family relations and privacy from the intrusion of communication media” (Fishman 1966). Although she addressed the need for sex education, Calderone’s statement on the changing landscape of adolescent sexual relationships is central to the issue of acquaintance rape. The chaperone was alive and well in 1922 when Emily Post first published her book, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. Her chapter on “Chaperons and Other Conventions” stressed that “a young girl who is unprotected by a chaperon is in the position precisely of an unarmed traveler walking among the wolves—his only

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Acquaintance Rape

defense is in not attracting their notice” (Post 1922, chap. 29). The purpose of the chaperone was to preserve the young girl’s honor and reputation by protecting her from situations that would bring her censure by the community: namely, the suspicion that girls who were alone with boys were behaving improperly. Although a boy was involved, it was the girl who was censured or judged by society. The chapter on chaperones disappeared by 1937, but the belief that women are responsible and that their reputation suffers for any unacceptable behavior continues to this day. The fact that a woman might be unable to protect herself or that force was used to gain sex was not even considered. The concern for girls was not that they were assaulted but that they might get pregnant because they could not help themselves. An inflammatory article in a 1966 New York Times Magazine headline announced that every sixth adolescent girl in Connecticut would get pregnant out of wedlock. Even the pioneer of sex education, Mary Calderone, offered the explanation that “neither fear nor external restraints such as curfews keep teenagers chaste any longer” (Brecher and Brecher 1966, 18). At the outset of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution, as young women were establishing their sexual freedom, critics called a woman’s newfound liberation a moral dilemma. Although engaging in sexual intimacy was “morally wrong,” forcible sex was not addressed at all. In January 1967 Joyce Brothers told the readers of her column, “On Being a Woman,” that girls did not have to say more than “no” to a boy’s pressure to have sex. Yet she also remarked that the sexual revolution had

given women conflicting messages about intimacy and that girls should not tease boys because they were the more excitable ones in the relationship. Although it was acceptable for “growing” boys to get their sexual experience on the other side of town or with “loose” girls, it was not acceptable for girls. It was the ultimate double standard. The proponents of sexual ethics placed the responsibility for and the cause of premarital sex and all its consequences on the female. They did not consider the possibility that a girl could be coerced, intimidated, or forced to do something she was not ready or did not want to do. What was it about Western culture that propagated such an idea? Characteristics of a Rape Culture Although there have been many descriptions of a rape culture, the definition remains consistent: it is a system of beliefs in which sexual assault is condoned, excused, and even perpetuated. Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth further describe a rape culture as one “that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women” (1993, preamble). It is a society in which violence and sex are inextricably linked, and the causes are rooted in the basic premises of power, sexuality, and ultimately gender relationships. Perhaps the place to begin is in the earliest centuries of Western civilization, when women were the property of either their fathers or their husbands. They did not have rights to rule or hold any significant possessions of their own. Likewise, a woman’s body was the property of her owner. A violated woman was worthless to her father, so to make amends for the dowry that could never be paid, the rapist

Acquaintance Rape offered to marry the woman, a custom known as bride capture (Brownmiller 1975). The socialization of male and female behaviors begins at an early age. Girls and boys learn they have distinct ways of dressing, playing, and interacting with each other. Women are instructed to be polite and considerate, whereas men are aggressors and competitors. Paradoxically, men are also instructed to protect women. A quotation from an 1876 book of virtues, The Royal Path of Life, exemplifies the attitudes about male dominance in life and in relationships prevalent at the time. The chapter on “Men and Women” contained this statement: “Man has his strength and the exercise of his power, he goes about, thinks, looks forward to the future and finds consolation in it. But woman stays at home, remains face to face with her sorrow, from which nothing distracts her” (Haines and Yaggy 1876). Similar messages continue to this day. The more traditional the attitudes held by men regarding sex roles and relationships, the more likely these individuals are to accept rape myths and be sexually aggressive than are men who do not have such traditional values (Muehlenhard and Linton 1987). The messages of sex, violence, and seduction are on the airwaves nearly every day. Although the nightly news may provide young audiences with stories of sex crimes, the regular programming and advertising seduce the youngest viewer with subtle messages about men, women, and sex. Not only is it suggested that having sex at an early age is the norm, but the way sexual behaviors are negotiated is portrayed as well. Helen Benedict describes the portrayal of women on television as “sex

5

object and glamour girl” (1992). She points out that there is a blending of images of women and the traditional rape myths: “The Vamp version: The Woman by her looks, behavior or generally loose morality, drove the man to such extremes of lust that he was compelled to commit the crime. The Virgin version: The Man, a depraved and perverted monster, sullied the innocent victim, who is now a martyr to the flaws of society” (Benedict 1992, 23). The media messages extend beyond television and film. Magazines, advertisements, and even greeting cards characterize women as less able members of the human race. The Theories of Acquaintance Rape Although changing social customs and cultural implications of sexual aggression may contribute to an environment that facilitates sexual assault, the etiology of date rape is much more complex and requires further analysis. For years researchers believed that rape was simply a matter of miscommunication: a boy overestimated a girl’s interest and underestimated her refusals, and the girl was reluctant to refuse unwanted sex. The miscommunication theories also promote the idea that women are gatekeepers, that they are responsible for ensuring their partners’ understanding of what they do or do not want. Only recently have prevention programs emphasized the need for men to be clear about their own communication and their responsibility to listen to the messages of others. However, Jodee McCaw and Charlene Senn (1998) found that relatively few men engaged in sex without knowing what they were doing. They understood the cues and behaviors of their partners but proceeded regardless of whether

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Acquaintance Rape

Girls are now taught to be cautious about placing themselves in dangerous situations with acquaintances as well as strangers. (Skjold Photographs)

behavioral cues were consistent with their partners’ verbal communication. Eugene Kanin (1957) was the first to explore male aggression in dating and courtship relationships. He later identified the male social support theory (1967). He proposed that boys who already have a tendency toward sexual aggression seek out others who share their attitudes. Once away from the home, these individuals find other young men who reinforce and support each other’s beliefs, verbally or nonverbally. It is not the assault of women per se that motivates these men but a high erotic goal, the need to “score.” When they are

frustrated in achieving this goal, aggression and violence result, and sex is gained through power and control. Walter DeKeseredy (1988) proposed the male peer support theory as an explanation for acquaintance rape. He contends dating involves stress, both internal and external to the relationship, for which males seek out support. Under certain conditions, this support may reinforce or encourage sexual assault. A more current model put forth by DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz (1993) expands the contributing factors to include familial and courtship patriarchy, alcohol consumption, membership in formal social groups (fraternities or sports teams), and absence of deterrence. In most social groups there are factors that encourage or support behaviors of members. Social groups also adhere to specific sanctions. These communications make clear to the membership that certain behaviors are not acceptable and thus deter such actions on the part of group members. The patriarchal environment was addressed earlier in this entry, which now turns to the effects of alcohol. Alcohol and drugs have long been at the center of the acquaintance rape debate. Although some researchers believe that the physiological effects of alcohol increase the probability of rape, most authors suggest that alcohol is not causative but may play a part in the student’s lifestyle and that unwanted sex is a product of that lifestyle (Ward et al. 1991). In one study alcohol was a permissive cue. For those men who were sexually aggressive, alcohol served to delay their decision to stop their sexual advances (Bernat, Calhoun, and Stolp 1998). All the mechanisms mentioned herein perpetuate rape mythology. Acquain-

Acquaintance Rape tance rape in particular is a complex situation with a multitude of variables that can influence the outcome of sexual aggression. But how does the young survivor respond to all of this? The Effects of Acquaintance Rape Burgess and Holmstrom (1974) identified rape trauma syndrome as the survivor’s reaction to the traumatic experience of being raped. They described two distinct phases, a phase of disorganization that occurred immediately after the event and a second phase that involves a longerterm reorganization process. Other responses to the trauma of rape include acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. The survivor’s experience in the days, weeks, months, and even years after the rape can include anxiety, somatic complaints, lifestyle disruption, and the inability to establish new intimate relationships. Koss and her colleagues (1988) found that survivors of both stranger and acquaintance rape experienced anxiety, depression, and sexual and relationship dissatisfaction. Nonstranger rape experiences often lead the victim to believe she is responsible for what happened. This can cause her to suffer lower self-esteem and higher psychological distress and to take longer to recover than survivors of stranger rape. Compared to students who had not been raped, survivors of acquaintance rape indicated significantly more trauma symptoms and lower self-esteem (Shapiro and Schwarz 1997). The age of the survivor is crucial: at what age do the symptoms of trauma become more significant, creating lifelong consequences? One might expect that younger adolescents would be more traumatized. In light of the fact that many young girls do not report their date rape, it

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is nearly impossible to determine the magnitude of the psychological consequences of this traumatic event. Special Considerations for Adolescent Girls in the Twenty-first Century Much of the research in the field of sexual assault and, particularly, acquaintance rape focuses on the college-age population. It is often more convenient to study a group of college students rather than younger teens in communities and public schools. This has put scholars and clinicians at a serious disadvantage. There is not enough information about ten- to seventeen-year-old survivors of rape. Serious efforts must be made to access this population. The discussion in this entry has centered on heterosexual relationships, but rape can happen in gay and lesbian relationships as well. Using language that assumes heterosexuality or making assumptions that the perpetrator was a member of the opposite sex can alienate the survivor, resulting in inadequate care or losing contact with the survivor altogether. It is important to evaluate cultural differences when working with young people who may have been sexually assaulted. Assuming that disclosure to family and friends will be beneficial can lead to conflict between the survivor and the family. There are numerous organizations that can guide scholars and clinicians in culturally sensitive ways to meet the needs of young survivors. Prevention If young adolescents are not informed about the risks of acquaintance rape, they will be less likely to acknowledge that they are victims or recognize the risks. In

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Acquaintance Rape

1991 the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) published sex education guidelines for elementary, middle, and high school students. Sexual coercion, including date rape and stranger rape, was among the topics. Twenty-one junior and senior high school sex education programs were evaluated for content on sexual coercion (Beyers and Ogletree 1998). The topic covered most consistently in any of the curricula was “sexual pressure”; sexual harassment was not addressed at all. Two-thirds of the programs covered date rape, and one-third dealt with stranger rape. Most curricula focused on a narrow view of sexual coercion. Some schools have developed programs that focus on gender relations in addition to sex education. The gender relations curriculum builds on the concepts of respect and communication as well as concentrates on the influences of culture and society. It is apparent that educators and researchers still have a great deal to learn about acquaintance rape and coercive sex, especially among younger adolescents. It will continue to be challenging to design appropriate educational programs to meet the needs of middle school students if educators are not aware of their concerns and questions regarding their intimate experiences. Donna Gaffney See also Birth Control; Child Abuse; Dating and Courtship; Depression and Girls; Female Sexuality; Psychotherapy; Sexual Harassment; Substance Abuse; Suicidal Behavior in Girls; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Abarbanel, Gail. 2000. Personal communication, March 25. Benedict, Helen. 1992. Virgin or Vamp. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bernat, Jeffrey, Karen Calhoun, and Stephanie Stolp. 1998. “Sexually Aggressive Men’s Response to a Date Rape Analogue: Alcohol as a Disinhibiting Cue.” The Journal of Sex Research 35, no. 4: 341–348. Beyers, Christine, and Roberta Ogletree. 1998. “Sexual Coercion Content in 21 Sexuality Educational Curricula.” The Journal of School Health 68, no. 9: 370–375. Brecher, Ruth, and Edward Brecher. 1966. “Every Sixth Teen-Age Girl in Connecticut.” New York Times Magazine (May 29). Brothers, Joyce. 1967. “On Becoming a Woman.” Good Housekeeping (January). Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon and Schuster. Buchwald, Emilie, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds. 1993. Transforming a Rape Culture. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Publications. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1994. Criminal Victimization in the United States. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice. Burgess, Ann, and Lynda Holmstrom. 1974. “Rape Trauma Syndrome.” American Journal of Psychiatry 131, no. 9: 981–986. Byers, E. Sandra, and Lucia F. O’Sullivan, eds. 1996. Sexual Coercion in Dating Relationships. New York: Haworth Press. Davis, Terry C., Gary Q. Peck, and John M. Storment. 1993. “Acquaintance Rape and the High School Student.” Journal of Adolescent Health 14, no. 3 (May): 220–224. DeKeseredy, Walter. 1988. “Woman Abuse in Dating Relationships: The Relevance of Social Support Theory.” Journal of Family Violence 3: 1–13. DeKeseredy, Walter, and Martin Schwartz. 1993. “Male Peer Support and Woman Abuse: An Expansion of DeKeseredy’s Model.” Sociological Spectrum 13: 393–413. Fishman, Katherine. 1966. “Sex Becomes a Brand New Problem.” New York Times Magazine (March 13).

Adolescent Health Haines, T. L., and L. W. Yaggy. 1876. The Royal Path of Life. Chicago: Western Publishing House. Kanin, Eugene. 1957. “Male Aggression in Dating-Courtship Relationships.” American Journal of Sociology 63: 197–204. ———. 1967. “An Examination of Sexual Aggression as a Response to Sexual Frustration.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 29: 428–433. Koss, Mary. 1985. “The Hidden Rape Victim Personality, Attitudinal and Situational Characteristics.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 9: 193–212. ———. 1989. “Hidden Rape: Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Students in Higher Education.” Pp. 145–168 in Violence in Dating Relationships: Emerging Social Issues. Edited by M. A. Pirog-Good and J. Stets. New York: Praeger. Koss, Mary, T. Dinero, C. Seibel, and S. Cox. 1988. “Stranger and Acquaintance Rape: Are There Differences in the Victim’s Experiences?” Psychology of Women Quarterly 12: 1–24. Laumann, Edward. 1996. “Early Sexual Experiences: How Voluntary? How Violent?” P. 40 in Sexuality and American Social Policy: A Seminar Series. Edited by M. D. Smith, et al. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. McCaw, Jodee, and Charlene Senn. 1998. “Perception of Cues in Conflictual Dating Situations.” Violence against Women 4, no. 5: 609–624. Muehlenhard, C., and M. Linton. 1987. “Date Rape and Sexual Aggression in Dating Situations: Incidence and Risk Factors.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 34: 186–196. Page, Randy M. 1997. “Helping Adolescents Avoid Date Rape: The Role of Secondary Education.” High School Journal 80, no. 2 (December–January): 75–80. Parrot, Andrea, and Laurie Bechhofer, eds. 1991. Acquaintance Rape: The Hidden Crime. New York: Wiley. Post, Emily. 1922. Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home. New York: Funk and Wagnalls. Schwartz, Martin, and Walter DeKeseredy. 1997. Sexual Assault on the College

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Campus: The Role of Male Peer Support. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Shapiro, Brenda, and J. Conrad Schwarz. 1997. “Date Rape: Its Relationship to Trauma Symptoms and Sexual Selfesteem.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 12, no. 3: 407–419. Snyder, Howard, and Melissa Sickmund. 1999. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 1999 National Report. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 29–30. Sweet, Ellen. 1985. “Date Rape: The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Deny It.” Ms. 14, no. 4 (October). Tjaden, Patricia, and Nancy Thoennes. 1998. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence against Women: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Ward, S., K. Chapman, E. Cohen, S. White, and K. Williams. 1991. “Acquaintance Rape and the College Social Scene.” Family Relations 40: 65–71.

Adolescent Health Adolescent health is more than the absence of disease: it is also the objective and subjective state of well-being that is present when the physical, psychological, and social development of a girl are in harmony with her own possibilities, goals, and prevailing living conditions. Throughout its history, the field of adolescent medicine has striven to address the needs of the whole person from a variety of psychological, sociological, and physiological perspectives, not simply diseases or disorders that affect adolescents. Currently, the trend in adolescent health care has been to go even further beyond the disease paradigm and examine not only health risks but also assets in the environment that contribute to a

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Adolescent Health

Regular checkups are an important part of maintaining health after a girl reaches puberty. (Skjold Photographs)

young woman’s physical and emotional well-being. From the colonial period until the early twentieth century, the most prevalent disease affecting adolescent girls was tuberculosis. The leading cause of death for all age groups, tuberculosis took an especially heavy toll on young women because of the biological and social features of female adolescence. Rapid growth during puberty encouraged the disease to flourish. Close contact between girls in homes, schools, and workplaces allowed the disease to spread rapidly from individual to individual. Finally, poor nutrition among the working classes and racial minorities increased the likelihood that these girls would develop the disease (Rothman 1994). Girls were also vulnerable to other

childhood diseases such as diphtheria, measles, mumps, and rubella and nutritional deficiency diseases such as rickets and pellagra that affected adolescent growth and development (Halpern 1988). In addition to the physical diseases mentioned above, the ways in which American society regards girls and their proper social roles have helped frame female adolescent health issues. In the case of adolescent girls, concerns about sexuality and reproduction have been at the forefront of both medical and lay thinking. During the nineteenth century, anxieties about precocious sexuality in girls were closely linked to fears about the impact of immigration and the emancipation of African Americans. Many scientists at this time endorsed

Adolescent Health racist ideas about human difference and looked for physical traits that would demonstrate that white, upper-class individuals of northern European descent were superior to other racial categories (Gould 1981). One of the physical signs that was used to “prove” the inferiority of African Americans, Asians, and other racial and ethnic minorities was early age of menstruation since this trait seemed to place these groups closer to animals. Scientists claimed that these groups experienced an early onset of menstruation because they had “looser” morals than white, upper-class girls and noted that bodily maturation in girls could be accelerated by indulging in conversations with men, kissing, or other sorts of sexual encounters. As a result of the views described above, white middle-class and upperclass parents in the United States became alarmed if a daughter entered puberty before the age of fifteen, which was the average age of menarche during the nineteenth century. Medical advice literature during this time advised mothers to prevent their daughters from masturbating, reading romantic novels, and indulging in any activity that might excite the sexual passions. Many physicians also believed that too much consumption of meat contributed to precocious sexual longings and development in young girls and could even cause insanity and nymphomania. Doctors therefore advised mothers to restrict their daughters’ intake of meat in order to prevent such disasters from occurring. Concerns about protecting female virtue also affected the kind of health care young women received. For example, until the mid-twentieth century, it was extremely unusual for adolescent girls to receive a pelvic exam from a physician.

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This practice was based on Victorian views about young women, which stated that girls should remain chaste and pure until marriage. Many physicians believed that a vaginal exam would not only damage the hymen, the physical proof of a young woman’s virginity, but could also arouse sexual passions in the patient by drawing unnecessary attention to this area of the anatomy. As a substitute for the pelvic exam, medical textbooks advised that physicians could receive all the information they needed from a rectal examination, which they claimed would be far less upsetting to the patient and had the added benefit of preserving the young patient’s hymen. In the rare case when a vaginal exam needed to be performed for accurate diagnosis, textbooks recommended performing the exam under anesthesia to avoid traumatizing the young patient. Advances in American medicine since 1900 have eliminated many of the health problems that affected adolescent girls in the past. Improved public health practices and environmental reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically reduced both the incidence of and mortality from infectious diseases such as typhoid fever, diphtheria, and cholera. Research in nutrition and the discovery of vitamins in the 1910s allowed physicians to prevent and control deficiency diseases and improve adolescent growth and development. The discovery of the sulfonamides during the 1930s and of penicillin during the 1940s gave doctors the ability to treat lifethreatening infections such as tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, and pneumonia. The development of vaccines in the early twentieth century greatly reduced the incidence and severity of many diseases that had affected

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Adolescent Health

girls, including measles, mumps, rubella, and polio. Improved medical technology has also reduced mortality from noninfectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and cystic fibrosis (Halpern 1988). The discovery of hormones affecting growth and development during the 1920s and 1930s made hormonal therapy an increasingly popular option for treating girls with developmental abnormalities. Physicians were especially apt to use hormone treatment for sex-inappropriate developmental characteristics that they believed originated from hormonal imbalances. For example, girls who were considered tall for their age would often be given estrogen therapy to prevent further growth. Similarly, girls who failed to menstruate or grow breasts by their midteens were given estrogen to encourage development (Oudshoorn 1994). Declines in the incidence of physical illness allowed physicians to focus on emotional problems common to adolescents. Although physicians since the mid-nineteenth century had been aware of the fact that adolescence was frequently accompanied by emotional stress, interest in adolescent psychological problems intensified in the early 1900s as a result of the mental hygiene movement. Founded in 1909 by Clifford Beers, a former mental patient, the mental hygiene movement was based on a “dynamic” approach to mental illness that emphasized the role of childhood experiences and family and social environment in psychological development. Since many mental problems were believed to have their roots in childhood and adolescence, the mental hygiene movement focused much of its preventive efforts on these age groups. Adolescent psychologists drew upon the ideas of the Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, who is best

known for developing the concept of the inferiority complex. Mental hygienists observed that adolescents as a group were especially prone to feelings of inferiority. Although all girls were vulnerable to this problem, those who were different from their peers because of illness, disability, or some other physical or emotional disorder were particularly likely to suffer from inferiority complexes. Some girls reacted to their distress by becoming passive and withdrawn, whereas others overcompensated for their perceived inadequacies by acting out in socially unacceptable ways. Victorian attitudes toward adolescent girls and their bodies also began to change in the 1920s as a result of new behaviors adopted by girls and young women during the late 1910s and 1920s. This period constituted the first “sexual revolution” in American society, during which young women abandoned Victorian reticence and became more frank and open in their sexual behavior. Although intercourse before marriage was still considered inappropriate during this period, petting and necking became so acceptable, even among girls from “respectable” families, that Victorian notions of female sexual purity were seriously called into question. These changes in female adolescent behavior prompted new views about the psychological development of adolescent girls. Before the 1920s, most writers on adolescent female psychology argued that healthy female development involved protecting the young girl from premature awakening of sexual longings. Under this view, only delinquent girls succumbed to their sexual instincts. By the 1920s, it became increasingly obvious that this view had to be revised as growing numbers of “respectable” girls engaged in

Adolescent Health what had previously been regarded as delinquent behavior. Rather than label these girls delinquents, experts in adolescent mental hygiene revised their views of female adolescent psychology and made sexual curiosity and a certain degree of sexual experimentation a normal part of healthy female development. In fact, mental hygiene experts worried more about girls who did not adopt an avid interest in the opposite sex by the middle years of adolescence and argued that such girls might become lesbians or otherwise fail to attain the normative adult feminine role of marriage and motherhood. This new view of adolescent female psychology had a profound impact on adolescent health care. By the mid-twentieth century, doctors became much more willing to perform pelvic examinations on girls. Physicians also became concerned about how illness might affect a young woman’s sexual identity. Physicians recognized that some diseases such as tuberculosis and diabetes could inhibit menstruation and the development of secondary sexual characteristics. Medical experts warned that underdeveloped girls might become so discouraged by their lack of “feminine” features that they would fail to marry or would become lesbians. After World War II, the concept of the inferiority complex prompted a number of medical experts to begin focusing more attention on the health needs of teenage girls. Dermatology benefited from adolescent anxiety about pimples and the psychological consequences of having a flawed complexion. Before World War II, treatment of acne was considered a luxury, since it was seldom life threatening. By the 1950s, concerns about the impact of a bad complexion on peer acceptance and self-esteem led to

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increased medical interest in acne and other skin disorders. Likewise, fields such as plastic surgery, orthodontics, endocrinology, and orthopedics drew on new ideas about the relationship between physical appearance and adolescent peer adjustment. Even experts in serious chronic and acute diseases in adolescents became concerned not just with the physical effects of illness but with the psychological consequences of diseases that made a girl different from her peers. This new interest in the health problems of teenagers led to the development of a new medical field known as adolescent medicine. Throughout its history, adolescent medicine has emphasized looking at the “whole patient” from a variety of psychological, sociological, and physiological perspectives. The first medical unit in the United States devoted exclusively to adolescents was founded at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1951. The Boston Adolescent Unit served as a model for other hospitals in North America. By the mid-1960s, there were fiftyfive adolescent clinics in hospitals in the United States and Canada, and by the 1970s nearly half of all hospitals in the United States had units dedicated to the health care of teenagers. The expansion of adolescent health services led to the creation of a professional organization for adolescent health experts, the Society for Adolescent Medicine, established in 1968 (Prescott 1998). During the 1960s and 1970s, girls began to engage in behaviors that placed them at risk for new health problems. Changing social norms during this period exposed girls to sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, violence, and pregnancy. Although these problems have affected the population as a whole, they

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Adolescent Health

appear to affect teenagers disproportionately and may be responsible for the fact that adolescent mortality has risen since 1960, while mortality for other age groups has declined (Schulenberg, Maggs, and Hurrelmann 1997). Since the 1960s, changes in female adolescent behavior and gender role expectations for women have prompted a revision of medical theory on female adolescent health problems. The second “sexual revolution” of the twentieth century led to higher rates of premarital sexual activity among American teenagers. Feminist health care publications promoted self-determination in women’s health care and challenged traditional ideas about femininity that mandated marriage and motherhood as the only acceptable roles for women. In the area of adolescent medicine, feminist practitioners claimed that girls deserved the same access to health care as adult women and helped eliminate laws that required parental consent for medical procedures, particularly those related to contraception and abortion. Adolescent health care has improved considerably since 1900, but girls still face major risks to their health. Teenagers are the only age group in the United States whose mortality rate has actually increased since 1970. Parents and physicians are more likely to gear preventive health care toward young children. Adolescents are also less likely than other age groups to have health insurance. Unlike diseases of the past, such as measles and polio, many problems affecting modern teenagers cannot be treated with a drug or vaccine. Instead, many of today’s adolescent health risks grow out of a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors, including poverty, peer pressure, street culture,

and conflicts with parents. Even diseases such as juvenile diabetes or cystic fibrosis, which are caused by a specific biomedical factor, can be complicated by the psychological and social pressures of adolescence (Schulenberg, Maggs, and Hurrelmann 1997). Adolescence as a social category also appears to be both disappearing and expanding. Children are exposed to violence, sexuality, and other “adult” themes at ever earlier ages (Elkind 1998). There is even evidence that children are literally “growing up” faster than ever before, since improved health care and nutrition have caused a steady decline in the age of puberty (Brumberg 1997). At the same time, growing numbers of young adults are living with parents for longer periods of time because of unemployment, divorce, graduate education, loneliness, or the high cost of housing. Since the late 1960s, the number of adult children living with parents has more than doubled from 2 million to 5 million, and it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of all young adults have returned to their parents’ home at least once. Therefore, it appears that the period of economic dependency usually associated with adolescence is expanding into the twenties and, for some individuals, the thirties and forties. The Society for Adolescent Medicine responded to these changes in both the biological and social features of adolescence by recently adopting a position statement that declared that adolescent medicine covered the ages of ten to twenty-five, with some members even arguing that the field should be extended to cover the late twenties and early thirties (Prescott 1998). Experts in adolescent medicine have also attempted to deal with the complex issues that continue to plague adoles-

Adoption cents by reconceptualizing health as more than the absence of disease or risk. Rather, the current trend in adolescent health involves bringing together families, schools, youth-serving organizations, congregations, and other institutions that can provide teenagers with the foundations for healthy lifestyles. Heather Munro Prescott See also Body Image; Child Abuse; Child Guidance; Eating Disorders; Female Sexuality; Hygiene; Menstruation; Psychotherapy; Substance Abuse; Suicidal Behavior in Girls; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Alexander, Ruth M. 1995. The “Girl Problem”: Female Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bailey, Beth L. 1988. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in TwentiethCentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Benson, Peter L. 1998. Healthy Communities, Healthy Youth. Minneapolis: Search Institute. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1988. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Elkind, David. 1998. All Grown Up and No Place to Go. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton. Haiken, Elizabeth. 1997. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Halpern, Sydney. 1988. American Pediatrics: The Social Dynamics of Professionalism 1880–1980. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oudshoorn, Nelly. 1994. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones. London: Routledge. Prescott, Heather Munro. 1998. “A Doctor of Their Own”: The History of Adolescent Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Rothman, Sheila. 1994. Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. New York: Basic Books. Schulenberg, John, Jennifer L. Maggs, and Klaus Hurrelmann. 1997. Health Risks and Developmental Transitions during Adolescence. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tanner, James Mourilyan. 1981. A History of the Study of Human Growth. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Adoption Adoption is the procedure by which a parent-child relationship is established by law, usually fully transferring parental care and authority from a girl’s biological parents to other adults, whether “strangers” or relatives. Although historical and anthropological evidence suggests that adoptive relationships have long been established across human cultures, full legal adoption was not accepted by the English common law tradition that was adapted by most of the United States from colonial days. This legal barrier was gradually eroded over the latter half of the nineteenth century and the entire course of the twentieth century by streamlined adoption statutes—a process that represents a dramatic change in domestic family law and is largely due to the increased demand of U.S. adults for adopted children. At the same time, infant girls have moved from being the least readily adopted to potentially the most attractive option for adopting parents, as all babies and girls in particular have come to embody innocence and fragility, characteristics central to the Western notion of childhood that arose during this period. Embroiled in complex and unresolved legal, social, and economic debates—involving critical issues both

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Adoption

within the United States and on the international scene—the adoption of girls remains a controversial subject that deeply affects the lives of young females in the United States today. English fears about jeopardizing the inheritance rights of the adopting parents’ legitimate “heirs of the body,” which were of course primarily males under traditional inheritance laws, long predominated in England and its colonies. The common law tradition was thus always more skeptical of adoption than were other Western traditions, particularly Roman civil law, which dominated in France and Spain and their colonies. The latter tradition was, however, eventually undermined by the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church and by Protestant reformers because it was frequently used by wealthy European males to legitimize their “natural sons,” primarily to continue the male line of succession and inheritance. Illegitimate girls, however, seem to have had little value for such purposes. Traditionally in Western culture, impoverished girls, but particularly those deemed “bastards,” have been the least valuable of all children in need of care and have therefore suffered most from the severe legal, social, and economic penalties long associated with illegitimacy. Because of this emphasis on male inheritance rights, by the seventeenth century full legal adoption was nearly nonexistent in Europe, although quasi-adoptive measures such as apprenticeships and other voluntary or involuntary transfers of child custody were widely practiced. In both England and the United States, parents in most social and economic classes, along with the church and town authorities responsible for orphaned and bastard children, placed virtually all boys

and many working-class girls into other families for labor and education, sometimes in circumstances that today might be formalized by legal adoption. Wealthier girls living with both parents were, however, the least likely to leave home before marriage. Early American citizens could, moreover, otherwise informally adopt children or use their wills to provide for younger relations, goddaughters, or others placed in their care in a procedure known as “testamentary adoption.” But more easily than their English counterparts, American adults could also ultimately appeal to state legislatures to pass private adoption acts that would fully surmount the legal barrier that the English-based legal system prescribed. This long, expensive process eventually became too cumbersome for the states, not to mention for the families involved, as a variety of cultural forces at work during the middle of the nineteenth century increased the demand for adoption. The demise of the traditional apprenticeship system, the increasingly wage-based industrializing economy, and the waves of European immigrants arriving in the United States and then generally forced into appalling living conditions created a substantial population of children struggling for existence outside the structures that traditionally would have provided adult supervision or care. Girls outside the family system and without a wellestablished kinship network were particularly vulnerable to such an existence, since urban life in particular provided few life-sustaining jobs for young women beyond prostitution. The public, moreover, typically viewed these impoverished girls as at best a drain on resources, particularly during their earliest years, or at worst a potential threat to the virtues of home and family, rather than as vic-

Adoption tims of the social and economic system or as holding any inherent or symbolic value in themselves. Yet, as the nineteenth century passed, children, and girls especially, were increasingly seen as innocents needing adult protection and—ideally—maternal nurturing, rather than paternal guidance and labor under the supervision of a “master.” This view of girls was promoted by individual women writers like Catharine Beecher, Lydia Maria Child, and popular journalists like Fanny Fern, and also by conservative and liberal women’s organizations. Using the popular media, women successfully spread the idea that motherhood was not only a virtuous state that inherently created a higher, spiritual relationship to children but also a profession that required training and complex skills. Various private responses to these children, rather than federalized or even coordinated statelevel solutions, thus arose in the midnineteenth century, many of them arguing that institutionalizing these girls was cruel and inhumane because it separated them from a mother’s loving care. The forerunners of the adoption and foster care movements were among these private responses. Under the pressure of this private response, states one by one began passing laws to move the adoption process out of the legislative system and into the judicial system, which served to streamline and democratize the process. By 1929, all the existing states had enacted some form of adoption law. Although a few states, notably Texas and Louisiana, based their law on the civil law tradition mentioned earlier, which viewed adoption primarily as a transfer of property rights, most U.S. adoption laws were based on the groundbreaking law passed

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by Massachusetts in 1851. That law created a means of establishing familial relations between adults and children that would ideally honor the needs and interests of all the members of the new family. Beyond immigration and the industrializing economy, republican sentiments seem to have balked at the binding nature of indentures, which often gave even older girls and boys little or no say in their placements and few rights or avenues of redress if they were neglected or maltreated by their masters. Many scholars, in fact, argue that such a feeling was at least in part a manifestation of the strong antipatriarchal sentiment that undergirded American notions of revolutionary nationhood. The rhetoric of the era often portrayed America as a child growing away from and ultimately rejecting the rule of king and “fatherland.” Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a notion of the rights of children also seems to have emerged in real families to challenge the father’s exclusive right to the care and custody of even his legitimate children. Legal codes governing custody disputes began to emphasize “the best interests of the child” by the mid-nineteenth century. These laws then explicitly charged the courts with ensuring both that the custodial parent was truly “fit” to nurture the girl and that the relationship would promote her welfare. These new notions about childhood also served to emphasize adoption and family-based foster care programs, all but replacing the Jacksonian era’s orphanages over the course of the twentieth century. Yet at the same time, what was perhaps most radical about the new adoption laws was that they ultimately had the effect of valuing this new legal relationship over any and all preexisting blood connections. Despite recent moves

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Adoption

toward open adoptions—which are not fully encouraged, enforced, or even recognized by all states—most adoption laws continue even today to terminate, and often even seek to erase, all relations between the child and her birth parents. Of course, adoptions by relatives probably account for about half of all U.S. adoptions and are generally treated with less scrutiny and secrecy than adoptions by nonrelatives, or “strangers,” as the law typically calls them. But the state still recognizes only two parents. Even in cases in which a parent retains her children but remarries after a divorce and then seeks to have her second spouse or partner adopt her children, the original spouse must agree to the termination of his or her legal relationship to the child. In the case of infant adoptions by strangers, original birth certificates are typically sealed by the state, with strict rules about the disclosure of any information on them, and replaced by a new certificate with the adopting parents’ names and the new name of the child. Although a significant percentage of the U.S. population has had a direct connection with adoption, particularly since the baby boom generation, the federal government ceased collecting statistics on adoption in 1975, so the actual number of girls adopted per year is not verifiable. In a culture that still stigmatizes and distrusts adoptive relationships, all this secrecy both creates and feeds numerous tensions and fears, fostering insecurity and shame for the parties involved. In the late twentieth century, regular reports erupted in the media surrounding the contested “ownership” of children. In some cases, biological parents have reported that they felt coerced into giving up their child, which may be particularly true for unwed, adolescent mothers. One

particularly notorious case involved a girl known in the national media as “Baby Jessica,” who was returned to her biological parents after living with adoptive parents for over two years. In this case, the father was misidentified by the birth mother, so the male partner did not give up his parental rights. Paperwork was mishandled, and all the adults involved claimed a powerful attachment to the young girl, whose life was presented as hanging in the balance. As a result of such cases, various movements have emerged to support the rights of the children and all the adults involved in adoption. Although typically the adopted infants and girls in question and the birth parents are poorer and less powerful than the adopting adults, the would-be parents still often feel shame. Infertility is still stigmatized in American culture. Having to “prove” one’s value as a parent for a social welfare agency can feel invasive, especially to persons who are used to relative autonomy in their private relations. Unmarried people and same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt in every state, and even where they are, residual social stigmas surrounding homosexuality and nonmarital relations often make adoptions difficult and painful, even those of young relatives or the children of one of the partners. Birth mothers, moreover, are often left with conflicting fears that the child will show up on their doorstep years later or, on the contrary, that the child will disappear from them forever. After a divorce, noncustodial parents may feel anger and resentment at the legal termination of their parental relationship. And an adopted girl may begin to feel like a transportable commodity, an item of exchange between adults who may at times seem more concerned with their own “best interests” than with

Adoption hers. Such children often report feeling strong and conflicting desires both to love and honor their adoptive parents and to find and possibly meet their biological parents, who are so frequently shrouded in secrecy and who may sincerely desire to remain unknown to their children. All of these shifts have, thus, created an atmosphere in which the valuation of the child has changed radically, particularly for girls. In what has been called the “sacralization” of the child (Zelizer 1985, 11), the child most easily “placed” into another family has changed from being a male child, old enough to provide real work to a farm or business, to a white, blue-eyed baby, often ideally a dimpled girl, holding primarily sentimental value to the adoptive parents. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children changed from being viewed primarily as a form of economic aid to the family and insurance against old age to being an expensive, luxury item with largely indefinite returns—to be indulged in only according to one’s means. Girls, in particular, have been viewed in this light: incapable of carrying on “the family name,” they are still under pressure to accept the burden of remaining innocent, which for girls is still frequently tied to notions of sexual “purity” and filling the desires and dreams of their parents. Meanwhile, abortion and a host of other cultural forces have made that “healthy white infant girl” quite rare on the adoption “market,” even as most adults seeking stranger adoption are middle- to upper-class white, heterosexual couples. Transracial adoption has, moreover, been viewed with great skepticism by many parties. Beyond the potential racial prejudices and desires of adopting couples themselves, who frequently would prefer a child who “looks like” themselves, fears

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of interracial sex and racial prejudice generally can lead to hostility against the child within her new “community” and against the family as a whole. Some people question the ability of parents who do not share their child’s ethnicity to create an environment that nurtures her selfesteem. Moreover, transracial adoption suggests a form of cultural genocide to some critics. The Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 forbids adoption agencies from creating separate waiting lists for girls and boys based on race or ethnicity but allows ethnicity as a consideration in questions of parental “fitness” to provide for the best interests of the child. All too frequently, the voices of the girls involved in these cases are not heard, lost in adult noise and almost assuredly in the unavoidable confusion created by such complex and competing interests. Despite all these difficulties, even persons of somewhat moderate aims will pay large sums of money to adopt a child. Although the idea of actually buying children outright remains repugnant to most Americans, childless couples will spend tens of thousands of dollars on prenatal care and other birth-related expenses, as well as legal fees for the adoptive process, often including legal counsel for the biological mother to ensure that she cannot legally claim to have been coerced into giving up her child. Fees can be particularly high for international adoptions, which typically involve travel and use of various intermediaries in both countries because of linguistic, legal, and cultural differences that require translation. China, in particular, has figured prominently in this debate, especially since it established the “one family, one child” rule in 1979. Since Chinese culture has traditionally valued boys over girls, thousands of girls are being abandoned each

A mother and her two-year-old adopted Asian American daughter visit the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day. (Skjold Photographs)

Adoption year in China and sent to orphanages (U.S. Department of State 2000). It should be noted, however, that Chinese leaders instigated this rule in order to combat serious threats of famine and overpopulation, although they took measures that appear severe by Western standards. Indeed, the “one-child” rule itself applies only in urban areas, where it was softened in the 1990s to allow more people to try for second children, and contains exceptions for Han-Chinese and other ethnic minorities. Thousands of American adults now adopt girls from developing nations and particularly from China each year, which has led to new international legislation to protect the interests of adoptees. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, for instance, was signed by the United States in 1993 and ratified in September 2000. However, questions still arise from many corners surrounding the ethics of such adoptions: do these adoptions ultimately serve to support repressive regimes? Do they finally serve the needs and interests of American adults more than the Chinese girls while doing nothing to challenge the inequities inherent in the larger social and economic forces that create such a huge population of unwanted girls? New technological options for people seeking children, moreover, have recently included the employment of surrogate mothers and the use of egg or sperm donors, thus creating an entirely new and complex set of laws related to adoption. Critics point out that young women in their late teens and twenties are at the peak of their fertility during the period of their life when the current social and economic system virtually requires them to be pursuing education and careers. These young females are thus the most likely candidates for donating “unwant-

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ed” children, reproductive labor, or ova. Yet there are grave concerns about their access to free choice in their role in the process, the effects on their health and their own fertility later in life, and fears that young women will be induced to “sell” their reproductive abilities to the highest bidder. Probably the saddest issue related to cost, however, is the continued cultural devaluation of children who are “difficult to place” because of mental, physical, or emotional health conditions or, more simply, age. Girls over six years of age do not have the labor value of their nineteenth-century counterparts, who would at least have been employed in domestic service from a young age. Nor, however, do these girls retain the emotional, symbolic value of the infant girl who does not retain memories of her biological family. Such children cannot fulfill the fantasy of a clean slate for adopting parents to fill up, a fantasy that also has its roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European American culture. Older girls may retain memories, emotional attachments, and the scars of early psychological, physical, or sexual trauma that may continue to haunt the new relationship. Without comprehensive mental and physical health coverage in the United States, girls of any age who are born with illnesses or suffer from acquired disorders and who then are orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise given up represent a financial and emotional burden that many Americans—not just adopting parents—simply feel unable or unwilling to accept. Lori Askeland See also Birth Control; Child Abuse; Orphans and Orphanages; Teen Pregnancy

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Advice Books

References and Further Reading Carp, E. Wayne. 1998. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grossberg, Michael. 1985. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hollinger, Joan A., et al., eds. 1989. Adoption Law and Practice. New York: Matthew Bender Press. May, Elaine Tyler. 1997. Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Modell, Judith S. 1994. Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretation of Kinship in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund). 2000. “Intercountry Adoption Information Portfolio.” http://old. unicef-icdc.org/information/portfolios/ intercountry-adoption/. U.S. Department of State. 2000. “1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: China.” http://www.state. gov/global/human_rights/1999_hrp_ report/china.html. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

Advice Books From the nineteenth century onward, American advice literature—especially books, columns, and now Internet sites— has communicated messages of normative femininity to adolescent girls. Although the content of these messages has changed dramatically from the nineteenth century, as social texts—examples of strongly held views of female behavior—advice books stand as a significant subgenre within young adult nonfiction. Undergirding this literature is the belief

that girls are lacking in guidance and that the advice given in manual, column, or Internet form will provide the warnings, information, or encouragement that they need on their way to becoming “normal” women. In its earliest incarnation, advice literature was essentially domestic in scope, educating readers (often from the middle class) in “modern” methods of housekeeping, childrearing, and cooking as preparation for running a household. Etiquette and social conduct were other pervasive topics of early advice manuals. This literature filled a void that the relatively fluid class structure of the nineteenth-century United States had opened: middle-class and upper-class girls whose families relied upon servants for domestic service were in need of practical instruction in basic homemaking skills in case their fortunes fell, and lower-class girls with intentions to rise in status required hints in etiquette and social conduct as a means to shed any behavioral or sartorial “markers” of poverty. In general, the audience for advice books was white (heterosexual) girls of either the middle or lower class. Immigrant and African American girls were largely ignored in early advice literature. By the mid-twentieth century, advice literature for girls began to focus on beauty, fashion, and relationships. This shift maintained the pressure on girls to please men—but in this case, the emphasis was on sexual attractiveness rather than housekeeping or mothering skills. Although training the girl both in the “rules” of physical beauty through makeup and fashion advice and in the ways of generating male attention continues to dominate advice literature for girls in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (particularly through mass media teen magazines), there is also a significant second-

Advice Books

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“Girl Learning Her Lesson,” John Frost, Easy Exercises, 1839, p. 21.

ary strain of advice literature that is feminist in nature and focuses on developing self-esteem, health, and independence within girls of all backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. Much of this literature is not mediated by an adult, “parental” voice but is advice given to girls by girls. Although nineteenth-century advice literature for middle-class girls was primarily domestic in nature, it also included information on the body and mind. Catharine Beecher’s housekeeping compendium, Treatise on Domestic Economy for Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841), read by girls as preparation for marriage and household management, was highly successful and reprinted almost annually through 1856. The expansion of this volume, The American

Woman’s Home, appeared in 1869 as the work of Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies by Eliza Leslie (1859) instructed girls in the niceties of decorum in the home (hosting “tea visiters” [sic] or engaging in polite conversation, for example) and outside it: “in the street,” at a hotel, church, or even on shipboard. Early in 1868, just before she tried her hand at writing the “girls’ story,” Little Women, that would make her famous, Louisa May Alcott was pleased to accept $100 from the New York Ledger to write an advice column for young women. Alcott titled her sketches of contented “old maids” “Happy Women” and in it advocated an active life of intellectual pursuits such as

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Advice Books

medicine and literature, social work, and self-sacrifice for girls. Physical fitness was another favorite topic of advice book authors of the nineteenth century. As a means to preserve health and to promote a vigorous work ethic, homeopathic physician Dio Lewis encouraged his readers in Our Girls (1871) to reject corsets and become physically fit through calisthenics and outdoor exercise. To improve posture, he suggested that the iron “gymnastic crown” (his own invention) be worn for fifteen minutes morning and night. Factory girls working in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills, whose work ethic needed no prompting, received inspiration and encouragement from their fellow workers in the Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley from 1842 to 1845 (it became The New England Offering in 1847–1850). For frank discussions of sexuality, reproduction, and health, girls had few options in the nineteenth century. Edward H. Clarke’s book Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls (1873) has been called “the great uterine manifesto of the nineteenth century” for its theory that educating girls would cause uterine atrophy (Ehrenreich and English 1978, 127–128). For a sex education manual written by a sympathetic female physician, girls could consult Mary Wood-Allen’s What a Young Girl Ought to Know (1897). Founded on the belief that too much information about sexuality could be dangerous to a girl, What a Young Girl Ought to Know proceeds cautiously, relating the fictional dialogues of a girl and her mother after the birth of a baby brother. Their conversation begins with plant reproduction and fish fertilization and culminates in this delicate description of sexual intercourse: “‘The germ of life . . . would never wake up unless it

were touched by the power that only the father could give’” (Campbell 1979, 20). The book also discusses masturbation, morality, and mental and physical hygiene and ends where Beecher’s manual begins, with woman’s natural role as wife and mother and as caretaker for the home and its occupants. The importance of periodical literature in contemporary advice literature for girls, now as well as in its past, cannot be underestimated. The Juvenile Miscellany: For the Instruction and Amusement of Youth (1826–1836), founded by Lydia Maria Child, was the first American children’s magazine to include entertaining (as well as didactic) features. The Juvenile Miscellany was directed toward both boys and girls, but most of its writers were female, some of them prominent authors such as Lydia Sigourney and Sarah Josepha Hale. The magazine included fiction informed by the British “rationalist” school (found in the work of Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Day, for example), poetry, biographical sketches of notable figures, dialogues about natural history or proper behavior, and puzzles, as well as guidance in the form of essays about virtues such as “Filial Obedience” and “Self-knowledge.” Under the able tutelage of Mary Mapes Dodge (who edited the magazine for thirty-two years), St. Nicholas (1873–1940) became perhaps the best-known periodical for children of the nineteenth century. Scribner, publishers of the Scribner’s Monthly and The Century, was also the parent company of St. Nicholas. Their popular literary magazine was directed toward the children of Scribner’s upper-middle-class readers. Dodge’s editorial page and advice column, “Jack-in-the-Pulpit” (1873–1896), discussed morals and manners. Targeting the Christian market, The Girls’ Com-

Advice Books panion (1902–1949) was a Sunday school periodical emphasizing morality and Christian duty in girls aged eight to twenty. In its advice column, “Light Hearted School Girls,” the true Christian girl was encouraged to attend to her role as junior homemaker. The Brownies’ Book (1920– 1921) was a short-lived periodical for African American children in which the overarching “advice” was to promote racial pride and unity. Each number included a column called “The Judge,” written as a conversation with readers about conduct, education, family life, and so on, and “The Jury,” which consisted of readers’ letters. Today, a girl (of any economic background) is likely to find advice about sexuality, health, fashion, beauty, relationships, and personal problems most easily in the many readily available and inexpensive monthly magazines targeted at teens such as Seventeen, Young and Modern (YM), and Teen. The topics most often covered in magazine advice are physical appearance (the search for beauty and the perfect body) and romantic attachments with young men (Currie 1999, 171–202). Research on readers’ responses to advice pages within “teenzines” shows that these columns are the favorite feature of an overwhelming majority of girls from thirteen to sixteen years of age (Currie 1999, 162). As in the past with other forms of advice literature, the pleasure that comes from reading “agony columns” in teenzines stems from both the satisfaction felt after gleaning useful information from such columns and the creation of a social community among “real-life” girls who share common concerns. The messages contained in the typical fashion and beauty teenzine represent a kind of advice literature that many (adults) find misleading and unwelcome.

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In response to the myriad accounts of the problems of the lack of self-esteem within female adolescents (published in research by Carol Gilligan, Peggy Orenstein, Mary Pipher, and others), and as a backlash against the overwhelming emphasis in teenzines on physical appearance, consumer goods, and romance, periodicals and books for girls with a feminist approach began proliferating in the 1990s. The sourcebook The Girls’ Guide to Life: How to Take Charge of the Issues That Affect You by Catherine Dee offers guidance on diverse subjects such as sexual harassment, pay equity, the arts, media, government, and education. New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams combines youth participation (through the all-girl editorial board) with positive messages of female empowerment, intelligence, health, and body image for girls aged eight to fourteen. The New Moon format supports reader participation through its many write-in columns, including an advice column, “Ask a Girl,” which prints readers’ responses to problems sent in by troubled readers. The desire to foster girls’ autonomy similarly informs the book Girls Know Best: Advice for Girls from Girls on Just about Everything, which resulted from a “Girl Writer Contest” designed to encourage girls to be creative and confident in their own ideas about the most effective ways to survive adolescence, sibling rivalry, divorce, boredom, and boyfriend anxiety, among other topics. Girls with access to the Internet can visit websites such as gURL.com (for older teens), a lively and highly interactive website with pages on sports, pets, music, reader artwork, shopping links, and “Help Me Heather,” an advice page by an adult who consults with experts to answer readers’ e-mailed questions. Readers can also visit the commu-

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African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

nity chat room for girls only. Whether the advice literature originates from an adult or peer source and is accessed through books, newspapers, magazines, or websites, contemporary advice literature continues in the tradition of the nineteenth century—albeit communicating a substantially different message—in helping to create and reinforce the boundaries of conventional girlhood. Lynne Vallone See also Child Guidance; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’ Magazines; Hygiene; Reading References and Further Reading Campbell, Patricia J. 1979. Sex Education Books for Young Adults, 1892–1979. New York: R. R. Bowker. Currie, Dawn H. 1999. Girl Talk: Adolescent Readers and Their Magazines. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dee, Catherine. 1997. The Girls’ Guide to Life: How to Take Charge of the Issues That Affect You. Boston: Little, Brown. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. 1978. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday. Roehm, Michelle, comp. 1997. Girls Know Best: Advice for Girls from Girls on Just about Everything. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing.

African American Girls in the Twentieth Century The average black girl born in the United States during the twentieth century faced obstacles few Americans can imagine. The barriers between her and a happy, fulfilling life varied from prodigious to insurmountable during three major historical periods. From the turn of the century through the Great Depression, the lives of African American girls, like those of their parents, were largely defined by

the brutal oppression called Jim Crow— struggling to live under it, resisting it, and moving to the North to try to escape it. Beginning with World War II, the movement for civil rights built momentum, and the lives of African American girls were actively rooted in the civil protest activities of their communities. From the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 until the end of the twentieth century, African American girls were far less separate from the mainstream culture, which brought both advantages and severe problems. 1900 to World War II As the twentieth century dawned, the American South was under the thrall of Jim Crow. A quarter of a century had passed since the end of Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops from the former Confederate states. In that quarter century, African American freedom had been attacked on all fronts—political, legal, and social. Political rights had ceased to exist entirely as soon as the federal presence exited southern states. The guiding legal principle was “separate but equal,” as endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, southern society had reverted to a state as near to that prevailing under slavery as it was possible to achieve, enforced by economic restrictions and by violence. And northern society, as it had since the antebellum years, reflected the racism of the South in its own ways. Those ways, although usually more subtle, were often just as oppressive. Black girls sought to create strong identities in a world that saw them in blatantly stereotyped terms. Foremost in the dominant culture were images of the mammy, the maid, the temptress, and, for young girls, the pickaninny. Black women in films, on the stage, in books,

African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

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A group of students from the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. (Library of Congress)

and on the radio were either asexual servants or hypersexual women of loose morals. Against these images, black girls had the weapons of family, community, and education. For all too many, these were not enough. Education, for one thing, was hard to come by. At the turn of the twentieth century, almost half of African Americans—boys, girls, and adults—were unable to read. At that time, 90 percent of the black population lived in the South, and southern states were simply not willing to provide a decent education to black children. This situation continued throughout this first historical period. According to scholar Valinda Littlefield (1997), “A 1930 survey revealed that eleven Southern states spent an average of $12.57 per black child [per year], as opposed to

$44.31 to educate a white child. At the time, the average expenditure for the nation was $99.00 per child” (17). In other words, Americans were spending $1.20 to educate a black girl in the South for every $10 they spent to educate a white girl in the North. Littlefield goes on to state: “As late as 1937, 64 percent of schools for Southern African Americans were one-teacher schools, and 19 percent were two-teacher schools” (17). She also quotes a description of a typical black school from Pauli Murray’s Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family: West End looked more like a warehouse than a school. It was a dilapidated, rickety, two-story wooden building which creaked and swayed in the wind as if it might collapse. . . .

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African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

Outside it was scarred with peeling paint from many winters of rain and snow. At recess we [were] herded into a yard of cracked clay, barren of tree or bush, and played what games we could improvise like hopscotch or springboard, which we contrived by pulling rotten palings off the wooden fence and placing them on brickbats. . . . The floors were bare and splintery, the plumbing was leaky, the drinking fountains broken and the toilets in the basement smelly and constantly out of order. We’d have to wade through pools of foul water to get to them. (Cited in Littlefield 1974, 16)

Living In, Living Out (1996). For the book, she interviewed ninety-seven women who were born in the South and came to the North during the Great Migration, which took place in the early years of the twentieth century. After several months of working with their mothers and other adult women in their families, most of these girls were sent out to work by themselves for at least three months a year. By the time they were nine years old, “all of the women had worked in the house of a white family near their homes as servants.” One of them described how it felt to go live with a strange family and work in their house:

Outside school, life for black girls was even more difficult. The largest proportion of black families were agricultural workers. Some owned their own farms. Far more were sharecroppers or tenant farmers, working land that belonged to white men in exchange for rent and a share of the crop. Every child in a sharecropper family was needed as a “hand.” Indeed, white owners often threatened to throw families off their farms if children and women were kept out of the fields. The memoirs of black women are filled with stories from girlhood of picking cotton until their hands bled and coming home from school to pick up a cotton sack and head out to the field. Like the majority of their mothers, black girls also worked outside the home. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as many as 54.7 percent of black girls ten and older were employed, in contrast to white girls, of whom only 17.9 percent had to work outside their homes during childhood. Black girls found work as domestics, washerwomen, and child care providers. Elizabeth ClarkLewis described this work life in her book

On the first job you was scared. Oh, I cried and even ran back home. But they always took you back. Most started at summer—you’d help the white missus all summer and then when school started, you’d go home. You’d get to go home on Sunday during the summer. . . . All summer you worked like a dog! They didn’t care you were a child. They saw you as a worker. And they worked you hard. (46) Working in white homes increased the risk of sexual assault for young black girls. This was true for all girls and young women who worked as domestic servants at that time, but the problem was even worse for African American girls in the South. Enslaved women and girls had been considered the sexual property of their owners and were often forced into terrible acts of resistance. The attitudes of white men in the South changed little when slavery ended. A 1904 article appearing in The Independent claimed that “few colored girls reached the age of sixteen without receiving advances from [southern white men] (Lerner et al. 1992,

African American Girls in the Twentieth Century 158). One of the women interviewed by Clark-Lewis explained: “You couldn’t be out working ’til you know how people was raped. You’d know how to run, or always not to be in the house with the white man or big sons. Just everyone told you something to keep you from being raped, ’cause it happened, and they told you” (48). To escape the increasingly severe and violent oppression of the South, African Americans migrated to the North in the 1910s by the tens of thousands. Black men often found jobs in factories in Chicago, Detroit, and a handful of other northern cities. The number of African Americans in Detroit increased from 5,741 in 1910 to 120,066 in 1930. Chicago, meatpacking center of the country, had a black population in 1910 of 44,103 (Hine 1998, 214). By 1930, it was 233,903. Black women and girls, however, did not find work in the automobile plants or the meatpacking houses. For the most part, they continued to do domestic work. Black girls as young as seven or eight years old found themselves caring for siblings while their mothers cleaned whites’ houses. Girls of twelve or thirteen were sent by their families in the South to care for the children of brothers and cousins. Despite the conditions in which they often lived, African American girls were not merely victims of race and gender roles. They were members of a community that was deeply committed to their welfare. One highly visible sign of this commitment came from the black women’s club movement. Growing out of the mutual benefit societies and literary groups of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women’s clubs grew in number and force in the 1880s and 1890s. By the early years of the twentieth century, they were providing most

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of the social services available in black communities. The club women ranged from the daughters and wives of wealthy businessmen to female entrepreneurs to educated domestic workers. They founded homes for the aged and infirm, schools, orphanages, and homes for girls. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), argued that “the real solution of the race problem lies in the children” (Giddings 1996, 100). The NACW focused on the establishment of day care centers and nurseries to support working women and to educate and provide play activities for their children. The Virginia Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs founded a rehabilitation center for troubled girls and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, which trained black girls in work skills. Victoria Earle Matthews, president of the Brooklyn Women’s Club and Woman’s Loyal Union, worked with other club women to found the White Rose Home for young working girls. Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry (granddaughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass) established the Colored Big Sister Association in 1934 in Kansas City, Missouri. Perry concentrated her efforts on delinquent girls who were unable to obtain state-supported foster home care. These were only a few of the institutions black women created to help black girls. Educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Nannie Helen Burroughs devoted their lives to the uplift of the race and the development of young black girls. Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904. Her students, all girls, helped Bethune make the sweet potato pies and ice cream she sold to make a down payment on land for the

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African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

school. At the age of twelve, Charlotte Hawkins Brown organized a kindergarten in the Sunday school of the Union Baptist Church. At nineteen she established the Palmer Institute in 1902 in North Carolina as “a finishing school for young black girls.” In 1909, twenty-one-year-old Burroughs established the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. Often called “the School of the 3 B’s,” it emphasized the Bible, the bath, and the broom. Black girls also benefited throughout the twentieth century from organizations such as the Phyllis Wheatley Clubs and Homes; Jack and Jill Clubs; the Links; and the sororities Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Sigma Gamma Rho, and Zeta Phi Beta. These organizations enforced communal support of African American girls. Many black girls also took control over their own lives in adventurous ways. Black entertainers such as Ethel Waters, Aida Overton Walker, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Billie Holiday were among thousands of black girls who sang and danced on street corners for tips or appeared in third-rate vaudeville shows. The stereotyping of African Americans as “amusing” and “natural entertainers” allowed them to scrape livings for themselves in these ways while they were still children. Florence Mills was an important source of income for her family by the time she was five or six. At eight, she was traveling as a “pickaninny” in a white vaudeville act. At fourteen, she and two of her sisters formed their own act, and she was on her way to being the first black superstar. The childhood lives of these entertainers illustrate two sides of oppression for poor black girls. Far too often, they were forced to adopt adult roles and responsibilities, but sometimes those roles

offered them a measure of freedom that white and middle-class black girls could not begin to enjoy. Toward the end of this historical period, the United States faced the Great Depression. The already difficult lives of black girls were further disrupted by this economic crisis. Thousands of tenant farmers were evicted when crop prices fell. Black girls and their families found themselves homeless. Relief efforts, usually administered on a local level, were rife with discrimination. When World War II was declared, jobless fathers and brothers volunteered by the thousands for economic as well as patriotic reasons. Postwar to 1964 After World War II, African Americans confronted as never before the persistent racism and inequality in American society. Black girls were full participants in the civil rights struggle. In her autobiography, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, June Jordan eloquently says, “there was a war against colored people and I had to become a soldier.” Her words are echoed in the lives of countless African American girls. The majority of the ground troops in the civil rights army were black women, and they started very early. Black girls passed out flyers, stood in the front lines of peaceful demonstrations, and ran mimeograph machines. They cooked for bake sales that kept the Montgomery bus boycott going, and they were arrested for praying at segregated lunch counters and bowling alleys. They were beaten by white police and sprayed with fire hoses. When “separate but equal” was tested in the courts, sevenyear-old Linda Brown of Topeka, Kansas, was at the center of the case. Before the final ruling, Linda walked past several schools for whites and even through a

African American Girls in the Twentieth Century railway yard to reach an all-black school. She and her family agreed to become a test case for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal team. The landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision found separate schools to be “inherently unequal,” overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. A decisive part of the NAACP’s strategy involved testimony from psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark that black children preferred white dolls to black dolls, confirmation that racism was embedded even in leisure activity, began early, and afflicted children negatively. Black girls were members of the “Little Rock nine,” a group of teenagers who were instrumental in desegregating Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates gathered these students, who were screened and tested for their ability to stand up under pressure, and every move of the group was carefully planned. Then, at the last minute, it was decided that white protest had made the momentous entry through the doors of the school on September 23, 1957, too dangerous. It was postponed. But Bates failed to get the message to one student, Elizabeth Eckford. When Elizabeth arrived alone at the campus, violence broke out. She was surrounded by white segregationists who jeered at her and threatened her. Two sympathetic white people may very well have saved her from being lynched. A photograph of Eckford walking with head high and books clutched to her chest was printed in newspapers across the country, and she became a symbol of the character of black youth. All of the girls in the Little Rock nine, which included Minnijean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria

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Ray, and Carlotta Walls, were kicked, called names, and harassed unmercifully for the entire school year. In her 1995 book, Warriors Don’t Cry, Melba Patillo Beals recounts her fears not only about mob violence but about her clothes, friends, and dating. When Ruby Bridges and three other girls desegregated schools in New Orleans in 1961, the city rioted for days. Ruby prayed twice a day for the people crowded around Frantz Elementary school when she entered. Anne Moody disclosed the radicalizing effect segregation had on her in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1976). Her poverty, her blackness, and her girlhood were handicaps in rural Mississippi, but Anne turned them in her favor as a young civil rights worker for the NAACP and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). In Pushed Backed to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home (1995), Gloria WadeGayles stated that her civil rights activism was born out of a girlhood in Memphis, Tennessee, filled with love, family, a segregated community, and true faith to tackle racism and sexism. One of the most infamous events during the civil rights movement involved Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. The Alabama Ku Klux Klan bombed their Birmingham church on September 15, 1963, ending their young lives. Three of the girls were fourteen, and one was eleven, and they had gathered in the church basement for choir practice. Joan Baez’s song “Birmingham Sunday” and director Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls emphasize the loss caused by the bombing and the contributions these girls could have made. The four little girls are best remembered for making

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African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

Americans look segregationist hatred squarely in the face. 1964 to the Present The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed life for all American girls. It took a few years for the legal changes to begin to have an impact, but educational, economic, and social conditions were forever altered. Black girls and boys found themselves bussed into white schools. Their college applications began to be accepted. By the 1970s, African American girls had opportunities to become more full-fledged American citizens. In addition to being race workers or civil rights activists, black girls could finally dream of becoming successful businesswomen or even elected officials as their mothers and aunts broke into all realms of American life. Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972. The Supremes became the most successful American rock and roll group of the 1960s. Fashion model Naomi Sims became the first black woman to appear on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal (1968) and Life (1969). Black girls redefined their images along with their lives and ambitions. Some African American girls have fond memories of straightening their hair and wearing ponytails in the 1950s, but during the late 1960s and 1970s the “natural” Afro won favor. Both hairstyles symbolized beauty and the revolutionary politics of the civil rights and Black Power movements. By the 1990s, African American girls opted for intricately braided hairstyles like those worn by the talented athletes Serena and Venus Williams. They often spent more time beading their hair than it took them to win a tennis match at Wimbledon.

Since the 1970s, black women have begun to talk about black girlhood in important ways. They have revealed in literature and film the suffering of black girls at the hands of both white and black men. Maya Angelou’s paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, helped her recover from sexual assault at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. Similarly, talk show host Oprah Winfrey suffered sexual molestation by an uncle and recovered at her grandmother’s home. Both women spoke out about this abuse, as did many others. African Americans were not generally receptive to having their secrets exposed to the entire American public, but “lifting a veil of silence” about sexual molestations was important in legitimizing the experiences of black girls. Gains made during the civil rights movement dissipated with the Republican presidential administrations in the 1980s. Economically, African Americans fared worse in the late twentieth century than they had in the 1950s. The fallout of this instability is reflected in the lives of black girls. The 1990 census revealed that almost half of all black families were headed by single mothers, and 46.1 percent of families headed by black women were under the federal poverty line. The same is true of only 24.8 percent of single white mothers (Hine 1998, 311). For young black girls in the United States race is so persistent and pervasive an issue that it masks many other social ills. Black girls face poverty, gangs, teen pregnancy, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and serious unemployment rates. Instead of fortifying family structures, grandmothers and extended families are now too often the primary caregivers as black men and women succumb to drugs and the penal-industrial

African American Girls in the Twentieth Century

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African American girls play at St. Ambrose Day Camp, a camp for inner-city children. (Shirley Zeiberg)

complex (Smith and Horten 1997, 355–358). Yet black girls defy these struggles and stereotypes on a daily basis with grace, pride, femininity, the undaunted faith of their ancestors, vision, and hope. That too is African American girlhood in twentieth-century America. Delia Crutchfield Cook and Kathleen Thompson See also Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Free Girls of African Descent; Work References and Further Reading Angelou, Maya. 1996. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Reprint, New York: Random House. Beals, Melba Patillo. 1995. Warriors Don’t Cry. New York: Pocket Books.

Boyd, Barbara. 1993. In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and SelfEsteem. New York: Penguin Books. Carroll, Rebecca. 1997. Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America. New York: Crown Press. Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. 1996. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration. New York: Kodansha International. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought. Reprint, New York: Routledge. Comer, James P., and Alvin F. Poussaint. 1992. Raising Black Children. New York: Penguin Books. Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor. 1985. “City Girls: Psychological Adjustment of Urban Black Adolescent Females.” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 2, no. 2: 28–36.

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Allowances and Spending Money

Giddings, Paula. 1996. When and Where I Enter. New York: William Morrow. Grant, Linda. 1984. “Black Females’ ‘Place’ in Desegregated Classrooms.” Sociology of Education 57 (April): 98–111. Greenfield, Eloise. 1993. Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir. New York: Harper. Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. 1997. Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America. New York: Facts on File. Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson. 1998. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books. Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley-Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. 1992. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing. hooks, bell. 1996. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt. Jones, Jacqueline. 1986. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage. Jordan, June. 2000. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. New York: Basic Books. Leadbetter, Bonnie, and Niobe Way, eds. 1996. Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities. New York: New York University Press. Lerner, Gerda, et al. 1992. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Random House. Lewis, Mary C. 1988. Herstory: Black Female Rites of Passage. Chicago: African American Images. Littlefield, Valinda. 1997. “Introduction.” In Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Facts on File. Moody, Anne. 1976. Coming of Age in Mississippi. Reprint, New York: Dell. Roberts, T., et al. 1997. Am I the Last Virgin? Ten African American Reflections on Sex and Love. New York: Aladdin Paperbacks. Rooks, Noliwe M. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shaw, Stephanie J. 1996. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Dianne. 2000. Womanish Black Girls: Dancing Contradictions of Resistance. New York: Peter Lang. Smith, Jessie Carney, and Carrell P. Horten. 1997. Statistical Record of Black America. 4th ed. Detroit: Gale. Snyder, Thomas. 1993. 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wade-Gayles, Gloria Jean. 1995. Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman’s Journey Home. New York: Avon Books. ———. 1998. Father Songs: Testimonies by African-American Sons and Daughters. Boston: Beacon Press. Way, Niobe. 1998. Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers. New York: New York University Press. Wharton, Linda F. 1983. “The Significance of Black American Children’s Singing Games in an Educational Setting.” The Journal of Negro Education 52, no. 1 (Winter): 46–56. White, Renee T. 1999. Putting Risk in Perspective: Black Teenage Lives in the Era of AIDS. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Allowances and Spending Money The practice of giving girls allowances developed in the early twentieth century, when children’s spending habits became a subject of concern and an object of reform. Girls’ increasing participation in the burgeoning culture of consumption as purchasers of movie tickets, clothing, candy, and toys not only provoked intergenerational tensions over the proper use of spending money but also raised broader concerns about how to tame children’s seemingly boundless impulse to buy. Parents, child experts, and educators conceived various strategies to regulate children’s use of spending money, including allowances and mandatory savings bank programs in the public schools. Allowances, however, were a decidedly middle-class phenomenon during the first half of the twentieth century. As a

Allowances and Spending Money result, middle-class girls who did not work but received allowances often enjoyed more financial autonomy than wage-earning, working-class girls who gave their families most, if not all, of their incomes. Predating the introduction of allowances, concern with children’s spending initially led to the formation of school savings banks in the late nineteenth century. Many believed that children were driven by powerful acquisitive instincts that made them incapable of postponing gratification. To stifle these spendthrift impulses, the school savings bank movement sought to make lessons in thrift a regular feature of public education. Beginning modestly in the mid-1880s and gradually becoming a national phenomenon in the early twentieth century, school banks required girls and boys to deposit money on a weekly basis in hopes that regular practice in saving would eventually become habit. Although student bankers enjoyed some adult banking privileges such as receiving interest on their accounts, schools strictly regulated withdrawals in order to discourage “foolish” purchases. Progressive reformers advocated such compulsory saving as a way to Americanize immigrant children and stem the growth of pauperism, welfare dependency, intemperance, and crime. For many immigrant families, the morality of family obligation imposed its own form of discipline on the spending of adolescent daughters—perhaps even more effectively than the institutional restraints of school banking. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, limited family resources and the pull of family duty circumscribed the spending of adolescent immigrant daughters who had left school to join the work-

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force. Though wage earners, immigrant daughters were expected to relinquish their unopened pay envelopes to their mothers in deference to family needs. Although immigrant parents often permitted wage-earning sons to pay half their wages for board and retain the rest for themselves, no such allowances were made for adolescent daughters. Immigrant daughters encountered resistance and family displeasure when they attempted to extend their financial independence by withholding some of their paychecks or sneaking money from their envelopes to spend on themselves. During the buoyant 1920s, enthusiasm for thrift education reached beyond those who sought to control the lower classes. School savings banks adopted a new mission as bulwarks against the reckless pleasure-seeking that allegedly typified middle-class youth. But the spendthrift habits of the flapper generation also highlighted the irrelevance of compulsory saving to an increasingly affluent population of middle-class children—a group well enough supplied with nickels and dimes not to miss the few they ritually deposited on school bank day. By the 1920s, child experts had come to view allowances as the solution to the money training problems and needs of middle-class children. Proponents of children’s allowances rejected the school banking movement’s exclusive focus on saving, arguing that teaching children the value of money also required teaching them to be wise consumers. Though sharing the school banking movement’s eagerness to discourage foolish child spending, allowance advocates sought to do so by teaching children to spend within a budget. Critical of sentimental parents who haphazardly doled out spending money on demand, allowance boosters

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Allowances and Spending Money

believed that lack of a system in children’s money experiences accounted for their lack of money sense. By contrast, a weekly allowance—a regular but fixed supply of spending money—would help systematize both children’s learning and their spending. Reflecting the progressive penchant for order and scientific management, allowance advocates sought to instill economic responsibility by rationalizing children’s money training. Popularizing their ideas in parenting guidebooks and women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Parents’ Magazine, child experts regarded allowances as strictly educational money set aside for children’s consumer training. They criticized using allowance money as a payment for household chores, a reward for good grades or good behavior, or a punishment for delinquencies. Doing so, they argued, confounded principles of duty and family obligation with the principles of the marketplace. As experimental money, allowances entrusted girls and boys with responsibility not only for their own spending choices but for their spending mistakes. Child experts believed such experiential learning was more effective than parental admonitions or interventions in helping children improve their taste; enhance their fiscal awareness; and gain a better sense of their favorite colors, flavors, and toys. Experts also believed allowances helped children develop habits of saving and restraint because children came to value saving as a means to obtain goods whose value exceeded their weekly allowance. The introduction of allowances was an important measure of the democratization of middle-class family life in the early twentieth century. Allowances both acknowledged and elevated the eco-

nomic status of dependent children. Child experts stressed the importance of allowances to children’s sense of power and independence and recommended that parents expand them as children grew into adolescence in order to combat resentment of economic dependence. Allowance money thus entitled middleclass children to spend long before having to earn. Such economic entitlements, however, did not necessarily require the dissolution of parental control. Though allowance money gave girls and boys greater spending freedom, it also promised parents an end to children’s incessant begging and a means to mold children’s taste to adult standards. Though child experts recommended allowances as important consumer training for both boys and girls, gender neutrality did not always inform their assessments of the spending needs and problems of girls. Some viewed adolescent girls as more susceptible to the fashion of their peers and powerless against the sway of shop windows, echoing longstanding stereotypes of women’s alleged vulnerability to consumer excess. By their lights, adolescent girls threatened to strain the family’s pocketbook and goodwill with their perpetual demands for new clothes. Faced with fewer opportunities to earn spending money than boys, middle-class girls relied much more on gifts, allowances, or parental largesse for their source of disposable income. Within some middle-class families, expanded clothing allowances for girls became a way to reduce family friction, keep adolescent resentment at bay, and gain some control over girls’ stepped-up requests for clothes. More commonly, however, gifts and parental indulgence rather than allowances boosted the spending-money supply of middle-class

Allowances and Spending Money girls. As sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd reported in Middletown, their mid1920s study of Muncie, Indiana, a mere 47 percent of girls received spending money through earnings and allowances compared to 85 percent of boys. Deprived of the opportunity to earn and manage a part of their money, Muncie girls not only lacked boys’ habits of financial independence but readily manipulated parents in their quest for greater funds. For some girls, economic dependence brought unintended rewards. As one Muncie high school senior insisted, “Some of us don’t want an allowance; you can get more without one.” Within working-class families during the interwar years, adolescent girls often earned money but enjoyed far less financial autonomy than their middle-class counterparts. Coming from economically disadvantaged families in which children’s earnings were essential to the family economy, wage-earning daughters continued to turn over most, if not all, of their paychecks to their families. By contrast, sons typically retained a portion of their earnings, owing partly to their higher wages but also to gendered expectations that honored male autonomy in the marketplace. Although some wage-earning daughters negotiated a greater degree of economic autonomy for themselves than previous generations—paying board, for example, in exchange for control over their earnings—expectations of filial duty still limited the economic autonomy of most. Working-class girls nevertheless made demands on the family budget for clothing and recreation, and family conflicts over such expenditures were often animated by long-standing gendered assumptions about women’s vanity, their propensity for self-indulgence, and their use of

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earnings as “pin money.” A harsh economic reality, however, lay at the root of these family conflicts over girls’ spending. Because of their low wages and higher clothing expenses, girls often spent more of the family’s resources than was offset by their meager wages. The Great Depression had a varied impact on attitudes toward girls’ spending. It intensified expectations within both working-class and middle-class families that girls should adopt a cooperative attitude and not place too many demands on the family budget. In keeping with traditional ideals of feminine self-sacrifice, girls’ economic obligations were to their families before themselves. Depression-era advice columnists also urged adolescent girls to be more respectful of their dates’ wallet by offering to pay their own way, shunning taxis for cheaper public transportation, and opting for less expensive entertainment and items on the restaurant menu. At the same time, however, the Depression also liberalized attitudes toward spending and reinforced the efficacy of allowances as a form of consumer training. During the 1920s, allowance boosters had discouraged borrowing as a violation of the basic principle of an allowance—learning to live within a budget. By the 1930s, however, the modern world of installment buying and easy credit had persuaded allowance advocates of the need to give girls experience in borrowing as well as earning and spending. As the New Deal linked consumption to economic recovery, children’s spending impulses also underwent a dramatic reassessment. Once seen as dangerous and insatiable, children’s consumer desires were now evidence of a well-adjusted personality, and excessive thriftiness signaled a lackluster imagination. Even cases of consumer excess

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American Girls Collection

found sympathetic treatment, being understood as signs of unmet psychological needs rather than moral failure. Although the ideological rationale for children’s allowances had been firmly established in earlier eras, the heyday of children’s allowances did not arrive until the 1950s. Children were among the primary beneficiaries of the rising standard of living in the postwar United States. According to a 1960 survey by Seventeen, the average teenage girl had a weekly income of $9.53. Receiving allowances in greater numbers than ever before, girls developed a strong sense of their economic and cultural clout as consumers, a sense advertisers all too eagerly reinforced as they aggressively sought the brand loyalty and disposable incomes of teens. As allowances became increasingly commonplace during the last four decades of the twentieth century, parents and children also came to see them more as an economic entitlement than a consumer training tool. Since the 1960s, allowance rates have climbed along with the cost of living and children’s sense of economic entitlement. According to a 1999 Rand youth poll, the typical weekly allowance for high school students ranged from $30 to $46, with girls receiving on average $5 more than boys. In the face of aggressive mass marketing aimed at children, child experts and financial advisers have continued to press for the educational value of allowances, reviving older discourses that speak in new ways to wider concerns about the potential perils of permissive parents and gullible child consumers. Lisa Jacobson

See also Consumer Culture; Girls and Sweets; Girls’ Culture; Work

References and Further Reading Benson, Susan Porter. 1998. “Gender, Generation, and Consumption in the United States: Working-Class Families in the Interwar Period.” Pp. 223–240 in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobson, Lisa. Forthcoming. Raising Consumers: Children, Childrearing, and the American Mass Market, 1890–1940. New York: Columbia University Press. Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rand Youth Poll. 1999. Cited in Kathy Kristof, “Do Your Kids Know That Money Doesn’t Grow on Christmas Trees?” Los Angeles Times (December 3, 2000): A1. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

American Girls Collection Extremely popular among eight- to twelve-year-old girls, the American Girls Collection is a set of seven dolls with accompanying books and accessories representing seven different phases in American history. Pleasant Company, which manufactures American Girl dolls, claims as its mission the enriching of girls’ play through educational toys that impart positive messages and a sense of the history of girlhood in the United States. Although the company now produces a wide array of consumer goods for girls, the flagship product remains the historical American Girl dolls, 18-inch cloth and vinyl dolls, each associated

American Girls Collection with a given year: Felicity (1774), Josefina (1824), Kirsten (1854), Addy (1864), Samantha (1904), Kit (1934), and Molly (1944). At the heart of the very successful appeal to parents is the interweaving of readership into the marketing of the fairly expensive dolls and accessories. Each doll is the protagonist of seven books that offer a window onto the time period to which she is linked, and every doll must be bought with at least one of these books. Although the dolls are not available in retail stores, the books can be found in any bookstore and in public and school libraries and have made their way into many school curricula. The books play a further marketing function: the clothing, furniture, and objects featured in the stories (and on display in the books’ illustrations) are also for sale. Pleasant Company was founded in Middleton, Wisconsin, in 1986 by Pleasant Rowland, a former elementary school teacher, television reporter and anchor, and writer and publisher of educational materials. Kirsten, Samantha, and Molly were the first dolls in the series, with Felicity following in 1991, Addy in 1993, Josefina in 1997, and Kit in 2000. Matching historical fashions for girls were introduced in 1987 so that girl and doll could dress alike. In 1991 the company began to sponsor American Girl activities at living history museums, beginning with “Felicity’s Elegant Tea Party” in Colonial Williamsburg. Programs are now featured at several sites, including Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, and Heurich House Museum in Washington, D.C. Activities like “Samantha’s Ice Cream Social,” “Josefina’s Fiesta,” and an American Girl fashion show travel around the country. A school curriculum based on the American Girls Collection was introduced in 1993. Company offerings

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expanded further in 1995 to include contemporary dolls and books and girls’ clothing. Products now include several different lines of dolls, a magazine, American Girl, games, crafts, an array of books and CD-ROMs, an extensive line of girls’ clothing and accessories, a television show, and a stage revue and restaurant at American Girl Place, a theme store in Chicago. Pleasant Company has been remarkably successful in staking a claim to a niche market and steadily expanding it. Many elements of the American Girls Collection have been copied by other toy companies, including creating historical dolls, making dolls the same approximate size (and the strategy of sizing one’s dolls differently from industry standards so outfits are not interchangeable), and pairing dolls with books. Girls’ enthusiastic response to American Girl dolls includes a lively Internet subculture. Many girls maintain and many more write into American Girl fan websites, which include discussions about American Girl dolls, pictures of girls and their dolls, and often polls that allow visitors to vote for their favorite American Girl dolls. The books, billed in the American Girl catalogue as “historical fiction,” underscore Pleasant Company’s emphasis on education and learning and are widely praised by parents, teachers, and the press for making history appealing to girls. The books locate each of the seven dolls in a different American landscape and historical context, using larger cultural events as the backdrop for girls’ stories that center around personal problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills. Felicity Merriman is a shopkeeper’s daughter in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where her stories play out against the events of the American Revolution. Josefina Montoya,

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American Girls Collection

the only doll whose books are available in Spanish, lives on a ranch in New Mexico ninety years before statehood, and her family’s struggles include change within a traditional community (Josefina and her sisters, unlike their mother before them, learn to read) and the effects of contact with Caucasian America. Pioneer girl Kirsten Larson has immigrated with her family from Sweden to Minnesota, where Kirsten learns English and, disregarding parental opposition, befriends a Native American girl. The Josefina and Kirsten books attend to the American experience of difference, assimilation, and accommodation. Discrimination and racism are addressed more directly in the books about Addy Walker, a North Carolina slave girl who, with her mother, escapes to freedom in Philadelphia. Although Addy is separated from her father and siblings in the first book, the family reunites by the series’ conclusion and, despite experiencing racism in Philadelphia, is hopeful about the future after emancipation. Samantha Parkington, the most romantic figure among the seven and the most popular doll, is a beautiful orphan whose series begins with her living with a cold but kind wealthy grandmother in New Bedford, New York, and ends with her adoption by her dashing young uncle and his glamorous suffragist wife in New York City. Kit Kittredge, who grows up in Cincinnati during the Great Depression, learns about thrift and selflessness as her family struggles to cope with their reversal of fortune. Molly McIntire lives in Illinois during World War II; her mother works for the Red Cross, while her father, a doctor, is serving in England; his safe return is the climax of the final book. At the end of each book, after the conclusion of the story, a section called “A Peek into the Past” offers several pages of

historical information and archival photographs corresponding in a general way to issues raised in the story. For example, the book in which Addy escapes from slavery features a “Peek into the Past” about the slave trade and plantation system; educational and career options for girls at the turn of the century are discussed in the book in which Samantha’s Aunt Cornelia gives a rousing suffragist speech in a park. Although the stories themselves are illustrated with colorful paintings of scenes and objects, the historical images are, by contrast, photographs, mostly black and white, and much more somber in their realism. These images, drawn from museums, libraries, galleries, archives, historical societies, and private collections, testify to the thorough research invested in each of the historical sketches. The sketches, which are more explicit about social and economic difficulties than the stories, nonetheless do tend to stress progress and improvement, usually ending on an upbeat note. American Girl history is noticeably positive: thus Addy, for example, despite her recent escape from slavery and the near-poverty in which her family labors, enjoys lots of nice toys, furniture, and clothing, and her possessions are exactly parallel to those “owned” by the other dolls, including the affluent Samantha. Although the books particularize the experience of seven different periods and regions in the American past, the overarching emphasis, frequently mentioned in the catalogue, is that American girls across time and space are fundamentally the same. The structure of each book series and the layouts of the catalogue serve to underscore this message. The books have identical titles and follow the same cyclical pattern: the first book in

American Girls Collection each set (Meet Felicity, Meet Josefina, Meet Kirsten, and so on) takes place during the summer of the protagonist’s ninth year, the second during that autumn, followed by a Christmas story, a springtime birthday story, a summer story, and a final winter story (Changes for Felicity, Changes for Josefina, Changes for Kirsten). The lessons each girl learns in her books are much the same, and the ways in which she learns them are quite similar: in one recurrent story line, by befriending another girl despite differences between them, and in another, by risking the consequences of disobeying an adult. All the stories focus on thoughtful decisionmaking, and the girls’ choices are rewarded with treats: special foods, fancy dresses, and toys. Each girl has a cherished pet and an even more cherished doll. Although the meticulously detailed accessories and clothing reflect specific historical periods, the exacting parallelism of the catalogue offerings and the books produces remarkable visual conformity: the girls’ poses on the covers of the corresponding books are identical, as are the catalogue layouts, with the dolls always standing or sitting in exactly the same relation to an array of toys, clothes, and home furnishings. Although the stories all focus on the hardship of each historical situation, the catalogue clearly conveys that being an American girl means to like entertaining, home furnishings, and clothes. Critics note the materialism of the American Girl product line. The focus on acquisition is emphasized by the way in which the books themselves function as catalogues by providing illustrations for those outfits and objects in the stories that are for sale as toys. History and commerce make some conflicting demands. The insistent consumerism of the prod-

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uct line calls into question aspects of its historical authenticity, imagining as it does that American girls have always owned extensive wardrobes and lots of toys; certainly the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dolls have more manufactured consumer goods than real girls in those periods and places. In addition, the company is lauded for its sensitivity to multiculturalism, although marketing considerations undoubtedly place some limits on inclusiveness. Even as the line has become more racially and ethnically representative with the additions of Addy and Josefina, Muslim and Jewish girls have not been introduced, presumably because Christmas is not only the subject of the third book but the real lifeblood of the company, the primary selling season for toy makers. Pleasant Company prides itself on providing positive images and messages for girls and is widely praised for depicting girls as active, independent, and capable. American Girl products, from the books to the Chicago stage show, are celebrated for offering girls an alternative to massmarket girls’ culture, with its sexualization of even very young girls and preoccupation with appearances, body image, and the conventional trappings of femininity. The books consistently represent their protagonists as lively and strongminded, and the dolls have sturdy, even chunky bodies, of realistic and healthy proportions. The constant point of comparison is the Barbie doll with its muchcriticized body shape and its play context of clothes and glamour. Pleasant Company deliberately positions itself against cheap, disposable toys; the line’s genesis, according to a corporate history published on the company website and occasionally in catalogues, was in Pleasant Rowland’s frustrated search for a high-

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quality Christmas gift for a niece. Among the salient differences between a Barbie and a Molly is the cost. At $82 for a doll with a paperback book ($88 for hardcover), $20 outfits, and furniture costing up to $155, American Girl dolls are priced for an upscale market and are not, presumably, available for the kind of casual and irreverent treatment Barbies receive at the hands of their young owners. American Girl products are also commended for encouraging girls to develop their imaginations through reading and interactive media play: a CD-ROM lets girls script their own dramas using the American Girl characters. However, the books present girls in highly normative domestic settings and as interested and involved in homemaking chores, nurturing of others, and very well-mannered. When the press covers American Girl events at local venues—tea parties and ice cream socials, often packed—abundant appreciative attention is showered on girls clamoring to learn “old-fashioned” social graces. Skeptical observers question whether in looking to the past the company does, in fact, help liberate girls from the pressures and constraints of modern American culture, or whether the focus on etiquette, clothes, home decor, and ardent consumerism reinforces traditional and sexist social roles. Gina Hausknecht See also Dolls; Girls’ Fiction; Nancy Drew Mysteries; Play; Reading References and Further Reading Acosta-Alzuru, Maria Carolina. 1999. “The American Girl Dolls: Constructing American Girlhood through Representation, Identity, and Consumption.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia. Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American

Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Inness, Sherrie A. 1998. “‘Anti-Barbies’: The American Girls Collection and Political Ideologies.” Pp. 164–183 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press.

Arts and Crafts Arts and crafts is an activity practiced by American girls from colonial times to the present that involved the production of material items for both functional and decorative purposes. Throughout American history, girls from diverse backgrounds have learned such skills as sewing, weaving, spinning, painting, and pottery making from elder members of their families and communities. The meaning of craft production for girls has changed over time, evolving from work that was part of the family economy in early America to a leisure activity rooted in peer culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although there is a vast literature on the decorative and folk arts in America, more attention should be paid to the history of arts and crafts as a social and cultural practice of American girls. In the eighteenth century, most young white women in America lived on farms with their families. A gendered division of labor governed their households: fathers oversaw financial, agricultural, and public functions, and mothers managed domestic duties. Mothers taught their daughters domestic skills and assigned them a variety of tasks, such as washing, ironing, cooking, and cleaning. Daughters learned the crafts of soap and candle making, spinning, weaving, and sewing as part of their sex-role socializa-

Arts and Crafts tion. Girls learned to sew and mend as preparation for their domestic roles as housewives. Clothwork was the primary duty of young women in the early American farm household. Many girls spent the majority of their time spinning wool or weaving flax into cloth. Diaries reveal the monotony of this work. However, the drudgery was overcome at social gatherings like quilting bees, where young women worked side by side at sewing or exchanged tasks to help one another. Young women were so tied to cloth production that the spinning wheel came to symbolize femininity and proper domestic character in early America. Although the spinning wheel stood for feminine work, the loom was equally important to women’s household production by the late eighteenth century. Once the craft of male artisans, weaving became a feminized skill after 1750 as more households owned looms, and more men found opportunities to earn wages for their skilled labor in the expanding consumer market. Weaving allowed young women to significantly contribute to the household economy, giving them a sense of personal satisfaction and material gain. They produced cloth items for their families and came to dominate weaving in some New England communities where friends and neighbors sought their skills. Surviving rugs and coverlets show that clothwork was also a medium for creativity. But in the “age of homespun,” the practice of spinning, weaving, and sewing constituted the work of domestic life and had genuine economic value in the early American family. Privileged families in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sent their girls to private schools and special academies, where girls received instruction in

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painting and needlework in addition to reading and writing. Girls learned embroidery through the making of samplers, one of the most important art forms in early America. On linen or silk, girls stitched domestic or outdoor scenes with images of people, animals, or flowers. They also stitched poetic or biblical verses, numbers, the alphabet, their own names, and the dates of their work. Samplers served as pedagogical tools, and their designs conveyed religious and domestic values. The long and intricate process of making samplers taught girls discipline and sewing skills they could use as adult women in married life. Many young women also learned to paint with stencils, a process known as theorem painting. By the early nineteenth century, both painting and embroidery had become signs of status and represented proper feminine accomplishments. Work dominated the lives of enslaved African American girls prior to the Civil War. Historians believe that childhood was brief for slave children because most began to labor like adults at age four or five. Girls worked in the fields, cared for other children, and did household chores. But free black women and slaves who served as house servants were able to develop special skills, such as soap and candle making, cooking, and basket weaving. Textile work, above all, was a valued craft for African American women. Free young women learned sewing, dressmaking, spinning, and weaving from their elders and then either sold or used their finished products. This strong tradition of textile work carried over into the post–Civil War period, when black women made quilts that expressed their creativity and their resistance to oppression. For example, historians believe the Bible quilts of Harriet

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Powers, a former slave, exemplify the craft skills and values of African American women during this period. Textiles, once the labor of both slave and free black women, were also art forms and sources of tradition learned by girls and passed on from generation to generation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the rise and expansion of the middle class enabled more families to release their daughters from duties associated with the family economy. Industrialization transformed the household, changing it from a place of production to a site of consumption. The new market economy employed middle-class fathers outside the home on behalf of the entire family. Mothers hired domestic help and purchased goods from the market. No longer needed for baking bread and spinning wool, girls lost their economic function in the home, and consequently the craft traditions that were so central to household production shifted from being a form of work to a source of leisure. In the late nineteenth century, girls began to attend public high schools at an unprecedented rate, and as a consequence, their role in the home became unclear, especially because of their newfound leisure time. Filling the leisure time of girls became a major concern among members of the middle class, who feared that new commercialized forms of entertainment would corrupt the morals of the nation’s youth. As immigrant working girls flooded dance halls, vaudeville shows, and amusement parks seeking pleasure and freedom as a reward for their labors, middle-class parents worried that their own daughters, freed from housework, would explore these new forms of recreation. Department stores, also new centers of entertainment, were very attractive to middle-class girls.

These attractions and the increasing consumer orientation of American youth stimulated several women writers to promote arts and crafts as a healthy and productive alternative activity for girls. Between 1880 and 1915, Lina and Adelia Beard, Helen Campbell, Lilla Elizabeth Kelley, A. Neely Hall, and Dorothy Perkins presented girls with “new ideas for work and play” in a series of “activity books” geared to adolescent girls (Beard and Beard 1902). The Beards encouraged girls to learn spinning and weaving, the traditional crafts of the preindustrial household. Kelley gave advice on knitting and crocheting, and Campbell offered guidelines for making dollhouses, wax flowers, and wood carvings. These authors also directed girls on furniture making and included instructions for building bookshelves, stools, and dressers. Woodworking required strong physical activity, as did hiking and camping, just two of the many outdoor activities that were also promoted by these authors. By advocating arts and crafts, the writers of activity books sought to reconstitute girls’ productive roles in the home by giving them new forms of useful work. They tried to draw them away from the lures of the commercial market by promoting the value of homemade items over mass-produced items. These books also promoted a new model of American girlhood, one that was active, healthy, and useful, to combat the image of the idle Victorian girl who spent her days quietly and passively in the parlor. In this way, the Beards and other writers who promoted arts and crafts were part of a feminist revision of American girlhood. At the same time that activity books encouraged girls to take up craftwork, adult men and women began to participate in the American arts and crafts

Arts and Crafts movement. Based on the ideas of the English craftsmen John Ruskin and William Morris, the movement responded to industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in the United States by calling for a return to manual production, craftsmanship, and the functionality and simplicity of material goods. Middle-class Americans who felt disillusioned with mechanization or idle from a lack of physical work could reinvigorate their creative skills and manual talents through glassmaking, pottery making, furniture making, bookbinding, and ironwork. Leaders of the arts and crafts movement tried to disseminate and institutionalize their craft ideals in school training programs. Gustav Stickley, the founder of The Craftsman, believed that crafts could save children from the negative impact of modern industrial life by providing occupation for the idle rich and uplifting poor and immigrant children. In Chicago schools, for example, privileged students had courses in aesthetic culture and built furniture and household items that reflected the tastes of the larger arts and crafts movement. Manual training programs for working-class children prepared pupils for work in adult life. Chicago’s Jewish Manual Training School instructed children in drawing, painting, and design and taught girls lessons in sewing and cutting for future garment work. In schools, girls learned craft skills deemed appropriate for their gender. Efforts to revive and instill craft traditions in American girls carried over into the twentieth century with the formation of girls’ outdoor organizations, such as the Girl Pioneers, the Girl Scouts, and the Camp Fire Girls. As middle-class Americans tried to get “back to nature” and escape the problems and stress of

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urban, industrial life, scouting movements, like activity books, encouraged girls to experience nature and pursue handicrafts in the outdoors. Girls would knit and sew in the outdoors, but more often they were encouraged to imitate Native American craft traditions and make pottery, Navajo blankets, and Indian dolls. Nature offered girls inspiration for art designs and a way to re-create the domestic sphere in the context of the outdoors. Scouting movements provided middle-class girls with new leisure activities and work roles with the goal of reestablishing a productive role for girls in the family and society. At the end of the twentieth century, the Girl Scouts still remain one of the strongest sources of arts and crafts instruction for American girls. While middle-class girls made faux “Indian” crafts, Native American women worked hard to maintain indigenous craft traditions in their communities. The crafts of many native cultures have survived because women remained dedicated to teaching girls specialized skills. For example, women on the plateau of the northwestern United States cultivated craft talents in girls by encouraging them to go on spiritual quests to discover their talents. Grandmothers were important teachers who, through example, showed young women how to do beadwork and basketry. Plateau women specialized in weaving twined and coiled baskets, working and tanning hides, and doing beadwork. Traditionally, items such as baskets were functional and used for gathering and preparing food, but such items were also decorated with beautiful geometric designs and often served as gifts or items for trade. Today, families and friends in these Native American communities still exchange craft items

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Three girls weave baskets, Hopi Reservation, Arizona, 1903. (Edward Curtis/Library of Congress)

as gifts, and grandmothers often watch with great pride as young girls wear their beaded regalia for traditional dancing. Mexican American mothers and grandmothers have also been key figures in the preservation of arts and crafts traditions in the twentieth century. In Mexican communities in Texas, many women inherited the art of quilting from their mothers and grandmothers when they were girls. Today, older women quilt as a source of enjoyment rather than out of a need to produce warm blankets for the family. Mexican women in Texas also have a tradition of making paper flowers for weddings, quinceañeras (fifteenthbirthday celebrations), and funerals. This tradition is still practiced by women and girls at the end of the twentieth century.

Despite efforts to maintain and revive cultural practices and formalize the teaching of arts and crafts, the practice of arts and crafts has declined steadily in the twentieth century. Commercialized leisure offers girls forms of entertainment and pleasure that focus on what they can purchase instead of what they can make. Rather than paint or weave, adolescent and teenage girls more often use their bodies as a canvas to express themselves. Girls also have fewer day-today ties to adult women in their families and communities who could teach them craft traditions. But little girls, between the ages of four and ten, do remain enthusiastic about arts and crafts. Beadwork, latch hooks, and lanyards are among the many handicrafts that are popular for

Arts and Crafts

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A young girl models a monster out of clay. (Shirley Zeiberg)

girls who turn to booklets, magazines, and ready-made kits as guides. Craft production no longer serves a functional purpose and is no longer the main medium for socializing girls into feminine roles. Yet it survives as one source of leisure and play for young girls today. Carla Bittel See also Clothing; Consumer Culture; Dollhouses; Girls’ Culture; Handbags; Play; Samplers; Saturday Evening Girls References and Further Reading Ackerman, Lillian A. 1996. A Song to the Creator: Traditional Arts of the Native American Women of the Plateau. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Beard, Lina, and Adelia Beard. 1887. The American Girls’ Handy Book: How to

Amuse Yourself and Others. Foreword by Anne M. Boulard. Reprint, Boston: David R. Godine. ———. 1902. New Ideas for Work and Play: What a Girl Can Make and Do. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Bishop, Robert, and Jacqueline Marx Atkins. 1995. Folk Art in American Life. New York: Viking Studio Books. Boris, Eileen. 1986. Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Ferris, William, ed. 1983. Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts. Boston: G. K. Hall. Graham, Joe S., ed. 1991. Hecho en Tejas: Texas-Mexican Folk Arts and Crafts. Denton: University of North Texas Press.

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Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson. 1998. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books. Macdonald, Anne L. 1988. No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting. New York: Ballantine Books. Norton, Mary Beth. 1980. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Oak, Jacquelyn. 1994. Sotheby’s Guide to American Folk Art. New York: Simon and Schuster. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Swan, Susan Burrows. 1977. Plain and Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700–1850. New York: Routledge. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1998. “Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England.” William and Mary Quarterly 55: 3–38.

Asian American Girls Across more than a century of migration, labor, family life, acculturation, and identity formation, Asian American girls have been unacknowledged actors in the larger transpacific story of mobility and circumscribed opportunity. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Asian immigrant and second-generation girls have played a necessary role in supporting the family wage economy in a context of race, gender, class, and sexual boundaries that were essentially transnational as families became divided by racialized, gendered, and orientalist U.S. immigration policies. Regardless of their occupations and the low value placed on their waged labor that resulted from the distorted passive image of Asian women, they more than simply augmented the wages of male breadwinners. To study

Asian American girlhood is also to reveal the ambivalent impact of popular culture and socializing agents (schools, churches, and social agencies) on representations, family socialization, and community life—overlapping experiences that have framed as well as limited Asian American girls’ efforts to develop their multifaceted womanhood. Few Asian American girls (or boys) were visible in cities, towns, or the countryside of the late nineteenth-century United States. A recent study suggests that the percentage of native-born Chinese children in late nineteenth-century San Francisco did increase over time, suggesting the possibility that more and more such immigrants in that city regarded the United States as their home community. Few Chinese parents, however, brought infants or children to the United States. The relatively small number of children had little to do with the “sojourner” mentality or the desire to maintain temporary residency in the United States and more with externally imposed constraints (Chen 2000, 56–57). The minuscule number of girls (and boys) stemmed from anti-Asian immigration laws. Following the passage of the raceand class-based Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and other related legislation, Chinese arrivals were turned back unless they qualified as one of the exempt classes (officials, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers). Gradually, versions of such legislation were extended to other Asian arrivals. Strictly enforced until their repeal in 1943, these laws stymied family immigration to the United States (Hing 1993, 44–48). Until the 1940s, Asian immigrant communities showed a skewed sex ratio, which thwarted reproduction, perpetuated divided family units, and engendered

Asian American Girls a male-dominated community life. Asian immigrant women not only were barred by the same laws that kept men out but were also excluded by officials’ belief that many were prostitutes or “immoral” (Peffer 1999, 8–9). Cultural traditions that proscribed the movement of women away from their extended family unit also limited the female inflow into the United States. Fear of racially motivated violence and the itinerant nature of labor also discouraged their immigration. Left behind in Asia, these women missed the opportunity, through education and labor in the United States, to possibly transform androcentric Asian immigrant cultures. The few Chinese and Japanese girls of the late nineteenth-century United States grew up in communities that privileged male offspring over female ones, as suggested in this Chinese proverb: “a boy is born facing in; a girl is born facing out.” Within the Chinese American community, patriarchy and a skewed sex ratio engendered the phenomenon known as mui-tsai (in Cantonese dialect, “little sister”). Sold by poverty-stricken parents in China into domestic service, these muitsai were brought to the United States to serve in affluent Chinese homes or brothels. Such girls typically received no wages for their labor, although they often were freed through marriage in their late teens. Unable to leave of their own free will, many suffered from economic and sexual exploitation at the hands of their employers. Upon attaining womanhood, some were resold into prostitution, considered a lucrative venture in the predominately male Asian communities. Bereft of any legal recourse, some girls ran away to so-called rescue homes established by maternalist Protestant missionary women. Though pressured to

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adopt gender roles that emphasized female purity, piety, and domesticity, many ignored such ideals, and few converted to Christianity (Yung 1996, 37–41; Tong 1994, 176–191). By the 1920s the mui-tsai system, due to the efforts of missionary women and Chinese social reformers, had almost entirely disappeared. Yet the participation of girls in supporting the family livelihood continued on. Japanese American immigrant and second-generation girls played several roles in supporting the family economy. Some of the immigrant young women came as “picture brides,” a phenomenon that occurred during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Usually in their late teens or early twenties, they moved to the United States to join their typically much older husbands in these arranged marriages. Issei (immigrants, or first-generation) picture brides often toiled in rural areas, laboring in sugar beet fields, lumbering camps, and horticulture. In addition to working alongside their husbands in these endeavors, these Issei young women shouldered the burden of domesticity in a frontierlike environment (Glenn 1986, 42–48). Other Asian rural girls recalled that their childhoods were arduous. After the 1913 Alien Land Act was passed in California and other states followed suit, Asian immigrants—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Asian Indian—could not own land or lease it for longer than three years. To compensate for that, Asian farmers resorted to labor-intensive farming, which demanded the effort of all family members. Daughters labored as fruit pickers, did cannery work, helped with housework and child care, and sometimes were hired out as domestics. Such responsibilities often delayed or

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interrupted their education. This lot was shared by countless Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Asian Indian girls. Mary Paik Lee, born in Korea in 1905, not only cared for her siblings and foraged for food but also washed other people’s laundry, cleaned a schoolhouse, and worked as a servant girl in various California localities (Lee 1990, lix). Punjabi Mexican girls in California of nonfarming families became part of the labor migratory circuit, earning the same wages as their parents as they labored in vineyards, fields, and orchards. Such Asian girls had little time for a social life; isolated from the larger society, their Americanization was retarded. Most rural second-generation Asian girls (and boys) played the important function of landholders. As U.S. citizens by birth, they could own the agricultural land that their parents coveted. In the interwar years, Punjabi farmers in the Imperial Valley bought land in the names of their children and then managed it as guardians through probate (Leonard 1992, 135). Compared to their rural peers, urban Asian girls led more comfortable, though not affluent, childhoods. Unlike their rural counterparts, they typically worked shorter hours and avoided heavy manual labor. Monica Sone, a Nisei (children of immigrants, or second-generation Japanese) who grew up in Seattle, fondly recalled the “games”—one of which was “climbing the laundry”—she and her brother devised whenever they assisted their parents with the housekeeping of their family-owned residential hotel (Sone 1953, 13). Mrs. Watanabe (first name is unavailable) and her siblings were sent to Japan—a not unusual occurrence—to be raised by relatives so that both parents could run their laundry

(Glenn and Parreñas 1996, 135). In early twentieth-century San Francisco, Chinese American working-class girls were groomed to become virtuous wives and mothers. Since their mothers led sheltered but still work-oriented lives, their daughters helped with the shopping and housework, sometimes even holding part-time service-oriented jobs. In spite of the limited time for play, these girls enjoyed Chinese celebrations, Chinese opera, and church meetings. Chinese American girls who hailed from educated, middle-class, and often Christianinfluenced families led far more leisurely lives than their working-class sisters; growing up in the 1910s, Florence Chinn Kwan taught English to Chinese immigrants but contributed her earnings to a missionary society (Yung 1996, 110–114). Regardless of subregion or locale, most Asian American girls received socialization through the Christian church, paid labor, and most important, public schooling. In these schools both boys and girls came into contact with non-Asian Americans and learned American culture. Most Asian American children were motivated to learn the English language and Euro-American mannerisms to fit in with their peers. Among some middleclass Asian American children, the drive to excel in their studies was also encouraged partly by parental stress on securing a good education for upward mobility. Through their interactions with teachers, employers, and peers, girls realized that being American meant having certain freedoms. As a teenager Jade Snow Wong, later a well-known writer, worked as a domestic for Euro-American families. During her service, she formed the impression that American social relations were warm and affectionate, whereas Chinese culture seemed rigid and

Asian American Girls restrictive. Since Asian boys enjoyed relatively more freedom than girls, the issue of personal freedom became paramount for the latter. Constrained by gender boundaries, some hoped to leave traditions behind, step into the public sphere, and receive recognition for individual accomplishments (Chan 1998, 135, 144). In a time when assimilation reigned supreme and cultural pluralism was not a choice, Asian American youth showed a strong preference for the American part of their legacy. One such girl was Sone, who recalled that during her childhood days before World War II, she “found herself switching [her] . . . personality back and forth daily like a chameleon” (Sone 1953, 22). Shuttling back and forth between her American public school and the Japanese-language institution, she developed a dual personality. Robust and active in the public school, she turned demure and self-effacing in the Japanese one. Encouraged to step into the model of the larger society’s “new woman” of the early twentieth century, she was also nudged to conform to the ethnic community’s image of motherhood. For most of her childhood, she could not envision herself being a “Yankee and Japanese at the same time” and found herself strongly drawn to the former (Sone 1953, 19). But often deep-seated racial prejudices thwarted such aspirations. Fellow students frequently taunted Asian girls, and teachers were either condescending or blatantly racist. Mary Paik Lee, a Korean American born outside the United States who immigrated before the end of high school, recalled that when she protested about receiving lower grades than white students, the teacher retorted, “If you don’t like it, get the hell out of here. We don’t want you here anyway” (Lee 1990,

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56). Esther Wong of San Francisco remembered that her French teacher, in response to her reading aloud in class, said: “Well, you read all right, but I don’t like you. You belong to a dirty race that spits at missionaries” (Yung 1996, 129). Social science studies of Japanese American students in the 1920s and 1930s showed that their Americanization foundered because of racism (Yoo 2000, 23). Perhaps such tensions in the schools discouraged Asian American girls from choosing professional careers or a college education. A 1937 study of Chinese high school students in San Francisco concluded that Chinese females were more accepting of the idea of marriage than career (Yung 1996, 130). Racial discrimination only served to make these girls more self-conscious—even ashamed—of their ethnic cultures. Young Asian American women also ran headlong into demeaning popular images that eroticized as well as exoticized the female body. Asians in literature and early Hollywood films were portrayed as being either “good” or “bad,” with the former taking the forms of helpless heathens, loyal allies, or sidekicks and servants, and the latter sinister villains and brute hordes. Stock figures such as Fu Manchu, the diabolical paragon of Chinese evil, and Charlie Chan, the model of the benign Chinese, underscore the white as superior in all aspects. Young female adolescents grew up knowing or watching films that featured Asian American actresses playing roles in the image of the “Lotus Blossom” (subservient and passive) or “Dragon Lady” (promiscuous and untrustworthy). Anna May Wong, the pioneer Chinese American actress of the interwar years, played only “exotic doll” roles available for white male dominance. Since Chinese deemed female artists to

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be “loose” women, Wong, who made her acting debut at twelve years old, both defied her parents and ignored public perceptions. And yet racial discrimination throttled her full potential because she never played complex characters (Tong 2000, 154, 156). Scientific studies of the interwar period also deemed the Asian body to be strange, peculiar, and weak. Scientists were interested in establishing a classification for the physical racial type of the Asian. Japanese American students in California in the 1920s underwent intelligence testing—which often did not take into account differing language skills and socialization—that produced results seemingly confirming the belief that whites were more intelligent than Asians (Chun 2000, 21–22; Yoo 1994, 57–65). By the eve of World War II, Asian American girls found themselves torn between two worlds: treated at times like ethnographic spectacle but always deemed alien, they were also ambivalent about their parents’ culture. That ambivalence was heightened by tensions over the question of dating, standards of beauty, and female autonomy. Most Asian American youngsters did not cross the color line; interracial dating was taboo in a time when antimiscegenation laws held sway. Filipino parents, recalling the customs of the Islands, expected their daughters to accept chaperonage and strict hours, and Punjabi fathers, in deference to the custom of arranged marriages, often rebuffed potential beaus who were vying for their daughters’ attention. Many Nisei girls were not allowed to “go out,” except for club or group activities. Some girls accommodated their parents’ demands, but others resisted (Leonard 1992, 153; Matsumoto 1993, 77; Posadas 1989, 281). Mary Paik

Lee asked her father for permission before she went out with her future husband (Lee 1990, 62). Yoshiko Uchida, however, expressed her exasperation aloud whenever her father demanded that she, even during her college days, return from her dates before nine in the evening (Uchida 1982, 43). Flora Belle Jan, perhaps a Chinese flapper and more interested in postwar consumerism and romance, simply ignored her traditionbound parents’ disapproval of her active social life and sometimes disappeared for days on end (Yung 1996, 123–124). World War II marked a turning point for some Asian American girls. Nisei young women found themselves incarcerated during the duration along with other people of Japanese descent. Families were divided, and community life broke down. Confusion colored Japanese American lives; at the age of seven Jeanne Wakatsuki puzzled over the disappearance of her father, who was taken away by agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Like so many other young Nisei girls, Wakatsuki was also perturbed by her family’s uprooting from a social milieu consisting of peer relatives, schoolmates, and teachers (Houston and Houston 1973, 8–14). The education she and others received in the concentration camps—which emphasized the message of Americanization—was incongruous with their imprisoned status. These girls joined the boys in staging mass walkouts, some of which led to vandalism. But because the incarceration years threw them together with other coethnics in confined spaces, their ethnic consciousness became heightened and would survive in the postwar years even as racialethnic enclaves declined (Yoo 2000, 106–110, 174). For other Asian American girls (and boys), the war years marked

Asian American Girls change in a positive direction. Exclusion was gradually chipped away following the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Women—often along with their foreign-born children—could now enter the United States as part of the family reunification process, eventually producing a new generation of native-born offspring. Legislation initiated in 1965 eventually pried open the door for even more family reunifications and some admissions based on occupational skills, with the latter initiating the migration of educated, middle-class Asians. During the 1950s and early 1960s rebelling against their parents’ familycentered values and worldview was a way for many native-born Asian girls to assert their own selfhood in a climate in which the mainstream youth culture extolled consumerism and rebellion against conformist family life. Foreign-born Asian youth could not escape intergenerational tension either, since the emotional reunification was tempered by the harsh reality of poverty and reassertion of parental supervision. Juvenile delinquency partly stemmed from a breakdown in family life. Sue Jean Lee Suettinger, raised in New York’s Chinatown of the 1960s and involved with a Chinese American youth gang that was often embroiled in scuffles with Italian gangs, explained her generation as simply wanting to “be independent, grow up, and have an identity” (Suettinger 1992, 39). Contemporary Asian American girls live in a world that seems much smaller but also more complex. Most refugees and recent immigrant children, along with their families, have fled countries haunted by a legacy of U.S. imperialism that resulted in distorted Western influences, political and economic chaos, and even war. Those uprooted forcibly from

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their native lands—Southeast Asian immigrants being an obvious example— often, at least for the first generation, maintain an emotional attachment to their country of birth (and families left behind) long after their settlement in the United States (Kibria 1993, 161–162; Rutledge 1992, 62). The fortunes of Asian girls in the United States have also been shaped by economic forces. Global restructuring— rapid global economic integration—has led to a contraction in United States of high-paying manufacturing jobs and an expansion of low-wage assembly and service-sector jobs that rely heavily on female labor. Among Vietnamese and Hmong refugees, the increasing involvement of women in paid work has given them an opportunity to gain qualified personal freedom and contest the traditional hierarchies of family life. Household tension, spousal abuse, and even divorce have ensued from this partial reconfiguration of gender relations, though radical change in traditional male roles and behaviors rarely occurred (Espiritu 1997, 75–76; Muzny 1989, 134). Not only do some female immigrant youngsters confront a conflict-ridden household, but many more face the burden of poverty, in part a by-product of conditions in their country of origin. For children caught in the throes of these conflicts, confusion reigns. “As a child, I did not understand why we had to work so hard and live so poorly,” Maijue Xiong, who grew up in Laos, recalled (Chan 1994, 121). To overcome poverty in the United States, recent workingclass immigrant children have had to help with family-run businesses or hold part-time jobs. The adjustment to life in the United States has been somewhat eased by the

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Having diverse role models is important for the self-development of girls. (Courtesy Girl Scouts of the USA)

continuance of family ties and traditions. Yet some of the continuities placed these girls on a collision course with their parents. Xiong, for example, resented the inordinate attention paid to her brothers and the overbearing protection of her parents. She felt ashamed of her native language and longed to change her identity or risk rejection from her peers (Muzny 1989, 133–139; Chan 1994, 128). The development of transnational ties for certain Asian American families—a by-product of the flow of capital from Asia to the United States and also the reverse—in recent decades has reshaped the socialization process of some girls. Asian American entrepreneurs and working-class parents often left their children in the care of relatives in their countries of birth so that they could pursue their occupations in the United States. They

might bring older progeny over to the United States to take advantage of schooling, but then sometimes fathers would spend time away from the United States, taking care of business in Asia. Without close parental supervision and possessing an evolving mind-set, children often develop their own conceptions of personal, ethnic, and national identities (Leonard 1997, 152; Chen 1992, 56–57). Further, the flow of information and the filtering of Western influences to Asian countries—particularly those that have had political ties to the United States— have also determined the pace of their Americanization. Catherine Tagudin grew up in the Philippines in the 1960s on a staple of Disney movies and tales from letters written by relatives in the United States, but upon her arrival in the United

Asian American Girls

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Three nineteen-year-old friends attend an Asian American festival. (Skjold Photographs)

States, she discovered a world quite unlike the idyllic paradise she had come to believe in (Tagudin 1996, 194–196). Contemporary Asian American girls face challenges not unlike those encountered by their peers of the past. Race and gender remain markers of difference. Language acquisition and the social pressure to discard “foreign accents” are also continuities from the era of exclusion. Many bemoaned the “culture shock” they endured (Kim and Yu 1996, 131–132; Dublin 1996, 176, 209). As in the past, migration to the United States also enhanced intergenerational tensions, which stemmed from cultural clashes between generations and the concomitant decline in the power and authority of family elders. Parents with little Englishlanguage fluency and familiarity with the U.S. bureaucracies have had to rely on the

mediation of their children, which in turn has given them more leverage in shaping family dynamics. Cultural clashes with elders have tended to differentiate along the axis of age: older girls tend to define their struggle against their Asianness (and against their parents) in terms of interpersonal roles and relations, but younger girls, being cognitively immature, see Asianness as simply material manifestations of ethnicity. Compared to young girls, older ones experienced a duality that is more psychologically driven. Benson Tong See also Immigration; Work References and Further Reading Bacon, Jean. 1996. Life Lines: Community, Family, and Assimilation Among Asian Indian Immigrants. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Chan, Sucheng. 1998. “Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender in the Construction of Identities among Second-Generation Chinese Americans.” Pp. 127–164 in Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era. Edited by K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chan, Sucheng, ed. 1994. Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chen, Hsiang-shui. 1992. Chinatown No More: Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chen, Yong. 2000. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Chun, Gloria Heyung. 2000. Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dublin, Thomas, ed. 1996. Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic: College Students Explore Their Roots. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Espiritu, Yen Le. 1997. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1986. Issei, Nisei, and War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, and Rachel Salazar Parreñas. 1996. “The Other Issei: Japanese Immigrant Women in the Pre–World War II Period.” Pp. 110–124 in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America. Edited by Silvia Pedraza and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Hing, Bill Ong. 1993. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston. 1973. Farewell to Manzanar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kibria, Nazli. 1993. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kim, Elaine H., and Eui-Young Yu. 1996. East to America: Korean American Life Stories. New York: New Press. Lee, Mary Paik. 1990. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America. Edited by Sucheng Chan. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lee, Robert G. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Leonard, Karen Isaksen. 1992. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1997. The South Asian Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Matsumoto, Valerie. 1993. Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Muzny, Charles C. 1989. The Vietnamese in Oklahoma City: A Study of Ethnic Change. New York: AMS Press. Peffer, George Anthony. 1999. If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Posadas, Barbara M. 1989. “Mestiza Girlhood: Interracial Families in Chicago’s Filipino American Community since 1925.” Pp. 273–282 in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women. Edited by Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon Press. Rutledge, Paul James. 1992. The Vietnamese Experience in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sone, Monica. 1953. Nisei Daughter. Boston: Little, Brown. Suettinger, Sue Jean Lee. 1992. “West Side Story.” Pp. 38–44 in Asian Americans: Oral Histories of First to Fourth Generation Americans from China, the Philippines, Japan, India, the Pacific Islands, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Edited by Joann Faung Jean Lee. New York: New Press. Tagudin, Catherine. 1996. “My Experience with Immigration/ Assimilation in America.” Pp. 193–197 in Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic: College Students Explore Their Roots. Edited by Thomas Dublin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Asian American Girls Tong, Benson. 1994. Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2000. The Chinese Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Uchida, Yoshiko. 1982. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wong, Jade Snow. 1945. Fifth Chinese Daughter. New York: Harper and Row.

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Yoo, David K. 1994. “Growing Up Nisei: Second-Generation Japanese Americans of California, 1924–1945.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. ———. 2000. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–1949. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Yung, Judy. 1996. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

B Babysitting

The decline in the number of teenagers by the mid-1980s was one among a number of factors that led to the idealization of preadolescent girls as babysitters. Glorified in girls’ culture, babysitting became the province of increasingly younger girls. Graduates of babysitting courses are today seen as especially competent caretakers. Before babysitting there was “minding the children,” the paid activity of girls and boys, women and men, kin, and neighbors. During the Depression, some boys who cared for youngsters even established their own informal babysitting clubs. Despite government attempts to conscript high school students to serve as an army of babysitters to guard the home front during World War II, it was often grade school children who answered the call. One 1943 study reported in the Journal of Home Economics revealed that as many as two-thirds of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in Elmira, New York (a small city with a booming war industry), regularly cared for children (between two months and nine years old) from the late afternoon until early morning (Pollock 1943, 31). The exigencies of World War II also led male college students at the City College of New York, Columbia, and Harvard to seek jobs as babysitters. Though the war generated a demand for child care, female adolescents and others were more

Babysitting, most typically associated with adolescent girls who receive payment for part-time child care in the home of employers, is a relatively modern form of labor. Since World War II, babysitting has remained the nearly universal introduction of girls into the labor force. The word babysitting, first coined shortly before World War II, did not emerge as a significant service industry until the postwar period because of the baby boom, suburbanization, prosperity, permissive childrearing, and other forces. Feeling exploited by employers, in 1947 babysitters attempted to organize unions and issue manifestoes that delineated mutual responsibilities. Drawing upon notions set forth by sitters, educators, experts, and others established a code of conduct meant to contain teenage girls seen as irritatingly irresponsible. It also spelled out for parents the importance of providing appropriate sources and resources for babysitters. In the 1960s, fears about the decline of community cohesion and other influences led to the widespread circulation of urban myths. The “man upstairs” who was incorporated into popular movie plots in the late 1970s sheds light on the fears of children, sitters, and employers. In the 1980s, representations of insane sitters more clearly revealed the anxieties of employers about female adolescents.

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This 1947 Saturday Evening Post cover depicts Norman Rockwell’s notion of babysitting. (Library of Congress)

Babysitting

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In postwar periodicals, babysitters were represented as militant radicals. (Christian Science Monitor April 10, 1948: 5)

likely to take advantage of wartime job opportunities instead of babysitting. That babysitting was not as yet professionalized led employers to pay sitters low wages (25 to 50 cents per hour) to watch the children and clean the house. Poor working conditions led teenage girls in three suburban communities in the Northeast and Midwest to draw upon the notion of class conflict in an effort to eliminate “exploitation,” assert their “sitters’ rights,” and reshape the “industry.” Through contracts, codes, and manifestoes, girls articulated their grievances over low wages, inadequate heat, and housework. Although boys mowed lawns at three times the babysitter’s hourly rate, teenage girls had few socially acceptable options for earning money other than

babysitting, which became a $750 million industry by 1948. In the 1950s, babysitting mushroomed because of new employment opportunities for women, rising affluence, the baby boom, suburbanization, a child-centered family life, the popularization of teen culture, and the expansion of consumer culture. But many parents who hired adolescent girls for 50 cents per hour did so with the expectation that girls—by virtue of their sex—were motivated more by maternity than by money. This discrepancy in expectations perpetuated labor conflict. In Parents’ Magazine and Family Home Guide as elsewhere, mothers and fathers routinely complained about unruly, unreliable, and irresponsible babysitters who ran up phone bills and left the refrigerator bare. Fed-up fathers motivated less by

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profit than by the promise of a free evening out participated in babysitter cooperatives typically organized by their wives, who were eager for time off. In movies such as Sitting Pretty and on TV, men who babysat (as did comedian Sid Caesar) were widely represented in the popular culture. Parents who felt frustrated with the self-absorbed teenage girls in their suburban neighborhoods followed the advice of experts who promoted boy sitters in popular magazines such as Life (1945), educational journals, and etiquette manuals. Many boys attended courses on babysitting offered by local nursing associations, where they practiced on life-size dolls. Despite wider concerns over male juvenile delinquency, boy sitters were said to possess an androgynous combination of “gentle determination.” By the early 1960s, the relationship between a teen and a toddler was even celebrated in the rock and roll hit “Baby Sittin’ Boogie.” By the 1960s, however, the publication of articles about babysitting in popular magazines significantly diminished. Instead, employers—along with babysitters and children—expressed their frustrations and fears in a new medium: the urban legend. Circulated as “true stories,” these legends shed light on the anxieties of everyone involved: the parent anxious about leaving a stranger in charge; the anxious child worried about abandonment; and the babysitter, often alone and isolated in a dark house at night. In “the man upstairs,” the most common babysitter legend, a persistent caller (a murderer who is actually inside the house!) makes threatening phone calls to a self-absorbed female babysitter. The raspy male voice (actually calling from an upstairs extension) asks the question on the lips of every parent: “Have

you checked the children?” She has not. In the end, the babysitter’s negligence (she is watching television) makes her nearly as dangerous as the maniac who, as it turns out, is more vigilant than she. Beginning in the 1970s, a frightened as well as frightening babysitter became a pop culture icon in horror films of the period. When a Stranger Calls (1979), about a teenage girl who unwittingly attracts the maniac who threatens her life and the safety of the children she has been hired to protect, is closely based on the urban legend. In Halloween (1978) the sexually active babysitters are victimized by a homicidal maniac. In both the popular and pornographic movies and fiction that followed, the iconic babysitter is represented as a vixen or villain who threatens marital fidelity and family stability. This characterization has continued to dominate the news media. In the 1980s, simultaneous changes in demographics (e.g., fewer teens) and increased job opportunities (e.g., the fast food industry) contributed to the search for alternative child care providers. Some parents hired young men, mature women (especially through babysitter agencies), and friendly neighbors (organized into parent cooperatives) as they had in the 1950s. But they also turned with increasing frequency to preadolescent girls, a source of labor untapped since World War II. Though girls had been “minding the children” during World War II, child experts in the 1950s advised mothers not to hire a babysitter who was younger than her mid-teens. But thirty years later the idealized preadolescent “super sitter” was everywhere in American popular culture. A commercial girls’ culture that emerged in the mid-1980s aimed to shape the preadolescent girl into a responsible professional.

Barbie The enormously popular Baby-Sitters Club book series, movies, and fan club, which glorified babysitting and idealized the preadolescent sitter in the mid-1990s, became a site of postfeminist socialization that aimed to prepare preadolescent girls for both motherhood and the marketplace. The negotiation of new social realities along with changing expectations and ideals about gender, girlhood, and female adolescence can be gleaned from the hundreds of books in the book series, the movies, and from girls’ fan letters to Ann M. Martin, the series’ author. The Baby-Sitters Club girls were shaped by the fledgling “girl power” ethos soon to flourish in the popular culture of the 1990s. This commercial form of postfeminism that empowered the fictionalized babysitters as well as contained them satisfied the needs of real girls, the families that hired them, the communities they served, and the consumer culture that absorbed their wages. Unlike previous depictions of babysitting as an isolated activity, however, members of the club make the job seem like a far more social experience than it usually is. Certified training courses (e.g., Safe Sitters) have similarly aimed to educate, acculturate, and elevate. Among those who babysit are some who appreciate the opportunity to keep the money they earn. Iselda, a migrant farmworker, is happy not to have to work in the fields on weekends. Unlike the wages she earns as a migrant worker, which she is obligated to turn over to her parents, the money she earns babysitting is her own to keep (“Migrant Workers’ Children”). But for others perhaps less desperate, babysitting still leaves much to be desired. The chief complaints of babysitters in this undervalued, feminized field are low pay, last-minute calls,

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cancellations, parents who come back late (sometimes drunk), sexual harassment, and having to care for the “brat pack.” For their part, parents continue to complain either about inaccessible girls who prefer to flip hamburgers or about incompetent ones who charge too much and give too little. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Domesticity; Work References and Further Reading The Babysitter (motion pictures, 1964, 1965, 1969, 1975, 1981, 1992, 1995). Forman-Brunell, Miriam. Sitting Pretty: Fears and Fantasies about Adolescent Girls. New York: Routledge, forthcoming. “Graduate Course in Baby-Sitting.” 1945. Life (April 12): 107–108. Kourany, Ronald F., et al. 1980. “Adolescent Babysitting: A 30-Year-Old Phenomenon.” Adolescence 13, no. 60 (Winter): 939–945. Margolin, Leslie. 1990. “Child Abuse by Baby-Sitters: An Ecological-Interactional Interpretation.” Journal of Family Violence 5, no. 2 (June): 95–105. “Migrant Workers’ Children.” http:// www.users.owt.com/rpeto/migrant/ html. Neus, Margaret. 1990. The Insider’s Guide to Babysitting: Anecdotes and Advice from Babysitters for Babysitters. Master’s thesis, Emerson College, Boston. Pollock, Kathryn M. 1943. “Helping the Mother-Aides.” Journal of Home Economics 35, no. 1 (June): 31.

Barbie Much has been written on the Barbie doll. Revered and vilified in the print media since her introduction, Barbie is still one of the most popular toys in the world. Despite common criticism that she is a materialistic, appearance-oriented, blonde bimbo, millions of these dolls have been sold since 1960. Mattel has

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estimated that two Barbie dolls are purchased every second somewhere on the planet. and if they were put end to end, they would encircle the globe three-anda-half times. Although critics differ as to her social significance, most would still agree that her longevity and popular appeal have entitled her to claim a piece of the American zeitgeist. A doll that becomes whatever a girl wants her to be, Barbie is alternatively a bitch, conformist, airhead, and plucky little blonde. No single interpretation seems to define her. Critics claim that her figure, hair, and accouterments suggest a life saturated with consumer goods and sexist dating rituals, but the doll’s social significance is really created by the girls who play with her. In all her manifestations, Barbie reveals American cultural ideals of femininity, beauty, and gender roles. Because Barbie exists as a reflection of the hopes and dreams of the girls who play with her, she is a perfect vehicle for exploring attitudes toward women in American society. In her incarnations throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, she has managed to change consistently with the times. In the late 1950s, Barbie’s shape and fictive life resonated with postwar Americans. As a teenage fashion model, she represented the glamorous world of postwar haute couture. With her car and fashionable apartment, she spoke to ebullient consumption, affluent teen culture, and captivating sexuality. In the 1970s, she had Saturday Night Fever and went disco dancing with Ken. In the career-oriented 1980s, she left the world of fashion modeling for life as a doctor, astronaut, and business executive. She was and is a perfect picture of her time. Before her entrance into the marketplace, Barbie’s prototype was a notori-

ously acquisitive sex symbol. According to fashion designer and Barbie collector Billy Boy, Barbie was modeled after Lili, a doll purchased by young German bachelors to flaunt their playboy status. She had evolved, in turn, from a popular gold-digging cartoon character of the same name drawn by Reinhard Beuthien. Lili’s talent was her ability to wrest money from wealthy men. She debuted as a doll on August 12, 1955, four years earlier than Barbie, but was not commercially successful. Despite the charming tale of Mattel’s then executive vice president and president, Ruth and Elliot Handler, Barbie was probably not the exclusive idea of their young daughter— also named Barbie—who wanted a teenage doll with beautiful clothes. Barbie and Lili’s characteristics seem too similar for coincidence. Some writers, including Jane and Michael Stern and M. G. Lord, have concluded that Barbie was copied directly from Lili. The dolls’ exaggerated eyebrows, blonde hair pulled back from their faces in the popular 1950s ponytail, sly side glances, pursed lips, and seductive hourglass figures seem almost identical. Despite her phenomenal popularity, Barbie was not well received when she first debuted in 1959. Although little girls seemed intrigued by her, parents were not sure what to make of such a sexy little toy. Before Barbie, most dolls resembled infants, and little girls played at mothering them. With Barbie, the object of the game changed. In Barbie’s universe, the focus was on youth, consumption, sexiness, and exciting careers. The toy was not designed to teach the motherly, caretaking functions usually associated with baby dolls. Rather, Barbie encouraged girls to project themselves into her world as an exciting and glamorous teenage

Barbie fashion model. To the horror of many, she did not have parents for disciplinary guidelines or even a boyfriend for emotional support. Her single status did not hinder her; she had everything she wanted, including an elegant apartment, a snazzy convertible, an extensive wardrobe, and an enviable figure. And it was Barbie’s voluptuous figure that caused such consternation for the general public. What would little girls do with Barbie in the privacy of their own bedrooms? Would her sexy shape and provocative clothes give children inappropriate ideas about proper sexual behavior? Would Barbie be a bad role model? Utilizing the advice of advertising executive Ernest Dicter, Mattel’s marketing plan countered this bad girl image by insisting that children would identify with Barbie, projecting their dreams and aspirations into her play world. One of Barbie’s inventors, Ruth Handler, said that the original Barbie concept was based upon the idea that little girls wanted to identify with teenagers. Handler stated, “These dolls became an extension of the girls. Through the doll, each child dream[ed] of what she would like to be” (Zinsser 1964, 73). Mattel promised that as girls played with Barbie, they would practice the arts of accessorizing, hairstyling, and appropriate grooming habits, all important skills for their lives as suburban teens and—in the age of 1950s hyperdomesticity—eventual suburban wives. Barbie epitomized the social world of postwar abundance with her cars, elaborate wardrobe, and fancy apartment. The toy was marketed as a training vehicle for practicing the rules of etiquette, as well as for learning to fit into David Riesman’s “outer-directed” world of the American consumer. She was promoted

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as instructive and good clean fun, in spite of her tantalizing appearance. Her fictive life revolved around shopping and boys, and her image epitomized the exciting world of teen culture. Mattel championed Barbie as a symbol of 1950s euphoria. For millions of Americans, she was the ideal teenage image of the period, with her perky sexuality, innocence, and enthusiasm for postwar consumption. As one writer gushed in 1964, Barbie was “long-legged and full-bosomed [and] . . . beautiful in the button-nosed tradition that America reveres in its drum majorettes” (Zinsser 1964, 72). For many consumers, however, Barbie still remained problematic. Despite Mattel’s protestations that Barbie was not about sex, seeing was still believing. Her figure was that of a seductively mature woman and with her blonde hair, large breasts, and fetching Dior gowns, Barbie connoted sexiness. Barbie looked too aggressive and too controlling to be appropriately deferential, as was demanded of women and girls in the 1950s. For many parents who grew up in the scarcity of the Depression, Barbie’s world seemed narcissistic and extravagant. Her life revolved around obtaining material comforts and flaunting her arrogant sexuality. Barbie was supposed to be a teenager, but she looked thirty-five with her heavily made-up eyes and womanly shape. In 1960, Mattel responded to this criticism. After her public relations makeover, Barbie went under the knife for some minor reconstructive surgery. Mattel modified her face in just a few subtle ways, but her overall appearance changed dramatically. Mattel’s designers relaxed Barbie’s eyebrows, gave her more fleshtoned skin, and less angular eyeliner. The most important difference, however, was

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Barbie

in her eyes. Her blue irises were enlarged like a toddler’s. As a result, Barbie’s face became more childlike. She had soft, baby blue eyes to accompany her seductive shape. With a few subtle manipulations on the part of Mattel, Barbie now fit the paradoxical image of a perfect 1950s girl, who was, as fashion historian Doreen Caldwell notes, “a curious mixture of innocence and . . . primitive physical allure” (Caldwell 1981, 89). The saucy blonde teenager with innocent eyes and sexual magnetism became the feminine aesthetic ideal of the late decade. Noting Barbie’s shapely hourglass figure, the New York Times stated that Barbie “arrived as a fully developed nymphet” (Kahn 1991, 24). Describing a young girl who is sexually desirable, the word nymphet became a popular addition to everyday vocabulary after the 1955 publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, the story of a middle-aged man’s passion for a nubile twelve-yearold girl. This interest in teenage sexuality reflected the fact that the first wave of baby boomers born in 1946 and 1947 was reaching puberty. By 1959, the Little Miss America Pageant was instigated, Teenbeat magazine premiered, and Pepsi reminded the listening audience of the importance of “thinking young.” But this fascination went beyond a mere appreciation of youth. Television and cinema promoted the blossoming prepubescent woman. Training bras in such unlikely sizes as 28AAA became the rage, as girls prepared for an adult life of elasticized undergarments. Despite or because of this sexual innuendo, Barbie was a great success for Mattel. By 1961, one-half of the company’s sales were in dolls, and its total sales vol-

ume tripled. Because of Barbie, Mattel claimed to have gone from ninth place in the toy market to first place in just a few short years. With Barbie’s success came Ken, her boyfriend (1961); Midge, her best girlfriend (1963); Skipper, Barbie’s sister (1964); and Allan, Midge’s boyfriend (1963–1964). In 1961–1962, a board game titled “Barbie, Queen of the Prom” was marketed: to win, you had to be like Barbie and have a steady boyfriend, a prom dress, and be elected president of a school club. Barbie even cut a record called the “Busy Buzz” in 1961 in which she proclaimed, “I never bothered with romance or gave any boy a second chance and then I met Ken.” By 1964, more than 25 press agents, 45 advertising executives, 5,000 workers in Japan who made the actual dolls and costumes, and 800 employees of Mattel worked to produce enough Barbies to meet the increasing demand. Barbie’s success surpassed the Handlers’ wildest dreams. By 1963, Life reported that Barbie was receiving more than 500 letters a week and had a national fan club and a bimonthly fan magazine (“Most Popular Doll in Town” 1963, 73). The Nation claimed that by 1964, Barbie’s fan mail had increased to 10,000 letters a week. She had a personal secretary and 15 assistants, and her fan club consisted of 8,500 chapters with 500,000 members (“Barbie Doll Set” 1964, 407). Mattel capitalized on the Barbie craze in every possible way. In 1964, the company actually diversified into girls’ apparel and featured such items as sportswear, lingerie, sweaters, and hosiery. The theme of the ads was “Barbie’s Designer Designs for You,” and the line consisted of colorcoordinated outfits in sizes 5–12 for—as the ad stated—“shopworn mothers who have scoured the market to match colors

Barbie and sizes to their growing-up girls’ needs.” The Barbie phenomenon was remarkable. From clothes to records to comic books, she permeated every available preteen market. Mattel’s marketing savvy and ability to capitalize on an ebullient postwar culture contributed to making Barbie one of the most sought-after toys of the decade. If Barbie had remained in her original 1950s form, she would probably have become obsolete, but part of Barbie’s enduring popularity is that she changes with the times. Although interest in her waned with the resurgence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s, she bounced back as a polyester disco queen in the late 1970s; sales of the doll have not lagged since, partially because Mattel has worked tirelessly to keep Barbie current. For example, to reflect the changing position of women in the workforce in the 1980s, Barbie became a career girl and sported a blue power suit. Recognizing changing demographic data, Mattel introduced African American and Hispanic Barbies in the 1980s. All these measures have added to her popularity among girls. Today, many girls own multiple Barbies. Buyers scramble to purchase limited editions of the doll, only to keep it in its original box as a hedge on its future value as a collectible. Barbie conventions attract the faithful by the thousands. As the decades come and go, Barbie’s reincarnations continue to reflect Americans’ complex attitudes toward gender, race, and class as well as changing demographics in the late twentieth century. But it is gender attitudes that matter most in the debate over Barbie. As M. G. Lord stated, “Femininity is the toxin; Barbie is [merely] the scapegoat” (Lord 1994, viii). Because she has become such

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a potent symbol of femininity, Barbie is often the butt of jokes and the object of countless performance pieces. In a wellpublicized prank, the Barbie Liberation Organization switched the voices of GI Joe and Barbie in December 1993. Children pulled the chords on their new dolls and were surprised to find that the burly Joe whined “Let’s go shopping,” and Barbie screamed “Eat lead, Cobra! Vengeance is mine!” One the most poignant uses of Barbie was in the video Superstar (1987) by Todd Haynes and Cynthia Schneider. It chronicled the tragic death of Karen Carpenter from anorexia and starred a plastic Barbie doll as the heroine. Despite the fact that Barbie has reinvented her personality again and again since 1959, her perfect figure and affluent lifestyle continue to reflect cultural ambiguity regarding the role women play in American culture. Ann duCille suggested that “deconstructing Barbie may be the only release from the doll’s impenetrable plastic jaws” (duCille 1999, 141). In other words, Barbie will cease to be contentious when Americans finally understand themselves. Barbara J. Coleman See also Body Image; Consumer Culture; Dollhouses; Dolls; Girls’ Culture References and Further Reading ”Barbie Doll Set.” 1964. The Nation (April 27): 407. Boy, Billy. 1987. Barbie: Her Life and Times. New York: Crown. Caldwell, Doreen. 1981. And All Was Revealed: Ladies Underwear 1907–1980. New York: St. Martin’s Press. DuCille, Ann. 1999. “Barbie in Black and White.” Pp. 127–142 in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty. Edited by Yona Zeldis McDonough. New York: Touchstone.

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Kahn, Alice. 1991. “A Onetime Bimbo Becomes a Muse.” New York Times (September 29): H24–25. Lord, M. G. 1994. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: William Morrow. McDonough, Yona Zeldis, ed. 1999. The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty. New York: Touchstone. “Most Popular Doll in Town.” 1963. Life (August 21): 73–75. Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stern, Jane, and Michael Stern. 1990. The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. New York: HarperCollins. Zinsser, William K. 1964. “Barbie Is a Million-Dollar Doll.” Saturday Evening Post (December 12): 72–73.

Bat Mitzvah According to halakah, or Jewish law, girls and boys reach legal maturity at ages twelve and thirteen, respectively. From that time forward they are personally responsible for fulfilling the commandments and adhering to traditional laws, rituals, and customs. Rabbinic sources assumed that girls would reach both social maturity and puberty earlier than boys and thus assigned them an earlier age for becoming bat mitzvah, or “daughter of the commandment,” than when boys became bar mitzvah, or “son of the commandment.” This original meaning of the phrases bat mitzvah and bar mitzvah referred to legal and social categories based on age and accountability within the Jewish tradition rather than a particular event. In practice, however, Jewish boys have for centuries enjoyed a public demonstration of their religious adulthood that followed naturally from their religious education and preparation for participation in the full complement of ritual activities. Jewish girls, with generally limited access to extensive formal

religious education, received no such training and no such inclusion in the public aspects of Jewish religious life. Until the twentieth century, their arrival at the age of bat mitzvah remained a private, often unremarked event. The emergence of liberal forms of Judaism during the nineteenth century included gradual changes in ideas about women that eventually led to the development of the bat mitzvah at both the conceptual and ritual levels. The growth of Jewish educational systems that attempted to reach girls as well as boys raised questions about some of the traditional gender divisions in Jewish religious life. As Reform Judaism in the United States introduced mixed seating in family pews at synagogue services, and traditional ritual observance decreased, a small but growing number of American Jewish families began to enroll their daughters as well as their sons in some form of Jewish education. Girls’ and boys’ religious instruction resembled each other more than ever before. Communal confirmation ceremonies offered largely to Reform groups of adolescents who had attained a certain level of religious training further eroded gender differences in childhood and adolescent religious experiences among liberal Jews. At the same time, however, the pattern of bar mitzvah rituals became more standardized among traditional Jews. On or near their thirteenth birthdays, boys celebrated their coming of age by participating in the public rituals of synagogue ceremonies. They recited the blessings over the Torah, read a portion of the Torah directly from the scroll, and chanted the complementary section from the Book of the Prophets, the Haftarah. They often conducted parts of the service and delivered speeches interpreting the Torah portion. No such

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A girl reading the Torah at her Bat Mitzvah. (Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis)

public ritual option was available either to Reform girls, whose denomination initially de-emphasized individual comingof-age ceremonies, or to traditional girls, whose participation in public ritual was inconceivable according to established interpretations of Jewish law. Not until 1922 did an American girl participate in a bat mitzvah ceremony analogous, though still not identical, to the bar mitzvah ceremonies that had become common. On March 18, 1922, in New York City, Judith Kaplan recited the blessings over the Torah, read a selection from a printed Torah, and chanted the Haftarah. Her father, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, developed this ceremony as part of his evolving approach to modern Judaism, which took him on a personal journey from traditional religious life to

his founding of Reconstructionist Judaism. Perhaps influenced by the suffrage movement, his ideas about Jewish ethics and individuals, or his close relationship to his mother, sister, and daughters, Kaplan was committed to the idea of women’s religious equality. Yet even this pioneer retained some aspects of traditional religious practice. During services at his new synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, men and women sat separately. Judith did not read from the Torah scroll itself. Her mother and grandmother were ambivalent about the ceremony and sat in the back with the other women, while Judith carried out her part in front of the synagogue. Judith Kaplan’s bat mitzvah did not spark an immediate or widespread interest in bat mitzvah ceremonies. As liber-

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al Judaism became increasingly committed to the religious education of girls, however, such ceremonies became more common. The increasing popularity of Jewish summer camping also played a role because the leaders of these camps supported a variety of religious innovations as well as traditions. Kinereth Dushkin, for example, celebrated her bat mitzvah in 1934 at Camp Modin in Maine, one of the earliest Jewish summer camps. The daughter of leading Jewish educator Alexander Dushkin, who also helped found Camp Modin, Kinereth learned to chant the Haftarah in a week, although she, too, did not read directly from a Torah scroll. Because Reform Judaism continued to stress confirmation ceremonies and Orthodox Judaism continued to uphold gender divisions within ritual practice, bat mitzvah ceremonies first became common within Conservative Judaism, the most popular denomination in the United States by the 1950s. These bat mitzvahs, an event in themselves instead of a descriptive phrase, resembled but did not equal bar mitzvahs. Girls generally celebrated their bat mitzvahs on Friday nights by participating in the service and reading the Haftarah. Not until the late 1970s did bat mitzvah ceremonies become nearly universal among Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative Jews, and even then the format of bat mitzvah celebrations continued to vary widely. Orthodox Judaism has also recognized the positive value of celebrating twelveyear-old girls’ coming of age as responsible Jewish adults. Although maintaining tradition, Orthodox Jews have developed many approaches to bat mitzvahs. Celebrations often include festive meals, speeches, and blessings. Some synagogues invite bat mitzvah girls to deliver talks

about the Torah portion. Many announce girls’ bat mitzvahs from the pulpit. Some modern Orthodox girls celebrate their bat mitzvahs in the context of women’s prayer groups, where they may participate in rituals inaccessible to them in more traditional synagogue settings. Even when not directly linked to communal synagogue worship, the widespread celebration of bat mitzvahs among Orthodox girls demonstrates the nearly universal acceptance of bat mitzvahs as life cycle events with spiritual significance beyond the boundaries of denominations. The influence of bat mitzvah ceremonies extends beyond girls’ coming-ofage rituals. The prevalence of such ceremonies requires equitable religious education for girls and boys. It also raises questions about women’s role in the synagogue more generally because it seems problematic to many that after participating in public synagogue rituals as twelveor thirteen-year-old girls, women might be relegated to apparently second-class status. The gradual acceptance of women’s full integration into the synagogue owes much to the evolution of bat mitzvah ceremonies. The contemporary idea of a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah is clearly associated with adolescence rather than adulthood, which requires further thought about age as well as gender within Judaism. Many older women, denied the opportunity of a ceremonial bat mitzvah as adolescents, embark on Jewish study and celebrate adult bat mitzvah ceremonies individually or in groups. By the end of the twentieth century, the bat mitzvah ceremony encompassed social and religious importance as both an individual rite of passage and a family milestone. Twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls typically spend a year or more joining their peers in a variety of bat mitzvah

Birth Control and bar mitzvah observances. The rounds of celebratory services and parties are often supplemented by charitable activities that illustrate bat mitzvah girls’ dedication to principles of Jewish social justice as well as religious education and ritual participation. Celebrating their bat mitzvahs gives girls access to values-oriented guidance and Jewish leadership and encourages them to take charge of the Jewish and spiritual dimensions of their lives. Bonnie Steinberg and Melissa Klapper See also Jewish Education of Girls; Kinaaldá; La Quinceañera References and Further Reading Berman, Donna. 1996. “Bat Mitzvah.” In The Dictionary of Feminist Theologies. Edited by Letty M. Russel and J. Shannon Clarkson. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Blocker, Hadassah. 1999. Personal communication to Bonnie Epstein. Gensler, Kinereth Dushkin. 1999. Personal communication to Bonnie Epstein. Goldin, Barbara Diamond. 1995. Bat Mitzvah: A Jewish Girl’s Coming of Age. New York: Viking Press. Hyman, Paula E. 1990. “The Introduction of Bat Mitzvah in Conservative Judaism in Postwar America.” YIVO Annual 19: 133–146. Koller-Fox, Cherie. 1976. “Women and Jewish Education: A New Look at Bat Mitzvah.” In The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives. Edited by Elizabeth Koltun. New York: Schocken Books. Metter, Bert. 1984. Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah: How Jewish Boys and Girls Come of Age. New York: Clarion Books. Meyer, Michael A. 1988. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press. Mushr, Hadassah Kaplan. 1999. Personal communication to Bonnie Epstein. Scult, Mel. 1993. Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

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Birth Control First used by Margaret Sanger in 1914 to spark a social movement to repeal laws banning contraception, the phrase birth control refers to various methods for preventing conception. Although women in the United States may take contraception for granted today, it has not always been legally available. Over the course of the nineteenth century, demand by married couples for effective means of preventing pregnancies spurred a booming patent medicine industry. But by the 1870s, contraception was banned as a threat to the moral well-being of American youth. The twentieth-century birth control movement, spurred by the activism of Sanger, secured the legalization of contraceptives. It also molded social acceptance of a woman’s right to choose whether and when she will become a mother. Throughout U.S. history, anxiety about the sexual activity of adolescent girls has played a central role in public debates about contraception. The unproven belief that access to contraceptives would encourage girls to engage in premarital sex justified laws prohibiting contraceptives and posed a significant barrier to legalization until the 1960s. Concerns about contraception’s influence on girls’ sexual morality have been tied to fears about illegitimacy, the decline of the family, and the moral decay of society; and they have led to policies regulating sexuality and fertility, especially among young women, poor women, and women of color. Historical evidence about contraceptives is scarce because they are usually employed in intimate moments of life and because frank public discussion of sexual matters is taboo. Historians have found some evidence in sources ranging from women’s diaries and letters to

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recipe books and patent medicine ads. Prolonged breast-feeding, withdrawal, and marital abstinence were some of the earliest methods mentioned in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. Prolonged breast-feeding was widely discussed by women as a means to space their pregnancies. Withdrawal was also common enough to be referred to by colloquialisms such as “minding his pullbacks” (Brodie 1994). Marital abstinence may have been used, but as the ideal of romantic marriage took hold in the nineteenth century, forgoing intimacy became increasingly unacceptable. Abstinence was an uncertain technique, anyway. The monthly cycle of human fertility was not well understood, so each woman had to figure it out on her own by trial and error, if she wanted to avoid sex when conception was most likely. Douches, vaginal herbal suppositories, condoms, and other barrier methods became increasingly available as a contraceptive market emerged in the mid1800s. The water cure, which was very popular with women, recommended several cold water douches per day as well as before and after intercourse. Instructions for homemade herbal concoctions to use for douches or as vaginal suppositories were published in recipe books, and commercial preparations were also available by mail order. The cost of condoms declined after the development of rubber manufacturing, and they became a common method among married couples by the 1870s. Direct evidence about the birth control practices of immigrant women and African American women in slavery and freedom is even more scarce. They probably had far fewer resources for controlling their fertility, however. Physicians cost money, as did the commercial prod-

ucts that were often marketed under euphemistic names, requiring both cash and knowledge of English idioms to acquire them. Slave women had no rights to their persons and were expected to produce many children, especially after the end of the slave trade in 1808 when birth became the only source of new slaves. Planters often complained that slave women knew secrets to prevent pregnancies and induce miscarriages. It is quite possible that the folk methods for homemade contraceptives and abortifacients were shared by oral tradition among African American women and women in immigrant communities. Women’s diaries and letters also convey their doubts about and frustrations with contraception. Even with a wide variety of techniques available, women did not often succeed in controlling their fertility as well as they might have wished. Yet women also worried about the morality of separating sex from procreation. This ambivalence was expressed in their practices. Typically, women did not try to control their fertility until after the birth of their first child. Their efforts (and frustrations) increased over their married lives as they had more children, with women trying particularly to limit the number of births they had after age thirty. In the eighteenth century, women seemed resigned to failure. But over the course of the nineteenth century, women’s frustration grew, and they expressed the desire for more effective methods. When contraceptives failed, women often relied on abortion, which was legal until the 1860s. The main argument advanced to support fertility control in this period was the necessity of protecting women’s health. This argument was a persuasive counterbalance to moral concerns about

Birth Control contraception because the risk of death in childbirth was very real. In fact, maternal mortality rates did not decline dramatically until the 1940s. Beyond death, which deprived children of their mothers’ love, chronic illness and disability were also associated with childbirth. The ability to control when and if they became pregnant promised to give women greater control over their own lives in a very literal way. However they managed it, the birthrate among white, native-born women fell dramatically. In 1800 they could expect to have seven children in their lifetime, but by 1860 this number fell to five, and by 1900 it fell to three and a half (Coale and Zelnik 1963). Fertility rates among African Americans and immigrants were higher and declined more slowly than those of native-born white women. As discussed below, these differences raised concerns about what kind of people were having the most children. Most of what is known about historical birth control practices concerns married women, not girls. However, it is important to recall that the average age of marriage for girls has shifted throughout U.S. history; many women married at ages that would be considered too young at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. Before universal birth registration and compulsory education through high school became the law in the twentieth century, the age dividing childhood and adulthood was not precise. More than their age, what made people adults was their assumption of adult roles, and throughout most of U.S. history, legally and culturally, marriage marked the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Age-of-consent laws, which indicate the age at which society thinks girls are too young to marry, were very

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low (ten to twelve) in colonial and nineteenth-century America. Although few girls married as young as age twelve, teen marriages were not uncommon. In these circumstances, girls’ sense of a need for birth control may not have been great. “A hastily arranged marriage” was the time-honored method for resolving the problem of a premarital pregnancy (Luker 1996). In the 1850s, 10 percent of brides were pregnant. Between 1880 and 1910, when both contraceptives and abortions were newly illegal, that figure rose to 23 percent (Odem 1995). Although frowned upon, the pregnant bride was accepted into society. The greater concern centered on those girls who were seduced and abandoned by married men. There was no socially approved remedy for that situation, and the resulting illegitimacy “ruined” the girl’s life. By the end of the century, profound social changes raised growing concerns about the perilous transition from girlhood to womanhood. Between 1870 and 1910, girls entered into the labor force in great numbers. They also moved away from domestic work and entered the factories and stores of growing urban centers. These jobs drew them away from the strictures of family life and exposed them to emerging commercial entertainments. In the eyes of many social leaders, this new urban landscape contained great dangers. According to Anthony Comstock, president of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, sexually explicit materials, including contraception, along with gambling, prostitution, and alcohol, posed a grave danger to the morality of American youth. He believed that exposure to such material would irreparably harm young people and that knowledge about contraception would undermine premarital chastity. What

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else would keep daughters chaste, if not the fear of pregnancy? In 1872, following Comstock’s logic, Congress prohibited distribution of all sexually related images and texts as obscene. The exhaustive list of obscenities included all contraceptive information and devices. By 1885 twenty-four states had enacted similar legislation, but only Connecticut prohibited the actual use of contraceptives. Books that were widely distributed earlier in the century were rewritten, and devices that had been available through the patent contraceptive market were suppressed. Comstock himself was very hostile to changes in women’s roles. He opposed contraception because of his distaste for the independence it promised to give women. However, the law he championed was part of a larger movement to promote social purity that also drew support from women’s organizations. For instance, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), known mostly for its anti-alcohol campaign, actively campaigned for laws that would raise the age of consent. The WCTU worried about innocent working-class girls who, adrift from family, overworked, and drawn to the new social pleasures of dance halls and amusement parks, were vulnerable to the advances of unscrupulous older men. Any girl who was seduced would be ostracized. The seducer, however, faced no penalty. The goal of raising the age of consent was to challenge this double sexual standard by imposing punishment on men. Other organizations, like the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), provided safe alternative entertainments for working girls. The representation of girls as victims of male lust ran up against the reality of

young women who eagerly explored the new freedoms of work and city life. An older age of consent, justified as protection, also defined adolescent girls as incapable of making their own sexual choices. Girls who challenged sexual conventions and resisted efforts to save them thus confounded their elders. By the early twentieth century, the new field of psychology provided an explanation for the rebelliousness of “modern” girls: adolescence. Defined as a specific developmental stage of life, adolescence was characterized by dramatic bodily changes and immature judgment. Thus characterized as beings who had strong desires but who lacked mature restraints, adolescents were beginning to be seen as too young to assume adult responsibilities. Compulsory education laws, child labor laws, and stricter age-of-consent laws passed by state legislatures in this period reflect this growing concern with activities appropriate for teenagers. Since the adult roles defining womanhood involved marriage and motherhood, social concerns about adolescent girls fastened onto nonmarital sex and pregnancy. Adolescent sexual activity became a signal of dangerous precociousness, an abnormal desire to assume adult roles too quickly. By the 1910s, reformers labeled this “the girl problem” and enlisted the state in imposing controls, especially on working-class girls and girls of color. During World War I, girls could be arrested for public flirting and sent to reformatories. The concern about the sexual rebelliousness of modern girls intertwined with concerns about legalizing contraceptives. If adolescence was characterized by high emotions and bad judgment, then open access to birth control would only undermine the fear of illegitimacy that kept most girls from

The July 1919 cover of the Birth Control Review, Margaret Sanger’s magazine that was taken to court by Anthony Comstock for promoting “obscenity.” (General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

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engaging in premarital sex. In legislative debates about contraception, legislators often justified restrictions as necessary for this reason. Although debate about the morality of legalized birth control increased, religious organizations, except the Catholic Church, had little to say about the issue. In the 1900s, mainstream Protestants and Jews were silent or supported legalized birth control, although not enthusiastically. Fundamentalist Protestants condemned it as secular and worldly but did not actively oppose it before the 1970s. The Catholic Church’s opposition emerged early, with condemnation of all artificial means of preventing conception. This opposition stemmed from the view that sex should only be indulged in for the purpose of procreation and contraception frustrated that purpose. Only natural methods such as abstinence during fertile times were acceptable. Throughout twentieth-century efforts to legitimate contraception, the Catholic Church has actively opposed it. The first sustained challenge to the Comstock laws came in the wake of Margaret Sanger’s activism. In 1914, Sanger was arrested for writing about abortion and contraception in her magazine, the Woman Rebel. She also wrote and distributed “Family Limitation,” a pamphlet that provided detailed descriptions of various contraceptive methods. In 1916, she and two other women opened the first U.S. birth control clinic, in Brooklyn. The police shut it down after ten days, and Sanger and her compatriots spent thirty days in jail. After her release, Sanger traveled across the nation encouraging others to open clinics and challenge laws. She opened her second clinic in New York City in 1923 (it remained open until 1974) and helped establish a nation-

al network of clinics that joined together as Planned Parenthood in 1942. These clinics contributed to the development of accurate pregnancy tests and supported the initial development of spermicides, diaphragms, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and the birth control pill. Sanger also continued to lobby for changes in the Comstock law. However, Congress refused, often citing the danger that open access to contraception would encourage promiscuity among single young women. In 1936, a federal court ruled that it was permissible for physicians to prescribe contraceptives in the interests of the health of their married patients. By that time, there were more than 300 birth control clinics nationwide. Planned Parenthood’s goal was to make legal, safe, and effective contraceptives accessible to all (married) women. From its earliest days, clinics were hesitant to provide contraceptives to single women for fear of being charged with corrupting their morals. Thus before the 1970s, their services were in practice available only to married women in cities that had clinics, like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Little Rock, and Baltimore. Young women, single women, and women without access to clinics still had to rely on the commercial contraceptive market, which grew quickly in the 1930s. Massengill and Lysol both advertised their products as douching agents. Condom manufacturers expanded their reach to gas stations and restaurant bathrooms. A wide variety of foams, tablets, and suppositories that purportedly contained spermicides were also available. These patent medicines were semilegal, unregulated, and of uncertain effectiveness. Thus, whether a women succeeded in controlling her fertility in this period was often

Birth Control still a matter of luck, age, marital status, and financial resources. Even though illegal, abortions were widely used as a backup for contraceptive failure. A twentieth-century woman might have had more luck in limiting her fertility, but young women, poor women, and women of color faced another threat: efforts by government and social bigots to control their contraceptive options. Alongside the birth control movement grew a national movement to legalize sterilization. Grounded in eugenics, which claimed to apply scientific principles of heredity to human reproduction, this movement helped pass laws in twenty-eight states between 1907 and 1931 that required sterilization of institutionalized mentally retarded and mentally ill people. Thus, the first birth control technique that was legalized in the twentieth century was actually surgical sterilization performed by court order. The standards by which people were labeled unfit to bear children were influenced by social prejudices. The majority of people sterilized under these laws before the 1960s were adolescent girls who were committed to institutions for the feebleminded because they were deemed to be promiscuous. Many were committed specifically so that they could be sterilized. In fact, the 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding compulsory sterilization involved the case of a seventeen-year-old girl, Carrie Buck, who had been committed to Virginia’s Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble-Minded because she was pregnant out of wedlock. Because she was the daughter of an unwed mother and social workers said her newborn daughter looked odd, the state declared that Carrie was feebleminded and ordered that she be sterilized before being released. The Supreme

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Court agreed. Saying “three generations of imbeciles is enough” (Roberts 1997), it enshrined eugenics logic about the relationship among age, poverty, social problems, and illegitimacy in the law. According to this logic, sex outside marriage as a teenager was the main symptom of feeblemindedness in girls because no responsible, intelligent girl would risk the social shame and ruin of an out-ofwedlock birth. Those who were sexually active were automatically deemed irresponsible, incompetent, and likely to pass these traits on to their children, either in their genes or through inadequate parenting. The Court reasoned that although society might not be able to control the sexual conduct of these problem girls, it could at least protect itself from their irresponsible fertility. In the 1950s and 1960s the focus of sterilizations shifted to poor black, Hispanic, and Native American women. These women were often coerced into consenting to the operation through tactics such as threatening to revoke their welfare benefits and refusing to give medical care during labor or provide abortions until women agreed to the operation. Many of these women were quite young, such that when the federal government issued guidelines for Medicaid reimbursement of sterilization costs in 1978, it specifically prohibited the use of federal funds to sterilize women under age twenty-one. Although abuses may have been curtailed, the eugenics idea that excess fertility causes poverty and that birth control is the solution informs much of the current debate about teen pregnancy and welfare mothers. Also behind that debate are concerns about the new reproductive choices women gained in the 1960s. That decade witnessed a great deal of social change involving birth control.

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A sixteen-year-old couple waits outside a family planning clinic. (Skjold Photographs)

Contraception was legalized in a 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, which ruled that married couples had a right to privacy in the matter of fertility control. This right to privacy was extended to single women in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972). The right of teenagers to have access to contraceptives was not clearly established until 1977, in Carey v. Population Services, which struck down a New York state law that prohibited the sale of nonprescription contraceptives to anyone under sixteen. Even before the 1977 case, however, federal funds for contraceptive services for poor, sexually active teens were initiated in 1971 and reauthorized in 1977. A

renewed feminist movement also reinvigorated birth control debates by championing the principle of a woman’s right to choose. Feminists argued that as owners of their bodies, women had a basic civil right to control their sexuality and reproduction without interference from the government. Also, with increased focus on the well-being of children, the idea that an unwanted child was just punishment for the moral lapse of premarital sex was seen as cruel to the child. These social changes coincided with dramatic changes in contraceptive technologies. In 1960, the birth control pill was introduced. For the first time in U.S. history, women had legal and practical access to a contraceptive method that was almost 100 percent effective. The safety of the Pill has been debated since its introduction, however. The side effects and long-term health risks posed by synthetic hormones have led many women to stop using it. Thus, although the Pill is often credited with causing the great decline in fertility since the 1960s, sterilization is the leading form of birth control in the United States and is the contraceptive choice of older women. The contraceptive choices of young women are still fraught with conflicts. The prospect of a foolproof birth control method reinvigorated moral concerns, which once again focused on the sexual activity of young women. The Pill (and feminism) are often blamed for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the moral decline of the 1970s. In turn, sexual permissiveness and moral decline are blamed for the crisis of teen pregnancy, and that crisis is blamed for poverty and related social problems. The crisis of teen pregnancy is greatly overstated, however. In the 1970s, the rates at which teenage girls

Birth Control engaged in premarital sex did increase (40 percent of urban, unmarried teens). At the same time, older women’s fertility rates began to drop precipitously. Thus it appeared that there was a sudden dramatic increase in teen pregnancy. In fact, there was an increase in the proportion of nonmarital and teen pregnancies among all pregnancies. Rates of teen contraceptive use have lagged behind those of older women, as has teenagers’ access to birth control, and thus their fertility has declined more slowly. But rates of birth control use among teens have increased in recent years. Just under one-half of teens used contraceptives the first time they had sex in 1982; by 1995 that proportion increased to 76 percent. Moreover, the teen birthrate is actually lower at the turn of the twenty-first century than in the 1950s (Moore and Sugland 1999). The main difference between the 1950s and today is that in the 1950s, more teen mothers were married when they gave birth. Although nonmarital births have increased as a proportion of all births, two-thirds of nonmarital births are to women who are not teenagers. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of teenage mothers are eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, who are legally adults and whose age was quite typical of teenage mothers in the 1950s. Also during the 1960s, as a result of court challenges, the proportion of unwed (although not teen) mothers increased among welfare recipients. This increase raised renewed concerns about who was having children. However, the complex demographic and legal reasons for these social changes were obscure. Instead, the weight of anxiety about changing sexual mores settled on teen mothers in debates about birth control and welfare reform.

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In 1994, the newest contraceptive, Norplant, brought the historical strains of birth control debates to the surface again. Norplant uses the same hormonal control as the Pill but is implanted under the skin of the upper arm. Once implanted, a women’s fertility is fully regulated for five years. Norplant was immediately hailed by some as a means to control the fertility of poor women of color and thereby solve inner-city social problems. Although state governments denied public funding to sex education, they quickly moved to subsidize the distribution of Norplant to poor women through Medicaid. Young, poor women of color rapidly became the primary users of this expensive method (Roberts 1997). The public provision of Norplant has been widely criticized as reminiscent of the 1960s rush to sterilize poor women of color. Many women have complained of being pressured into using it, not being fully informed of its side effects, and having their requests for its removal ignored. The Norplant episode demonstrates the extent to which birth control policy still hinges on two misconceptions. Public provision of birth control continues to be based in the belief that teen pregnancy causes poverty and related social problems. In fact, the reverse is true: poverty is a major cause of teen pregnancy. The poorest girls in the United States have the highest teen pregnancy rates, but poverty precedes pregnancy. These girls have bleak prospects for employment and education, which might otherwise give them a reason to avoid pregnancy. They are also least likely to have access to health care clinics, which in a society that often still does not offer comprehensive sex education, is where so many girls learn about and obtain contracep-

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tives. The lack of comprehensive sex education reflects the second misconception embedded in public policy. Policy continues to assume that contraceptive information and access will encourage more teen sex, but research shows it increases the amount of protected sex (Luker 1996). In 1996 this misconception was incorporated into federal sex education programs. Abstinence-only programs suggest that teen sex is dangerous to teens and to society. According to these programs, the only appropriate sex is adult sex, which it continues to confuse with marital sex. Birth control will continue to be both widely accepted for married couples and controversial for teens as long as our society confuses marital sex and adult sex. Because it gives girls autonomy over their sexual and reproductive lives, birth control will continue to frustrate efforts to control their sexuality. Yet since the average age of marriage for U.S. women reached twenty-five in 1998, unmarried girls’ and young women’s real need for accessible birth control information and devices will also continue. Carole McCann See also Adoption; Female Sexuality; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Brodie, Janet Farrell. 1994. Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coale, Ansley, and Melvin Zelnik. 1963. New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Luker, Kristin. 1996. Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McCann, Carole. 1994. Birth Control Politics in the United States,

1916–1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moore, Kristin, and Barbara Sugland. 1999. “Piecing Together the Puzzle of Teenage Childbearing.” Policy and Practice of Public Human Services 57, no. 2: 36–42. Odem, Mary E. 1995. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books.

Body Image Body image refers to the mental picture a girl or boy has of his or her body. When a girl looks into a mirror and likes what she sees or closes her eyes and has a generally affirming attitude about her body, she is said to have a positive body image. Body image changes over the course of the life cycle but should ideally be a source of affirmation and positive selfworth. One girl explained that her dance teacher said she could not be a cheerleader or a dancer until she lost five pounds. This made the girl believe that she needed to go on a diet quickly to look the way her teacher thought she should. Today it is argued that from adolescence to adulthood, both girls and boys are so preoccupied with their physical appearance that they tend to downplay other virtues or abilities as signs of self-worth. Fashion and media images are viewed as a driving force, but achieving a perfect body or body image may reflect a deeper personal and societal preoccupation with narcissism. For example, one boy was feeling puny and insecure, so he decided to begin weightlifting in order to “be a man and make friends.” Few individuals

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The Large Bathers by Auguste Renoir. (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Mr. and Mrs. Carroll S. Tyson, Jr. Collection)

ever achieve the perfect body image of a fashion model or Olympic athlete, but most are affected by the pressures of Western society to conform to an ideal standard of attractiveness. For example, one ten-year-old girl told her mother she “felt fat” because her friends teased her. In fact, she was not fat at all, but she still thought so. Girls who are especially vulnerable to society’s emphasis on attaining a “perfect” body and measure their self-regard primarily by their appearance and body image are at high risk for developing an eating disorder (e.g., anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa). Body image is formed over the course of a girl’s early life from many different kinds of sensations, including visual

images, touch, and even smell. Girls tend to compare the mental image of their bodies with an ideal human form. Ever since antiquity, painters and sculptors have rendered these ideal masculine and feminine images, and a brief trip through any art museum will supply numerous examples of these “ideal” bodies. Clearly, what is considered beautiful has shifted over the centuries; in earlier centuries beautiful women were considerably heavier than contemporary supermodels. Since the creation of the Gibson Girl model in the 1890s and the flapper after World War I, thinness has become an integral part of female attractiveness.

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Usually, focusing on outward appearance is not problematic for a girl because she can shift quickly to other lifeenhancing activities, like study, play, or work. When a girl becomes exclusively preoccupied with chasing an illusive ideal of a perfect body image or bases her self-esteem primarily on her shape and weight, she has developed one of the cardinal features of an eating disorder and is at risk for numerous associated medical and psychological problems. Today body image problems affect all cultures and socioeconomic groups—girls, boys, Caucasians, African Americans, Hispanics, heterosexuals, homosexuals, and rich and poor. Cultural attitudes are believed to play a major role in the large number of body image disturbances affecting American society. As the feminine ideal has become thinner since the 1960s, both boys and girls, but particularly young women, have come under extreme pressure to become slender and stay thin. For example, in one study 60 percent of girls had placed themselves on diets to lose weight; in another study of high school students, 80 percent of senior year women wanted to lose weight, and 30 percent were actively on a diet. By contrast, only 20 percent of boys wanted to lose weight, and only 6 percent were actively dieting (Piran, Levine, and Steiner-Adair). In one poll of 33,000 women, 85 percent were dissatisfied with their bodies, and those that had negative body images were more likely to have had mothers who were critical of their appearance (Wooley and Kearney-Cooke 1986, 476–502). Family and friends also unwittingly emphasize maintaining a slender, fit physique. Girls tend to be preoccupied with feeling too fat and strive to lose

weight. In contrast, boys are more preoccupied with increasing their body mass and tend to engage in physical activity such as bodybuilding, running, or gymnastics as a means of controlling weight and building up lean body mass. Sometimes, girls and boys can feel so compelled to maintain a certain weight that they will exercise relentlessly, restrain their eating continually, and even attempt self-induced purging. Evidence has accumulated that cultures exposed to Western values quickly and radically assimilate the ideal-body stereotype of the West. For example, in 1983 A. Furnham and N. Alibhai explored how body image concerns developed in women who immigrated from Africa to Great Britain. In general, these traditional Kenyan women greatly enjoyed their fuller figures and lovingly adorned themselves in bright robes and headdresses when living in their homeland. Within four years of moving to Britain, these women adopted the British viewpoint with respect to size and shape. Just like the British women interviewed in the same study, these Kenyan immigrants desired to have a smaller physique. The investigators speculate that media images and societal beliefs about attractiveness played an important role in the shift in the Kenyan women’s attitudes about their bodies. In another example, in 1995 television was introduced to the South Pacific island of Fiji. Before 1995, women and girls were actually encouraged to put on weight—in essence, the bigger, the more beautiful. After introducing television to Fiji, girls in the rural coastal villages watched television shows like Friends, Melrose Place, and Beverly Hills 90210. Within thirty-eight months, 74 percent of the Fiji teens studied said they felt

Body Image “too big or fat” at least some of the time, 62 percent said they had dieted in the past month, and a significant number had begun to go to excessive means (i.e., vomiting) to lose weight. Although media images and cultural changes are not the only factors responsible for how teens and adults experience their bodies, the acute and constant bombardment of certain images in the media appears to be quite influential. Parents and educators are encouraged to help adolescents question their acceptance of these images, and high school and youth groups are employing discussions and educational panels to critique these media messages. Medical science has also studied how changes in the brain influence body image. For example, research carried out during World War II showed that starvation can affect how people feel about their bodies. Ansel Keys took a group of fit volunteers and placed them on a lowcalorie diet until they lost a great deal of weight. He observed the same psychological changes and unusual food behaviors other writers described in their experiences in concentration camps. Both the volunteers and the people starved in the camps became depressed, irritable, lacked energy, and were preoccupied with food. They also described changes in how they felt about their bodies and appearance, and sometimes these poor feelings about their bodies lasted after they regained enough pounds to be in a normal weight range. Recently, psychiatrists have begun to describe a different kind of profound disturbance in body image called body dysmorphic disorder. Girls with this syndrome are preoccupied with an imagined defect in their physical appearance, even though there is no physical anomaly present. The girl’s reaction to the misper-

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ceived flaw is always intense (i.e., focus on a mole, prominent nose, large feet, or breasts) and leads her to consult plastic surgeons. It is usually quite difficult to persuade these individuals that they have an actual psychiatric disorder that can be treated successfully with medication and psychotherapy. Clearly, concerns about body image in American society fall on a continuum from a normal, everyday concern of wanting to be attractive to a pathological concern with physical defects and an obsession with measuring up to an ideal weight or standard of attractiveness. Because concern with physical appearance in American culture is nearly universal, most girls also want to know what to do so as not to become overly preoccupied with body image concerns. Individuals and families must face down the problem by having discussions about the inordinate emphasis society places on attractiveness, especially thinness. They should encourage girls to recognize that how they feel about their bodies is determined by individual, familial, and societal factors and help them to remember that the prejudice American society tolerates toward the obese person would never be tolerated toward other religions or races. Girls should be encouraged to explore their thoughts and feelings about weight and shape, especially the degree to which they affect their self-evaluation. Emphasizing positive aspects of a girl’s character (such as her ability to make friends or her artistic and academic interests) other than appearance can also be helpful in placing body image in perspective. In addition, when families get together for meals, inadvertent comments about weight, diet, or other emotionally charged subjects should be curtailed. Instead, mealtime

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should be an experience where all family members, girls included, get psychological as well as physical nourishment. As girls age, their bodies will change; thus their body image must also change. For example, as people age, their metabolic rate naturally slows. To some extent, genetic heritage plays a significant role in the propensity to gain weight. Although the role of the environment is also significant (in times of famine, very few people are obese), few men or women maintain the same weight in adulthood as they did in adolescence. Trying to control weight and have a perfect body image proves extremely difficult—if not futile—because it leads to an increased preoccupation with body size and food. Girls are thus encouraged to try to moderate the inordinate emphasis American society places on physical appearance and body image. A helpful maxim publicized by the National Eating Disorders Organization addresses the issue of finding a balanced self-image and body image succinctly: “Don’t weigh your self esteem. It’s what’s inside that counts.” Kathryn J. Zerbe See also Consumer Culture; Cosmetics; Depression and Girls; Eating Disorders; Female Sexuality; Girls’ Culture; Hair; Psychotherapy; Suicidal Behavior in Girls

References and Further Reading Becker, A. E. 1999. “Acculturation and Disordered Eating in Fiji.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC. Furnham, A., and N. Alibhai. 1983. “Cross-cultural Differences in the Perception of Female Body Shapes.” Psychological Medicine 13: 829–837. Phillips, K. A. 1996. The Broken Mirror: Understanding and Treating Body Dysmorphic Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1998. “Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Clinical Aspects and Treatment Strategies.” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 62, no. 4: A33–A48. Piran, N., M. P. Levine, and C. SteinerAdair, eds. Preventing Eating Disorders: A Handbook of Intervention and Special Challenges. Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge. Werne, J., ed. 1996. Treating Eating Disorders. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Wooley, S. C., and A. Kearney-Cooke. 1986. “Intensive Treatment of Bulimia and Body Image Disturbance.” In Handbook of Eating Disorders: Physiology, Psychology, and Treatment of Obesity, Anorexia, and Bulimia. Edited by K. D. Brownell and J. P. Foreyt. New York: Basic Books. Zerbe, K. J. 1993. The Body Betrayed: Women, Eating Disorders and Treatment. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. ———. 1999. Women’s Mental Health and Primary Care. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.

C Camp Fire Girls

and votes than in motherhood. Although the Gulicks welcomed women’s suffrage and expanded public roles, they decried what they perceived as the erosion of women’s unique contributions to civic life. They viewed the combination of work, health, and love as indispensable to training girls to combine their public and private lives. In many ways, the Gulicks’ roles within the Camp Fire Girls reflected their ideal and revealed the paradoxes of a combined public and private life. Luther Gulick held several distinguished administrative posts in his career leading to the Camp Fire Girls and had wide-ranging professional affiliations. He was head of the Department of Child Hygiene at the Russell Sage Foundation, close friends with famed child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and the director of physical education for all of the public schools in greater New York. In addition, he designed the triangle symbol for the YMCA, formed the American School Hygiene Association, served twice on the U.S. Olympic Committee, and was instrumental in establishing the Playground Association of America. Gulick was a national figure, frequently asked to speak publicly concerning childrearing and appropriate play for children. His close ties to luminaries within children’s organizations fueled the Camp Fire Girls’ success.

In 1910, Luther Halsey Gulick and his wife Charlotte Vetter Gulick hosted a small group of girls at their camp on Lake Sebago, near South Casco, Maine. Clad in bloomers, middies, long black stockings, and white tennis shoes, these seventeen campers were the inaugural members of the Camp Fire Girls, the first nonsectarian girls’ organization in the United States. Although the Gulicks were the official founders of the Camp Fire Girls, their organization shared philosophies and leadership with the Boy Scouts, Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA), and Boy Pioneers of America. By 1913, there were 60,000 active members of local groups, called “Camp Fires,” in every state as well as the Alaskan and Hawaiian territories. The organization’s motto was “Wo-HeLo,” the first two letters each of work, health, and love, and reflected the founders’ goal of bringing the “qualities and spirit of the home into the community.” Luther and Charlotte Gulick posited the Camp Fire Girls as devoted to preparing girls for the “new and splendid social world” by elevating the virtues of hearth and home while emphasizing the importance of proper female citizenship. The early twentieth century witnessed the proliferation of the “new woman” who was more interested in the professions

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Camp Fire Girls raise the American flag at Camp Paxson in Montana, 1941. (Corbis)

Charlotte Vetter Gulick was a less nationally recognized figure, yet her contributions to the Camp Fire Girls have continued to reverberate. Gulick was close friends with Ernest Thompson (Seton), the famed nature writer and founder of the Woodcraft Indians in 1902, and consulted with him to formulate the organization’s Wo-He-Lo philosophy. Seton’s Woodcraft Indians was a boys’ organization devoted to “playing Indian” through writing and memorizing Indian lore and dressing up as “braves.” Seton believed that encouraging boys to behave as “savages” built character and brought them into closer communion with nature. Using designs created by Seton, Gulick taught girls how to sew their own

“squaw” [sic: squaw is a pejorative term that means “vagina”] dresses and beaded headbands. Gulick chose an Indian name for herself (Hiiteni, meaning “life, more abundant and desire for attainment”) and for her husband (Timanous, meaning “guiding spirit”). Each Camp Fire Girl chose her own Indian name that best reflected her aspirations and personality. Likewise, the girls decorated their dresses with symbols that represented their selfperception—indeed, Charlotte Gulick claimed to express herself more precisely through symbols than through words. Charlotte Gulick’s encouragement of girls to express themselves through symbolism and “playing Indian” reveals her personal idiosyncrasies as well as the

Camp Fire Girls boundaries of the organization’s democratic philosophy. The Gulicks strove to collapse racial, class, ethnic, and religious barriers among girls by encouraging them to dress as Indian women. Whether or not they achieved their goal remains in question—a glance through photographs of the earliest Camp Fire Girls reveals that white girls appeared most frequently in organizational literature. Dressing like Indians also reinforced gender roles for Camp Fire Girls—girls were expected to sew their dresses themselves and choose colors, patterns, and skirt lengths that flattered their coloring and figures. As for reducing class barriers, though the Camp Fire Girls’ founders sought to elevate and glorify work, the work for which girls were rewarded was largely unpaid labor such as learning to care for an infant, walking 2 miles a day, or memorizing an “authentic” Indian poem. Membership in the Camp Fire Girls required free time and resources that many poor and working-class girls did not have. Camp Fire Girls were required to attend meetings, sometimes twice weekly, and many longed to travel to overnight camps in the summertime. As the organization’s popularity grew, commodities associated with the Camp Fire Girls flooded the marketplace. By 1913, the availability of Camp Fire Girl fiction, songbooks, “outing” clothing manufactured by the Camp Fire Outfitting Company, and the Camp Fire Girls monthly magazine Wo-He-Lo, later Everygirls’ Magazine, demarcated girls who could and could not afford to enjoy every aspect of Camp Fire membership. Despite such limitations, the Camp Fire Girls was undoubtedly the first and most popular girls’ organization of its kind in the years leading to World War I.

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By 1912, the organization created Blue Bird Nests, local groups of six- to twelveyear-old girls who wished to join their older sisters and friends in Camp Fire. In the same year, the Camp Fire Girls headquarters in New York City was receiving 500 letters per day and sending out nearly 10,000 pieces per week. Luther Gulick had the Camp Fire Girl handbook translated into Braille to include blind girls, and by 1914 the New York Public Library included several Braille handbooks in its collection. As the organization’s membership steadily increased, the Gulicks formalized the training for Camp Fire leaders, or Guardians. They conducted training programs for Guardians across the nation, boasting that 42 percent of the guardianship were college graduates and that 73 percent had training beyond high school. The expanding administrative staff required girls to begin to pay annual dues for membership in the Camp Fire Girls, despite internal opposition from several Guardians. The Camp Fire Girls’ efforts during World War I reflected the Gulicks’ belief in women’s and girls’ unique citizenship. Upon the war’s commencement, Luther Gulick implemented the Minute Girl Program within the Camp Fire Girls to support the nation by keeping girls fit and healthy as well as advocating food and resource conservation. In a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, Gulick proposed the Minute Girl uniform for all women and girls in the United States. The uniform consisted of a red tie, white blouse, blue skirt, and white navy cap, and Gulick recommended that it be worn at work and school and that the money women and girls saved on clothing be donated to the American Red Cross. Although Wilson did not adopt the Minute Girl Program for the nation, he

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praised the Camp Fire Girls’ patriotism and devotion to the war effort. The program was a partial success; 58,558 Camp Fire Girls joined the Minute Girl Program, but it was not nearly as popular as the organization’s Red Cross program, in which 83,356 girls participated. Gulick’s missive to President Wilson revealed both his commitment to the Camp Fire Girls and his boundless energy. His death in 1918 left thousands of Camp Fire Girls bereft, yet the organization persisted despite countless financial setbacks ushered in by the Depression. Everygirl’s Magazine folded in 1933, and membership dropped in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1943, the organization had no investments or endowments, and links between local Camp Fires and national headquarters were feeble. The 1943 appointment of Martha F. Allen as the first female national director of Camp Fire Girls revitalized the ailing organization. Under Allen’s tutelage, local Camp Fires donated nearly $54,000 in war bonds to bolster the national organization’s financial resources and enable it to employ a field and public relations staff. In 1960, the Camp Fire Girls celebrated its Golden Jubilee with the help of $100,000 in contributions from individual members. With the help of child psychologists and social workers, Allen and her administration modified the Gulicks’ unique vision to ensure the Camp Fire Girls’ vitality and relevance. Committed to improving local-national ties, encouraging a larger and more diverse membership, immersing the organization in community service, and training volunteers professionally, Allen nearly doubled the number of local Camp Fires by 1960. The national transformations of the 1960s reverberated within Camp Fire Girls as well. In September 1962 the

organization presented a dramatically transfigured national program. Camp Fire Girls were divided into three age groups rather than two, ascending from Blue Birds to Junior Hi Girls and then to Camp Fire Girls. The program’s traditional emphasis on interpersonal relationships and socializing was replaced with an emphasis on community service. In 1965, Camp Fire undertook the “Widen Your World” project during the United Nations International Year of Cooperation. Camp Fire Girls “widened their worlds” by befriending children and adults from diverse backgrounds. In 1964, August 4 was set aside as Camp Fire Day at the New York World’s Fair; a new era in Camp Fire was afoot. In 1963, after receiving a generous grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Camp Fire established local groups in underrepresented neighborhoods in Boston, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the Metropolitan Critical Areas Project. Camp Fire instituted troops in rural areas, in migrant worker camps, and on Native American reservations as well. In 1966, Camp Fire continued to expand its visibility through the Horizon Club Conference, during which more than 1,000 Camp Fire Girls traveled to Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Jamaica as “good ambassadors” to the world. In the same year, Martha Allen resigned her post as national director to Hester Turner, a former dean of students at Lewis and Clark College. She inherited Allen’s expansive organization and instituted additional changes in the Camp Fire Girls, apparent in the “psychedelic” version of “America the Beautiful” sung at the Quadrennial Conference in 1967 and the dissemination of pamphlets concerning the dangers of

Camp Fire Girls lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Also in 1967, Turner appointed Camp Fire Girls themselves as members of the board in order to ensure that girls’ voices were heard amid the cacophony of adult voices. In the tradition of their activities during World Wars I and II, Camp Fire Girls participated in war relief for the Vietnam War, sending toys to young refugees in Vietnam and cookies to American soldiers overseas. The changes within the organization were visible to all—indeed, Turner stipulated that Camp Fire uniforms be made from permanent-press, stain-resistant fabrics to relieve parents of excessive ironing. The “Take a Stand” National Council Meeting of 1970 revealed that still more changes would follow. Articles in The Camp Fire Girl magazine (later called Today’s Girl) reflected contemporary concerns of adolescents; articles entitled “Youth and Drugs: A Language Gap” and “Unwed Motherhood” earned the magazine top honors in a contest hosted by the Community Agencies Public Relations Associations. In 1970, high school boys were permitted to join Camp Fire and men were allowed to become group leaders, perhaps the most significant decision in Camp Fire’s history. One local leader wrote that Camp Fire choosing to remain single-sex would perpetuate destructive role stereotyping. Camp Fire’s new magazine, Today’s Girl, was evidence of the organization’s new self-perception as well as broader national transformations. For example, in the October 1971 issue, Cesar Chavez wrote an article for the magazine concerning racial discrimination. Though the magazine could not be sustained beyond 1972, it testified to the organization’s commitment to encompassing a broader constituency. Camp Fire established projects specifically addressing the

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needs of Catholic, Jewish, eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Buddhist youth in order to avoid excluding local church organizations. Despite Camp Fire’s attempts at inclusiveness and augmented membership, by 1972 the program was losing nearly 40,000 members per year. The Membership Growth Campaign of 1970 fell short of its 1-million-member goal. By 1975, there were 453,000 Camp Fire Girls, evidence of a 10 percent drop in membership annually. Declining birthrates after the baby boom generation along with a range of choices beyond Camp Fire for boys and girls called the organization’s survival into question. In May 1973, the organization’s planning committee, called “New Day,” reaffirmed Camp Fire’s commitment to remaining unaffiliated with other youth groups. Changes from within were dramatic—the planning committee replaced the National Council with a congress of delegates elected locally. This decision increased local councils’ autonomy and rendered dues paying a local, rather than national, decision. In addition, in response to local councils’ votes, Camp Fire relocated from its Worth Street, New York City, address to Kansas City, Missouri. A massive flood in Kansas City flooded the local Camp Fire office, yet the national headquarters’ move was finalized in 1979. New Day also extended membership to boys in all age groups with some slight changes in name: for example, Blue Birds became Blue Jays. In admitting boys, Camp Fire perceived itself as expanding rather than severing its commitment to enhancing girls’ lives. Organizational leaders interpreted boys’ presence as meeting a feminist goal by allowing them to explore the importance of learning how to do housework, express

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emotions, and perform other activities typically unavailable to boys without embarrassment. The Camp Fire Girls changed their name to the Camp Fire Boys and Girls and have retained that title. The organization has persisted predominantly in the western United States, and its membership remains lower than that of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, yet it leaves an innovative legacy as the nation’s first character-building organization for girls. Erin McMurray See also Girl Scouts; Saturday Evening Girls; Summer Camps for Girls References and Further Reading Buckler, Helen, May F. Fielder, and Martha F. Allen. 1961. Wo-He-Lo: The Story of the Camp Fire Girls 1910–1960. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Deloria, Philip Joseph. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. www.campfire.org

Captivity Captivity has been an important theme in American literature and the arts from the seventeenth century to the present. As such, it has served as a vehicle in popular culture for reflecting upon critical social and existential issues, ranging from divine providence to the family and gender roles and from the dichotomy between the civilized and the primitive to the frailty of individual and collective identity. No short essay can do justice to the diversity and complexity of the representations of captivity over the centuries. My focus here will be limited to Indian captivity and, more narrowly, to the representation of female captives, especially girls. Indian captivity has occupied the Western popular imagination ever since

the European “discovery” of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century. In narrative tales, sermons, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture, and more recently the cinema, Indian captivity has proven to be symbolic of a fundamental boundary situation. A captive loses her freedom, of course, but more importantly she also faces the prospect of having her individual, social, and communal identity stripped away. In critical ways, the idea of captivity raised troubling questions concerning human nature, the precarious state of personal and social identity, gender roles, interpersonal power relationships, and morality. These and other issues were raised in narrative accounts and visual representations of actual abductions by Indians, but they are also found in fictional accounts, as well as in pictorial clichés and stereotypes. It is important to note from the start that no narrative or visual representation of captivity is ever a purely “objective” depiction. All representations of captivity are value-laden interpretations. To be sure, some seek to re-create accurately the events and experiences of actual captives, but even these are informed and shaped by the author’s or artist’s culturalhistorical milieu. For social and cultural historians, however, fictional or imaginary representations of captivity—especially stereotypical ones—are also important. This is so because they encode cultural values in a condensed form capable of evoking a shared response in readers or viewers. Thus, even though such representations may not provide much “hard” information about an actual captivity, they provide invaluable insight into the cultural values and the prevailing ideology of people in a given time and place.

Captivity The earliest stories of captivity in North America come from the Puritans of New England in the late seventeenth century. They are markedly different from captivity narratives of later centuries. The taking of captives by Native Americans began only after the Puritans attempted to displace the natives from their land and burned their fields and stores of food in 1675–1676. Most Puritans, however, did not recognize their own culpability here. Rather, they saw God’s hand in these events and ascribed all power and sovereignty to God. The self-image of the New England Puritans, who had emigrated to the New World seeking freedom of religion, was shaped in part by their identification with the Israelites in the biblical story of their captivity. Thus, the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay colony depicts the Puritan colony as a female captive in the wilderness. In this case, then, the biblical theme of captivity was crucial for the Puritans even before the first captive was taken in King Philip’s War in the late seventeenth century. Perhaps the most famous captivity narrative of all time, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), written by the wife of a well-known minister, is typical of Puritan works in that it correlates events of the time with similar events in the Bible. Rowlandson interpreted the tragic events swirling around her through selected tales from the Bible. Rowlandson’s children figure in her narrative largely as victims of Indian brutality, although one son is portrayed as a faithful Christian, reading his Bible and praying regularly even in captivity. Historians argue that there was no concept of “childhood” in Puritan culture. As a result, there were few forms of juve-

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nile literature. Instead, Puritan children largely read the same texts (e.g., the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan) and heard the same tales and sermons that adults did. Although some children in outlying farms and settlements may have known Indian captivity firsthand, most would have known of it through oral accounts, sermons, and written works. One frequently conveyed message was that Indian captivity and the depravations suffered by settlers were due to their having affronted God in some way. Children, like adults, were taught that human nature was inherently sinful. After the Fall, all persons, including children, were sinful by nature; all were “captives of the devil.” This sinful nature was sometimes referred to as an “inner captivity,” whereas actual abduction by Indians was called “outward captivity.” Accounts of the horrors of captivity were sometimes used to frighten children and adults into “being good.” For instance, after recounting the torture and death suffered by some boys and girls at the hands of the Indians, Cotton Mather, a famous Puritan minister, warned all children: “Oh! See that you become Serious, Pious, Orderly Children, Obedient unto your Parents, Conscientious to keep the Lord[’]s Day, and afraid of committing any Wickedness.” The clear threat was that if they did not behave properly, God might punish them by causing the Indians to swoop down on their homes and carry them off into the wilderness. Girls learned that women and girls were the special objects of the horrible violence of “brutish” and “ravenous” Indians. As a form of moral didacticism, Puritan ministers invited readers and auditors to imagine themselves in the position of captives. “Read, therefore, peruse, ponder, and from hence lay up something from the

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experience of another, against thine own turn come,” Increase Mather wrote in the preface to Rowlandson’s narrative. The following depiction of the horrors of captivity from the pen of Cotton Mather is typical of Puritan texts: How many Women have been made a prey to those Bruitish men, that are Skillful to Destroy! How many a Fearful Thing has been suffered by the Fearful Sex, from those men! Let the Daughters of our Zion think with themselves, what it would be, for fierce Indians to break into their houses, and brain their Husbands and their Children before their Eyes, and Lead them away a Long Journey into the Woods; and if they began to fail and faint in the Journey, then for a Tawny Salvage [savage] to come with Hell fire in his Eyes, and cut ’em down with his Hatchet; or, if they could miraculously hold out, then for some Filthy and ugly Squaws to become their insolent Mistresses, and insolently to abuse ’em at their pleasure a thousand inexpressible ways; and, if they had any of their Sucking Infants with them, then to see those Tender Infants handled at such a rate, that they should beg of the Tygres [tigers, or the Indians], to dispatch ’em out of hand. An equally frightening prospect for Puritan girls was that a girl would be carried off and “go native,” becoming an Indian herself. In 1704, John Williams, a Puritan minister, his wife, and their five children were abducted from their home in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Most eventually were safely returned, but Eunice Williams, seven years old when she was taken, was adopted by a Mohawk family

in New France (present-day Canada) and never returned. With the passage of time, she forgot the English language, married a Mohawk man, and refused to return to Massachusetts. Eunice’s story was told in many different ways and in many different genres in New England and beyond, but most accounts sent shivers down the spines of readers and auditors who contemplated the real possibility that they might revert to a savage state of being. Girls and women shuddered at the idea of being sexually possessed by “savages.” Even more frightening, however, was the prospect of a girl being carried off to New France, put in a convent, and forced to convert to Roman Catholicism. It is hard for people today to appreciate the deep fear Puritans had, in the wake of religious wars in England and on the European continent, of being forced to convert to Catholicism. From their perspective, the child’s eternal soul was at risk if she were carried away by “Papists.” Even “going native” was preferable to this form of religious conversion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Puritan providential narratives of Indian captivity were largely replaced by sentimental tales. The latter share some elements with the earlier genre but also are markedly different. Sentimental literature was consumed utilizing reading practices similar to those assumed in Puritan texts, most especially the expectation that the reader would imagine herself into the existential situation of the main characters. The “feeling” reader would learn moral lessons by vicariously experiencing the vicissitudes of life through the travails of the protagonists. The understanding of human nature and relationship between the human and the divine found in sentimental literature, however, is notably different. Sentimen-

Captivity tal literature expresses a radical change in the understanding of human nature and in the image of children. Sentimental works frequently represent the nuclear family—a father, mother, and young children—as enjoying “heaven on earth.” They live an idyllic pastoral life amid the bounty of nature, yet this Edenic state is always threatened by evil forces from outside, such as crude, greedy, and dishonest men or menacing “savages.” Gender relations are critically important in sentimental works, as are familial relations. One of the most important cultural developments found in sentimental tales is the image of the pure, innocent, and perfect child. Shedding the theological view of human nature as inherently sinful, sentimental authors presented a new middle- and upper-class view, which suggested that persons of the “better sort” were naturally good moral beings. Sentimental authors represented the domestic sphere as the primary site of moral education for children. Ann Eliza Bleeker’s novel, The History of Maria Kittle (1790), is typical in its description of the main protagonist as a child and, later, her daughter Anna as well-behaved, obedient, industrious, caring, and considerate toward others and as having “every special grace.” Such characters were ideals for girls and women to emulate. Yet it was precisely the purity, innocence, and goodness of such female characters that heightened the tragedy of the misfortune and suffering that inevitably befell them. The very idea of being ripped from the “bosom of family” and carried off into the wilderness by Indians led generations of readers to more highly value the warmth and security of the family home. In sentimental works of literature, pure boys and girls had the power to

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change the world by melting the hard hearts of grownups. Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the best-known character of this sort, though many are found in Indian captivity tales as well. The following passage from Sarah Larimer’s The Capture and Escape (1870) is typical in reimagining the death of a young girl as a blessing in disguise, for suffering innocents and children were immediately transported to heaven: The body of little Mary had been found pierced by three arrows, and she had been scalped by the ruthless knife. . . . But it was only the passage from death into life, from darkness into daylight, from doubt and fear into love and endless joy. Those little ones, whose spirits float upward from their downy pillows, amid the tears and prayers of broken-hearted friends, are blest to enter into heaven’s shining gate, which lies as near little Mary’s rocky, blood-stained pillow in the desolate waste as the palace of a king, and when she had once gained the great and unspeakable bliss of heaven, it must have blotted out the remembrance of the pain that won it, and made no price too great for such delight. Indian captivity allowed writers, poets, painters, and filmmakers to explore diverse issues over the years. In the nineteenth century, female captives were one of the most common subjects of American sculpture and figured in the lively cultural discourse on gender. The meaning of captivity was never set, however. Young and adult female captives provided the opportunity for authors and artists to proffer the public everything from racist diatribes against the Indians to

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Rousseau-like paeans on the “noble savage.” A few used the theme of captivity to offer sexually titillating scenarios of girls and women at the mercy of seminaked men. Such works presaged a subgenre of the romance novel in the twentieth century, frequently featuring a cover depicting an unconscious female being carried off in the arms of a brawny, dark-skinned male. A few women even used their experience of captivity to mount in an indirect way a feminist critique of their own patriarchal society. In Dakota War Whoop (1863), Harriet M’Conkey Bishop, writing about her experience among the Indians, argued for the existence of a universal female nature—caring, peaceful, and moral— that had been repressed, to the detriment of society as a whole, by men. We are glad that we have comparatively small record to make of [Indian] women being the aiders and abettors of the transactions which brought such dismay to our frontier. As a general thing, they have “fed the hungry and clothed the naked” when in their power to do so. True, they have been subject to their liege lords, obliged to do their bidding, but whenever left to themselves, we are convinced that the fundamental elements of true womanhood live in the hearts which beat beneath their dirty short gowns and rusty old blankets. Remove the shackles which the men inflict upon them, and they would soon arrive to the dignity of white women. Many girls read not only captivity narratives but also stories about Indian maidens like Pocahontas. What they almost never found, however, was any story of children born of a mixed mar-

riage. This certainly is true in the classic Hollywood westerns produced down through the 1950s, but it even continues in late-twentieth-century films with a captivity plot element, such as A Man Called Horse (1970) and Dances with Wolves (1990). Both films romanticize Plains Indian culture in some ways while portraying the brutality of whites. In A Man Called Horse, the male protagonist marries an Indian maiden, and they have a child. In a reversal of the typical captivity tale, though, both the mother and child are killed in an attack on their home by white cavalry men. In Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner’s character voluntarily lives among the Indians and marries a woman who had been captured by the Indians as a small girl. This brief and partial survey has demonstrated that captivity has fascinated people for centuries. It has captured the imagination of boys and girls, not to speak of adults, leading them to imagine a different life and even a different identity in an alien world. The captivity theme has allowed people to imaginatively enjoy forbidden pleasures as well as to confront their deepest fears. The idea of captivity has captivated people for different reasons throughout American history, speaking no doubt to escapist fantasies, utopian reveries, and deep-seated fears and anxieties. Gary L. Ebersole See also Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Frontier Girls; Pocahontas References and Further Reading Breitwieser, Mitchell. 1990. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Cars Burnham, Michelle. 1997. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Castiglia, Christopher. 1996. Bound and Determined: Captivity, CultureCrossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demos, John. 1994. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and James Arthur Levernier. 1993. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900. New York: Twayne. Drinnon, Richard. 1972. White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter. New York: Schocken. Ebersole, Gary L. 1995. Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-Modern Images of Indian Captivity. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Kasson, Joy. 1990. Marble Queens and Captives: Women in NineteenthCentury American Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Namias, June. 1993. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Vaughan, Alden T., and Edward W. Clark. 1981. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1620–1675. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Cars The changing role of cars over the course of the twentieth century has surprising significance to the lives of girls. As early as 1910, girls’ serial novels described teenage girls taking thrilling automobile trips to distant places. During the 1920s, cars replaced the parlor as the site for teenage courtship. By the late 1930s, drive-ins had supplanted the local “lovers’ lane” as the preferred location for dating. With the 1950s came the not-so-surprising discovery that nearly half of all girls who

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engaged in premarital intercourse did so in a car. Later on, after the novelty of auto technology wore off, cars offered opportunities for girls to experience independence, gender equality, and self-expression and consumption. Throughout the century the car has never lost its prominent place in the history of girlhood. Mass market publishers capitalized on the country’s fascination with automobiles by offering serial novels about the adventures of girls who traveled around the country in automobiles of their own. Artemus first began publishing The Automotive Girls in 1910, along with Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate and Cupples and Leon, which published The Motor Girls. Soon after, Hearst Publishing introduced The Motor Maids. All described teenage girls’ travel exploits with similar messages about technology that publishers probably hoped girls would adopt. Although the novels appeared to challenge conventional notions about women’s relationship to machines, they reaffirmed women’s roles as consumers, not creators of technology. The novels encouraged a girlhood fling with cars, but the expectation was that they would return to more traditional roles after reaching maturity. In the 1920s the car became the focal point of conflict between female adolescents and their parents. Robert and Helen Lynd concluded that “the fact that 348 boys and 382 girls in the upper three years of high school placed ‘use of the automobile’ fifth and fourth respectively in a list of twelve possible sources of disagreement between them and their parents suggests that this may be an increasing decentralizing agent” (Lynd and Merrell 1929, 257). No longer able to monitor their daughters during courtship, parents grew fearful of sexual promiscu-

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ity. With the car’s backseat, gone were the days of dating safely confined to the parlor or to the swing on the front porch. Schools, also concerned by the new freedoms cars offered girls, took a hard line on students’ use of automobiles. Paula Fass noted that “more and more schools were banning automobiles on campus in the twenties. By 1927, 17 of the 35 leading institutions had such a ban” (Fass 1977, 432). Students circumvented the rules and replaced them with their own form of self-regulation, however. Although the car offered the opportunity for premarital intimacy, it was the mores of the peer group that drew the line. According to the diary of nineteenyear-old Yvonne Blue, “[She] was not ready for intercourse, although she was primed for more restrained forms of sexual negotiation and interaction such as necking and petting” (Brumberg 1997, 154). Necking and petting were the two automobile activities sanctioned by teens in the 1920s. The secluded “lovers’ lanes” of the 1920s came out into the open as cars filled the landscape of American life. The auto’s role as a place of passion was enhanced as more drive-in movies sprang up. Young people had “an excuse for being out late at night in a car with a person of the opposite sex” (Marsh and Collett 1987, 16). In 1950s movies, the car became an icon of the teenage search for identity in addition to its association with dating and sex. In Rebel without a Cause (1955), James Dean, the newcomer in school, is spurned by Natalie Wood. Her peer identity is secured through her relationship to her boyfriend Allen, who drives a hot rod and dons a leather jacket. By accepting Allen’s masculine challenge to a “chickie run,” a contest between two drivers to

determine who could drive their cars closest to the edge of a cliff before jumping to safety, Dean seeks acceptance by the group as well as the attention of Wood. A guy with a car was more attractive to a girl. Writing several decades later about her high school years in Kansas, Anemona Hartocollis noted in a similar vein: “I don’t remember the guy who took me to the Kansas State Fair, but I do remember his car, a two-seat Corvette Stingray, nosing the ground like a giant bottom-feeding fish” (Hartocollis 1996, 28). Since the 1950s, the car and more recently the van have retained their association with masculinity, sexuality, and dating. In the 1960s, the Volkswagen (VW) bus (subsequently renamed a van) became associated with the counterculture and, later, feminism. Hippies adopted the VW bus as their own, more readily available version of the 1939 International Harvester school bus that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters used on their 1964 “trip” across the country. The statement “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus” became the central metaphor for the trip and was repeated endlessly by all participants and documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Images of hand-painted peace symbols and flowers on VW buses became a staple of late 1960s iconography. During the 1980s and 1990s, girls had their own cars to drive, although they usually did not own them. Recently, television ads have portrayed high school girls receiving new cars from their parents as graduation gifts and as expressions of gender equality and independence. In one commercial, the father’s handing over the keys to his daughter symbolizes his acceptance and even support of her independence.

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A mother teaches her fifteen-year-old daughter safe driving skills. (Skjold Photographs)

When Sue Zesiger bought her new 1995 Porsche, she discovered more than just an attractive, high-performance car. Sue got the feeling that “nothing could touch me—a feeling that surpasses the thrill of a new job, a new suit, a new love . . . you can hit the gas, play with those alluring new boundaries, and enjoy your position: in the lead” (Zesiger 1995, 288). Others have described their cars as parts of their psyche. Just as boys were attracted to the sexy, feminine design of cars in the 1950s and 1960s, girls and women today, according to Jerry Palmer, director of design for General Motors North American Design Center, “would really rather have a vehicle that is more masculine” (Meredith 1999, sec. 4). The popular sports utility vehicles reflect this prefer-

ence for more “muscular” cars by girls and their mothers. Girls have progressed from the early days reflected in serial novels, when their relationship to the technology was superficial and transient. In the present, they recognize mastery of technology as a way to gain equal footing in their relationships. How comfortable girls are at taking control, however, remains to be seen. Writing in Seventeen Magazine, Amy Lumet asked her readers: “Do you notice how we girls hand over our keys whenever a guy is around? I think it’s symbolic of the way we give up power in a relationship.” Her remedy for girls’ temptation to let boyfriends drive is to “know your car. You’d be surprised at how your confidence and skills increase as you learn how things work” (Lumet 1994, 132). Since

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1950, girls’ place has moved from the backseat to the driver’s seat, as they have gained a significant measure of independence, identity, self-expression, and equality through their cars. John Morrow See also Consumer Culture; Dating and Courtship; Technology References and Further Reading Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press. Hartocollis, Anemona. 1996. “She Drives Like a Man.” Life (Winter). Lumet, Amy. 1994. “Sex Drive.” Seventeen (March). Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace. Marsh, Peter, and Peter Collett. 1987. “Driving Passion: There Seems to Be No Slowing Down Our Ongoing Love Affair with the Car.” Psychology Today (June). Meredith, Robyn. 1999. “Hey, Nice Headlights: In Detroit, a Sex Change.” New York Times (May 16). Romalov, Nancy Tillman. 1995. “Mobile Heroines: Early Twentieth Century Girls’ Automobile Series.” Journal of Popular Culture (Spring). Scharff, Virginia. 1991. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Zesiger, Sue. 1995. “Velocity Girl: In Tomorrow’s High-Performance Automobiles, Speed Becomes Sexier— and Safer.” Harper’s Bazaar (September).

Catholic Girls Catholic girls’ education served to condition females to fit within their traditional

role as defined by the church and patriarchal society. In a predominantly Protestant country, the church pushed an educational platform that taught Catholic children to keep the Catholic faith and to maintain Catholic culture and tradition. Until the advent of World War I, ethnic consciousness, both language and culture, served as another educative goal. As a role model for women, the church offered Mary, the Virgin Mother, or the wifemother. Because mothers in the home and nuns in the schools served as primary educators, the church supported the education of Catholic girls who would one day fill these positions. During the colonial period, few Catholics migrated to the American colonies. Those who did followed the general custom of the age; they prepared their daughters for societal roles through informal education. Daughters learned from their mothers and other adult women in the home what would be expected from them, and they learned to carry out traditional domestic tasks. Trained for genderappropriate roles, girls received a practical though informal education. Girls’ education outside the home began in earnest with the arrival of nuns who established academies beginning in the eighteenth century. The Order of Saint Ursuline (OSU), or the Ursulines, arrived in New Orleans in French colonial Louisiana in 1727. The sisters became renowned for educating girls in academies and eventually in parochial schools. In the early years, lessons served to prepare young girls for motherhood. Girls who attended the Ursuline academy in New Orleans received lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, catechism, and industrial training. Daily prayers, mass, and examination of conscience

Catholic Girls were a part of the curriculum as well. Students hailed from the upper levels of the socioeconomic hierarchy, whose parents could best afford academy fees. Later academies concentrated on the introduction of social skills or ornamental studies, such as dancing and music, that augmented girls’ attractiveness in the marriage market. In rare instances, girls gained access to the so-called masculine branches of learning. Study in the masculine fields of knowledge (Latin, mathematics, and science), some believed, more adequately prepared a future mother to guide her sons in their role as American citizens. At the same time, the conventlike atmosphere of the academies provided a safe learning environment for Catholic daughters. The academies existed where support by a religious community could be found. In addition to educating young women, the academies provided financial support for the growing number of religious communities and served as recruiting bases for new vocations. The nuns taught the importance of marriage and motherhood while providing evidence of the value of women outside the traditional role of the wife-mother—as woman religious, reformer, and teacher. Whether intentionally or not, the church offered Catholic girls an acceptable and appropriate alternative: a religious vocation. Unlike so many other areas of American life, a religious vocation helped to negate class differences, though it did not resolve ethnic ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a religious vocation provided young girls from working-class and rural backgrounds an education and other opportunities their families could ill afford. In the immediate post–World War II

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decades, the prototypical Catholic family hoped that at least one daughter would choose a religious vocation. Bright, creative, and ambitious girls found an outlet for their talents and energy. Disciplined, competitive, and sex-segregated Catholic schools offered girls an advantage in a world that reportedly cheated young women in their acquisition for knowledge and recognition. Italian families seemed to prefer public schools and believed that educating daughters wasted money because girls did not need an education to marry or to raise children; evidently a religious vocation would not serve familial plans. In general, Italian families’ lack of concern for female education continued into the 1960s. For Latinas, as well, a religious vocation seemed to go against the cultural values attached to family and children. Today, Latinas continue to fight family and peers in their pursuit of higher education. Ethnicity remained a determinant in the education of Catholic girls and their futures throughout the twentieth century. During most of the nineteenth century, the church hierarchy strongly believed in, and perhaps rightly so in some instances, the danger of a public school education. The Third Plenary Council, meeting in Baltimore in 1884, commanded that all parishes establish, within two years, a parochial school. Not all parishes could afford the luxury of a parochial school, however, and parents continued to send their children to public schools. Local governments allowed public funds to be used for parochial schools, and in many ethnic neighborhoods public school boards allowed nuns to teach in public schools. In some locations, a large percentage of lay teachers

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were themselves products of a Catholic education or upbringing. Whether they attended the academies and parochial schools or public schools, Catholic girls received the benefit of highly trained teachers who also served as competent and strong female role models. The council’s directive led to the establishment of teacher preparation programs. Catholic female academies and seminaries provided the much-needed teacher training. Although females would not be admitted to Catholic colleges until 1911, by 1925, they were able to choose from fifty-one liberal arts Catholic colleges. Higher education for Catholic girls, however, would continue to emphasize religion and motherhood alongside teaching. If she married, a teacher had to leave the public stage for the more private one in the home. Church-supported education also provided vocational opportunities other than the religious or teaching. Working girls received the benefit of practical training when religious women in growing urban centers began to establish trade schools to help unskilled females. Working girls and wives, whose need for wages necessitated moving beyond the domestic realm, found companionship and enlightenment in the summer and evening schools as well as the reading circles established by the nuns. The trade schools often had a distinct ethnic quality. Not only did girls seek those who shared similar backgrounds, but also different immigrant groups often responded to one trade over another. Parochial schools in the parishes served national interests as well. German Catholics called for church schools to preserve their language and culture during the nineteenth century. In the

early twentieth century, Poles in particular ensured their daughters received knowledge of Polish language, literature, and history, alongside the standard American subjects such as math, science, and English. Czechs, Lithuanians, and French Canadians followed the Poles’ example to some extent. With the Americanization movement heralded by World War I, national or ethnic interests gave way to American patriotism, and the parochial schools became American institutions, teaching Catholic girls how to be Catholic and American. Irish Americans realized this from the beginning; their daughters, seemingly more than others, took advantage of what the academies, convent schools, and parochial schools offered. Irish Catholic girls were the first to enter the teaching profession, and they outnumbered other ethnics in entering a religious vocation as well. Catholic girls’ academies remained as educational institutions for adolescent daughters of the growing Catholic middle class. They offered the only secondary education for girls until the early twentieth century. The boarding schools, such as those sponsored by the Society of the Sacred Heart, catered to the elite and provided instruction for the daughters of wealthy and powerful Catholics. From the establishment of the society’s first school in the 1820s and continuing into the early twentieth century, daughters of the Catholic elite could attend one of the society’s boarding schools in urban centers throughout the country. The academies trained young ladies to be gentlewomen and proper wives and mothers, not teachers or nurses. Whether elite or common, religion formed the core of Catholic girls’ education.

Catholic Girls Before the 1920s, parochial schools probably offered a better education than could be found in the public school system. Catholic girls received a more strenuous academic background than would have been possible in the public system. Training in Catholic faith, culture, and tradition shaped the lives of girls who attended these schools, regardless of their future plans. The emphasis on female orientation, supported by the nuns through examples and use of “she” in the educative process, resulted in more Catholic girls attending secondary schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than their male counterparts. Many would give back, in various ways, to the Catholic community that nurtured them. For example, the church supported the training of young women during World War I to serve at home and abroad in the war effort by establishing the National School of Social Service at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Whether convent-trained, a product of the academies, or graduates of the parochial school system, Catholic girls became nuns, teachers, social settlement workers, nurses, and mothers. After World War II, the parochial school curriculum paralleled that offered in public institutions. The church added religious instruction to reading, arithmetic, grammar, history, geography, nature study (science), and writing. A major difference between parochial and public schools, however, was the content of textbooks. Religious rather than secular themes and interpretations became the norm. The postwar years brought a renewed emphasis on motherhood and family rather than professional training in Catholic girls’ education. But by the

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1960s and throughout the rest of the twentieth century, the emphasis would shift toward offering girls opportunities to gain a preparatory education for careers or higher education. However, studies have shown that sex-segregated classes that offer girls an equal and competitive playing field in the learning process contribute to high self-esteem. A list of renowned and often powerful women in today’s world claim their Catholic girlhood education as a contributor to their success. Today, there exists no social or denominational need for Catholic parents to send their daughters to a convent or parochial school. Yet, they continue to do so, as do many nonCatholics who feel that the educational challenges offered by such an education can only benefit their daughters. For many late-twentieth-century Catholic girls, parochial education parallels an experience in a private sorority. Attendees learn a certain “codified language” that allows them to speak with and understand other graduates of the system, whether they attended the same school or not. The largest ethnic group within the church is Latinos, few of whom choose religious vocations for their daughters. The connections to family and the importance of motherhood combine with cultural values to make such a choice less desirable for them than for other Catholic girls. The importance of the Virgin Mary, particularly her role as mother, plays a significant role in the lives of Latinas. Direct offerings to her in coming-of-age ceremonies, or quinceañeras, and weddings symbolize the importance of motherhood in the future lives of young Latinas. Like Italians of an earlier age, many Latino families today see little value in

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Uniformed students walk to Mass at the all-girls’ Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. (Philip Gould/Corbis)

education for girls whose primary function in lives is to become mothers. This continued focus on the home, within a world in which girls’ choices for their futures are many, feeds what scholar Ana María Díaz-Stevens refers to as the “matriarchal core.” For Latinas, their role in the home constitutes more than the duties normally associated with the wifemother. The importance and authority that are a part of this matriarchal core are historically grounded and important as stabilizing factors for a culture in transition in the United States. For Latinos, unlike other ethnic Catholics, religion and culture, including language maintenance, remain home-based, suggesting that parochial schools that serve to instill

the faith and a more general Catholic culture would not serve the needs of Latinas. Less than 10 percent of the entire Latino population in the United States send their daughters to parochial schools, though the parochial schools in inner cities are largely composed of Latinos and African Americans, who desire education in a secure environment (Díaz-Stevens 1994). And those girls who do attend parochial schools are more likely to seek education beyond the secondary level, a threat to the traditional values imposed by their culture. Despite these restrictions, more and more Latinas are taking advantage of the educational opportunities offered them; their biggest supporters, in many cases, are their mothers.

Cheerleaders Catholic girls come from diverse backgrounds. Their goals differ as well. The education offered perhaps remains more a personal matter than the institutions and the church that sponsors them would care to admit. Sister Antonia McHugh, dean of the College of St. Catherine, offers this advice to Catholic girls: “Fill your minds with great things and there will be no room for trivialities. . . . She who would be woman must avoid mediocrity!” (Coburn and Smith 1999, 159). Kay J. Blalock See also Education of Girls; Jewish Education of Girls; Mennonite Girls References and Further Reading Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. 1999. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Díaz-Stevens, Ana María. 1994. “Latinas in the Church” and “Latino Youth and the Church.” Pp. 240–277 and 278–307 in Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S. Edited by Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Kenneally, James. 1990. The History of American Catholic Women. New York: Crossroad. Whitney, Catherine. 1999. The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns. New York: Crown Publishers.

Cheerleaders A cheerleader is one who uses verbal commands and body motions to direct a crowd to cheer in unison. The word cheerleader signifies two American icons: the wholesome, popular high school goddess and the gorgeous dancer on the sidelines at professional football games. Whether envied school leader or marginalized starlet, the cheerleader is perceived as a feminized role reflecting pos-

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itive and negative cultural values ascribed to girls and women. This gendered identification is ironic because cheerleading was invented by nineteenth-century American college boys as an entirely masculine enterprise. The evolution of cheerleading from a male collegiate experience to one shared by girls in venues as diverse as secondary schools, national competitions, and professional sport franchises reflects profound changes in the opportunities and expectations of American girls. The cheerleader’s original function, to lead yells in support of an athletic team during competition, endures and has expanded to include entertaining the crowd with spectacular tumbling and acrobatic stunts. Spirit groups—pep squads, song girls, and drill teams— evolved from the early yell leaders and marching bands to increase the pageantry of sport contests. Educators and entrepreneurs have assigned cheerleaders additional roles as school leaders, consumers, and marketing devices. The spontaneous yelling of the first cheerleaders evolved into stylized, physically demanding routines performed by trained specialists. Elite practitioners now participate in competitive cheerleading as a sport in its own right. The development of cheering from a student lark to a formalized, extracurricular activity and sport is the result of adult intervention at college, school, and community levels prompted by pedagogical rationales and the emergence of a profitable industry to equip and train cheerleaders. The institutionalization and commercialization of cheerleading determined who participated, defined cheerleader roles off the field, shaped performance style, and entrenched it as a pervasive symbol in mass media and popular cul-

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ture. Cheerleading as an activity can provide girls with expanded opportunities or reinforce the constraints of peer and adult expectations. The cheerleader as a symbol presents girls with contradictory images that reflect cultural ambivalence about female roles. American intercollegiate athletics developed during the mid-1800s at private colleges that were restricted to male students. The first intercollegiate football game took place in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. The earliest cheerleader was probably a student who stood up and urged fellow spectators to yell encouragement during a game. By the 1890s some colleges had a designated yell leader to direct cheering at games. These students, also known as “rooter kings,” “yell kings,” “yell captains,” or “yell marshals,” were chosen for their enthusiasm and charisma. Alumni, community, and media interest in college games grew rapidly, and the trappings of big-time athletics—paid coaches, marching bands, mass rallies—were established by the early 1900s. Grandstands and stadiums were built to hold thousands of spectators. Colleges added multiple yell leaders who did synchronized acrobatics and cheers to focus the attention of ever larger crowds. As college athletics grew in the late 1800s, state-supported and land-grant institutions began to admit female students. They participated in pep clubs, which formed organized cheering sections in the stands at games. By the 1920s coeducational pep clubs gave women the opportunity to serve as yell leaders. With the development of college fraternities and, later, sororities, affiliated women students became involved in social and extracurricular activities centered around sports. In the 1920s, beauty pageants and movies promoted female display in mass

entertainment. The collegiate sport spectacle, with performing cheerleaders, also incorporated feminine allure. By the 1930s some women made the transition to coeducational cheering squads, but they were excluded from Gamma Sigma, the national cheerleaders’ fraternity, and were not eligible for all-America status with the men. Through the 1940s, college cheerleading continued to be viewed as an athletic, masculine role. After World War II, women students entered college cheering in greater numbers. Today, both men and women cheer at the college level. As college cheerleading expanded from emotional support of the team to entertainment of the crowd, two types of feminized spirit groups emerged: song girls and drill teams. Incorporating music and choreography, each contained elements that would form the prototype for today’s professional cheerleader dance troupes. In 1929 the University of California at Los Angeles featured song girls in addition to its male yell leaders. During games a small group of girls led crowds in singing school songs played by the band. Dance routines were incorporated and replaced singing by the 1950s. Drill teams, larger groups of girls performing precision marching and dance elements, may have grown out of the traditions of marching bands and elaborate, musical comedy revues. Gussie Nell Davis, who in 1940 organized the Kilgore College Rangerettes of Kilgore, Texas, is credited with establishing this genre, which features complex, synchronized formations set to music. Drill teams became popular at the college level and were widely adopted by secondary schools as an activity in which many girls could participate. Song girls, dance teams, and drill teams require space and time for their musical

Cheerleaders routines, limiting their performances to breaks during games. Compared with the emotional support role of cheerleaders, the entertainment function of dance and drill teams is more removed from the action of a game. Organized athletics, cheerleading, and pep clubs spread from colleges to high schools in the early 1900s and to middle and elementary schools by the 1950s. Public school educators stressed school spirit and leadership as part of a broader curriculum of socialization and citizenship. They established cheerleaders as student role models, adding scholarship and character criteria to a formal selection process. When girls participated in cheerleading, they gained opportunities to serve as school leaders as long as they conformed to behavioral and academic standards set by school authorities. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s educators debated the appropriateness of girls as cheerleaders, voicing concerns about their ability to do athletic stunts and the erosion of ladylike behavior; others acknowledged girls’ success as cheerleaders and argued that since most sports were restricted to boys, cheerleading (emotionally supportive and attractively presented) was a valid activity for girls. By the 1950s, cheerleading in middle and secondary schools was feminized to the extent that boys became the exception. Cheerleading, like athletics and other extracurricular activities, became institutionalized and professionalized under adult control. Educators added adult sponsors or coaches to train and supervise cheerleaders. In 1927, an instruction manual was published to promote the skills and principles of cheerleading. A national compilation of cheers, George M. York’s Just Yells, was published the same year. In the 1940s high schools offered brief clinics

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led by college cheerleaders to advise and critique school cheerleaders. Lawrence Herkimer, head cheerleader at Southern Methodist University in 1947–1948, was one of the first entrepreneurs to offer cheer clinics and camps as a full-time business. Cheer entrepreneurs formed companies to teach clinics, publish manuals, and supply uniforms, businesses that today earn millions of dollars serving hundreds of thousands of cheerleaders. To increase demand for their services, cheer entrepreneurs began to sponsor competitions among squads who could qualify at their camps and advance through regional to national contests. These competitions played a major role in establishing cheerleading as an athletic sport in its own right. In 1983 the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) televised a high school competition sponsored by the Universal Cheerleading Association, followed in 1984 by the Universal Cheerleading Association (UCA) contest for college squads. Such events are now regular fare on cable television. Today, hundreds of private cheerleading clubs train and compete solely in events sponsored by cheerleading companies, providing girls an athletic outlet beyond interscholastic competition. Cheerleading, first institutionalized as a student activity, is now also recognized as a competitive sport. Interscholastic cheer meets sponsored by public schools took place in the 1940s, and by the 1960s local Catholic Youth Organizations sponsored contests among parochial schools. Today, school activity associations field statewide championship cheerleading and drill team competitions. Where cheering is designated as a sport, schools provide coaches, athletic trainers, insurance, transportation, and uniforms. If

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A group of high school cheerleaders in Minnesota. (Skjold Photographs)

cheering is designated as an activity, cheerleaders may have to provide their own funding. As college and high school girls joined early squads, they continued in the athletic tradition established by male cheerleaders and promoted by cheer entrepreneurs. Today, many all-girl and coeducational squads perform physically demanding lifts, tosses, catches, and pyramids. They participate in year-round conditioning and weight training and take formal gymnastics training to prepare for cheerleading. Like all athletes, cheerleaders incur injuries, ranging from sprains to permanent vocal damage to spinal cord trauma. Safety and liability issues face participants and school, conference, and cheer industry officials. Title IX, federal legislation enacted in 1972 prohibiting sex discrimination in

educational programs and activities receiving federal financial support, had paradoxical implications for cheerleading. In mandating equal opportunities for girls and boys, Title IX enabled girls to participate in sports previously closed to them. Title IX required that girls’ and boys’ teams receive comparable support; thus if cheerleading squads appeared at boys’ games, they must also appear at girls’ games. Girls previously limited to cheerleading could now compete in other sports, which created more teams needing cheerleaders. Cheerleading provides various options to participants. Some colleges offer athletic scholarships to cheerleaders. After their own cheerleading stints, girls can continue as cheer coaches, instructors, competition judges, and entrepreneurs.

Chicana Girls Cheerleaders with dance training can try out for professional cheerleading squads. Girls have different reasons to get involved in cheerleading. They may seek development of leadership, dance, or athletic skills; the enjoyment of extracurricular activity; the camaraderie of training, performing, and competing in a squad; or the recognition, even celebrity, attached to cheerleaders. For some, cheerleading is an incidental activity in their lives; for others, cheering is significant enough to be mentioned in their obituaries. Positive and negative images of cheerleaders are pervasive in American media and culture. The cheerleader who appears in advertisements, television, movies, visual art, cartoons, tabloids, and fiction for adults and children is almost always female. Cheerleaders are portrayed as wholesome “good girls” and promiscuous “bad girls,” as straight-A students and mindless bimbos, as social leaders and sexual trophies, as the pinnacle of adolescent success and the poor unfortunate who peaked too soon. These images convey mixed messages about cultural expectations for girls. Should girls be supportive and ornamental or independent leaders and athletes? Are they valued for their appearance or their accomplishments? Do they belong on the field or on the sidelines? Are they victims or heroes? Girls see the as victim in slasher horror movies and a warrior in the movie Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1992) and its spin-off television series. Cheerleading is sold to girls in general via merchandise such as Barbie and Madame Alexander dolls. It is sold directly to cheerleaders via the services, products, and publications offered by cheer entrepreneurs. At its best, cheerleading gives young women the benefit of adult coaching and mentorship. At its worst,

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cheerleading is a vehicle for fanatical adult ambition harmful to child participants. A notorious example is Wanda Webb Holloway, the so-called cheerleader hit mom, who was tried in 1991 for plotting to murder the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl who was competing with Holloway’s daughter for a spot on their junior-high cheerleading squad. Although cheerleading reflects negative cultural values and stereotypes that can limit girls’ potential, it also offers beneficial opportunities. As a school activity, sport, competitive challenge, or means to a college scholarship, cheerleading gives girls many options to develop their physical, social, and mental skills. Mary Ellen Hanson See also Sports References and Further Reading Chappell, Linda Rae. 1997. Coaching Cheerleading Successfully. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Gradler, Frank A. 1927. Psychology and Technique of Cheer-leading: A Handbook for Cheer-leaders. Menomonie, WI: Menomonie Athletic Book Supply. Hanson, Mary Ellen. 1995. Go! Fight! Win! Cheerleading in American Culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Hawkins, John. 1991. Texas Cheerleaders: The Spirit of America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Neil, Randy. 1983. The Official Pompon Girl’s Handbook. New York: St. Martin’s Press/Marek. Villarreal, Cindy. 1994. The Cheerleader’s Guide to Life. New York: Harper Perennial.

Chicana Girls Information about Mexican American girlhood comes from a variety of formal

A five-year-old Mexican American girl at a Cinco de Mayo Festival. (Skjold Photographs)

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Chicana girls in Texas jump rope in front of a large mural commemorating the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo. (Philip Gould/Corbis, 1988)

and informal sources, including diaries, letters, and other personal testimonios (i.e., autobiographical accounts, especially of individuals in extremely oppressed conditions), literary texts, oral history accounts, personal observation, and scholarly studies. It is important to emphasize that formal scholarship on the subject is sparse and “until the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s Mexican-American women in their totality were unrecognized” (Rebolledo and Rivera 1993, 1). Chicana girlhood is part of the subset of Mexican Americans in the United States known as Latinos (or Hispanics), the fastest-growing ethnic population in the United States, numbering approximately 20 million in 1990 and expected to exceed that in the 2000 census (Gutiérrez 1995,

179ff.) About 60 percent of Latinos are Mexican Americans, also known as Chicanas and Chicanos, a gender-inclusive self-description for Mexican-origin people whose continuous North American culture is older than that of any other European immigrants. Along with their large population and continuous presence, Chicanas/os are important to any study of American history because of the crucial role in the Western Hemisphere played by Mexico, Spain, and mestizaje, the racial and cultural hybrid resulting from Native American and Spanish exchange. Like other U.S. females, girls of Mexican descent traditionally have been socialized in a largely uncontested patriarchal world with defined gender boundaries separating feminine and masculine

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roles and ignoring or ostracizing androgynous, lesbian, homosexual, and other expressions of gender (Dietrich 1998, 3–9; Mirandé and Enríquez 1979, 96–117). Unlike the vast majority of other American girls, however, young Chicanas (a term used interchangeably with Mexican American in this entry for convenience) share a complex range of sociohistorical and bilingual/bicultural features that— depending on upbringing, socioeconomic class, and identification with Mexico— provide many developmental opportunities and challenges that are different from the majority (Baca-Zinn 1993, 161–166; Chavira-Prado 1994, 247–253). The most important of these cultural differences include language, immigration, and ethnic and racial discrimination, but it must be underscored that these features vary within the population itself. There is a diversity of in-group variations, from monolingual English speakers with U.S. roots dating before 1848 (the date of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), to bilingual girls whose parents are monolingual Spanish speakers of recent immigration into the United States, to a wide range of bilingual bicultural forms in between. Traditionally (i.e., pre-1960s), Mexican American girlhood was seen as training for becoming a mujer (woman) and, her parents hoped, a dama (lady) and doña (an especially respected lady). The formal rites of passage designed to ensure the success of this socialization for Roman Catholics, who constitute more than 80 percent of the total Mexican American population (Weaver 1994, 24), consist primarily of baptism in infancy, first communion between ages six and nine, confirmation occurring after first communion to the early teens, and membership in Catholic Youth Organizations (CYOs) dur-

ing adolescence usually until marriage (Morales 1994, 194–196). Another formal, albeit secular, tradition that affects the gendering of many Mexican American girls is the quinceañera, a fifteen-yearold’s “coming-out” event that celebrates the girl’s transition to womanhood, with emphasis on her conventional feminine qualities and potential value as a wife. Standard garb for both the first communion and quinceañera are “virginal white” dresses and veils, although veils are disappearing from contemporary coming-out celebrations. Finally, formal education is generally highly prized among Mexican Americans, and the vast majority of girls attend public schools, although a significant number of parents will endure great sacrifices to pay for private, usually Catholic education for their children. The institution of compadrazgo, or “coparenthood” (an elaborate social structure of kinship through godparenting), is deeply integrated into traditional Mexican American cultures and has a strong influence on female socialization. It is a complex set of interlocking relationships between parents, godparents, and child, starting with baptism and expanded at confirmation by godmothers for girls and godfathers for boys and also at marriage by godparents (see discussion of matron of honor and best man customs) for the couple. Many variations of compadrazgo naturally occur, but it is a recognized tradition for extending the kinship structure to provide a social and spiritual network upon which the individual can depend in times of need. Cumulatively, these customs promote a gendering process that places the Virgin Mary and the biological mother at the center. That is, the adoration of the Virgin Mary, known as “Mariolatry” or “Marianism,” produces a feminine ideal

Chicana Girls based on the Madonna that traditional Mexican American mothers (madres), grandmothers (abuelas), and godmothers (madrinas) put forward as a role model of virtue, love, compassion, and strength through suffering, as in the famous pietà images. In Mexican American history and culture, the most important Madonna icon is the Virgin of Guadalupe, known as the patron saint of Mexico for her combined religious, political, and historical meaning (Wolf 1976, 55). Her importance to girls and women traditionally has been as an image of purity, goodness, and nurturance intended to reinforce societal notions of proper feminine conduct. Many of the numerous sources of information about Chicana girlhood chronicle this religious socialization experience favorably (e.g., Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert’s We Fed Them Cactus, and Jovita Mireles Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero: A Historical Novel), but others give a much different and more complex account (e.g., Estela Portillo Trambley’s Day of the Swallows, Rain of Scorpions, and Sor Juana; Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years; Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Massacre of the Dreamers). The formal traditions are supplemented by informal practices that, depending on upbringing and other individual socioeconomic variables, include learning traditional domestic work like cooking, proper housecleaning, sewing, shopping, babysitting, and related responsibilities. Along with the formal religious rites, these informal activities combine to teach girls proper feminine behavior and social decorum. These traditions coexist with the values and practices of the majority American culture, but they often give way to assimilation to mass

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popular culture forms of Americanization (see José Antonio Villareal’s Pocho and Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel, two fictional treatments of this transnational, cross-cultural exchange). One of the central challenges facing Chicanas in the late twentieth century and into the new millennium has been to recover, rewrite, and re/vision the full complexity of their humanness and humanity as females to correct and expand the record. The feminista recuperation and re/presentation of girls fittingly begins with Malinalli Tenepal, also known as Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche (ca. 1502–1527), for she enters the human record at the dawn of European-Mesoamerican contact. As the teenage interpreter, guide, and mistress of the conqueror Hernán Cortés, La Malinche is the only female associated with the Conquest (1519–1521) whose name survived the start of Spanish colonial occupation in the Americas (Candelaria 1980). A native Nahua (or “Aztec”), she served the Spaniard dutifully, bore him two sons, and because of her remarkable role at this singular crossroads in history, was perhaps the first “American” to confront publicly what we recognize in the twenty-first century as the gender, ethnicity, race, and class issues of mestizo cultural identity, bilingual consciousness, and transnational discourse. Nevertheless, her role was discounted or scorned by history, and La Malinche eventually was reconstructed as a traitor and scapegoat. Fortunately, feminists in the late twentieth century have recuperated her biography as a woman and girl and reclaimed her place as an important actor in the landmark events of her lifetime (Candelaria 1995). Another historical figure significant to the history of Mexican American girls

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was Juana de Asbaje (1651–1695), a Roman Catholic nun known as Sor Juana, the preeminent Spanish poet of the colonial era, even acclaimed as the “New World Muse.” Other than her extensive poetry, her most famous writings are the essays Athenagoric Letter (1690) and Response to Sor Filotea (1691), which argue forcefully for the right of girls to be educated formally to better prepare them for their roles as women (Peden 1982). Known facts of her girlhood include that she learned to read her grandfather’s books when she was only three years old, that she began writing verse soon thereafter, and that she composed her first lyric play when she was eight. Because of her amazing intellectual and creative gifts, unrelenting curiosity, and courage in challenging the status quo even at the cost of personal freedom, contemporary Latina and other writers look to her example as a brilliant beacon of possibilities in a male-dominated world. Although not a historical personage, another female who has had extraordinary influence on Chicana girls is La Llorona, the weeping woman, a Mexican folk legend that teaches that immoral behavior produces bad results for women. Sometimes seen as a mythic version of La Malinche, the kernel plot of La Llorona’s life involves a poor peasant who abandons or kills her children in retaliation for their father’s unfaithfulness and who is punished by being eternally condemned to wander in griefstricken search of her children. Many variants describe her as sexually promiscuous because of her husband’s infidelities. Frequently used as a bruja, or witch, tale “to coerce obedience from children” whom she might kidnap “to replace her babies” and from adolescent girls who are reminded of her punish-

ment “if they emulate her sexual misconduct,” La Llorona has been compared to Medea, Lilith, Pandora, and other madwomen in the patriarchal attic of received traditions (Candelaria 1995). In the late twentieth century, however, several writers and scholars have reexamined her persistence in folklore and have emphasized her attributes as a resister of unjust power, like Antigone, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, and 1930s Chicana labor activist Emma Tenayuca. In this rereading, she is a woman who refuses to subject her children to life as victims of classist and sexist conventions and decides their destiny by instead choosing eternal suffering for herself and merciful death for them. Whether traditional, modern, or hybridized versions, La Malinche, the Virgen de Guadalupe, Sor Juana, and the Llorona stories persist as cultural images of powerful female complexity. From these crucial historical and mythic seeds (as well as from such later portraits of Chicana/Latina girlhood as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1885 novel The Squatter and the Don; Jackson’s 1888 romance Ramona; Katharine Anne Porter’s 1939 Miranda stories; Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits of the artist as a girl; González and Raleigh’s 1930s Caballero, A Historical Novel and others) emerge many of the Chicana representations of girls and girlhood in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A brief entry of this sort can only survey key examples of the actual changes and impact of feminista images of girlhood in Mexican American culture, one being the short fiction of Estela Portillo Trambley. Her story “The Paris Gown” offers a classic rendering of a Chicana adolescent’s agency toward self-determi-

Chicana Girls nation, and her story “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle” depicts active sisterhood in the defense of a teenage girl from physical abuse. The frequently anthologized poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes exhibits similar cultural thickness in the construction of girl narrators negotiating their place in adult, mostly urban worlds (e.g., “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” and her pachuca poems). Another view of urban life appears in poet and playwright Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, a poignant, mixed-media memoir of growing up lesbian. One of the most popular treatments of muchacha experience is Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, a Chicago-based fiction told by and about a Chicana adolescent. In a later collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros adds several other well-rounded characters to the roster of girlhood that for over a century has been dominated by such familiar types as Alice in Wonderland, Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls Wilder of The Little House on the Prairie series, Shirley Temple, Holden Caulfield’s little sister Phoeby, and Heloise. A very noteworthy contributor to an expanded roster of girlhood that includes doncellas (maidens), chicas (little girls), and muchachas is Tiffany Ann Lopez’s short fiction collection Growing Up Chicana/o containing ten rite-of-passage stories by Chicanas, including three especially remarkable titles: “The Ruins” by Patricia Preciado Martin, author of Songs My Mother Sang to Me; “The Moths” by Helena Maria Viramontes, author of the girl-narrated novel Under the Feet of Jesus; and “The McCoy Hotel” by Denise Chávez, author of The Last of the Menu Girls, also narrated by a Chicana adoles-

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cent. Other powerful inscriptions include Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories set on the Texas-Mexico border; Norma Cantú’s postmodernistic Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera; Elva Treviño Hart’s autobiographical novel, Barefoot Heart, about growing up in a migrant farmworker family; as well as the important visual artwork of Carmen Lomas Garza, which includes vibrant images of girls, women, families; and others. Another indispensable domain of Chicana definition and identity is formal academic research, including such cultural studies titles relating to girls as Dietrich’s book, Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, “Ho”s, and Schoolgirls; Dicochea’s master’s thesis, “Salsera Heterosexualities: Chicana/Latina Agency and the Feminist Politics of Mestizaje”; and Aragon’s work on “Coming of Age Themes in Drama by Kennicott, Moraga, and Lopez.” Cordelia Candelaria See also Catholic Girls; Latina Girls; La Quinceañera References and Further Reading Baca-Zinn, Maxine. 1993. “MexicanHeritage Families in the United States.” Pp. 161–172 in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology. Edited by Felix Padilla. Houston and Madrid: Arte Público Press and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Candelaria, Cordelia. 1980. “La Malinche: Feminist Prototype.” Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer): 1–6. ———. 1993. “Latina Women Writers: Chicana, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican Voices.” Pp. 134–162 in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art. Edited by Francisco Lomeli et al. Houston, TX, and Madrid, Spain: Arte Público Press and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana.

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———. 1995. “La Malinche.” P. 468 in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda WagnerMartin. New York: Oxford University Press. Cantú, Norma Elia. 1995. Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. 1980. “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” and “Uncle’s First Rabbit.” In Emplumada. By Lorna Dee Cervantes. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chavira-Prado, Alicia. 1994. “Latina Experience and Latina Identity.” Pp. 244–269 in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures of the United States: Anthropology. Edited by Thomas Weaver. Houston and Madrid: Arte Público Press and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Dietrich, Lisa C. 1998. Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, ‘Ho’s, and Schoolgirls. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. 1993. The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review/Press. Gutíerrez, David G. 1995. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lopez, Tiffany Ann, ed. 1993. Growing Up Chicana/o. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (See stories by Patricia Preciado Martin, Denise Chávez, and Helena Maria Viramontes.) Mirandé, Alfredo, and Evangelina Enríquez. 1979. La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morales, Beatriz. 1994. “Latino Religion, Ritual, and Culture.” Pp. 91–207 in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures of the United States: Anthropology. Edited by Thomas Weaver. Houston and Madrid: Arte Público Press and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Peden, Margaret Sayers. 1982. A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Translation of La Respuesta (i.e., Response to Sor Filotea). Salisbury, CT: Lime Rock Press. Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana Rivero, eds. 1993. Infinite Divisions: An

Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1. Trambley, Estela Portillo. 1975. “The Paris Gown” and “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle.” In Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings. Berkeley, CA: Tonatiuh International. Weaver, Thomas. 1994. Handbook of Hispanic Cultures of the United States: Anthropology. Houston and Madrid: Arte Público Press and Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. Wolf, Eric, ed. 1976. The Valley of Mexico: Studies in Pre-Hispanic Ecology and Society. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Child Abuse Each day, girls of all ethnicities, incomes, and family backgrounds become the victims of child maltreatment. In the vast majority of cases, this abuse occurs at the hands of an adult who is known to the child—often a family member. Although much of the research and commentary on the maltreatment of girls has focused on sexual abuse, child maltreatment also includes physical abuse, psychological or emotional abuse, and neglect. Relatively little is known about its precise causes and consequences. Likewise, there is no consensus regarding the scope of acts that should be identified as maltreatment. For example, while accepted as an appropriate form of discipline by many, spanking is considered by others to be a form of maltreatment. The historical roots of child maltreatment are intertwined with early views of children, and female children in particular, as being the property of the father. At various points throughout history, infanticide (e.g., the killing of young children) has been a common practice across Western and a variety of other cultures, many of which have devalued female offspring. In the United States, public attention to

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Medical examinations of children did not include looking for symptoms of child abuse until the late twentieth century; now, by law, a doctor must report suspected child abuse to the authorities. Child abuse occurs across all classes and races. (Library of Congress, 1939)

the issue of child abuse and neglect began with the 1874 case of Mary Ellen Wilson, an eight-year-old victim of severe physical abuse and neglect. At the time Mary Ellen’s plight came to the attention of a local church worker, Etta Wheeler, there were no social services in place for abused children; accordingly, Wheeler directed Mary Ellen’s case through the only available alternative—the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). In 1875, in response to the case of Mary Ellen, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) began an organized child protection movement.

However, not until 1935 did child protection receive attention in federal legislation with the passage of the Social Security Act, which mandated child welfare services for neglected children. Today, all fifty states have laws that provide for both criminal and civil prosecution of child abuse and neglect. Likewise, since 1974, legislation in all states has mandated reporting of suspected cases of maltreatment of girls and boys. Although individual state laws vary as to who is required to report as well as the procedures for reporting, all states identify physicians, nurses, emergency room

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personnel, coroners, medical examiners, dentists, mental health professionals, social workers, day care personnel, and law enforcement officers as mandated reporters. Nonetheless, many commentators believe that many, if not a majority, of cases of child maltreatment go unreported for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of clear definitions of child maltreatment in the law as well as in the minds of reporters. Along with perceived socioeconomic status of the family, the age, race, and gender of the child, the offender, and the reporter appear to factor into a decision to report. These same factors may also affect whether a report of suspected abuse or neglect is substantiated by social services or law enforcement. Only if a case is deemed meritorious by one of these agencies will it move forward for possible prosecution in a court of law. As an end result of this series of evaluations, through which an increasing number of cases go unreported, unsubstantiated, or unprosecuted, many believe that only a fraction of actual incidents ever reach a courtroom. The failure to reach a uniform definition of what constitutes maltreatment of girls as well as boys has not only frustrated attempts to identify and respond to cases of abuse and neglect but has also complicated efforts at research and reform. Even maltreatment statistics are affected by a lack of uniform definition. For example, prevalence rates, although commonly believed to reflect very severe acts, may include more culturally accepted forms of violence toward children, such as spanking. Another factor that has complicated efforts to reach a unified definition of child maltreatment is the issue of consent. For example, some have contended that an act cannot be considered

abusive if the girl has given her “consent,” which raises additional questions regarding the voluntary nature of that consent given the power differentials that often characterize abusive relationships and, arguably, male-female relationships more generally. Despite the potential for including or excluding individual acts within the umbrella of child maltreatment, a majority of experts believe that most statistics, which in any event typically encompass only reported cases, seriously underestimate the actual number of incidents of maltreatment. Boys may be abused as frequently as girls; however, the majority of reported cases of sexual abuse involve females. Victims of child prostitution are often female, and girls may more often be tricked or forced into participating in child pornography. Again, definitional dilemmas, such as whether noncontact abuse (e.g., exposure of genitals, solicitation) as well as contact abuse (e.g., fondling, intercourse, oral sex) should be included, have made attempts to determine the number of female victims of sexual abuse extremely difficult. For example, according to statistics from the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, the percentage of females estimated to have experienced some form of sexual abuse before age eighteen currently ranges from as high as 75 percent to well below 15 percent (National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse 1994). National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse statistics also document that the average age of sexual abuse victims differs by gender. Female victims tend to be older, eleven to fourteen years old on average, than male victims, who are between four and six years old on average. Several factors that have been identified as placing a child at risk for sexual

Child Abuse victimization may also differ by gender. Among these risk factors are social isolation, a mother who is often absent or unavailable, the presence of a stepfather in the home, and marital problems between parents in the home. Incest offenders claim that the seductiveness or promiscuity of the victim serves as a contributing factor. However, links between the physical attractiveness of the daughter and incest have not been established. Data related to daughters’ promiscuity indicate that such behavior may itself be related to problems within families, as are other vulnerability factors, such as restrictions on a girl’s ability to say “no.” Despite this growing body of research on risk factors, it is important to note that there is no reliable profile for the “typical” victim of sexual abuse. In the short term, at least some victims of sexual abuse may suffer from fear, anxiety, depression, anger, and inappropriate sexual behavior. The data on the longterm effects of sexual victimization are more clear. Women who were sexually abused as girls appear to be at increased risk for depression, sleep disturbances, poor self-esteem, difficulties in relating interpersonally, sexual behavior labeled as deviant, substance abuse, and victimization in intimate partnerships. However, long-term outcomes may be mediated by a number of factors, including the frequency and duration of the abuse, the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, the presence of force, and the availability of family support. Physical and emotional abuse can be defined as nonaccidental physical or psychological injury to a child, respectively. Although gender has frequently been examined as a variable in studies on these types of abuse, there has been little discussion of its impact beyond the find-

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ing that boys are more often the victims of physical abuse than are girls. The implication is that boys and girls experience these forms of abuse in the same way, even though such a conclusion seems counterintuitive. In contrast to the other forms of abuse previously discussed, neglect typically involves omissions rather than acts that cause or threaten injury to a child. Neglect covers a range of behaviors, including educational, supervisory, medical, physical, and emotional neglect, as well as abandonment. Particularly within the category of neglect, which comprises the majority of cases of child maltreatment, there is a general consensus that socioeconomic considerations have resulted in African American children being overrepresented as victims of abuse, whereas white children have been underrepresented. Statistics further indicate that children under age six are at higher risk for neglect as well as for physical abuse (Crosson-Tower 1999). Less is known about the short- and long-term consequences of physical and psychological abuse and neglect than sexual abuse. Nonetheless, available data point to effects on the physical, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral development of children and adolescents. Negative consequences may include brain dysfunction, mental retardation, language deficits, poor academic performance, attention deficits, poor social skills, and reduced emotional stability. Although girl victims of abuse and neglect are at increased risk for delinquent behaviors in adolescence, it is important to note that the majority do not exhibit such behavior. Not only delinquency but other problem behaviors, including teenage pregnancy and alcohol and drug use, may be affected by a number of factors that are often con-

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founded with maltreatment, such as separation from one’s family and socioeconomic status. Other factors, such as high intelligence and certain temperaments, may serve a protective function and provide at least a partial explanation for why a large number of victims of abuse and neglect grow up to function successfully as adults. Researchers and advocates have begun to point to the coexistence of child abuse and domestic violence. Feminists point to the pattern of men abusing girls in part as a means of hurting their partner. Girls are also at risk for a wide range of behavioral and emotional problems simply by virtue of their exposure to marital violence. Girls who witness violence in their homes may experience anxiety, internalization of problems, and less empathy in comparison to their male counterparts. Although there is a consensus as to the many potentially detrimental effects of abuse and neglect, the majority of treatment programs continue to focus on family-based services rather than providing direct programmatic attention to the psychosocial problems of the girl victim. Feminists are among those who have favored adopting a rape crisis model with an emphasis on victim advocacy. Those direct treatment services that do exist tend to borrow extensively from approaches designed for treating other disorders in childhood and adolescence with a similar symptom profile. Even within the medical community, which is often the first point of contact for girls and their families in cases of physical injury, there is little knowledge regarding recommended treatment. In fact, many experts agree that a great deal of work remains to be done in regard to the identification and detection of

potential maltreatment across a wide range of professional disciplines that confront these cases, including law, medicine, education, and social services, as well as the general public. Many modern commentators have begun to focus on the need for prevention over intervention and treatment of child abuse and neglect in their various forms and stress the importance of strengthening potential victims. However, such methods place undue responsibility on the girl victim and may, in fact, lead to the mistaken inference that the girl is to blame when abuse does occur since she failed to “prevent” it. Other prevention efforts have concentrated on parent training. Although there is a continued need for evaluation of prevention services and programs, a number of features appear to be linked to the success of programs directed at parents, including initiating services as close to the birth of the first child as possible, providing training relevant to the developmental stage of the child, creating links to other parents, and recognizing cultural differences in family functioning and parent-child interactions. To date, efforts at effecting public policy and other system-level reforms, which many believe to be crucial to prevention, have been relatively limited. For example, arguments that the high incidence of child neglect should be addressed through policies designed to provide relief from the severe poverty that often accompanies such cases have yet to inspire significant policy changes. Resources and support for the social service system, which is charged with investigating, monitoring, and addressing the overwhelming number of cases of child abuse and neglect, also remain limited. There is still a great deal to be learned about how girls experience abuse and

Child Guidance neglect. Although feminists have long pointed to the unique nature of girlhood, research on boys is still the norm, except in the case of sexual abuse. The result is an implication that boys and girls experience and respond to abuse in the same way and that child maltreatment can be adequately addressed without attention to the gender of the victim. Future efforts are needed to develop better intervention and prevention efforts tailored specifically to girls and young women. In addition, more careful consideration of the links between girlhood abuse, spousal violence, and the sexual abuse of women is needed to clarify the nature of the interconnectedness of systems of oppression. Sharon G. Portwood and Kelly E. Kinnison See also Acquaintance Rape; Body Image; Depression and Girls; Orphans and Orphanages; Psychotherapy; Sexual Harassment; Suicidal Behavior in Girls References and Further Reading Briere, John, Lucy Berliner, Josephine A. Bulkley, Carole Jenny, and Theresa Reid, eds. 1996. The APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crosson-Tower, Cynthia. 1999. Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect. 4th ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Finkelhor, David. 1986. A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Haugaard, Jeffrey J., and N. Dickon Reppucci. 1988. The Sexual Abuse of Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Holden, George W., Robert Geffner, and Ernest N. Jouriles. 1998. Children Exposed to Marital Violence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Lutzker, John R. 1998. Handbook of Child Abuse Research and Treatment. New York: Plenum Press. National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. 1994. Current Trend in Child Abuse Reporting and Fatalities: The

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Results of the 1993 Annual Fifty State Survey. Chicago: National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. National Research Council. 1993. Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Child Guidance Child guidance is a twentieth-century concept that refers to the principles of psychodynamic psychology and particularly to psychoanalytic constructs of child development as they were applied to prescriptions for everyday childrearing and to diagnoses and treatment of child and adolescent behavioral problems and juvenile delinquency. These ideas flourished as part of the early-twentieth-century mental hygiene movement committed to promoting mental health through preventive programs and early intervention. The institutional base of child guidance was the child guidance clinic, staffed by a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social workers. The idea for a specialized clinic originated during the Progressive era as an adjunct of the juvenile court and was expanded during the 1920s to handle both delinquency and nondelinquent behavioral problems. Professional proponents of child guidance held that the early years of life were the “golden age” of mental hygiene, the formative period for behavioral habits and patterns of thought that would mark the adult man or woman as either emotionally balanced or psychologically damaged, or (un)happy and (in)efficient, to use the language of child guidance. For infancy and early childhood, child guiders promoted habit training to teach patterns of obedience and regularity to both girls and boys. For the adolescent

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years, child guidance held that acceptable and unacceptable expressions of sexuality, intellectuality, and sociability were determined by a girl’s need for security and understanding as she developed an identity independent of her parents. These needs applied to both boys and girls, although the precise meaning differed for each gender. For a girl, independence meant emotional distancing from the family of origin so that she would be psychologically ready for marriage and motherhood. As found in both popular advice and clinical practice, the tenets of child guidance usually located the source of emotional and behavioral problems in flawed family relationships and in particular in what came to be termed the “pathological” mother. During the mid-twentieth century, the child guidance view of behavioral problems dominated childrearing literature and shaped public policy debates about children and adolescents. The child guidance framework for child nurture was clearly evident in the most popular midcentury childrearing manual, Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1945). Although the term child guidance is no longer fashionable (having been replaced by child development, child psychiatry, child psychology, and other disciplinary specialties), the concepts and the clinical practices associated with child guidance remained evident in latetwentieth-century approaches to the emotional and behavioral problems of young people. Child guidance emerged from the efforts of Progressive reformers to curb what appeared to be a rising tide of juvenile delinquency sweeping over urban working-class neighborhoods. The first child guidance clinics were created to assist juvenile court judges and they pro-

vided medical and psychological assessments of delinquents and social work evaluations of their families. In 1899 Illinois became the first state to enact legislation setting up a juvenile court system to handle youthful offenders through a separate judicial system. Passage of the Illinois law was the result of years of lobbying efforts by local “child savers,” women and men committed to salvaging the lives of children from impoverished, immigrant families. Other states followed the Illinois example, creating a nationwide juvenile justice system during the first decade of the twentieth century. Although most of the young people brought before juvenile court judges were boys charged with theft or truancy, girls were seen most often because of shoplifting or “sex delinquency,” a term that covered a broad range of behavior from aggressive flirting to intercourse. The juvenile court—and by extension child guidance work—reflected middleclass ideals of girlhood and boyhood as a time of innocence to be spent either in school or at play. Like compulsory education laws, the juvenile court statutes sought to extend those values to a class of children who from an early age were expected to contribute to the family income, who left school early with only a rudimentary knowledge, and whose innocence was called into question by the frequent charges of inappropriate sexual behavior filed against teenage girls. In hopes of intervening during the formative years, juvenile court judges applied an individualistic kind of justice that was more akin to therapy than to punishment. They used probation liberally and frequently sent “wayward” girls to charitable homes or institutions for the “feebleminded” rather than to reformatories.

Child Guidance As they monitored the court’s work, the Chicago child savers responsible for the original legislation found that a significant portion of the young people who passed through their juvenile court were “recidivists,” or repeat offenders. In an effort to make the court more efficient, these child savers turned for help to the new fields of psychiatry and applied psychology. With the financial support of Ethel Sturges Dummer, a wealthy patron of child saving, the Chicago reformers established a clinic and a research program headed by local physician William Healy. Named the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute when it opened in 1909, this agency is regarded as the first child guidance clinic. Healy’s work at the clinic, published in 1915 as The Individual Delinquent, became a major text of American criminology and ultimately a cornerstone of the child guidance movement. Healy was an eclectic practitioner; his approach to delinquency blended the individualized therapeutic approach of psychiatry and psychology with the environmental perspective of his Progressive patrons. Much of his system was built around the ideas of the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer. Meyer viewed mental illness as a problem of adjustment between the individual and the environment. Healy was also indebted to the child study expert G. Stanley Hall, whose ideas represented adolescence as a unique developmental stage, a time of angst as girls and boys made the transition to independent adulthood. Moreover, Healy appropriated concepts from the writings of Sigmund Freud. Although Freudian psychology was in its infancy in the United States when Healy was constructing The Individual Delinquent, psychoanalysis appealed to Healy and his child guidance colleagues. Hid-

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den motives for misconduct, particularly emotional conflicts occasioned by guilt over sexual thoughts or behavior, motives that could only be uncovered through a talking relationship with a therapist, enabled him to explain the recidivism rates in the juvenile courts. Unless judges were made aware of the underlying cause of the behavior, their efforts to turn a delinquent around would be unsuccessful. The ideas of Meyer, Hall, and Freud shaped the child guidance movement of the early twentieth century. But the eclecticism of child guidance can be seen in the frequent use of behaviorist methods in clinic recommendations for changing child behavior. At the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (and the network of court-affiliated child guidance clinics that followed the Chicago model), the psychiatrist supplied only a part of the diagnosis. Psychological testing, particularly the Stanford-Binet intelligence quotient (IQ) test, was a required part of the evaluation, as was an assessment of the delinquent’s home and neighborhood environment. Moreover, Healy, like the child savers before him, argued that only by looking at the specific circumstances, the life history and the intellectual and emotional background of the individual delinquent as collected by a trained social worker, could the problem of juvenile delinquency be solved. Child guidance clinics always relied on a multidisciplinary team of professionals that included a psychologist to administer the tests and a social worker for family assessments. But even though it represented the work of several professionals, the child guidance evaluation privileged the voice of the psychiatrist, for only someone with medical-psychiatric training was deemed capable of uncovering the hidden causes of delinquency.

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Healy’s studies and the evaluations made by other child guiders directly affected juvenile delinquent girls in two ways. First in acknowledging child and adolescent sexuality, Healy’s work merged with a nascent sex education movement, one that urged parents to teach young people the “facts of life” before they were guilt-stricken by misinformation learned on the streets. As Healy and later child guidance professionals defined the sex delinquencies of girls, these behaviors were to be treated not as evidence of immorality and certainly not as marks of psychopathology but as signs of emotional troubles, symptoms of problems, and expressions of hidden conflicts in otherwise “normal” adolescent females, problems better subjected to treatment by the psychiatrist than prosecution by the judge. As child guiders reinterpreted the causes of juvenile delinquency, they helped to decriminalize female adolescent sexuality. Second, Healy’s conclusions represented a challenge to the then popular view that delinquent behavior and adolescent sex delinquency in particular were evidence of mental retardation or “feeblemindedness,” an idea identified at the time with the psychologist Henry H. Goddard. According to this perspective, an adolescent female who consorted with young men must be doing so because she lacked the mental capacity to conform to higher moral standards. Moreover, any adolescent found to show evidence of mental retardation had to be assumed to be at risk for sexual delinquency. Because of this identification with mental retardation, institutionalization was a favored sentence for the “sex delinquent” and for girls deemed mentally “unfit.” As he examined the unique combinations of factors found in individual delinquents,

Healy undercut such one-dimensional explanations of behavior; although mental retardation continued to represent a risk factor for delinquency, a child guidance examination was expected to look beyond the surface expression of mental capacity to the personality of the delinquent and the environment in which she lived. With a good personality and a regulated home environment, the “feebleminded” girl would not necessarily become a threat to sexual order. The tendency to relate promiscuity to mental retardation (and to worry that mental retardation would lead to sex delinquency) did not disappear in the wake of child guidance challenges, but the child guiders certainly made the simple equation far more complex. The term child guidance was coined in 1922 at the Commonwealth Fund, a wealthy private agency that, along with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, financed many of the early-twentiethcentury parent education programs as well as clinical services and research studies of childhood and adolescence. During the 1920s the Commonwealth Fund sponsored eight pilot projects modeled on the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (and on Healy’s second clinic, the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston, opened in 1917). Initially, child guidance referred only to the diagnostic work of these court-affiliated programs. The clients, like those that filled juvenile court dockets, were working-class adolescents, often from families that had recently immigrated to the large urban centers capable of supporting both court and clinic. By the 1930s child guidance practitioners had modified, augmented, and publicized their ideas to attract a new clientele of families with troubled and trouble-

Child Guidance some but nondelinquent youths from all socioeconomic classes. The decade of the 1920s was a turbulent decade for young people, as all age groups responded to a rapidly developing consumer culture and a culture of new leisure activities. Rebellious daughters, particularly daughters of middle-class families with disposable income to spend on professional advice, attracted the attention of child guidance experts looking to secure the professional legitimacy of their discipline by expanding the range of clinic services. The behavior of these girls was more troubling than it was delinquent because they termed the values of the older generation puritanical or straitlaced and sought peer group acceptance instead. They demanded the right to create and participate in sexualized dating rituals, activities that seemed outrageous and scandalous to their mothers and fathers. Wearing makeup, frequenting movie theaters, going “automobiling,” going on unchaperoned dates, staying out late, choosing friends parents did not approve of—the behaviors brought to the child guidance clinics of the 1920s and 1930s seem tame and inconsequential in the wake of late-twentieth-century epidemics of teen pregnancies and schoolyard shootings. But during these years of transition to a modern, consumer, leisure culture, they symbolized changes that many parents were unwilling to accept in girls. As they looked for ways to control their daughters and their sons, middleclass parents turned for help to the child guiders. Through therapeutic sessions at a child guidance clinic (in 1936 more than 600 clinics were available for parents who were particularly vexed) or in the form of childrearing advice published in popular magazines, in parent-training

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manuals, and by the federal Children’s Bureau and state extension programs, child guiders popularized their message. Although it is impossible to know for sure the impact this information had on parent practices, it is known that when parents looked for advice after the 1920s, they were quite likely to encounter something written from within the broad field of child guidance. The child guidance message to parents was one of reassurance. Girls needed a sense of emotional security (child guiders disapproved of divorce, but they were far less concerned with evidence of economic security) and understanding (in place of physical punishment). Most important, once they reached the teen years, young people needed the freedom to develop emotional independence. Parents with rebellious adolescent daughters, therefore, were advised to lighten up and to recognize that often a youth’s contemporaries had a firmer grasp of requirements for social success than did the girl’s more traditional parents. For the very young, “habit clinics” introduced parents to deliberate methods of behavior modification (reward systems and star charts), but the principles of security, understanding, and a gradual releasing of parental control framed child guidance advice about children of all ages. By midcentury, the eclecticism of the early child guidance practitioners gave way to a more thorough identification with the constructs of psychoanalysis. This intellectual shift was evident throughout the post–World War II mental health professions. The Freudian stages of childhood—oral, anal, and genital—dominated advice on child development and shaped therapeutic services. Helene Deutsch’s views on femininity—motherhood as female destiny—shaped child

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guidance literature much more so than the iconoclastic ideas of Karen Horney. For girls, this thoroughgoing shift to psychoanalysis only strengthened already strong cultural pressures to pursue behavior that would lead to heterosexual relationships during adolescence and to see maternity as the ideal female career goal. Although the writers of child guidance advice manuals were stressing gender differences and emphasizing female independence during adolescence as the necessary prelude to marriage, child guidance practitioners were, at the same time, creating a powerful critique of mothers as the source of juvenile emotional and behavioral problems and the emotional unhappiness of their adult sons and daughters. Indeed, mothers were seen as so entirely to blame for everything from personal neuroses to social problems such as inner-city youth drug use and violence that some child guidance experts began to speak of the need for “family guidance” or “parent guidance” as a more appropriate goal of their practice. During the 1920s and 1930s, child guidance psychiatrists and social workers conducted studies and reported anecdotal accounts of emotionally detrimental mothering. The child guiders thought they had discovered a class of mothers whose personal emotional needs led them to smother their children with inappropriate care and concern and prevent the emergence of a healthy psychological independence. “Maternal overprotection” was the clinical diagnosis for what the popular press called “smother love.” The behaviorist John B. Watson was certainly a believer in the evils of motherhood, dedicating his childrearing book, The Psychological Care of Infant and Child, to the first mother to raise a

happy child, and some of the psychoanalysts focused on relationships with mothers as well as fathers in their efforts to uncover the roots of adult neuroses. However, it was the New York City psychiatrist David Levy who named the disease and observed that motherhood could be downright psychopathological. Levy’s work at the Institute for Child Guidance was consolidated in the book Maternal Overprotection, first published in 1942. In clinical practice and in Levy’s studies, most of the sufferers of maternal overprotection were boys; Levy, however, applied the diagnosis to girls as well. Overprotection of girls led to rebellion during adolescence, but more importantly, it disturbed a girl’s ability to transfer allegiance from her mother to her husband; thus maternal overprotection had to be regarded as a primary cause of marriage failure. By the 1940s child guiders were equally, if not more, concerned about the consequences of “maternal rejection,” or a mother’s emotional distancing from her child. Indeed, like Levy, many believed that overprotection was only a mask for rejection of motherhood, a rejection caused by emotional needs that had gone unmet during the mother’s girlhood. It was a conundrum for mothers—how to provide security, understanding, and independence while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of overprotection and rejection. In an effort to alleviate some of the guilt, advice books, most importantly the best-selling Baby and Child Care, told mothers to trust themselves, but at the same time, these guides cautioned mothers to turn to the experts, such as those from child guidance, whenever signs of trouble appeared. The post–World War II years, the years of the baby boom and the glorification of suburban family culture, were the heyday

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Youth centers are the modern-day version of child guidance clinics; here, a social worker counsels a group of teens. (Shirley Zeiberg)

of child guidance. With support from the federal government, community mental health clinics were established across the nation; programs for children and adolescents formed an important component of the national agenda. Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, the institutions and ideas of child guidance retained a powerful hold on both parents and professionals, despite challenges from the 1960s liberal faith in environmental explanations of behavior, from an emerging feminist movement, from the youth rebellion of the Vietnam era, and from a psychiatric community newly attuned to the possibilities of drug therapy for children. The fundamentals of child guidance—misbehavior as a consequence of emotional problems and unmet

emotional needs often traceable to flawed family dynamics—remain a guiding paradigm for contemporary psychotherapeutic work with young people. Kathleen W. Jones See also Adolescent Health; Advice Books; Female Sexuality; Hygiene; Juvenile Delinquents; Menstruation References and Further Reading Hawes, Joseph M. 1997. Children between the Wars: American Childhood 1920–1940. New York: Twayne Publishers. Horn, Margo. 1989. Before It’s Too Late: The Child Guidance Movement in the United States, 1922–1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jones, Kathleen W. 1999. Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance and the

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Limits of Psychiatric Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Odem, Mary E. 1995. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Richardson, Theresa. 1989. The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schneider, Eric C. 1992. In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810 to the 1930s. New York: New York University Press.

Clothing The history of American girls’ clothing reflects all the changes that have occurred in the education and social position of girls and women in American society. In less than 400 years, girls’ clothing has gone from being miniature versions of women’s clothing, with all of its trappings and restrictions, to offering a huge array of choices. In part, this transformation has occurred in synchrony with the emergence of modern women’s fashions; part is owed to changes in children’s clothing in general. In most cases, major stylistic changes accompanied alterations in girls’ education, leisure activities, and eventual roles as adult women. Fashionable girls of the colonial era wore three styles of dress as they grew from babies to women: the genderless clothing of infancy, the simplified women’s styles worn by young children, and the elaborate gowns of womanhood. Babies up to four months of age were wrapped in layers of cloth that immobilized their arms and legs. Once out of these swaddling clothes, babies wore long wool or silk dresses that were based on women’s fashions over long linen or

cotton shifts. The outer dresses were very colorful—dark red, yellow, blue, and other fashionable colors—and the underclothing was generally white. As the baby girl became a toddler, she exchanged her plain dresses for clothing that was much more similar to adult clothing. A “pudding” (a padded hat that tied under the child’s chin) protected her from bumps on the head as she learned to walk and run. Toddlers’ clothing also featured leading strings, long strips of fabric that hung from the shoulders of their dresses. Leading strings were used to restrain the child’s movements, for example, to tie her to a table leg to keep her away from the fire in the hearth. Twentieth-century conventions of gender distinction for little children would have seemed quite inappropriate to eighteenth-century adults. Although men and women were believed to be quite different—in fact, opposites—infants were perceived as having undeveloped sexuality. More gendered clothing would be introduced as the child matured and began to exhibit masculine or feminine traits. For that reason, other than the pudding and leading strings, clothing for both boys and girls from one to six years of age was quite similar. One exception to this pattern was that girls began to wear stays (corsets) when they were about four years old, while boys rarely wore stays. Stays helped mold the growing girl’s body into the ideal posture and were part of a larger process of training her in adult ways. By the time a girl was seven, she was well on the way to entering the adult world and already dressed in scaled-down versions of women’s clothes. At a time when girls married in their teens, no one looked askance at an eight-year-old girl who was a precise replica of her mother,

Clothing down to her high-heeled brocade shoes. She was destined to be hostess, mistress of a household, wife, and matriarch, and dressing the part was a significant part of her training. By the end of the eighteenth century, the educational philosophies of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau gained new acceptance, to the point of transforming children’s clothing. For the first time, dress for infants and children was designed for comfort and freedom. Swaddling fell from favor, and the use of stays for little girls drew a great deal of criticism. In general, girls’ clothing became more simple and unrestrictive. Simple white cotton muslin or gauze frocks that hung from the shoulders, bound only by a simple ribbon at the waist, were the ideal garments for babies, toddlers, and girls as old as twelve or thirteen. During the period from 1780 to 1820, women’s clothing came to resemble girls’ clothing rather than vice versa. Partly this occurred because adolescent girls and young women declined to adopt the restrictive styles of their mothers, having been raised with relatively more freedom of movement. But the romantic notion of the childlike woman was also reinforced by fashions that made so many women look like girls. Eventually, the vogue for simple, flowing styles faded and was replaced by more structure and elaborate trim. Infants’ dresses were the exception; from 1820 to 1890 baby dresses were both scanty and plain. Though their hemlines ended just above the floor, most had low necklines and short sleeves, exposing much more of the child’s body than had once been acceptable. Most were quite plain, although it was not uncommon to see frocks with a touch of embroidery around the hem. Only in the 1860s and

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1870s, as sewing machines became more popular, did baby and toddler clothing begin to be more elaborately trimmed. Because of its extreme plainness, it is sometimes hard to distinguish baby clothing from the 1820s from that worn a generation later. Slightly more fashionable dresses were adopted for girls from the age of three through early puberty (from thirteen to fifteen years). School-age girls wore simple cotton frocks with no boning. White was associated with little girls and special occasions, and daintily printed cottons were also popular for everyday wear. The narrower skirts and slightly shorter hems of the early 1800s revealed more of girls’ legs, which led to the introduction of cotton underdrawers, or pantalettes. These were two separate legs gathered into a waistband but with a completely open crotch from front to back. “Closed drawers,” with a completely sewn crotch seam, were not commonly used until the 1880s. Parents who found the idea of any form of trousers for women to be abhorrent could substitute cotton tubes that looked like pantalettes but went only to the knee or just above. From 1820 through the 1840s, fashions for little girls were miniature versions of women’s clothing, with the main distinctions found in the fit of the bodice, length of the skirt, and choice of fabric. The waistline for young children conformed to the natural waistline or fell just slightly above it, even as women’s fashionable styles shifted to deeply pointed waistlines. Light stays were once more used for little girls, reversing the gains of the late 1700s. In the 1820s, girls’ dresses became even shorter, usually reaching to a point between the calf and the knee, revealing more of the pantalettes, which became longer and more elaborate than

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they had been, filling the gap between hem and boot-top. By midcentury, fashionable dress for women was becoming more complex and elaborate, and styles for girls followed suit. Clothing became more elaborately trimmed, primarily due to the availability of sewing machines and inexpensive trimmings. Colors were deep and vivid, and textured fabrics such as velvet were favored for clothing and trimmings. The 1870s and 1880s marked the high point of elaborate dress for girls. Reflecting trends in women’s fashions, a single outfit might be made up in three fabrics and trimmed in several different trims. The dominant reason for this complexity was the technological advances in textile manufacturing, which had resulted in an enormous increase in the varieties of fabric available at lower and lower costs. Designers and dressmakers responded to this abundance by using as many different materials as possible in a single outfit. Multipiece costumes were much more popular than one-piece dresses, to the point that dresses for two- to four-yearolds were designed to look like suits, with bodices, vests, overskirts, and underskirts all sewn into one garment. Waistlines dropped to the hip or lower in the late 1870s, freeing the child’s torso but sometimes hobbling the upper legs instead. For older girls, dress bodices became more fitted, and corseting became more rigid. Little children’s skirts had become short in the 1820s, but women wore floor-length dresses; some way had to be devised to lower girls’ hems as they grew older. This was usually done by making dresses with lower-calf-length skirts when the girl was about ten and putting her in floor-length skirts at fourteen or fifteen. Fashions for adolescent girls

began to appear in the women’s magazines during the 1860s. For the most part, these featured a semifitted bodice to accommodate the girl’s changing body without drawing attention to it. White and pastel shades were considered most appropriate for older girls who were not yet part of adult society. Still, to the modern eye, late-nineteenth-century girls in their late teens often look much more adult than their counterparts today. The period from 1890 to 1919 was one of great change for girls’ fashions. The fitted bodice and matching skirt were replaced by separates: shirtwaists and other loose-fitting tops worn with a plain skirt. Beginning in the 1890s, one-piece lingerie dresses (ready-to-wear, lacetrimmed cotton dresses) offered girls comfort in hot weather. Sports were popular, especially bicycling; active sportswear such as knickers and pullover sweaters found wide acceptance. Girls benefited from this trend much more than adult women, since physical education was an increasingly familiar part of schooling, but there were fewer opportunities for adult women who wished to participate in sports. Dresses lost most of the upholstered look found in the clothing of the late 1870s and 1880s. For little girls, dresses with deep yokes were favored, the dress falling in gathers or pleats from the yoke to the hem. Dresses for very little girls (one or two years old) usually had no waistline at all; girls from three to thirteen or fourteen years wore dresses with loose belts or sashes at about hip level. Sailor-style dresses were very popular, as were middy blouses worn with baggy “bloomers.” Rompers and overalls were introduced in the 1890s and became overwhelmingly popular for preschoolers’ play clothes. In many ways, the clothing

Clothing of the early twentieth century was reminiscent of the soft, loose styles of the neoclassical period a century earlier. The same innovations can be seen in styles for schoolgirls. Even though some adult trends were reflected in girls’ fashions, the silhouettes were different. The lowered waistline was used extensively, rather than the hourglass shape favored for women. Both women’s and girls’ clothing featured shorter hemlines: skirts for children under the age of five were usually just above knee-length, with short socks leaving an expanse of bare leg. School-age girls wore their skirts at or just below the knee, and girls approaching their teens wore calf-length skirts. These were the girls who grew up to wear knee-length skirts during the 1920s. Public schooling was becoming more common, and the demands of school activities resulted in some changes to girls’ wardrobes. “School dresses”—sturdy, modestly trimmed, and easy to wash and iron—became much more important. As more schools added physical education to the curriculum, middy blouses and bloomers became the standard uniform. Another new item of clothing was the graduation dress. Prior to the turn of the century, girls had just worn their best clothes to graduation. As grammar school and high school graduation became significant rites of passage, white dresses became the expected costume for girls. Sometimes, the graduation dress was made by the girl herself, as the final project in home economics class. Girls of this period from 1920 to 1946 enjoyed new freedom in dress. Unstructured, slender, lightweight dresses; short, uncomplicated hairstyles; and simple underwear were popular throughout the 1920s. Sleeveless and short-sleeved dresses worn with long-sleeved sweaters in

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colder weather were the most common school costume. Sometimes adults wrote disapproving editorials or attempted to regulate girls’ dress with dress codes and even local ordinances, but it was also adults who created, marketed, and sold these new teenage styles. For all the bleakness of the Depression years, girls’ clothing contained increasing elements of fun and whimsy, thanks in large part to the styles made popular by Shirley Temple. The red-and-white polkadot dress she wore in Stand Up and Cheer (1934) was sold by the millions and was the first of many children’s fashions she inspired. Although girls wore dresses most of the time, all kinds of pants and trousers— from dresses with matching panties to overalls and dungarees—were worn for play. In the 1940s, playsuits consisting of a one-piece romper with a separate skirt were popular for school-age and adolescent girls. The practicalities of girls’ active lives were gradually eroding the taboo against women in trousers. The war in Europe influenced girls’ clothing from the late 1930s on. Dirndl skirts, inspired by the folk costumes of occupied countries, were immensely popular. The emergence of a strong teenage market during World War II provided an important new source of fashion influence for younger girls. Where once little girls had dressed like their mothers, more and more of the trends for gradeschool girls were set by high school and college students. What eventually emerged as a dominant and powerful youth culture in the 1960s had its origins in the girls’ and teens’ clothing markets of the 1930s and 1940s. School-age children’s clothing of the first half of the postwar period was not very different from that worn in the late

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This elaborate dress shows off actress Anna Held’s “hourglass figure.” (Library of Congress, 1900)

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Girls learn at an early age to enhance their appearance with clothing and accessories. (Genevieve Naylor/Corbis)

1930s. Plaid, full-skirted, cotton dresses with white collars and cuffs were the staples of the schoolgirl’s wardrobe through the early 1960s. Jumpers were a popular alternative. Western styling was a strong influence, with cowboy shirts and “squaw” [sic—this term is actually a pejorative reference meaning vagina] dresses (cotton dresses with tiered skirts

trimmed with rick-rack). Dress styles inspired by Alice in Wonderland or Heidi appeared in girls’ departments, and Walt Disney characters adorned slippers, pajamas, and T-shirts. Teen clothing in the 1950s and the early 1960s continued to diverge more sharply from children’s wear and from adult fashions. Girls rejected school

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dresses in favor of separates, usually a tailored blouse or sweater and a full skirt. Slacks, pedal-pushers, and shorts were also popular for casual wear for high school–age girls. Few schools permitted trousers in any form for school activities other than sports. During the social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, the differences between little girls and teenagers became even more dramatic. For girls not yet in their teens, fashions mingled an old-fashioned look with modern easy care and durability. The classic styles worn by the many Kennedy children also won widespread acceptance. The loose silhouette and short skirts of the miniskirt era were translated very successfully into clothing for toddlers and younger girls. Clothing for teenagers became increasingly troublesome for parents and educators. For many adults, the confusing smorgasbord of youth fashion offered few acceptable choices. Popular styles, included mod British styles (including the miniskirt), West Coast surfing styles and, in the late 1960s, the exotic hippie style, which mixed ethnic clothing with thriftand surplus-store chic (especially Navyissue bell-bottom jeans). In the face of the miniskirt, many schools dictated that hemlines could be no shorter than 1 inch above the knee and forbade girls to wear trousers; by 1969, skirts had become so short that pants were a welcome alternative, so school systems changed their dress codes to permit girls to wear trousers. Another major issue in girls’ clothing was gender stereotyping. The women’s liberation movement and arguments over pants for women and long hair for men had heightened awareness of how costume reflects the roles we play. In the early 1970s, the idea of nonsexist child-

rearing encouraged many parents to dress their children more androgynously. Girls wore jeans, overalls, and knitted shirts, even to school. Since then, the clothing available to girls has continued to include a wide range of styles, from frilly to preppy to Goth. Dresses came back, and trouser styles now include leggings and shorts as well as jeans. This presents a different set of challenges to girls and their parents than girls’ clothing of the late nineteenth century or earlier, when female clothing reflected a much more restricted notion of acceptable gender roles. Jo B. Paoletti See also Arts and Crafts; Body Image; Consumer Culture; Domesticity; Eating Disorders; Girls’ Culture; Hair References and Further Reading Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Ewing, Elizabeth. 1977. History of Children’s Costume. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Worrell, Estelle Ansley. 1980. Children’s Costume in America 1607–1910. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Collecting The accumulation of objects gathered for study, comparison, and exhibition generally defines collecting, past and present. Collecting by girls and boys, however, has at times been vaguely and variously defined by adults as play and work, as innate and learned. Some scholars view girls’ collecting as an instinctive drive, a gathering through play of what adults may consider incongruent objects, resulting in a perceived hoard of trash or junk. At other times girls’ collecting has been

Collecting studied as a learned habit of diligent and serious attention to a single genre of objects as a means of knowledge acquisition. It is in the very process of collecting, however, that the girl learns the myriad physical features of the world in which she lives and, especially in the modern era, creates through the processes of consuming and collecting a self. A collected person, after all, is one who is self-possessed. In the United States, girls’ and boys’ collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mirrored both the childrearing concepts of parents, teachers, advice writers, and social reformers and the increasing intrusion of the market into children’s collecting habits. In both respects gender differentiation and attendant cultural and economic value may be discerned in the means and types of material culture collection. The Enlightenment belief in the child as a tabula rasa explains in part advice writers’ admonitions to parents to encourage their offspring’s “natural” curiosity. Born innocent and with an innate sense of wonder, girls as well as boys were considered most susceptible to the lessons of God’s creation. Europeans had early recognized that children learned through direct sensory experience. Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus revolutionized children’s education in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Comenius, a Czech Brethren minister faced with teaching unlettered children, sought an instrument for universal education to convey his belief in the unity of all knowledge—what Comenius called “pansophic” wisdom. He created for his young charges a picture book, which used both German and Latin to teach language skills and incorporated the knowl-

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edge of the entire world. Printed first in 1658 in Nuremberg and a year later in London, the Orbis Pictus (as it was commonly called) featured pictures of “a world of things” ordered by categories derived by both biblical precept and Western social and political organization. The first American edition of the Orbis Pictus was published in 1810, although copies of the volume had been earlier carried to the United States through the settlements of the Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In the years after the American Revolution, advice writers and parents considered the gathering, assembling, and study of natural history specimens as a primary means of acquiring worldly knowledge and a Protestant Christian identity. This activity mirrored Americans’ faith in Enlightenment natural theology and adults’ interests in the new nation’s natural wonders and wealth, in scientific investigation, and in the creation of cabinets of curiosities or museums in which such investigation and display of national power took place. The employment of scientific methods and the exploration of scientific principles thus did not necessarily lessen the widespread belief in God’s creation of the world. In the first years of the nineteenth century, Charles Willson Peale’s museum, for example, offered visitors a tour of the nation’s natural history and wealth through habitat groups of stuffed animals and the use of Linnaean nomenclature to order that “world in miniature.” At the same time, visitors could pause to read biblical quotations appearing on the walls. A circa 1820 floor plan of the museum, then housed on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), places a specialized “Children’s Case” in the Quadruped Room. The

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room also boasted a biblically inspired tableau of the wolf and lamb, conjoining the pursuit of science with biblical prophecy: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). This proselytizing sentiment was mirrored in childrearing manuals, textbooks, and children’s fiction throughout much of the nineteenth century. Lydia Maria Child, Samuel G. Goodrich, Francis Woodworth, Jacob Abbott, Louisa May Alcott, and others counseled parents to discipline for religious ends their children’s curiosity or sense of wonder by inculcating “habits of observation” through the creation of “cabinets” or “museums.” Like Peale’s Museum, these cabinets were collective endeavors, dependent on the contributions of others. Contents were supplied by family members as well as friends near and far: shells, snakeskins, butterflies and other insects, minerals, leaves, pictures, and other found or (less often) man-made specimens. Little gender differentiation of collecting style or collections is readily discernible in childrearing manuals and textbooks, religious instruction being the goal. But children’s fiction reveals in subtle ways the gendered notions of property and possession inherent in the collecting enterprise. Jacob Abbott’s Rollo’s Museum (1855), for example, contains whole chapters of paternal instruction of boys on the legalities of loaning and owning things. Although permitted to contribute to the collection and participate in its society by creating order and rules, an elder sister and baby sister are excluded from the lesson. In another of the Rollo series, Rollo’s mother’s attempt to instruct her young son and his playmates

on the concept of sharing and the symbolism of things only partially succeeds. Alice, the true Christian of Susan Warner’s bestseller The Wide, Wide World (1850), has long outgrown her own cabinet of curiosities—and, as the reader learns, is ready to depart this world. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men (1871) introduces the natural history cabinet to the prodigal roughneck Dan upon his return to Plumfield because he is confined by a broken foot. Only as a feminized invalid may he grasp the symbolic meanings of the natural history specimens he had gathered and now will order in a museum. Boys in these stories learn the material lessons of the specimens they acquire, whereas girls provide the symbolic, spiritual meanings of God’s hand in nature. Girls’ (and boys’) collecting habits were influenced and abetted by the spread of market capitalism and technology. By the Civil War girls in particular participated in autograph and photograph collecting, whether those objects represent a celebrity or a dear friend or relative. The printing revolution and high literacy rates resulted in a golden age of children’s books and periodicals—Merry’s Museum, Francis Woodworth’s Youth’s Cabinet, and, of course, in 1873 the successful St. Nicholas, under the editorship of Mary Mapes Dodge. The nonfiction contents of these periodicals rehearsed the same lessons of children’s collections: natural history and science, history, and travel and geography. Several journals offered pins and awards to be collected and won, and especially after the Civil War objects themselves were topics of essays. Editors of these children’s periodicals consistently advised girls to keep and bind issues of a journal into an annual for further use. Like their mothers, girls were charged

Collecting with reproducing the culture, a responsibility traditionally symbolized perhaps in the keeping of a dowry or marriage chest, later known as a hope chest. Now girls also cared for and preserved objects of sentimental value in albums, folios, and boxes, all of which—like the hope chest— could be purchased for the purpose of collecting. In the twentieth century the rise of mass consumerism, evidenced in advertising, department stores, and mail order catalogues, ineluctably linked consumption and collecting. Although the Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and the Boy Scouts encouraged finding, making, and collecting things, these organizations quickly succumbed to consumerism and provided their young charges with craft kits. Indeed, over the course of the century girls and boys would increasingly purchase rather than find objects to augment their collections. Progressive educational professionals were the first to explore this link through several studies of children’s collecting. In 1900, Caroline Frear Burk surveyed fifth-grade classes in Santa Barbara and Santa Rosa, California. She collected questionnaires from 607 boys and 607 girls and found that the typical number of collections for each child was three or four. The children in Burk’s sample had begun to collect before the age of six. This activity peaked between the ages of eight and eleven, likely due to the desire to imitate others (Burk had been motivated by one class’s “spontaneous” interest). Similar results were reported by G. Stanley Hall in his survey of 1,200 California children in 1907. Hall listed more than 300 items collected, with boys reporting (in rank order) cigar bands, stamps, birds’ eggs, marbles, seashells, buttons, rocks, and advertising cards. Girls favored (in rank order) stamps,

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seashells, advertising cards, cigar bands, buttons, marbles, pieces of cloth, paper dolls, and dolls. A later study, recognizing that collecting was “intimately” associated with the “growing self,” sought to divine possible sex differences in collecting. This study by Paul A. Witty and Harvey C. Lehman (1931) revealed that girls more often than boys collected objects of personal adornment or of affection and sentiment, schoolroom souvenirs, and dolls. Boys preferred items evincing outdoor activities and commercially viable goods. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, these children did not employ classification and discernment in their acquisitions. Like their predecessors, girls and boys preferred things that mirrored adults’ gender affiliations—with girls curating artifacts of social value that were given to them and boys acquiring (and trading) things that possessed market value. Studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s found that boys’ and girls’ interest increased with time, as did the age at which that interest peaked and that rural children tended to foster more collections than those in towns and cities. Care must be taken in utilizing these studies. The results of each study vary, which may be due in great part to the methods of data collection. Collection is only loosely defined, and it is not clear at times that the researcher differentiated between a collection that is acquired, classified, studied, and exhibited and a mere assemblage of objects that are possessed. For example, Witty and Lehman state that the children in their study were told that a collection was “assembled voluntarily in order to extend the kind or number” (1930). This definition applies equally to everyday consumption

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of, say, clothing. In addition, these Progressive educators evince a clear nostalgia for rural life and its supposed connection to the earlier form of cooperative collecting within a shared belief system. Hall and his peers suggested that nature cabinets be installed in schools—and, much like earlier cabinets of curiosities, that these be the product of cooperative, not individualistic, activity on the part of schoolchildren. Collecting, however, is in practice an individualistic—and now, secularized— endeavor, one that throughout the twentieth century has been colonized and rationalized by toy manufacturers (among others) who seek to create instant collectibles to be purchased rather than found. The Ty Company’s Beanie Babies and Pleasant Company’s American Girl Collection are but two examples of how consumption has itself been rationalized by the selection, classification, labeling, organization, and presentation skills long required of collectors. Shirley Teresa Wajda See also Advice Books; American Girls Collection; Comic Books; Consumer Culture; Dollhouses; Dolls; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’ Magazines; Girls’ Rooms; Nancy Drew Mysteries References and Further Reading Belk, Russell W. 1995. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London and New York: Routledge. Burk, Caroline Frear. 1900. “The Collecting Instinct.” Pedagogical Seminary 7: 179–207. Durost, Walter Nelson. 1932. Children’s Collecting Activity Related to Social Factors. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. Hall, G. Stanley. 1907. Aspects of Child Life and Education. Boston: Ginn. McGreevy, Ann. 1990. “Treasures of Children: Collections Then and Now, or Treasures of Children Revisited.”

Early Child Development and Care 63: 33–36. Mechling, Jay. 1989. “The Collecting Self and American Youth Movements.” Pp. 255–285 in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1889–1920. Edited by Simon J. Bronner. New York: W. W. Norton. Whitley, Mary T. 1929. “Children’s Interest in Collecting.” Journal of Educational Psychology 20: 249–261. Witty, Paul A., and Harvey C. Lehman. 1930. “Further Studies of Children’s Interest in Collecting.” Journal of Educational Psychology 21: 112–127. ———. 1931. “Sex Differences: Collecting Interests.” Journal of Educational Psychology 22: 221–228. ———. 1933. “The Collecting Interests of Town Children and Country Children.” Journal of Educational Psychology 24: 170–184.

College Girls For many American girls, college life is the last transition period from being a “girl” to becoming a “woman.” College girls in the United States have had a long and varied history. From the struggles of young women in the colonial and antebellum periods to obtain quality educations to the dorm and sorority life of the twentieth century, American girls have insisted upon educational opportunities equal to those offered to their brothers that at the same time served the unique needs and interests of women. Women’s colleges and coeducational schools have sought to meet these needs in both the curriculum and lifestyles offered at these institutions, giving American college girls a chance to mature into college women. Although great efforts have been made to diversify the population of American college women, the majority remain white, middle-class, and in their late teens or early twenties.

College Girls Most colonial women were not encouraged or permitted to pursue education beyond basic abilities in reading and writing, and most blacks were prohibited from obtaining even a rudimentary education. Education for white girls and young women in colonial America was largely limited to domestic skills and decorative arts, although dame schools and venture schools operated to teach girls as well as boys reading and writing, along with a small amount of music, art, and a foreign language. A few colonial American women stand out for their educational achievements. These include the poet Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose master taught her to read and write; Eliza Lucas, a South Carolina woman well tutored in the arts and sciences; and Jane Colden, who studied Latin and botany. However, both Lucas and Colden ceased their studies after their marriages, and in general, only about half of American colonial women could read or write at the turn of the eighteenth century. By the early national period (1770– 1820), several women of note, including Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, advocated the education of young women. Women were expected to use their education not in careers but for the betterment of their families. The concept of “republican motherhood” held that women could use their domestic influence over their husbands and children to produce better citizens, and in this way, women could increase their very limited role in the new country. Because of this recognized role of white women and their different educational needs and expectations, educational institutions for young women were created. Although dame schools and venture schools had provided some opportunities

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for young white women, these schools offered extremely limited curricula, very basic or ornamental in nature. More institutionalized schools, or academies, offered subjects such as arithmetic, grammar, history, and literature in addition to the ornamental arts of music, painting, and needlework. Often the young women who attended these academies went on to teach at other academies or to open their own schools; other students used their education to fulfill the prescribed role of republican motherhood. During the antebellum period (1820– 1860), the concept of republican motherhood and the emergence of female academies evolved into the notion of “separate spheres” for women, apart from the urbanized and industrialized world of men. Women were expected to be pure, pious, submissive, and domestic; “true women” emerged as the moral leaders of their families and communities. This moral leadership provided opportunities for women as teachers as well as in the home. This larger sphere of influence required broader, more sophisticated forms of education for young women who were entering the public sphere as professional teachers. The desire of women to teach was matched by demand, especially in the North and West, where public education for children had begun in earnest. Accordingly, seminaries evolved from academies and provided more rigorous academic training, although ornamental education was still offered. For the most part, seminaries provided a high school– level education for teenage girls and young women. The seminaries, like the academies, were not considered true colleges, although in some cases the academic standards were comparable to men’s colleges, and several women’s

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seminaries, like Mount Holyoke, evolved into the first women’s colleges. Women’s colleges date from the midnineteenth century. Several societal trends contributed to the rise of women’s colleges, including the earlier desire for an educated motherhood and the desire of women to teach. The rise of public schools also created a generation of young women who had become accustomed to education and who desired further opportunities. Reading for pleasure also became more popular, especially among the middle class and upper class, and literature specifically designed for women gained in popularity as their leisure time increased. New inventions and industrial innovations enabled women and girls to spend less time in household chores (e.g., soap making, hand sewing, and spinning). Several colleges lay claim to being the first institutions of higher education for women. Salem Academy, now Salem College, was founded in North Carolina in 1772. Georgia Female College, now Wesleyan College, was chartered as a college in 1836, and Mount Holyoke opened as a seminary in 1837. Mary Sharp College opened in 1851 in Tennessee, and awarded its first bachelor’s degrees in 1855. With Latin, Greek, and other degree requirements, Mary Sharp College was widely acknowledged as the first true college for women granting degrees equivalent to those at men’s colleges. Mary Sharp College closed in the 1890s after educating more than 4,000 girls and young women at all educational levels. The most important of the early women’s colleges, collectively known as the Seven Sisters, are Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard. These colleges

served as the models for many other women’s schools where the curriculum and lifestyle by late nineteenth century were very similar. Other institutions of higher education opened for women as well, including religious schools, both single-sex and coeducational; coordinate colleges that educated both women and men, although separately; and vocational schools. By the 1870s, approximately 11,000 young women were enrolled in college, and although higher education for women was not yet considered fashionable or popular, it was certainly an option. This first generation of women students considered college education a privilege and took their academic pursuits seriously. Planning to use their degrees in careers, these young women studied hard and found very little time for recreation, entertainment, or dating. The majority of young women attending college during this time were white, middle-class, and from eighteen to twentyfour years old, but many women college students during this time would today be classified as “nontraditional students,” who worked before, during, and after their attendance at college. Most young women who attended college between 1870 and 1900 did not consider marriage as a life choice but attended college to prepare for a career in teaching and medicine primarily, although a few women entered the ministry or became lawyers. After the turn of the century, there was a slight shift in the population of women college students. Although college girls remained overwhelmingly white, nativeborn, middle-class, and in their late teens and early twenties, this second generation did not see education and marriage as mutually exclusive. College girls at

College Girls the turn of the century were much more interested in recreational activities, and their demand that the college life include more extracurricular activities changed the experiences of girls entering college forever. College also became an option for a variety of other American girls. More African American, foreign-born, and lower-class girls began viewing college as an attractive option in order to better support themselves and their families as educated professionals. According to historian Barbara Miller Solomon, “by World War I college was a very important option to provide a daughter within some circles, and outside these circles, it was something to aspire to” (Solomon 1985, 77). As the number of college women increased in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a particularly strong type of female friendship emerged, called the “smash” or “crush.” For the most part the “smash” was an intense, platonic friendship characterized by ritualized courting, including the sending of flowers and the writing of love poems. Often the “smash” involved a freshman or sophomore “falling in love” with an upper-class junior or senior. These relationships were viewed as a mentorship wherein older girls taught younger ones the accepted ways of college life. Other women found their “crush” within their own class and created friendships that lasted a lifetime. For most students, “smashing” was just another part of college life, and although women created enduring friendships, they often later fell in love with men, married, and had children. For others, “smashing” led to romantic friendships and life-long companionships.

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“Smashing,” along with other facets of college life, figured in turn-of-the-century literature written for girls. In her 1995 work, Intimate Communities, Sherrie A. Inness discusses the attention given to “smashing,” athletics, and stereotyping in girls’ fiction. Although the characters discussed in these novels are fictional, many are thinly veiled versions of the authors themselves during their college careers and, as such, are indicators of what college must have been like for many girls between 1870 and 1920. Athletics was an important extracurricular activity for college girls. In the early years of women’s schools, individualized gymnastic exercises made up the bulk of the physical education curriculum for young women. However, basketball and other team sports dominated the interests of women by the turn of the century, although physical education instructors continued to insist that gymnastics was the best course for young, developing women. By 1901, an article in Cosmopolitan magazine stated that “college girls are enthusiastic athletes. Basketball is the universal favorite sport” (quoted in Inness 1995, 74). Girls entering college in the decades around the turn of the century quickly found themselves classified or stereotyped as “digs,” “freaks,” “grinds,” “swells,” or “all-around girls.” Digs and freaks were at the bottom of the college social ladder, considered outsiders because of their social inabilities or inequities, including class, race, or disability. Grinds, or studious girls, chose their studies above an active social life and were usually liked well enough, but were generally passive in the larger campus life. Swells loved excitement to the exclusion of everything else and had the money to host room parties

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featuring spreads of “lobster salad on crisp, curly lettuce, delicious thin, little bread-and-butter sandwiches with the crusts off, devilled eggs, stuffed olives, almonds and ginger” (quoted in Inness 1995, 40–41). All-around girls had struck a happy balance of study and fun and gained the respect, admiration, and friendship of their peers. Although swells remained popular and fashionable, it was the allaround girl who was elected class president or became an officer in other school clubs and activities. School clubs, like drama, debating, and literary societies, were formed as soon as girls were allowed to enter college, and were outlets for students interested in drama, literature, and the like. However, by 1900, many student organizations became socially exclusive sororities, with membership only by invitation, either with or without the characteristic Greek letters. As one historian has argued, “however pleasant for their members, the exclusive societies intensified [class] distinctions among students” (Horowitz 1984, 153). Because of the divisive effect, some colleges banned sororities on their campuses in the early twentieth century. Yet women’s student organizations and sororities often provided active participation in self-government, an opportunity that was not offered to most American women in the world outside college. As the numbers of girls enrolled in college increased, so did their social acceptance, and in turn even more women pursued higher education. The makeup of the college population began to more closely reflect that of the larger society, although most college students, both male and female, were still largely white and middle- or upper-middle-

class. Following the passage of the woman’s suffrage amendment in 1920, young women began to insist upon a larger place in society. Young women as well as young men began asserting their independence, both from parents as well as from college administrations. Smoking, drinking, and unchaperoned dating prevailed on college campuses, where a more conservative lifestyle had been the norm. In order to attract and retain students, colleges began to relax regulations, although dress codes and curfews were still enforced on most campuses. College girls of the mid-twentieth century followed the pattern set by the generation of girls who attended college in the 1920s. Books such as Mabelle Babcock Blake’s The Education of the Modern Girl (1929), Gulielma Fell Alsop and Mary McBride’s She’s Off to College: A Girl’s Guide to College Life (1940), and Suzanne Gould Emerson’s Off to College (1949) aimed to prepare girls for college “life,” with chapters on clothes, etiquette, dating, and sororities in addition to studying. Although printed over a period of twenty-plus years, these books’ content changed very little, and Blake’s Education of the Modern Girl was reprinted as late as 1967. The advent of the women’s movement in the 1960s drastically changed college campuses and experiences of women students. College girls and women began to seek more educational opportunities specifically tailored to their needs as women while at the same time branching out into traditionally male academic subjects, such as mathematics, medicine, business, engineering, and the sciences. In many universities in the 1970s and 1980s, women’s studies departments emerged, providing a multidisciplinary

Comic Books educational opportunity for the study of women’s roles in history, literature, law, the sciences, and other disciplines. At the same time, campuses established women’s centers that provided health, self-defense, mentoring, education, and career programs for women. The passage of Title IX in 1972 also encouraged the growth of academic and athletic opportunities for college women and paved the way for a more equitable college climate for girls and women in the twenty-first century. Tara Mitchell Mielnik See also Education of Girls; Jewish Education of Girls; Mathematics and Science, Radical Feminism; Sororities References and Further Reading Alsop, Gulielma Fell, and Mary F. McBride. 1940. She’s Off to College: A Girl’s Guide to College Life. New York: Vanguard Press. Blake, Mabelle Babcock, et al. 1929, 1967. The Education of the Modern Girl. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. Eisenmann, Linda, ed. 1998. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Emerson, Suzanne Gould. 1949. Off to College. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company. Faragher, John Mack, and Florence Howe, eds. 1988. Women and Higher Education in American History. New York: W. W. Norton. Farnham, Christie Anne. 1994. The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South. New York: New York University Press. Gordon, Lynn D. 1990. Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1984. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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———. 1987. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Inness, Sherrie A. 1995. Intimate Communities: Representation and Social Transformation in Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1910. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Newcomer, Mabel. 1959. A Century of Higher Education for American Women. New York: Harper and Brothers. Solomon, Barbara Miller. 1985. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Comic Books Newspaper comics have existed since the turn of the century, and comic books have been popular items since the late 1930s. Thought of as a boy’s craze, comics have been just as popular with girls, particularly in contemporary times. Newspaper comic strips became popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Newspapers, anxious to show off new colored ink capabilities, experimented with comics sections. Comics’ popularity, especially among young boys, led manufacturers to the mass production of comics in a cheap marketable book form. The first comic book, made in 1932 as a means of advertisement, did nothing more than provide newspaper strips in a small tabloid style. Once the appeal of the books was known, many comic book publishers followed suit. Some books were used as premium giveaways to endorse products; others were sold for minimal fees, usually a dime a book. A real boom began in 1936, when six publishers produced seventy-six different

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books (Benton 1989, 17). The number of books expanded, as did the variety of stories. Competing companies developed a number of superhero characters who possessed supernatural powers and served humanity by protecting justice, and this expanded variety of superhero stories created a wider range of readers. Believed to be just for young male readers during the early 1940s, comics changed once World War II soldiers clamored for them overseas. Comics became more complex, with elaborate stories told via colorful illustrations and simple text. As a popular base expanded, publishers offered the public a variety of comic genres: crime, educational, funny animals, horror, jungle, kid, movie and television, mystery and detective, newspaper-comic characters, romance, satire, science fiction, superhero, teen, underground, war, and western. These did not emerge all at once but were created throughout the 1940s and 1950s to serve an ever-growing demand for new comic book material. According to Mike Benton, writing in The Comic Book in America, “At the beginning of 1942, there were over 143 comic-book titles on the newsstands being read by over fifty million people each month. The comic book was no longer a passing publishing fad. It had become an established part of Americana, finding its way into the bedrooms and bivouacs of children and service-men everywhere” (Benton 1989, 35). One of these widely read comics detailed the adventures of a young woman with superpowers. The character Wonder Woman was introduced in 1942, marking the first time that girl readers were spoken to directly. Wonder Woman was spawned from an amalgamation of mythical characters, including Hippolyta and the Amazons. Born Diana of The-

myscira, she left the haven to become ambassador to the world, spreading the message of peace. Diana had amazing abilities that allowed her to thwart evil villains. These included super strength, speed, and the ability to glide through the air. Special bracelets enabled the deflection of bullets, and when villains were caught in her golden lasso, they had no choice but to tell the truth. Six months after her creation, sales of Wonder Woman were strong enough that publishers considered her an established character among the cast of comic book heroes (Wonderland website). Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist interested in providing young female readers with a positive role model. Marston believed that women had a “fundamentally healthier emotional balance than men.” When creating Wonder Woman, he used feminine characteristics he believed would be beneficial to solving problems. Similarly, Marston’s comic stories encouraged women to become financially independent and advocated that men and women work together to solve problems (“The Comic Strip and Popular Culture” 1975, 84). These feminist sentiments had never before been available to such a large group of impressionable readers. The incredible attributes possessed by Wonder Woman and her success fighting evil went far to encourage readers, who have adopted her as a super role model since her inception in the 1940s. From 1947 to 1954, other comic books targeted more mature readers. Books focusing on cowboys and crime stories became quite popular, even surpassing superhero comics. These comics, though intended for adult readers, were easily accessible to children. The comics graph-

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The popular Wonder Woman cartoons led to a TV series starring Lynda Carter. (Kobal Collection/ABC-TV)

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ically depicted violent acts, suggested rape, and represented women in highly sexually suggestive manners. A crusade against such comics was led by psychologist Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent blamed comic book content for expanding juvenile delinquency. Wertham complained about books that contained sadism, violence, rape, graphic sexuality, and racism. But Wertham was neither a liberal nor a feminist thinker. He opposed changing mores and challenged new roles for women. Wertham wrote that Wonder Woman was a “horror type” because she “is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, [and] is the cruel phallic woman. While she is frightening for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to be” (Wertham 1954, 34). Wertham’s efforts led to a U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency concerning the influence of comic books on children. In addition, the Comics Code Authority was established by comics publishers in 1954 as a means of self-regulation. This action averted strict government interference. Not all comics designed for girls encouraged them to challenge societal norms. In 1948 twenty-seven out of forty-nine comic books were targeted at young female readers (Robbins 1999, 36). Almost all represented girls in traditional roles. “Funny animal comics” that told the stories of familiar cartoon animals from the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers Studios encouraged girls to be nurturers and represented female characters in typical domestic situations. Similar in style, “kid comics” were also popular. Drawn in an unrealis-

tic fashion, these cartoons told tales about the joys and pratfalls of childhood, generally with precocious leading characters. Little Lulu was one such character designed for girl readers. She had been a regular newspaper strip character until 1944, when she made the switch to comic books. Lulu Moppet was a young girl who enjoyed various activities with her friends. She and her girlfriends played with dolls and had tea parties. Lulu had a love-hate relationship with the neighborhood boys, who belonged to the Boys Only Gang. Many stories centered on Lulu’s attempts to join the misogynistic club, which never proved fruitful. In her tenacious attempts, however, Lulu generally proved herself more clever than the boys. In part because of popularity derived from an early subtle feminist stance, Little Lulu stayed in print from 1945 to 1984 (Don Markstein’s Cartoonpedia website). Perhaps most successful with girls were “teen comics.” These comics told humorous stories about groups of teenage friends who exemplified typical teens who never challenged the status quo. “Archie” comics, established in 1941, focused on Archie, his friends, and the girls romantically interested in him, Betty and Veronica. According to Trina Robbins’s study on girls and comics, “the majority of Archie readers were girls, age six to thirteen” (Robbins 1999, 12). Because of this, Betty and Veronica played vital roles. Both vied for Archie’s attention. Betty was a good-girl-nextdoor type, whereas Veronica was slightly more vixenish, possessing money, glamour, and the ambition to get what she wanted. Neither Betty nor Veronica had any more personality than necessary in the role of comic girlfriend.

Comic Books More teen comics followed after the success of “Archie.” Character Katy Keene of the “Wilbur” comics, known to her readers as the “Queen of Fashion,” was slightly more complex than her “Archie” predecessors. Katy was a career girl, a beautiful fashion model who did worldwide runway work and print advertisements. The first of the supermodels, Katy did not let her success go to her head. She maintained friendships and did all she could to help others in need, including her sis, who was prone to stomachaches from too much sugar. Especially appealing to readers were Katy paper dolls. Publishers encouraged readers to design clothes for the dolls to wear, which would be included in subsequent issues. Girls loved seeing their artwork in print, and collecting Katy’s dolls and outfits was a popular hobby among young girls from 1949 to 1961 (Archie Comics website). Another trend in girls’ comics was the combination comics and advice magazine. Publications, like Miss America, Calling All Girls, Junior Miss, Keen Teens, Sweet Sixteen, and Polly Pigtails, all aimed at entertaining young readers with stories about growing up, fashion tips, and celebrity gossip (Robbins 1999, 45). In the late 1940s romance comics emerged for female readers. These comics targeted older readers than those who enjoyed teen comics. “Love comics,” as they were also known, were designed for young women, older teens, and new housewives. At a time of domestic containment, love comics served to keep women in their place as subservient wives to hardworking men. The basic formula for love comics involved a heroine who became unhappy with her current situation, went on an adventure, and dis-

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covered in the end that all she ever really wanted had been at home the entire time (Sadler 1964, 487). Readers were taught that happiness came from the simple things in life and was acquired through hard work. Love comics served as lessons in morality. They also supported the status quo and the ultimate goal of a successful marriage. These lessons taught that beauty was in the eye of the beholder, offering hope for less-than-ideal beauties. Even more important, love comics emphasized a need for concessions in exchange for romance. The most important sacrifice was the desire for a career (Perebinossoff 1974, 825). With the emergence of television, the popularity of comics waned. Comic books were no longer the easiest mode of quick entertainment. Regular comic books still existed, but a new type of comic was introduced. “Comix,” or underground newspaper comics supporting counterculture beliefs, emerged as an alternative to regular reading material in the 1960s. Comix also provided satirical viewpoints that challenged the consensus culture that had prevailed in regularly published comic books. These underground comix were particularly important to feminist writers and cartoonists looking for a new medium in which to express themselves. Unhappy with the males in charge of the establishment, female creators opted to remove the word “men” from “women.” After a number of variations (“wimmen” and “wimmin” among them), “womyn” became the preferable spelling for a word that would now designate more radical feminists. Womyn’s comix served to oppose girl comics, which had come before and “taught that goodness meant goodeytwo-shoeism: Rather than a strong left

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hook, girls’ heroes got by on politeness, obedience, and proper grooming” (Kennedy 1990, 386). A number of underground comix dealt with realistic female issues. Another new trend was the use of an autobiographical style. Comix issues ranged from single parenthood to lesbianism and abortion rights. The 1990s have seen a large interest in comic books for girls and by girls. Referred to as “grrrls’ comix,” these stories are written by women for adolescent readers. Inspired by third-wave feminism, these comic books address feminist issues rather than offer advice on how to catch a husband, like girls’ magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. Grrrls’ comix have continued trends started by earlier underground comix, especially in response to the backlash against secondwave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s (Robbins 1999, 125). Today, girls have access to a great variety of comics. Newspaper strips, superhero comic books, and teen comics still exist but in updated forms. Most characters have taken on feminist attributes, especially superheroines who refuse to be treated differently in a world that no longer belongs exclusively to men. An alternative to regularly published comics is the underground comix, published in zine form or through independent publishing houses. Cherie Kelly

See also Collecting; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’ Magazines; Television; Zines References and Further Reading Archie Comics, “Katy’s Korner,” http://www.archiecomics.com/katy/ allabout.html. Benton, Mike. 1989. The Comic Book in America. Dallas: Taylor Publishing.

“The Comic Strip and Popular Culture.” 1975. Intellect 104: 84–85. Don Markestein’s Cartoonpedia, “Little Lulu,” http://www.stormloader.com/ markstein/cartoonpedia/lulu.html. Friends of Lulu, http://www. friends-lulu. org/. Kennedy, Pagan. 1990. “P.C. Comics.” The Nation 250 (March 19): 386. Perebinossoff, Phillipe. 1974. “What Does a Kiss Mean? The Love Comic Formula and the Creation of the Ideal Teen-Age Girl.” Journal of Popular Culture 8, no. 4: 825–835. Robbins, Trina. 1993. A Century of Women Cartoonists. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. ———. 1996. The Great Women Superheroes. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. ———. 1999. From Girls to Grrlz. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Sadler, A. W. 1964. “The Love Comics and American Popular Culture.” American Quarterly 16, no. 3: 486–490. Wertham, Frederic. 1954. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart. Wonderland—the Ultimate Wonder Woman Site, http://www.lacosa.sion. com/ww.

Communication From the early nineteenth century to the present, girls have used various kinds of communication methods to create their own culture, learn their roles as girls, or subvert adult authority. Communication devices have also facilitated the construction of an underground culture that girls have built in response to their unequal status, both at school and in the larger culture. The actual forms of communication (as well as to whom girls have corresponded) have changed over time, beginning with letters, continuing with telephones, and evolving most recently to include pagers, chat rooms, cell phones, and e-mail.

Communication In the early republic, girls began to systematically use letter writing to communicate with each other. Colonial children did not learn how to write a letter as second graders do today, but their nineteenth-century peers learned that letter writing was an essential part of female socialization. According to The Young Lady’s Friend, “A letter, written in a fair, legible hand, without any blots or erasures, and properly folded, sealed, and directed, is one very good index of a lady’s character” (1837, 281). It was primarily the job of mothers to teach their daughters the “art” of letter writing, in which graceful penmanship was as important as the content. “Madame de Sevigné praises her daughter for attention to dates, which, she says, shows an interest in the correspondence” (280). Drafts of letters were corrected by plantation mistresses who supervised their daughters’ socialization. Mothers read not only the letters their daughters wrote but also those they received: “Young ladies under age,” The Young Lady’s Friend explained, “should gracefully acknowledge their parent’s right of inspection” (281). Indeed, letters were semipublic documents that were routinely read aloud as a form of family entertainment. Middle-class girls also learned how to write letters that conformed to contemporary standards and expressed appropriate sentiments by using such books as Mrs. Farrar’s the Youth’s Letter-Writer. Etiquette manuals written just for young ladies often provided information and instruction on whom to write and when, what to write, and how to write it. Manuals urged girls to choose a few correspondents among their friends in order to practice the art of letter writing. Because Victorian girls were also expected to

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manage the concerns of others, experts advised writing about those things that would be of interest to the reader, not the writer. Not only did letter writing reinforce emotional restraint, but also it provided girls with an excellent opportunity to learn about order. They were encouraged to organize their thoughts before they set pen to paper so that topics of “inferior importance” did not dominate. The Young Lady’s Friend advised: “The letters of a regular correspondent should be endorsed and filed, as regularly by young ladies as merchants; this facilitates your reference to any one of them, prevents their being lost, or mislaid, or exposed to curious eyes, saves your table from being strewed, and your letter-case from being crowded with them” (1837, 282). Experts and other adults urged girls to write letters that were neither informal nor intimate. To them, letter writing provided an opportunity to instruct girls in the importance of self-control, not selfexpression. Despite the imposition of social conventions, some girls nevertheless used letters to express their emotional anguish, anxiety, and affection. In fact, adolescent girls routinely used letters to convey their deepest feelings and thoughts about each other. For girls, writing letters provided relationships with continuity. While away at boarding school (attended by even those from relatively poor families), girls wrote mothers, sisters, and other family members. Once back home again, girls had few opportunities other than letter writing to maintain communication, unlike adult women who often arranged visits for extended periods of time. Girls confined their intimate communication with friends to the postal ser-

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vice until their access to formal schooling began to expand in the industrial era (near the turn of the twentieth century). When in school, they found new ways to communicate with their friends. It is unclear when young girls began to pass notes to each other under a teacher’s watchful eye, but a famous scene from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little Town on the Prairie, set in 1880s South Dakota, depicts a teenage Laura passing her seatmate a slate on which her handwritten poem mocked their teacher (Wilder 1941, 173–176). Girls’ circle of intimates began to expand in the interwar era (1918–1945), which also witnessed a relaxation in rules about content of letters. No longer did girls practice emotional restraint or supposedly embrace order when writing letters; their letters became emotional outlets for their burgeoning circle of intimates, which now included movie stars and radio friends. Primary among the catalysts for this expanding group of intimates was the proliferation of electronic media (movies and radio in the 1920s, television in the 1950s) and an emerging culture of celebrity that showcased new role models such as movie stars Mary Pickford and Clara Bow. Young girls wrote fan letters to celebrities or broadcasters, desiring to acquaint themselves, to establish an intimate, albeit one-sided relationship, or to describe their love of media. Donna Warren, for example, wrote one Chicago radio broadcaster that she was “just crazy for radio” (Warren 1941). Two world wars provided another impetus to letter writing as young girls wrote soldiers stationed on battle fronts. Finally, advice columns such as “Let’s Talk Things Over” and “Dear Beth” told girls

that letter writing allowed them to air “problems [that] usually bring comfort and practical suggestions” (Grayson 1944, viii). Young girls wrote desiring advice on subjects ranging from parental relationships to their sexuality, advice they felt their friends or parents could not give. They also began to use a new kind of communication device to contact their circle of intimates: the telephone. The telephone, which became a common component of everyday social life in the 1910s and 1920s, typically appeared first on rural homesteads and in middleclass urban households. For those women and girls who lived in rural areas, phones seemed to mute their isolation, at least until cars became common. For those who lived in urban communities, AT&T advertisements claimed that telephones nurtured a “close-knit, personalized society” (Fischer 1992, 223). They did not seek out new intimates but used the phone to reinforce existing relationships. One woman remembered that, when a young girl, she walked home from school with a friend, separated at a street corner, and then called the friend when she got home (227). But because Americans associated telephones with young girls and women, they were consistently derided as “female foolishness” (231). In the postwar era, a transformation occurred in the ways that girls used communication devices for historical and cultural reasons. First, the Cold War caused Americans to promote conformity to social ideals, especially to gender roles embodied in sit-com television characters. In a process called “domestic containment,” Americans believed they could defeat the evil Russians by adhering to these new norms, which identified a patriarchal, almost domineering role for

Communication men and a subservient, nurturing role for women. Second, a newly identified group of Americans appeared, spurred on by the postwar prosperity and by the expansion of high school attendance (in 1900, 6 percent of Americans had high school degrees; by 1940, a majority of Americans had their diplomas). Marketers identified these “teenagers” by their age, leisure activities, and spending ability, which by 1960 exceeded $10 billion. To exploit that market, new magazines appeared, most notably Seventeen magazine (which actually debuted before World War II ended, in 1944), to promote “wholesome bobbysoxer” and future June Cleaver as the primary role for teenage girls and to exploit the pocketbooks of those who wished to don that image (Palladino 1996, 112). If girls meant to rebel against these images, then it had to be done through hidden means, typically through phone calls, letters, and note passing. Because they were adults in training, girls were taught communication skills to ensure that they would fight the Russians from their kitchens. There was, for example, a surge in interest in girls’ letter writing in the post–World War II era. Research journals, parenting magazines, and Seventeen’s etiquette books emphasized how letter-writing skills built character. Research journals such as Elementary School Journal analyzed schoolchildren’s letters and decried the spelling and grammatical mistakes they found. It seemed the United States might lose ground to the Russians if Americans could not inculcate a sense of excellence even in the most mundane acts such as letter writing. In parental guidance periodicals like Parents’ Magazine, columnists advised mothers to teach their girls to “enjoy writing letters” by providing the correct

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equipment: a desk, a box of pencils or fountain pen, notepaper, and pen pals from all over the world (Burris 1953, 53). Start girls writing at an early age, one article said, by teaching them the fine art of “letter telling,” in which three- or four-year-old daughters dictated letters sent to distant relatives (Pratt 1961, 54). The emphasis on young girls as letter writers seemed to be a youthful version of some pundits’ belief that “letter writing is a private art; and private life is woman’s native and triumphant sphere of achievement” (Cecil 1957, 98). Seventeen’s etiquette manuals told girls that letter writing would “be a part of your path of etiquettes [sic] all your life” (Haupt 1957, 79). That etiquette included “a very useful feminine accomplishment . . . pretty handwriting” (79). Etiquette manuals also warned girls about sharing certain kinds of information warning “your best friend today may not be tomorrow” (102). Pen pals, or correspondents who lived at a distance and who were not family members, were a part of this postwar world of communication. The United States’ debut as a superpower in the 1950s prompted some girls to write the UN seeking pen pals from far-off countries. Letters to pen pals tended to be more formal because these were messages sent to acquaintances met at places such as summer camp or other instances of chance acquaintance. Girls exchanged information on a variety of subjects, from the weather to Christmas gifts to school schedules. Imparting information was certainly an important component of letter writing, but it also allowed girls to create new friendships. With close friends who may have moved away or pen pals with whom a casual relationship

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had become intimate, girls discussed more personal information such as their current boyfriends or sought advice for personal problems. Girls had pen pals who were boys, and letters exhibited some of the same themes as those between young women. Weather seems to have been a primary subject, as were favorite musical groups. One form of letter writing, passing notes, was a means by which girls subverted the authority that etiquette manuals, experts, and parents attempted to exert. Girls used ruled notebook paper, paper scraps, and colored ink pens, while folding their notes in ways that escaped the teacher’s notice. As they communicated in this subliminal dialogue, note passing seemed to be almost a conversation since girls used the same paper to write each other several times. Simultaneously, passing notes served a therapeutic purpose while reinforcing girls’ nurturing skills. Girls poured out their hearts, dreams, and sorrows to confidantes who dreamed along with them or comforted them. They also gossiped about friends, acquaintances, and, especially, boyfriends. Young girls wrote these notes in a secretive language in case they were intercepted. Certainly, consumerism was a critical component of this new world since specific kinds of stationery, pens, stamps, and stickers were important, if not crucial, to girls’ letter writing and note passing. Stationery featured feminine themes such as flowers or cartoon characters. Snoopy and Hello Kitty were popular choices, as were equally feminine colors like pink and pastels. In some cases, girls personalized their stationery by drawing hearts or other female symbols on white paper. Many chose stamps, flower stickers, and colored

pens that matched their stationery and practiced a flowery script when writing pen pals. Interestingly, girls used their matching envelopes to state demands to mail carriers that were anything but “real life,” submissive, and deferential. After sealing their envelopes, they regularly wrote: “Postman: Deliver Deletter, Desooner Debetter, Delater Deletter, Demadder Megetter.” Although letter writing seemed to reinforce girls’ supposedly “private” natures, communication remained an avenue for girls to explore their personalities and to develop an identity outside the family circle. Moreover, communication served as an emotional catharsis. Letters to “Let’s Talk Things Over,” for example, allowed girls to complain of family strictures while providing an outlet for emotional turmoil when parents could not or would not help resolve problems. One troubled fourteen-year-old girl wrote, “I wish I could confide in my mother. I tried once but she laughed at what I called a secret” (Grayson 1944, 12). In an era in which girls turned to friends and outside advisers for advice, etiquette manuals also sought to fulfill these needs. The Seventeen Book of Answers to What Your Parents Don’t Talk About and Your Best Friends Can’t Tell You, for example, discussed traditional subjects like boyfriends and dating as well as issues such as homosexuality and drugs after those issues became important topics of conversation in the 1970s. Telephones mimicked changes in letter writing as usage surged in the postwar era. Indeed, by 1950, 62 percent of Americans owned a phone, a number that exceeded car ownership; by 1980, 93 percent of Americans owned a phone. The telephone’s association with girls

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Two teenage girls engage in a serious discussion. (Shirley Zeiberg)

appeared in various media venues, including a song in the movie Bye Bye Birdie in 1963 and a famous Brady Bunch television episode in which arguments between the Brady kids necessitates the installation of a pay phone. Books such as The Seventeen Book of Young Living provided phone etiquette lessons for teenagers, guaranteed to improve their popularity. Girls were also urged not to monopolize the phone. Indeed, only six hours of babysitting each month could pay for a girl’s own phone line according to Seventeen magazine editor Enid Haupt. Nice girls did not phone boys, and they always used the phone in a precise ladylike manner. “Most boys consider

the telephone call their special privilege, and they don’t like girls to call them regularly,” Haupt warned in 1970 (Haupt 1970, 39). The constant admonitions against monopolizing the phone and calling boys suggest that girls might have been contesting prevailing stamdards of phone etiquette. The post-1960s generations utilized new ways of communicating with good friends, particularly through instantaneous devices such as beepers, cell phones, and e-mail. But a “circle of friends” might now include unseen “electronic” friends, developed through chat rooms on the World Wide Web. Thus, the wider availability of e-mail technology

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and beepers, for example, has moved girls’ communication from paper to digital and electronic methods. Girls use beepers and e-mail to keep in close contact with family and friends; nurture them with a coded and, in the case of beepers, abbreviated language (“831” on the display screen means “I Love You”); and send messages that subvert the power of authority figures. Cell phones are now part of girls’ everyday attire since the character Cher from the movie Clueless considered her cell phone part of her wardrobe. It is as necessary now as the latest handbag or shoes. In this world that demands instantaneous connection, the phone connects girls no matter where they are, whether at school, home, or work. Chat rooms geared toward teenagers are another new means by which girls have developed their circle of intimates and, simultaneously, have subverted the authority of adults. A variety of Web services such as Yahoo! and America Online (AOL) provide specialized rooms for teens, for example, “Interracial Teen,” “Asian-American Teens,” and “Down South.” Exhibiting the constant links between consumerism and girls’ culture is a Yahoo! chat room called “The Mall: A Hang-Out for Girls.” Girls discuss a wide variety of issues, but chat rooms have proved to be a dangerous place for teenage girls, as a recent book, entitled Katie.com, proved. Written by teenager Katherine Tarbox, the book examines her attempt to rebel against her parents by building a relationship with a man in an AOL chat room. (He turned out to be a pedophile and rapist.) Tarbox’s case became the first federally prosecuted case involving an Internet pedophile. Psychologists have noted the development of an underground girls’ culture facilitated by these communication

devices. Although there is no way of knowing when this underground originally emerged or the specific ways that communication devices such as note passing prompted its growth, Harvard psychologists Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown noticed its importance when conducting a study of girls at an Ohio private school. Despite promises to respect the privacy of the psychologists’ questionnaires, girls repeatedly breached that promise by telling their friends what to expect from researchers. This underground—built on relationships developed through note passing, phone calls, and informal discussions over lunch or studying—provided girls with a culture that they used to protect and nurture each other in a world that renders them powerless. In short, this underground is a means to power, albeit of their own making, and phones, beepers, chat rooms, and letters have been the means to building this pathway. Kristine M. McCusker

See also Advice Books; Emotions; Relational Theory References and Further Reading Burris, Gladys Tolar. 1953. “Help Your Child Enjoy Writing Letters.” Parents’ Magazine 28 (December): 52–53. Cecil, Lord David. 1957. “Letter Writing: A Private Talent of Women.” Vogue 130 (August 1): 98–99. Cornell, Betty. 1954. Betty Cornell’s TeenAge Popularity Guide. New York: Prentice-Hall. Farrar, Eliza Ware. The Young Lady’s Friend. 1837. Boston: American Stationers’ Co. Farrar, Mrs. n.d. Mrs. Farrar’s the Youth’s Letter-Writer. New York: Barlett and Raynor. Fischer, Claude S. 1992. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Consumer Culture Grayson, Alice Barr. 1944. Do You Know Your Daughter? New York: D. Appleton-Century Company. Haupt, Enid A. 1957. The Seventeen Book of Young Living. New York: David McKay Company. ———. 1970. The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Young Living. 2d ed. New York: David McKay Company. Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Pratt, Joanne. 1961. “I’ll Tell You a Letter.” Parents’ Magazine 36 (Fall): 54–55. Tarbox, Katherine. 2000. Katie.com: My Story. New York: Dutton. Warren, Donna, letter to John Lair, November 30, 1941, John Lair Papers, Southern Appalachian Collection, Berea College, Berea, KY. Wilder, Laura Ingalls. 1941. Little Town on the Prairie. New York: Harper and Row. Wood, Abigail. 1972. The Seventeen Book of Answers to What Your Parents Don’t Talk About and Your Best Friends Can’t Tell You. New York: David McKay Company.

Consumer Culture Since its emergence in the early 1900s, mass marketing aimed at children has played a key role in the transformation of twentieth-century childhood. Girls’ and boys’ growing consumer clout as both shoppers and selling agents within the family has at once reflected and propelled the democratization of family life. As girls gained more freedom and autonomy within the family, they acquired greater influence over family spending. Consumerism has also become a vital arena in which many girls explore new identities and embrace or challenge the values of the dominant culture. Over time, children’s culture itself has become less ordered by the adult world and increasingly peer-oriented. For American girls in particular, consumerism has had profound yet con-

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tradictory influences. Through shopping, many girls have discovered a new brand of independence that comes from making their own consumer choices. At the same time, however, consumer culture has also steered girls toward prescribed gender roles and culturally acceptable aspirations. For girls, consumer culture has thus been a realm of freedom and restraint, satisfaction and disappointment. Mass marketers first began courting the girls along with boys as consumers in the 1890s through advertising trade cards displayed in grocery stores and pictorial advertisements in children’s magazines. Though these efforts were modest at first, mostly reaching well-to-do child and adult readers of children’s magazines like St. Nicholas, they gathered steam during the mid-1920s as advertisers became tantalized by the lucrative potential of selling to children. In the girl, they believed they had discovered an unproblematic consumer: impressionable, loyal, and—perhaps most important—influential. Mass marketers aimed not only to impress brand loyalty upon future generations of consumers but to enlist girls as active selling agents within the home. Selling the child, advertisers believed, was the path of least resistance to mothers and fathers. Whatever girls may have lacked in the power of the purse—and this itself was expanding—advertisers hoped girls could make up for in their power to nag and persuade. Indeed, by advertisers’ own reckoning, the growing egalitarianism and child-centeredness of the middle-class companionate family made girls potent lobbyists for the goods advertised in juvenile magazines. During the 1920s and 1930s, advertisers reached out to girls through a variety of mass magazines. They courted preteen and adolescent girls in magazines like

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Children often spur their parents’ consumption, as this photo of them looking through a shop window at Christmas shows. (Library of Congress)

American Girl (the official magazine of the Girl Scouts), Everygirls’ (published by the Campfire Girls), St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion, and Scholastic and sought out even younger girls through magazines like Little Folks and Child Life, which mothers typically read to children. Within these magazines, advertisements preached the merits of a wide array of products, ranging from soap and toiletries to breakfast cereal, food, clothing, shoes, cameras, toys, and dolls. The ads placed in magazines for younger girls aimed to sell mothers and imprint lasting impressions on pliable young minds. Those placed in magazines for preteens and adolescents addressed girls both as consumers in their own right and as mother’s helpers whose newfound knowledge

of the best brands could inform family shopping. Advertisers employed a variety of tactics to raise girls’ as well as boys’ brand consciousness and cement their brand loyalty. To cultivate consumer consciousness in younger girls, they published advertising jingle books and coloring books, typically offered as special premiums to mothers, which incorporated brand names and advertising trademarks into nursery rhymes and Mother Goose stories. Advertisers also appealed to girls’ competitive and acquisitive instincts by offering toys, cash prizes, and other special premiums to those who saved up a specified number of cereal box tops or composed the best testimonial letter explaining the merits of their

Consumer Culture favorite brand of soap or shoes. Another popular scheme was the advertising club, which awarded membership badges, secret passwords, decoding devices, and other tokens of belonging in exchange for proofs of purchase. The club and prize contest formulas became particularly popular during the Depression, when radio supplanted magazines as the primary advertising medium for girls and boys, and membership in clubs like Cocomalt’s Little Orphan Annie’s Secret Circle and Post Toasties’ Junior Detective Corps swelled into the millions. Eager to reassure prospective advertisers of the profitability of selling to girls and boys, magazine publishers also devised various schemes to transform their readers into brand-conscious shoppers. Some devoted editorial space to discussing the trustworthiness and superior value of advertised goods. Others, like American Girl, aligned editorial content with advertising by recommending that Girl Scouts play brand-name identification games at troop meetings and by reminding readers to mention the magazine when writing away for special premiums. Advertisers, in turn, catered their messages to particular juvenile audiences, showing, for example, how an Eastman Kodak camera could help Girl Scouts earn a photography merit badge or a certain brand of dishwashing soap could be used to secure a homemaker merit badge. Because advertisers ultimately wanted their sales message to reach parents as well as girls, advertisements often supplied girls with talking points that appealed to parental concerns about girls’ mental and physical development. Advertisements, of course, did not merely instruct girls how to be brandconscious shoppers and effective parental lobbyists. They also taught girls about

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culturally prescribed ideals of femininity and how to achieve them through consumption. Advertisements frequently reinforced traditional gender norms, addressing girls as future wives and homemakers. During the 1920s, for example, advertisements for Hoover vacuum cleaners taught girls to view such household machines as essential to efficient, scientific housekeeping and their future success as homemakers. Though marriage was still years away, numerous advertisements reminded preteen and adolescent girls that maintaining their charm and good looks was a key ingredient in achieving social success—and presumably in enhancing their marital prospects. Echoing the emotional appeals prominent in the advertising pages of women’s magazines, such advertisements cautioned that attractiveness and popularity need not be sacrificed to the wrong dishwashing soap, athletic shoe, beverage, or breakfast cereal. In crafting advertising copy that promised girls beauty and social prestige, advertisers were in part drawing upon long-standing cultural assumptions that vanity and other-directedness were decidedly female traits, ones that could be easily exploited. But advertisers also sought to exploit an increasingly central facet of adolescent social life—the quest for acceptance, popularity, and dates—and they did so by anointing themselves friendly shopping advisers to socially striving teens. Advertisers did propose less traditionbound cultural scripts for modern girls during the 1920s and 1930s. Shoe advertisers, for example, hailed the freedoms of athletic girls as a measure of women’s progress from the encumbrances of long skirts and the days of horse power. When the Howie Wing radio show, a children’s serial about a boy’s aviation adventures,

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aired in the late 1930s, the show’s sponsor, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, actively recruited girls to join its Cadet Aviation Corps, reminding them that women, too, played a key role in modern aviation as stewardesses and daring pilots. Such acknowledgments of the adventuring spirit of modern girls did not fundamentally challenge deeply rooted cultural expectations that girls would ultimately embrace the private realm of domesticity, but they did concede that women had become fuller participants in the public realm of sports and work. Had the advertising industry, then a predominantly male profession with limited market research tools, had more insight into the social milieu of girls, perhaps they might have more routinely invented less orthodox cultural scripts for girls. The return of economic prosperity after the deprivations of the Depression and World War II accelerated the expansion of juvenile markets and the creation of distinctive consumer cultures for children and adolescents. Thanks to full employment and a booming economy, many families that had scrimped during the lean years could now afford to allocate more of the family budget to their children’s spending needs. Indeed, allowances for girls and boys began to rise during the postwar years, and advertisers and cultural commentators took sharper notice of teenagers’ rising stock in the marketplace. As baby boomers came of age in the late 1950s, the size of the youth market made it difficult to ignore. Demographic shifts and rising incomes were only partly responsible for the postwar expansion of juvenile markets. Much like their early-twentieth-century predecessors, the publishers of Seventeen magazine, which debuted to instant success in 1944, had helped to cultivate a buoy-

ant image of the youth market by touting the buying power and progressive influence of teenage girls on family spending. Seventeen helped shape the teenage girl market through its editorial content, devoting columns to personal grooming, diets, fashion, party plans, and the brandname goods that could help girls achieve their goals. The magazine’s promotion staff also worked with clothing and cosmetics manufacturers to design goods and advertisements that catered to teenage girls’ tastes, and they convinced department stores to create tie-in displays that featured merchandise advertised in the magazine. The success of these and other teen merchandising schemes during the 1950s in turn convinced mass merchandisers to undertake more systematic market research, in which teenage girls surveyed the tastes and attitudes of their peers. Television was an even more powerful shaper and creator of juvenile markets, and unlike mass magazines, its reach extended to preschoolers and younger girls who could not yet read. Toy manufacturers learned that bypassing adults and marketing directly to girls in Saturday morning cartoons and child favorites like the Mickey Mouse Club worked merchandising wonders—not only because girls hounded their parents but because toy retailers, preferring surefire sales makers, stocked their shelves with toys that television-tutored girls could readily spot. As a measure of marketers’ faith in the new medium, television advertising to children skyrocketed from about $26 million in 1956 to about $750 million in 1987. During those years, mass marketers perfected a number of selling and merchandising strategies to entice girls as well as boys. Aware that girls influenced the buy-

Consumer Culture ing patterns of other girls, advertisers increasingly catered their sales message to girls’ sensibilities rather than parental concerns about the educational value of toys or the nutritional value of food. Toy commercials thus featured girls and their peer group culture in a utopian world of fun where “kids rule.” By using girls and boys as spokespersons, commercials invited them to identify with their peers rather than adults, only on occasion using adult presenters who were well-known children’s personalities. Market research studies also took some of the risk out of product development as toy makers geared toys to girls’ as well as boys’ fantasies and play preferences. Toy licensing agreements, a staple in children’s marketing since the 1930s, became even more widespread during the 1970s with the phenomenal megalicensing success of Star Wars toys. By the 1980s, a new generation of toys—Smurfs, Care Bears, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—had joined Depression-era favorites—Shirley Temple, Charlie McCarthy, Superman, and the still classic Mickey Mouse—in the pantheon of licensed character toy sensations. Much to the dismay of parents and child experts, however, the proliferation of television-based licensed character toys had the effect of transforming programming itself into one long commercial. As if advertising itself was not a sufficient sales stimulant, toys themselves taught girls in particular powerful lessons about the joys of spending. No toy, after all, was a better tutor in consumption than Barbie. Arriving on the toy scene in 1959, Mattel’s new fashion doll required repeated expenditures to outfit her in Mattel’s newest fashion coordinates and accessories. Not a mere plaything but a doll with her own personality profile, Barbie reinforced as many feminine stereo-

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types as she broke. Unlike the dolls of the past, Barbie was not a mother figure but rather an autonomous teenager whose doings took her outside the confines of domesticity. Barbie did not, however, model unorthodox roles for young women. Instead, she linked teenage liberation with consumption, teaching girls to associate femininity and being grown up with the joys of shopping, going to the beauty parlor, and having a boyfriend (Ken was introduced in 1961). Toy manufacturers and toy retailers have also perfected an entire aesthetic code for marketing to girls. Toy stores often demarcate the girls’ toy aisles with pink and pastel colors, a sharp contrast to the boys’ aisles with their bold, primary colors. These visual cues let girls know what section of the store they are supposed to feel at home shopping in. Toy makers are so committed to these distinct gender-coding formulas that they even try to revive sluggish sales of girls’ toys by “pinking them up.” Although the revival of the feminist movement in the early 1970s has forced mass marketers to create a broader range of consumer options for girls of all ages—pink and frilly, smart and sassy, athletic and androgynous—marketers’ enthusiasm for corralling young girls into rigid gender identifications has continued and perhaps even intensified in the wake of the feminist backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet by promoting consumption as a form of liberation and statement of identity, mass marketers have also sown the seeds of consumer rebellion. In their own quests for self-expression, girls have long appropriated and misappropriated the symbols of consumer culture to suit their own personalities, needs, and values. During the 1960s, when many youths rebelled against the conformist dictates

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and ecological excesses of their parents’ generation, shopping in nonmainstream venues—the thrift store, the Indian import house, the local cooperative— became an affirmation of alternative values. Rejecting what many regarded as the sexist “uniform” of girlhood, rebellious adolescents and young women turned in their high heels, nylons, and tailored outfits for long billowy skirts, ethnicinspired garb, comfortable shoes, and secondhand clothes. Resistance and youth rebellion soon enough found their own marketing niche, which advertisers eagerly exploited through generational appeals and nods to the hipness of youth. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, youth tastes and youth outlooks acquired a much more expansive kind of cultural authority, influencing the style of advertising directed at adults and children alike. And with the advent of Internet zines created by girls themselves and the explosion of teen-oriented fashion magazines geared to varied adolescent markets in the 1990s, peer-say and peer know-how have come to both antagonize and assimilate the dominant culture. Institutions that formerly had great influence on girls’ acculturation—the church, school, and family—not surprisingly have struggled to compete with or accommodate the influence of the mass media and mass market in shaping girls’ peer culture. As a result, girls’ consumerism has often given rise to heated debate about the growing authority of the marketplace and the demise of family values and childhood innocence. Lisa Jacobson See also Arts and Crafts; Barbie; Body Image; Clothing; Cosmetics; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’

Magazines; Hair; Play; Television; Zines References and Further Reading Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacobson, Lisa. Forthcoming. Raising Consumers: Children, Childrearing, and the American Mass Market, 1890–1940. New York: Columbia University Press. Kline, Stephen. 1993. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. New York: Verso. Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Seiter, Ellen. 1993. Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Cosmetics Cosmetic use signals a passage into adulthood in American culture. Understanding the complex historical relationship between adolescent girls and cosmetics is crucial to understanding the explosion of consumerism and changing ideas about femininity and sexuality in the twentieth century. Cosmetic use became socially acceptable among some adult women as early as the 1920s. Social commentators continued to deride women who wore cosmetics as sexually loose, and women who wore too much makeup were marked as members of the lower class. The use of cosmetics was largely determined by geographic region and economic standing; the Midwest and rural United States continued to see cosmetic use as a sign of bigcity life and its values. Well into the 1930s, many American women and their daughters continued the practice of making cosmetic preparations in their own

Cosmetics kitchens with egg whites, oatmeal, and buttermilk. The 1940s signaled the emergence of cosmetics as an everyday practice for most American women, and significantly, teenage girls began to use cosmetics to mark themselves as adult. Cosmetic use among teenagers in this period reflected their emergence as a national consumer market, one sought after by advertisers and marketing firms. The economic and social conditions of the wartime United States in the 1940s allowed teenagers the social and economic space to define themselves as a distinct group. The term teenager came into use in the 1940s, with its first published use attributed to a 1941 Popular Science magazine article. Seventeen magazine, which most teenage girls for the last fifty years have claimed as the publication that speaks to them and reflects their tastes and habits, emerged on the national scene in 1944. Teenagers had access in the 1940s to unprecedented income as the wartime mobilization created betterpaying, skilled positions, which left more marginal positions available for teenagers. New sources of income such as babysitting also gave teenagers the disposable income that they had not had access to during the Great Depression. By 1945, according to one writer’s estimation, about 3 million young people had full- or part-time work during the school year. The availability of disposable income that teenagers had to spend made them attractive to cosmetic companies. Avon, for example, began advising their representatives to talk to the “daughter in the house” in their weekly household calls. Cosmetic companies like Noxema created lines of cosmetics specifically designed for teenage girls, such as Cover Girl. The success of Cover Girl was

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astounding: annual sales climbed from $1 million to $3 million from 1938 to 1944. Clearly, teenage girls were interested in cosmetics that were packaged exclusively with them in mind. The disruption caused by World War II provided young people with more freedom from adult control and more opportunities for sexual experimentation. During the war, the incidence of premarital pregnancy, illegitimacy, and venereal disease rose sharply (Mintz and Kellogg 1988, 166). The changing sexual norms reflected in more independent sexual behavior as well as the use of cosmetics were the subject of debate in the 1940s. The use or nonuse of cosmetics and their potential to create generational conflict revealed the pressures of family, peers, and consumption on teenage girls. Seventeen, the self-proclaimed magazine of the American teenager, sought in the mid-1940s to help teenage girls and their mothers negotiate the issue of cosmetics and how to be a “good girl.” For teenage girls in the 1940s wearing lipstick or rouge may have signaled their own interest in being grownup or at least in being perceived as adult. However, many Americans, particularly those from immigrant groups, still did not accept the “made-up” look. Despite the increased use of cosmetics in the 1940s, the lingering identification of cosmetics with prostitution remained. As the advice book Strictly Confidential warned its teenage readers in 1944, “good judgment in the amount and application of make-up is very important. Many a girl has ruined her chances for popularity and a successful career because she has made her face look like a paint department” (Hustead 1944, 21). “Looking like a paint department”

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meant looking like a prostitute or looking like a “loose” girl. The practice of wearing cosmetics, as this advice manual made clear, was fraught with peril for teenage girls. They were encouraged to look sexually attractive, and makeup was seen as a tool to help them accomplish this. At the same time, wearing too much makeup or perhaps the wrong color or combination of colors could give others the wrong message. Wearing makeup signaled one of the rites of passage for teenage girls into the consumer world in which their mothers, aunts, and sisters maneuvered. But it was a consumer world in which they needed direction. Experts that stood outside the hierarchy of the family more often than not provided advice and guidance. In the 1950s, wearing makeup (at least lipstick and pressed powder) was seen as an essential part of being feminine. On television shows like Father Knows Best, the youngest daughter Kathy, or “Kitten,” sheds her tomboy image on the advice of her sister, who puts makeup on her, urging that “nothing will make a boy sit up and take notice like a little glamour” (Douglas 1994, 37). Actresses Sandra Dee and Debbie Reynolds portrayed adolescent beauty in movies, and the central message of their films was how to secure a boy. The most popular film representative of the 1950s was Marilyn Monroe, whose soft, lisping voice and voluptuous body reflected an image of femininity that was both childlike and sexualized. Monroe’s dyed-blonde hair instructed women and teenage girls alike that beauty required time and products. As Monroe’s popularity soared, so did sales of hair-coloring products. For adolescent girls, cosmetics were now only one part of the equation—they wanted to be

accepted by their peer groups, and popularity often required a certain look. In addition to the use of makeup, adolescent girls increasingly used over-thecounter preparations that promised them relief from one of the most obvious signs of adolescence—acne. With products such as Clearasil, girls were told they could discreetly hide the manifestation of their hormones through a medicated cover-up. In their advertising campaign, “Clearasil Personality of the Month,” girls were introduced in Seventeen to others who had triumphed over pimples and, in doing so, achieved popularity. Avon also jumped on the clear skin bandwagon in the 1950s, offering “Clear-It Shampoo” and “Clear-It Stick” as complete care for troubled skin. A visit to the dermatologist became a rite of passage for many teenage girls whose families could afford the medical expertise offered by such doctors. The expense and time that teenagers devoted to making up continued to rise in the 1950s. The 1960s would challenge many Americans’ consciousness about their beliefs, and for many the superficiality associated with cosmetics and fashion was rejected. The criticism of cosmetics came from many directions. African American civil rights activists rejected the white standard of beauty that had been projected onto African Americans for generations and pointed out that they were not represented in fashion and beauty magazines. Many rejected the hair straighteners and skin bleaches that cosmetic companies (both white and African American owned) had promoted. The “black is beautiful” motto implied both a celebration of African American beauty and difference and a dismissal of white beauty culture.

Cosmetics African Americans were not alone in their criticism of cosmetics and the values they embodied. Feminists who had come of age in the 1940s and 1950s attacked symbols of male domination. In the 1968 protest at the Miss America contest, they threw bras, curlers, false eyelashes, and wigs into a “Freedom Trash Can.” The protesters argued that women were forced to compete for male approval, that the cult of youth promoted by the pageant discriminated against older women, and that there had never been a Miss America who was not white. Cosmetics represented to many feminists the misogyny of a sexist culture that devalued women’s intellect and demanded that women conform to unrealistic standards of manufactured beauty. Adolescent girls of all ages and races were affected by these arguments. The “natural look” was popularized, and many girls gave up wearing makeup entirely. The emergence and incredible popularity of alternative symbols of beauty like folksingers Joan Baez and Mary Travers, who eschewed makeup and curlers, appealed to many adolescents. The cosmetic industry was quick to respond to the larger cultural changes of the 1960s and promoted the natural look, which in advertisers’ eyes was still a manufactured look consisting of long straight hair shaped by Vidal Sassoon, eyes lined with liquid eyeliner, and sheer lip gloss. It may have looked natural, but it still took time and money. By the mid-1970s and 1980s, adolescent girls were exposed to more than one standard of beauty as the civil rights and feminist movements challenged the beauty industry to look beyond the image of the blond, blue-eyed American. Corporate cosmetic companies saw the economic opportunities in further seg-

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mentation of the cosmetic market. Lines of cosmetics designed to appeal to specific ethnic groups were introduced. Adolescents were no longer seen as a small segment of the market. Avon claimed in 1971 that there were 15 million teens in the United States spending $510 million on cosmetics and toiletries. At the turn of the twenty-first-century, American culture offers few rites of passage for teenage girls. But almost every teenage girl, no matter what her ethnic background, remembers her first “makeover,” whether it took place at the mall or at a slumber party. Teens still have to make sense of the complex sexual images that wearing makeup suggests. The 1980s and 1990s exposed Americans to teenage models as young as twelve and thirteen years of age, who with makeup looked like they were thirty. The sexual practices of teens have not been unaffected by this emphasis on appearing grownup as quickly as possible. One expert estimates that “nearly half of all young women ages fifteen to nineteen have had sex, nearly double the rates of 1970” (Pipher 1994, 207–208). Often teenage girls’ sexual experiences are violent because they are sexualized but not provided with protection or guidance as they negotiate their adolescent years. Meanwhile, teens are inundated with cosmetic advertising. A new line of cosmetics introduced in 1999 and called SkinMarket has sprung up in malls in California. SkinMarket is a beauty shop designed for teens, with music videos playing and hundreds of lipsticks, shadows, creams, and glitter for teens to try. Teens are invited to “hang out,” and the atmosphere is low-key. Girls are encouraged to try on products, and salespeople have been instructed to let teens linger, which is frequently not

A young girl watches as her older sister applies makeup. (Shirley Zeiberg)

Cosmetics the experience at major chains’ cosmetic counters. The founders, Tony and Patsy Hirsch, themselves the parents of two teenage girls, believe that makeup is more than an accessory for teen girls. “It’s really about a lifestyle,” Tony Hirsch comments (ApRoberts 2000, G1). The Hirsches are savvy entrepreneurs who recognize that they have tapped into a market that continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. American teenage girls spend an average of $45 a month on cosmetics, more money than they spend on music and entertainment. Historically, the relationship between teenage girls and cosmetics has been complex, as social mores and economic conditions structured their access to cosmetics. Using make-up remains one way in which teens assert their independence and maturity in the twenty-first century. Samantha Yates Francois See also Adolescent Health; Body Image; Clothing; Consumer Culture; Domesticity; Female Sexuality; Hair

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References and Further Reading ApRoberts, Allison. 2000. “About Face.” Sacramento Bee (May 19): G1–G5. Banner, Lois. 1983. American Beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Douglas, Susan. 1994. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books. Hustead, Alice M. 1944. Strictly Confidential (for Young Girls). Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House. Inness, Sherrie A. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. 1988. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press. Peiss, Kathy. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books. Pipher, Mary. 1994. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine Books. Ware, Susan. 1989. Modern American Women: A Documentary History. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.

D Dance Classes

African cultures as a spiritual or religious expression, a way of establishing group identity and difference from others, and an enactment of gender roles. In the New World, slaves and their daughters and sons continued the pattern of learning to dance in community, to music drummed and played by African Americans, marking important events in slave life. Many of the accounts of slave dancing were written by whites and white owners, so they must be used with care. But it seems clear that circle and line dances continued African patterns, as did challenge dances. The ring shout built toward a state of ecstatic feeling in dancers, and possibly trance possession. Masters sometimes feared that gatherings of slaves would fuel insurrection. In New Orleans, for example, the city sought to contain the potential for rebellion by designating an area called Place Congo as the spot for slaves’ dancing. European immigrants also composed a sense of themselves by dancing, using quite different practices. Girls and boys, like their parents, pursued dancing as a formal study in order to gain skill and display their status in social interaction. They practiced the proper ways to enter and exit rooms and to honor others by bowing. They danced formal choreographies for male-female couples, which led two people in symmetrical patterns through defined ballroom spaces. In

Formal instruction sessions on dance have been available in the United States since colonial times, yet they have been only one of several ways in which girls learned about dancing, took part in these physical practices, and transmitted them to others. Commercial dance classes supplied professional training for many girls who sought careers as performers in theater, opera, ballet, and musical comedy productions. Equally important, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, dance classes showed young females ways to be and ways to act in navigating everyday life. The United States has been a land of ongoing immigration, and the different race, class, and ethnic groups to which girls belonged deeply affected the kinds of dancing and dance instruction they could access. With the introduction of film, television, and then digital media in the twentieth century, girls could tap many more resources with which to learn in dancing, or to find instruction in changing movement practices. Mastering Dances in Colonial Times In distinctive ways, enslaved African people and European immigrants to the American colonies used dancing to forge senses of themselves as groups. Dancing figured importantly in many different

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How to dance the minuet: “Dance Manual with Instructions in the Southern Colonies.” (Library of Congress)

Dance Classes the ballroom minuet, the most widely performed of all, they showed their skill in offering and withdrawing their hands from each other. Well-to-do planter families in Anglican southern colonies often employed dancing masters to reside for a period and to offer etiquette and dance instruction to their own and children on neighboring plantations. It was much more common in New England for itinerant dancing masters to travel a circuit each season, teaching classes of girls and boys housed in public spaces, sometimes in homes. Dancing masters might accompany classes on pocket violins as they tutored girls in couple dances and country dances, the latter performed socially in sets where parallel lines of boys and girls wove patterns together. Both these types of dancing could be studied in published period instruction books. At the end of the eighteenth century, the dance practices that American girls pursued were remarkably similar to those of boys. Both sexes aimed to step precisely, to hold the torso upright, and to show a keen musicality. Contact between partners was limited to holding hands. Nineteenth-Century Models and Modes As the new United States crafted a national identity, European models continued to shape dancing by native-born and white immigrant girls, and by some elite groups of free blacks in New Orleans. The minuet and dances by a single couple gave way to group dance formations called quadrilles or cotillions. Girls and boys in groups of six or eight moved to popular piano and violin music in geometric formations, giving and taking hands with their partners and others in the set. In addition, close contact was now possible between male and female

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partners. When a dance called for couples to waltz or polka around the quadrille formation, for example, a boy encircled the girl’s waist with one arm and used his other to extend her arm to the side. In this “round dance position,” popular through the 1950s, boys set the course and girls followed their lead. Dancing thus reinforced the deepening distinctions between female and male sex roles that the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity dictated. The cult of domesticity also emphasized the family as an affective unit and it positioned women as guardians of piety, purity, health, and children. Exercise for girls received new attention, and emerging systems of “physical culture,” as it was called, incorporated numerous elements of gymnastics and dance. Catharine Beecher, author of an influential 1843 book on domestic economy, devoted a substantial section of her 1856 book Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families to physical training exercises that she culled from contemporary systems. Dio Lewis, who lectured on temperance in the 1860s, developed his own gymnastics program for girls, boys, and adults. Lewis’s published books on exercise show that while exercising in neat rows, children frequently moved to live music. Lewis introduced exercises with slender wooden wands to increase the flexibility of the torso, and he added wooden dumbbells to the more traditional metal ones used to build body strength. After the Civil War, Genevieve Stebbins promoted a physical culture system that particularly appealed to elite and middle-class white girls. She extended the earlier voice cultivation and actor-training dimensions of the system by adding breathing techniques to channel the

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These girls dance to choreography inspired by Isadora Duncan in this photograph by Francis Benjamin Johnson. (Library of Congress)

body’s energy and achieve a state of dynamic yet relaxed poise. Stebbins also offered instruction in the drawing room performance form called statue posing. Here girls and adult women embodied tableaux drawn from well-known paintings, for instance, and “melted” from one pose to another like human kaleidoscopes. By the turn of the twentieth century, Stebbins’s teaching reached aspiring performers like Ruthie Dennis (later Ruth St. Denis) and Isadora Duncan. These young women used the system’s aesthetic potential to fashion new dance practices for stage performance. Claiming that their work was “art,” they challenged the low social status traditionally given to profes-

sional female dancers. They also challenged the sexual division of labor that had long excluded females from taking, and from imagining themselves as taking, creative and directorial roles. Those indigenous peoples who survived early contact with Europeans and the attendant disease and warfare had to cope with continued European repression of their culture, including dance. In the Southwest, for example, Spanish Catholic missionaries evangelized among the Pueblo beginning in the sixteenth century. Missionary work at the Tewa Pueblo included attempts to suppress public presentation of masked ritual dances. These dances survived as secret dances, performed by males; only some groups among the Pueblo people offer public performances of them today. Tewa Pueblo dances that continued to be seen publicly involved many members of the community as they marked cycles connected to the agriculture and hunting practices that traditionally sustained Tewa living. Young girls learned to dance by following their female relatives in the line of dancing, learning by bodily repetition the values and aesthetics that dancing enacted. Girls and boys, adults and parents, young and old gathered together in a central plaza of the pueblo to move together for long periods of time across one day. They strived to dance in unison, signaling the importance of the community. Over time, Catholic and indigenous religious beliefs came to coexist, and today Tewa Pueblo dances include Spanish-influenced matachines dances and those honoring Catholic patron saints. But the Tewa maintained their own dances, too, and these provided bodily means for learning the Tewa way of being in the world, for addressing and mocking outside events and people, and for com-

Dance Classes muning with the ancestors and the gods. In another part of the country, the Ghost Dance religion offered a form of resistance for Native American people in which girls and boys sometimes joined adults. From the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government removed Native American people from southern and western territories that whites coveted. By the 1870s and 1880s, U.S. military engagement with indigenous people constituted real warfare. Spreading from the Paiutes to the Plains Indians, the Ghost Dance emerged as a new, rehabilitative movement practice in native cultures that traditionally incorporated dance in their rituals. Dancing and singing for long stretches in circular formation surrounding a central tree or pole, falling into trance states to receive dream visions, young and older practitioners thought the Ghost Dance would restore Native American people to a right relationship with their religious beliefs. They thought their dancing would reverse recent bad experiences, even rid them of the white invaders. The U.S. military prohibited the Ghost Dance because Native American people frequently left reservations to dance it, and because whites feared that Ghost Dance gatherings would result in armed uprising. At the pitch of white anxiety and efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance, the massacre of Native American people at Wounded Knee in 1890 killed about 300 girls, boys, women, and warriors. Sharing the Dance in the Twentieth Century The settlement house movement in cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia placed middle-class men and women in residence among new central and eastern European immigrants. Living

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in dense urban ghettos, settlement workers tried to forge neighborly relations with newcomer children, working girls and boys, mothers of families, and laboring fathers. Each settlement house developed its own curriculum and gave scope to adventurous settlers, many of whom introduced gymnasium work, Delsarte classes, aesthetic gymnastics, folk dance, and historical dance classes. Daily activities scheduled specific instructors to work with different age groups; girls were usually separated from boys. The social dancing classes that settlements offered to adolescents and young adults played a part in the dance hall reform movement, in which settlement workers, with others, tried to remove liquor from public dance venues and endeavored to stave off embodiments introduced with new “animal” dances like the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear that the organizers found vulgar. As they had at settlements, female teachers provided the impetus for a program of after-school folk dancing inaugurated for New York City schoolgirls in 1905. A woman-run voluntary society, the Girls’ Branch of the Public Schools Athletics League (PSAL), created and supported the program that by 1913 involved 26,000 schoolgirls from all five boroughs. In contrast with PSAL boys’ athletics, girls’ folk dancing limited competition to intraschool contests and emphasized group dances rather than individual accomplishment. Most of the dances taught were from western and northern Europe and did not complement the ethnicity of many immigrant girls on the Lower East Side who participated so avidly. Each year’s work was celebrated publicly in Central Park and other boroughs. Newspaper photographs circulated widely the images of these “park

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fetes,” making explicit the links between nature, noncompetitive movement, play, and an ideal femininity. In several ways, this huge folk dance enterprise called into question issues of gender, immigration, and ethnicity. Settlement houses and Girls’ Branch dancing classes set themselves against commercial dancing of two kinds: the orientalist fare that Ruth St. Denis’s choreography helped popularize and the sensual, spectacular dancing of Broadway revues and nightclub shows. The dancing displayed in these latter contexts proved very attractive indeed to adolescent girls and young women, and their interest fed a new dance instruction industry. Ned Wayburn started a New York City school for ambitious dancers that trained girls in tap and stepping, acrobatics, ballet, musical comedy, and specialty dance styles. Although some Wayburn-trained working girls joined professional chorus lines, the elite and middle-class students of Irene and Vernon Castle aimed to refine their movement skills for ballroom dancing in social settings. Also cultivating middle class consumers, Russian émigré teacher Louis Chalif sold dance routines through a lively mail-order publication business in the early 1900s. Girls and their mothers could study Greek and aesthetic dancing, classical ballet, ballroom dances, and national forms by following instructions and consulting photographs in Chalif’s book, or they could purchase classes at his Manhattan studio. Surging interest in classical ballet and modern dance added vibrant elements to American teaching and performance culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The School of American Ballet has been one of the most long-lived training schools in the country. Launched in 1934, it nurtured dancers for new companies formed by

George Balanchine between his arrival from Europe in 1933 and the 1948 success of the enterprise Ballet Society, which became the New York City Ballet (NYCB). For girls and boys as for adults, ballet classes followed a time-honored sequence: students first exercised holding a wall-mounted barre for balance, warming up arms, legs, and torsos. Then they moved to the center of the floor where they repeated fundamental exercises, without support. Next came sequences for jumping, turning, and leaping. As they entered puberty, girls added classes in toe work. Still other classes in partnering taught the gendered division of labor that had reigned since the 1820s, in which boys physically supported girls in their performance of balances and turns on one leg, and soaring lifts into the air. The publication of several dance book series oriented to young females reveals the strong attraction ballet has held for girls since the 1940s and 1950s. Thalia Mara’s First Book of Ballet, Second Book of Ballet, and Third Book of Ballet as well as On Your Toes provided many illustrations and simply worded instructions for essential exercises. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, Dancing Shoes, and Theatre Shoes novelized the life and training experiences of plucky young British girls entering these professions. Men still filled most choreographic and directorial roles in ballet, but American women figured prominently in establishing the new genre of modern dance. Doris Humphrey began her dance training as a girl at the Francis Parker School in Chicago and then with Mary Wood Hinman, who taught at the Hull House settlement and also ran a private studio. Humphrey turned to dance teaching (with her mother as pianist) to support the family when her father lost his job.

Dance Classes She jumped at the chance to study at the Denishawn summer school in Los Angeles, run by Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn. From a wealthier family, Martha Graham also came to the Denishawn School as a late adolescent. Both she and Humphrey danced as featured performers in the Denishawn company before striking out to form their own modern dance companies. Helen Tamiris studied dancing at the Henry Street settlement in New York City and also had some ballet and public school folk dance instruction. She too formed a modern dance company and, like her peers in the new genre, pursued themes for dancing that spoke to their American cultural experience. Ballet instruction everywhere taught similar sequences, but modern dancers generated unique movement styles and taught these materials to their students. Floor work, virtually absent from ballet, was fundamental for many modern dance proponents. These teacher-choreographers produced new talents in the 1930s. The children of immigrants, Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow studied at settlement houses and at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, where Martha Graham taught classes. Sokolow and Maslow went on to make careers as independent choreographers and were especially important in the leftist dance movement between the two world wars. The Neighborhood Playhouse was a leader among commercial schools in teaching dance composition. Whereas studio instruction in ballet and modern dance tended to focus on movement technique, new university dance courses inaugurated choreography as a subject matter for college girls. Although the choreography for much ballet and modern dance claimed to make

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universally understood statements, the training and performance practices for these dance styles were generally racially exclusive through the first half of the twentieth century. The leftist New Dance Group in New York City and Lester Horton’s West Coast Dance Theater company proved early exceptions, and each offered student dancers a broad range of classes. Prior to the 1950s, several generations of African American girls had to pursue racesegregated training. Arthur Mitchell, who broke a color line by rising to principal dancer status at the NYCB during the 1950s, left that company to form a new training school and a new company for African Americans. He founded Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. With Karel Shook he inaugurated a ballet school in Harlem that offers classical training to girls and boys alike and continues to feed dancers to DTH. Katherine Dunham brought extensive anthropological study of Caribbean dance to her Hollywood film, Broadway, and concert choreography. She opened a dance school in east St. Louis that still operates today. Alvin Ailey, first a leading dancer with Horton’s multiracial company, also created a company and training school that featured African Americans. The company and the school have continued in operation since Ailey’s death in 1989, and the school includes dance history classes in its curriculum. Interestingly, in accounts they gave of their childhood ballet classes in Oklahoma and Kansas, Native Americans Maria and Marjorie Tallchief, Rosella Hightower, and Yvonne Chouteau reported no racial barriers to their instruction. They went on to make careers as ballerinas in NYCB, Ballet Theatre, and postDiaghilev Ballets Russes Companies,

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Young women in a dance class in the 1990s. (Shirley Zeiberg)

among others. Chouteau danced on the powwow circuit as a girl in the 1930s. The intertribal powwow circuit has gained visibility, especially since the 1960s, and offers Native Americans occasions to revitalize traditional dances, perform competition and exhibition dances, and bring girls into the dances at early ages. Founded in the 1970s, American Indian Dance Theatre, a concert company, offers Native Americans formal training. Hip-hop dancing has come to be a cross-class, cross-race movement style practiced by young girls and boys, teenagers, and professional performers alike. It was influenced in important ways by break dancing, a street style that

black and Puerto Rican boys and some girls introduced in New York City in the 1980s. Responding to the break in the music played by rap music deejays, break dance strove to invent new moves, new “freeze” poses, and new ways of competing with others through bodily movement. Other African American movements added rich possibilities; for example, popping, in which one body part moved suddenly while other areas remained still, or locking, where the ends of a dancer’s limbs circle and swing, giving the impression that the joints are locked. Combined with break dancing and even moonwalking, they helped form the new hybrid hip-hop, which

Dances Classes infuses the choreography for rock shows and music videos. First winning popularity for its improvisational zest, hip-hop dancing is widely taught today by commercial dance studios in teacher-student formats familiar from ballet and modern dance. At the end of the twentieth century, the touring stage show Riverdance has catalyzed phenomenal interest among girls and boys in Irish step dancing. This evening-length entertainment showcased percussive dancing in a range of different cultures, linking them loosely through history and myths, always connecting sections of the show with hard- and softshoe Irish step dancing. Through television, videotape sales, and also live performance, the steely footwork, intricate rhythmic play, and unusual restraint of upper body movement for boys and girls alike fired a new interest in dancing in the United States. Today eager girls can take Irish dance classes in commercial dance studios, on college campuses, and in summer dance camps, sites that respond to the changing interests of girls while continuing to sustain plural movement practices in the United States. Linda J. Tomko

See also Dances and Dancing References and Further Reading Aldrich, Elizabeth. 1991. From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Beecher, Catharine E. 1856. Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families. New York: Harper and Brothers. Castle, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon. 1914. Modern Dancing. New York: Harper and Brothers. Dunning, Jennifer. 1985. “But First a School”: The First Fifty Years of the

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School of American Ballet. New York: Viking. Emery, Lynne Fauley. 1980. Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970. New York: Dance Horizons. George, Nelson, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski. 1985. Fresh, Hip Hop Don’t Stop. New York: Random House. Gonzalez, Anita. 1998. “Powwow Dancing and Native Rap: American Indian Dance Patronage and the Politics of Spirituality.” Minneapolis, MN: Society of Dance History Scholars Proceedings, 227–233. Heth, Charlotte, ed. 1992. Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, with Starwood Publishing. Lewis, Dio. 1862. The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children. 3d ed. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Livingston, Lili Cockerille. 1997. American Indian Ballerinas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Mara, Thalia. 1955. First Steps in Ballet. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1956. Second Steps in Ballet. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1959. On Your Toes. Reprint 1972. Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons. ———. 1963. Third Steps in Ballet. London: Constable. Mooney, James. 1865; abridged 1976. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page, Ruth. 1984. Class: Notes on Dance Classes around the World 1915–1980. Princeton: Princeton Book Co. Rameau, Pierre. 1725. Le Maître à Danser. Paris. Stebbins, Genevieve. 1902. Delsarte System of Expression. 6th ed. Reprint, 1997. New York: Dance Horizons. Stratyner, Barbara. 1996. Ned Wayburn and the Dance Routine, from Vaudeville to the Ziegfield Follies. Studies in Dance History no. 13. Minneapolis, MN: Society of Dance History Scholars. Streatfeild, Noel. 1937. Ballet Shoes. New York: Random House. ———. 1945. Theatre Shoes. New York: Random House. ———. 1957. Dancing Shoes. New York: Random House.

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Tomko, Linda J. 1999. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. White, Julia C. [Meyna Hahn-a’ae]. 1996. The Pow Wow Trail. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company. Wilson, James. 1998. The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. New York: Grove Press.

Dances and Dancing Throughout the twentieth century, dancing has been a particularly popular pastime for teenage girls in the United States. Around the turn of the century, dancing typically took place in a neighborhood hall or room attached to a saloon and was traditionally tied to community and family events or to raise money for charity. Over the next several decades, these dance venues would remain popular, but increasingly American youth began to organize their own dances apart from the prying eyes of family, and entrepreneurs began building commercial dance halls to capitalize on the growing popularity of dance. By the 1910s and especially by the 1920s, dance halls could be found in small and large towns alike, and there were a number of different types of dancing sites from which to choose, the most notable of which was the dance palace, a larger and much more elaborate and ornately decorated dance hall than previous establishments. At the same time, dancing was experiencing many significant changes. Beginning in the first half of the century and gaining speed after World War II, freestyle dancing, or solo performances, replaced dancing in which couples held hands or touched hands periodically. Both the commercialization of dance and changes in dance style in part explain the popu-

larity of dancing, the former affording young men and women the opportunity to couple up without their parents’ interference and the latter promoting greater individual expression and spontaneity. But for young women in particular, these changes also helped them shape and influence their relations with men on and off the dance floor. The traditional working-class dance was known as the “affair,” a dance sponsored by mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, unions, or political associations, or dancing was linked to community and family events like weddings. In both cases, the dancing reaffirmed community networks and relations: mutual aid and fraternal dances helped raise money for charitable causes, and neighborhood- and community-based dances ensured that certain customs were passed on to the next generation, including the rituals of courtship. Indeed, young women rarely attended these dances alone. Their parents usually accompanied them, or they found an acceptable chaperone, a practice particularly common among emigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Mexico. By the 1890s, working-class youth began to organize their own dances called “rackets.” These “rackets” were generally sponsored by social or pleasure clubs, which typically included anywhere from about a dozen to fifty or more members who were in their mid- to late teens and early twenties. Club members usually met once a week in saloons, settlement houses, rented halls, cigar stores, cafés, or in their own hangouts they set up in the basements of tenement flats to smoke, play cards, gamble, organize athletic contests, and entertain their dates with dances, skits, and other games. Most social clubs also held a semiannual or

Changing styles in the “flapper era,” shown on this 1926 cover of Life magazine, highlighted young women’s new sense of freedom. (Library of Congress)

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annual dance in a neighborhood hall or an uptown hotel, using the money they raised through the sale of tickets and hatcheck fees to pay for club activities, buy uniforms, and outfit and decorate their hangouts. Over the next few decades, dancing would become a veritable craze, and as the demand for dancing increased, so did the number and types of dance halls. By the 1910s, dance palaces joined the neighborhood or saloon halls as entrepreneurs became more ambitious and as the popularity of dancing continued to grow. New York’s Grand Central Palace, which was the first dance palace, opened its doors in 1911, and within ten years entrepreneurs had built five more in New York, the most famous being the Roseland and the Savoy. The Trianon and the Aragon led the pack in Chicago, the Raymor in Boston, and the Hollywood Palladium and the Palomar in Los Angeles. Dance palaces were a more elaborate and conspicuous commercialized attraction than the multiple-purpose hall and saloon and were usually much larger, accommodating anywhere from 500 to 3,000 patrons. The dance palace also attracted young men and women from all walks of life and nationalities, although they appealed more to factory and office workers. Young middle-class men and women preferred the city’s cabarets, which also made their debut in the 1910s and cost more because they included dinner and a floor show along with the opportunity to dance. By the 1920s, couples were dancing at more than a dozen different establishments, including roadhouses, dancing academies, dime-a-dance restaurants, dance pavilions, and taxidance halls where young women worked as hostesses and danced with the young men in attendance for a dime a dance.

The most obvious difference between the commercial dance hall and the traditional “affair” was the absence of parents. The anonymity female adolescents found at dance palaces and similar establishments enabled them to experiment with alcohol and cigarettes and to cultivate intimate relations. Teenage boys and girls were frequently seen closely embracing one another in the balcony or in the chairs and tables surrounding the dance floor. The dance hall had even earned the reputation as the parlor of certain classes because of the numbers of married couples who first met at a dance. Dance hall entrepreneurs and managers even went out of their way to encourage patrons to take advantage of their time away from parents. Dance halls routinely held lucky number contests, raffles, and even special dance nights or dance contests. Dance marathons, although particularly popular during the Depression when large numbers of young men and women had ample free time to attend a contest that might last several months, initially started in the 1920s. Another popular dance was the shadow dance. During the shadow dance, the ceiling lights were turned off, and a spotlight bathed the dancers in colored lights as confetti poured down from above, providing opportunities for more intimate moments in the semidarkness created by the dance. At the same time, dance hall owners were concerned about attracting female clients. Females were often admitted into the dance hall at reduced admission prices, cocktails were available to help make drinking a more acceptable pastime for them, and some dance halls provided what were known as “spielers,” males hired to dance with and entertain any females found sitting alone. Indeed, for female adolescents the

Dances and Dancing dance hall provided one of the few opportunities to smoke, drink, and experiment sexually without their parents’ close supervision. Although young men had their saloons, gambling dens, poolrooms, and countless other institutions, similar hangouts were generally unavailable for young women. The new social dances from the period only reinforced the commercial dance hall’s appeal. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pivoting, spieling, and tough dancing were beginning to replace the traditional waltz and twostep. Pivoting and spieling were simply a fast parody of the waltz in which couples closely embraced one another and engaged in much twisting and twirling. When dancing a waltz, teenage boys and girls did place their hands on each other. But their shoulders were expected to be 3–4 inches apart, and the dancers were not supposed to look directly into their partner’s eyes but over their right shoulder, limiting the contact between dancers and the dance’s sexual expressiveness. The tough dances, also known as animal and rag dances, were even more out of control. Unlike the waltz, in which partners held each other by the hands or around the waist, tough dances celebrated bodily contact. Couples not only stood close together with the young man’s arms around his partner or on her hips, but the dancing had a much more sexually expressive look and feel than previous dances. Unlike the more rigid waltz, tough dances were performed from a crouched position with knees flexed and body bent. Many of these dances, like the turkey trot, bunny hug, and grizzly bear, imitated animal gestures and movements while celebrating improvisation, giving them a swinging motion and a more sensual and sexually expressive look and feel.

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, this form of dancing would continue to grow in popularity. The 1920s saw the rise of the shimmy, the black bottom, and the Charleston. In these dances, partners did not face one another or move around the floor to the beat of the music. These new dances required partners to maintain an arm’s-length distance from each other, either by touching hands or not touching at all because they were busy swinging their arms, swiveling their hips, or shaking their shoulders. By the 1930s, swing music, which came from larger or big bands and produced an ensemble sound, began to replace the smaller jazz combos. Swing was less restrained and less ornate than its jazzy predecessors and more individualistic, a sound that fit well with the Lindy, a dance also known as the “jitterbug.” Like the Charleston and other dances from the 1920s, the Lindy required partners to touch hands or dance apart instead of in an exclusively face-to-face position. In particular, the Lindy featured two innovations: the breakaway or solo, typically reserved for the male, and the “air steps” in which dancers showed off their skill by dancing with their feet off the ground through a number of gymnastic moves. In short, the Lindy was more of a style of dance than an actual dance, characterized by athleticism and acrobatic maneuvers. The dance hall did have its critics, however. Besides the problem of having to deal with intrusive parents, dance hall patrons faced endless rules and regulations. As early as the late nineteenth century, cities and states across the country began to establish ordinances to regulate dancing. Many of these ordinances dealt with the location and physical condition of the hall and its proper ventilation and sanitation. But reformers were particu-

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larly concerned about the dance hall’s link to vice and the unsupervised intermingling of the sexes. In city after city they successfully passed ordinances to restrict the use of alcohol, to prohibit certain dance moves, and to prevent the attendance of youth guilty of “unruly” behavior. The extent to which these ordinances achieved their intended goal varied considerably. But working-class youth generally found ways to circumvent the rules and regulations they faced. Some young women successfully convinced their parents to grant them more control over their personal lives. Others simply resorted to sneaking out of the house after their parents had gone to bed, or they collectively worked with their siblings to conceal their whereabouts. Once inside the dance hall, young men and women frequently made use of “pass out checks” to leave during intermission, either to consume alcohol or to take part in more intimate encounters, or they simply brought alcohol back in with them. Dance hall patrons also took advantage of the dance hall’s dark corners and back rooms to drink or even to dance more sensual steps, effectively allowing them to take advantage of the autonomy dance halls offered despite efforts to regulate their behavior. At the same time, male and female adolescents often had different ideas about leisure and intimacy. A 1910 survey of 1,000 children between the ages of eleven and fourteen found that among girls, nine out of ten knew how to dance, as opposed to only one-third of the boys. As these boys grew older, more of them undoubtedly learned to dance, but many of them either remained ambivalent about dancing or attended dance halls but refused to dance. Part of their

ambivalence reflected young women’s greater skill and ability at dancing. By the second decade of the twentieth century, dance instruction was cheap and accessible. Printed dance lessons were available through the mail, and magazines and newspapers often featured articles on the newest dance fashions. Yet young men recalled that they typically picked up the new steps from a female friend, sister, or sweetheart. In fact, when young men sought out more formal instruction at a dance hall, young women still played an important role as teacher. In some cases, dance halls admitted females free of charge because they needed more female patrons to help teach the males in attendance how to dance. In other cases, dance halls simply hired females who regularly attended to work on certain nights of the week as instructors in exchange for a week’s worth of free passes. By working as an instructor or by simply dancing with a male companion, young women found numerous opportunities to show off their expertise and skills, skills that often set them apart from their male counterparts but that young men coveted because of their value in dating and courtship. Adolescent males, of course, retained the traditional prerogatives of asking for dances and leading their female partners. But these prerogatives did not always protect them from the potential problems they faced from a dance partner who possessed greater skill and ability. The disproportionate numbers of young men in dance halls also helps explain young women’s attraction to dance. Throughout the early twentieth century, there were almost always more males than females at dance halls. The greater numbers of males meant that all

Dances and Dancing of them faced the prospect of being passed over for dances. Indeed, competition for dances was so difficult that some claimed that they had to know someone before being assured of getting a dance, or that they avoided dancing on the weekends when there were greater numbers of males in attendance. A young woman could thus pick and choose until she found an appropriate dance partner or companion for the evening. If a suitable male partner was unavailable or if she preferred, she could simply dance with a female friend, further allowing her to define what she considered acceptable behavior on and off the dance floor as well as the opportunity to challenge the idea that her parents should closely supervise her social life. Working women did, of course, confront a number of problems. Some young men refused to dance, claiming that they might be awkward or that they never took the time to learn. Male youth who had failed to find a dance partner sometimes formed what were known as “stag lines” at the entrance to the dance floor to harass any unescorted women as they left the floor. And paying for commercial leisure was a particularly chronic problem for young women. In the 1920s, women’s wages averaged only 57 percent of men’s, and parents generally expected them to turn over what little they made, even though their brothers kept up to half or only paid for room and board. To make up for their low wages, young women often made do without many essential items. They often skipped meals, sewed and washed their own clothes, boarded with other single women, and depended upon their male companions to help pay for commercial leisure. In short, since young women often lacked the means to pay for their

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nights out, they participated in a system known as treating in which they traded sexual favors that ranged from a simple goodnight kiss to more intimate sexual encounters for access to commercial leisure. The problem with the system of treating was that it was an exchange that often failed to meet the expectations of both participants. Adolescent males typically expected females to reciprocate for the money they spent or to “come across” and agree to some sort of intimacy. Although some young women, known as “charity girls,” embraced this system of treating more thoroughly than others, most young women feared that the system of treating ensured their dependence on men and threatened to taint their reputations. The dilemma compelled some to attend only chaperoned dances or to try and find ways to accept treats without having to “come across.” The most common way was to attend the dance hall with a female friend. Attending with a friend guaranteed companionship for the evening and helped protect young women from unwanted sexual advances. Other young women watched the amount of alcohol they consumed, feigned illness, accepted offers to dance from more than one partner, or looked for the appropriate moment to end a date by slipping away unexpectedly. These strategies only seemed to exacerbate the frustration of male youth. But they also challenged the system of treating upon which young men relied to gain sexual favors. Treating allowed young women to balance the demands their male companions made with their attraction to dancing and the dance hall. Throughout the post–World War II period, social dancing experienced many

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major changes with the rise of rock and roll dance. Often connected to names like Fats Domino, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley, rock and roll was a derivation of the blues characterized by a pounding beat, a simplicity of form, and the newly developed electric guitar, which made the beat louder and stronger than ever before. Rock and roll’s use of repeated phrases along with hard and grinding percussion and a driving beat gave rise to dances that emphasized swiveling and thrusting hips, especially after Presley took the stage. Rock and roll dances like the jet, the locomotion, and the bop still required partners, but they frequently lost contact. With the rise of the twist in 1960, partners became nearly obsolete. Popularized by Chubby Checker on American Bandstand, the twist was akin to toweling oneself after a bath while grinding out a cigarette with one’s toes. Soon to follow were dozens of hipswiveling dances know as “mimic” dances such as the jerk, which required dancers to snap their body, or the shake, which required the body to shimmy. Like the twist, these dances were performed solo. Dancers independently gyrated across the floor, often without acknowledging other dancers. In fact, dancers did not even need to face their so-called partners or to worry about keeping in step. By 1967, the last of the more famous rock dances, the funky Broadway, was waning in popularity, and there was little to replace it. Young Americans were beginning to favor a heavier rock and roll sound, with the rise of bands like Led Zeppelin and stars like Jimi Hendrix. It was more difficult to dance to this brand of rock and roll, and dancing was rarely seen at the concerts these bands staged. The male and female youth in attendance typically preferred to “freak out”

or “trip out,” often while vibrating their spines or contracting their torsos and generally under the influence of drugs or alcohol—that is, until the rise of disco. Disco, which is simply music that is reproduced “on disk” and not performed, can be traced to the late 1960s, when disk jockeys in primarily gay and black clubs began splicing together faster soul songs to produce a continuous dance mix that provided a predictable rhythm and an irresistible beat. For about a decade, disco was confined to larger cities until the release of Saturday Night Fever (1977). After its release, disco became a national craze, and discotheques began to replace café jukeboxes in popularity. At discotheques across the country, freestyle dance typically dominated the dance scene. But some of the more popular dances like the hustle encouraged having partners, and group or line dances were not uncommon. The bus stop, a line dance with participants dancing singly but facing in the same direction, was particularly popular. Responses to freestyle and group dances varied considerably. Many critics decried the rise of these new dances and the supremacy of the solo performance. A single dancer was no longer part of a community of couples. Instead, he or she spent time on the floor alone; males and females rarely touched one another; and couples rarely moved from one spot. To make matters worse, critics charged that there was no way to differentiate between the males and the females. They moved around, or danced, in the same monotonous manner, and they even looked the same in dance, dress, and style, often donning the same bracelets, clothes, and hairstyles. Indeed, by the 1960s male youth had abandoned their barbershops and crew cuts for longer locks, or what became known as

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Salt-N-Pepa, a hip-hop rap group, performs at Woodstock II. (Neal Preston/Corbis, 1994)

“Jesus hair.” At the same time, both males and females found that the rise of freestyle dance offered certain advantages. Both sexes still faced the problem of finding partners, but with freestyle there was no need to synchronize steps and no need even to practice with a partner because there was no planned-out next step or variation. In short, the freestyle rock and roll and disco dances paled by comparison to the pre–World War II Lindy, which required not only skill and timing but also strength. All that the social dances of the post–World War II period required was that dancers keep up with the beat. In fact, by the late 1960s and 1970s, youth were attracted to nightclubs and discotheques as much for the drugs, alcohol, and sex as they were to the dancing.

Studio 54, a discotheque in Manhattan, became notorious for the conspicuous culture of drugs and sex both on and off the dance floor. In addition, the continued popularity of communal dances or line dances meant that neither female nor male youth had to have a partner, a particularly attractive feature for females. Although males may have always had problems finding partners, female youth have typically been expected to wait patiently for an offer to dance. Moreover, not only did they find that freestyle dancing promoted expressiveness and individuality, but they could show off their dancing skills without the problem of having to deal with a partner of inferior skills and ability. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, dancing would remain particu-

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larly popular among women, and group and freestyle dances would continue to profoundly shape the dance scene. In the 1980s and 1990s, line dancing led to a renewed popularity for country and western bars because of the ease with which dancers could pick up the steps, and raves featured trance dancing, or what can be described as dancing with an emphasis on spinal vibrations or torso and pelvic contractions reminiscent of the “tripping out” of the late 1960s. But whether young women actually held their partner’s hand when they danced meant little if they could not look the part, with fashionable dress and hairstyle, and take part in the culture of consumption surrounding dance, a problem that has plagued young women throughout the twentieth century. Since World War II, women’s work opportunities have expanded. Yet during this time, poverty also disproportionately affected women and children. By the 1980s, women constituted two-thirds of the adults who fit into the federal definition of poverty, and even when women earned more significant incomes, they made about 70 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned doing comparable work (Ehrenreich 1983, 172; Moberg 2001, 24–26). Throughout the twentieth century, young women have used dance to embrace the physical and sensual, to find potential partners and spouses, and to challenge conventional gender norms. But dancing still remained embedded in the larger world in which women lived, affecting their experiences with dance culture and their access to it. Randy D. McBee

See also Clothing; Consumer Culture; Dance Classes; Punk Rock

References and Further Reading Buckman, Peter. 1978. Let’s Dance: Social, Ballroom and Folk Dancing. New York: Paddington Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1983. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor Press. Erenberg, Lewis. 1981. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, Carol. 1994. Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McBee, Randy D. 2000. Dance Hall Days: Leisure and Intimacy among WorkingClass Immigrants in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Moberg, David. 2001. “Bridging the Gap: Why Women Still Don’t Get Equal Pay.” In These Times (January 8): 24–26. Nasaw, David. 1993. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic Books. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wagner, Ann. 1997. Adversaries of Dance: From the Puritans to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dating and Courtship Dating is a ritual of sexual interaction and, unlike courtship, may or may not lead to marriage. Courting in early America implied a commitment between two people and included traditions such as letter writing. Although Victorians preferred the act of courting, dating and petting occurred first in the 1920s with the advent of the automobile. The World War II era introduced the concept of “going steady,” and a couple who was thinking of marriage became “pinned.” Since the 1970s, the words courtship and dating have been replaced by hooking up and hanging out, after college campuses

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Popping the Question, a lithograph showing the old-fashioned tradition of the formal marriage proposal. (Library of Congress, 1846)

dropped curfews and allowed coed dormitories. The earliest forms of courtship in America were practiced by Native Americans. For example, courtship practice among the Iroquois was liberal compared to Christian standards, and out-of-wedlock births were numerous and accepted. Young Iroquois women and men experimented freely with physical contact and spent time together without a chaperone. Since Iroquois society was matrilineal and all the family wealth passed through daughters, matrons took full responsibility for approval of marriage unions. Divorce was common, easily attained, and without stigma (Demos 1995). In stark contrast to the courtship of the Iroquois, seventeenth-century colonists

in New England practiced full authority over courting youth. A New England Puritan law gave parents “the care and power . . . for disposing their Children in Marriage” (Rothman 1984, 26). The patriarchal order of New England families determined that fathers chose spouses for their sons and daughters. “Bundling,” or sleeping together fully clothed, was nevertheless a common practice during this period but was reserved only for the very serious suitor. This ritual, as Ellen K. Rothman explains, gave daughters a power rarely allowed in the division of the sexes. It was the young woman who permitted or denied a suitor the access to the bundling bed, and it was a favor granted only to special lovers. By the end of the colonial period, youth had already come

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to expect autonomy from parents in the matters of courtship as the concept of romantic love emerged and Americans replaced communal values with individual values. Courtship among the new middle class in the nineteenth-century became more rigid as parents took a protective roll in guiding young people in the ways of love. A young suitor presented a “calling card” at the home of a young lady, who would either “receive” him or turn him away. The system of “calling” provided young women numerous opportunities to meet young men without breaking strict Victorian courting rules. Cards could be exchanged between young people of both sexes, although unmarried women often printed their name beneath that of their mother. Sanctioned activities for a Victorian courtship included playing the piano, singing, talking, attending outdoor events, and by the end of the century, biking and hiking. Socially acceptable Victorian courtship rituals were included in etiquette books and in periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book by the 1890s. Flirting was accepted as a way for a young girl to exhibit her grace and availability to prospective suitors. Sixteen was the recommended age for a young lady to begin to keep company with young men, and young couples attended social functions with young married friends as chaperones. Acceptable leisure activities for couples included sitting alone in the parlor, with other couples, or sitting together and playing piano duets; one important rule was that a lady should never take a man’s arm unless he offered it (Green 1983). Enslaved African Americans in the plantation South courted on Sundays, during church services, and on walks in

the woods. On Sunday evenings, courting couples would join family members in singing, dancing, and reciting poetry. Young courting couples at parties played kissing games, including fruit in the basket and fishing. Wilma King explains, “Young slaves’ courting manners were ritualistic and stylized” (1997, 61). Girls used coquetry and cosmetics made of dried berries to secure the heart of a suitor. Sometimes masters who sold one partner broke apart courtships and marriages. Slave families nevertheless worked hard to preserve family unity. At the turn of the twentieth century, working-class girls in urban areas spent nights and weekends indulging in commercial amusement with young men. In Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss demonstrates that Coney Island promoted romance with penny arcade machines that measured the ardor of a couple’s kiss. Rides, such as the Canals of Venice and the Tunnel of Love, provided enough privacy to steal a hug or a kiss. Working-class courting culture shaped middle-class practices in the 1920s. The term dating was used first on college campuses, and it differed from courting in that it allowed a paired relationship without a commitment to marriage. With the advent of the automobile, dating moved from long walks and porch swings to the backseats of cars. The automobile also transformed courting into an act of consumption that included spending money on movies, restaurants, and dance halls (Bailey 1988). In her book The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s, Paula S. Fass explains that young couples isolated from parental supervision invented

Dating and Courtship ways of staying within acceptable sexual boundaries while at the same time expanding horizons: “The young, reared in a moral standard in which all sex was taboo, redefined that standard according to their own needs and laid the basis for change in the standard itself” (Fass 1977, 261). College youth of the 1920s discovered that “love is erotic,” laying the foundation for the dating ritual of “petting.” “Petting” was the exploratory sexual activity of kissing, hugging, or touching. This activity evoked criticism from youths’ elders, who voiced concerns about deteriorating moral standards. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the United States into calamity and changed the structure of dating once again. Young people waited to marry because of financial insecurity. In this climate, dating became more competitive, but a couple considering marriage could eliminate competition by becoming “pinned.” The pin came from the young man’s achievements in academics or sports and served to bond the couple in a premarital agreement to date each other exclusively. Girls were expected to “rate” in order to “get a date” on college campuses. Getting “pinned” moved to a more secure arrangement known as “going steady” in the 1950s. The young man offered his class ring, and the couple attended school proms that imitated the wedding ceremony. For such occasions, the young women wore an expensive gown, accessorized with pearls, gloves, and a bouquet of flowers. At this time, the average girl married at the age of eighteen or nineteen (Bailey 1988). Shaped by the rise of feminism and the sexual revolution, dating in the 1960s led young middle-class couples to experi-

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ment with new sexual boundaries. The invention of the birth control pill revolutionized sexual freedom for women, and “free love” became a model for young couples protesting the values of their parents’ generation. Marketed to eight and a half million women by 1968, the Pill changed the meaning and experience of sex for middle-class Americans (Bailey 1999). Although marriage was still a goal, dating college students often lived together. The term dating was replaced with hanging together and shacking up. College campuses dropped curfews and allowed coed dormitories, and some campus clinics distributed birth control. By the 1970s and 1980s, older dating practices became obsolete as women gained economic, political, and social independence. The wide availability of birth control and the legalization of abortion in 1973 enabled women to postpone marriage and openly choose a single lifestyle or a same-sex mate. Young people attended dance clubs known as discos that featured recorded dance music, disc jockeys, alcohol, and drugs. The “courting manners” that governed the earlier “rules of dating” were disregarded as both genders became confident enough to explore new frontiers. Many Asian immigrants with traditional patriarchal values were ill at ease with American dating practices. Forbidden from dating casually, Vietnamese young women bound to old world ideas of arranged marriages felt obligated to conform to family practices. Iranians and Jordanians often chose to marry someone from the same nationality after a courtship that followed a strict code of conduct reflecting religious and ethnic traditions. Parents reserved the right to interfere in courtships, and at times

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arrangements were made between supervising fathers. By the late 1980s, issues of public health would change the face of dating for all young couples in the United States. The rise in sexually transmitted diseases and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) led to a public health campaign for “safe sex” that curtailed “free love.” Condoms were passed out on the streets to young people by health departments in a campaign to promote safe sex. Young couples found ways to express their affection for each other in nonsexual ways such as cybersex, the sexually titillating Internet communication on computers. A casual way of developing a paired relationship arose by the 1990s, in which young people met in public places like restaurants, theaters, and parks to get to know a potential partner. Today, urged by experts, cautious baby-boomer parents of teenage girls set strict guidelines for dating, such as age limits and dress codes. Increasingly, couples engage in premarital coitus only after passing a sexually transmitted disease test. Rita Papini See also Acquaintance Rape; Birth Control; Domesticity; Female Sexuality; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Bailey, Beth L. 1988. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in TwentiethCentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1999. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Demos, John. 1995. The Tried and the True: Native American Women Confronting Colonization. New York: Oxford University Press. Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Green, Harvey. 1983. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books. Jones, Jacqueline. 1986. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books. King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Larkin, Jack. 1988. The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790–1840. New York: Harper and Row. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Rothman, Ellen K. 1984. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books.

Daughters and Fathers The father-daughter relationship has undergone many transformations since the colonial period and has played a major role in defining the relationship of girls to men and to family life overall in American culture. Of the Ten Commandments, the one that carried the greatest weight among the Puritans, apart from the first, was the fifth: “Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land.” For Puritan girls, the weight of the fifth commandment was reflected in both the seriousness and subordination that inhered in their relationship with their fathers. For fathers, the command was not only at the center of their family life but of the political, religious, and social organization as it was enacted by men in seventeenthand early-eighteenth-century New England. A man’s authority in the world at large was exercised through his role as the head of a household, and all political power flowed from and through men’s

Daughters and Fathers responsibility for enforcing sanctified— or at the very least civil—behavior in their own homes. Within such a political and social framework, fatherhood held a kind of significance in the day-to-day lives of men and girls that was quite unlike that of the modern period. Over the course of American history, the social meaning and formal obligations of the father-daughter relationship have reflected and played a role in larger social, economic, and political developments. And as conceptions about the father-daughter relationship have changed over time, they have transformed the emotional landscape in which successive generations of Americans have grown up and raised families. Puritan fathers were responsible for teaching all their children reading and writing and instructing them in religion, including teaching them their catechism and exposing them to sermons. Their roles as teachers, however, did not override fathers’ investment in nurturing their infant children, both boys and girls. Fathers held their daughters at baptism, kept meticulous diaries chronicling their growth and development, and wrote to friends asking them advice about all manner of infant care. Fathers also referred to the care of their daughters in terms that reflected their sense of mutuality with their wives, often making statements such as “today we began to wean ye child” (Wilson 1999, 123). As girls and boys matured, mothers took over their daughters’ care in order to teach them household skills, such as spinning, soap making, and cooking, and fathers oversaw sons’ work. Sometimes girls would be “put out” to a neighboring household to learn housewifery under the guidance of another family. The widespread practice of putting out

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children between the ages of eleven and sixteen is not completely understood, but it has been argued that Puritans did so because they felt that they could not trust themselves not to spoil their own children by too great affection and that children learned better manners when brought up in a home other than that of their parents. Puritan fathers were also afraid of bestowing such an immoderate love upon their children that it would displace God in their hearts. Frequently, when children died young, Puritan fathers believed it was because “the Lord doth strike his people in that child they take too much affection in.” Though fathers ultimately spent more time with their sons, there is no evidence that they cared more for sons than for daughters, and there is evidence— from letters and diaries—that fathers mourned the loss of a daughter in terms equal to those of a son. One of the most important forms of economic and social power that Puritan fathers held over their daughters was that of dictating the terms of marriage, but fathers had rather less control in this arena than is popularly believed. The laws of New England provided that no man could court “the affections of any Maid” without the express consent of her parents. However, a daughter could decline to marry any suitor she believed would not make a good match; hence fathers had more control over when girls married than to whom. The most important role they played was in the negotiation of the terms of the marriage. On average, a girl’s dowry consisted of about half the amount given to the marriage by the boy’s parents, usually in the form of household furnishings and other movable objects. However, this basic formula left a great deal of room for bargaining,

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and a father often bickered with the boy’s parents until he (and his wife) were assured that the settlement would provide for their daughter’s needs. When the bargaining was satisfactorily completed, the financial agreement was recorded in a legal contract, and consent to marriage was given. And at this point, under normal circumstances, a father’s responsibility for his daughter ended. Traditionally, one of the important parental responsibilities involving girls has been that of sexual surveillance. Girls were to remain chaste until marriage, and it was the parents’ duty to keep a firm eye on their daughters’ sexual behavior. An unwanted pregnancy or gossip about a daughter’s liaison could ruin the reputation not only of a young woman but of her entire family as well. Officially, fathers (as well as town magistrates) were charged with both protecting their daughters against and ultimately passing judgment on sexual transgressions, including “fornication” and adultery. In practice, however, sexual surveillance was conducted by mothers and older women in the community during the colonial period. When a girl got into some kind of trouble with a man, she usually turned to her mother or an older woman. Moreover, older women took the most interest in such cases and thus acted as advisers, counselors, and even judges, deciding when magistrates should be appealed to and when a husband or father should (or should not) be informed about a situation involving sexual transgressions, harassment, or rape. Until an older woman or mother had made up her mind—that is, until the women of a community had decided to act—neither fathers nor magistrates were typically brought into the picture.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the requirements of fatherhood, as well as attitudes toward childhood and maturation, underwent a transformation in the northern United States. As an aspect of life increasingly separate from the world of work, the domestic realm became a central preoccupation among the northern middle class: a place where nurturance and love would provide a respite from the competitive values of the marketplace and the anonymity of the industrializing city. Within this context, the center of power in the household within Protestant, native-born families shifted from the authoritative father to the loving mother; the subordination of the entire household—including mothers, children, and domestics—to the rule of fathers declined. Fathers remained the “head” of a family more in title than in practice. As households produced less and men began to move into wage work outside the home, mothers concentrated on raising children and tending to family concerns. Fathers spent less time with their daughters than they once had, religious instruction fell to mothers and education to schools, and as a result the relationships between fathers and daughters became somewhat more distant. In the antebellum rural South, more traditional patriarchal family settings remained in place, and the institution of fatherhood underwent less change among whites of both the planter elite and the small-time farming community. Enslaved fathers had no legal control over their daughters, and the legacy of this fact for the African American family has been hotly debated by historians and social commentators. However, there is a great deal of evidence supporting the perception that enslaved fathers did the best they could to support their families and

Daughters and Fathers that daughters often formed close bonds with their fathers and viewed them as providers and protectors. Louisa Adams of North Carolina recalled her father’s efforts with pride: “My old daddy partly raised his chilluns on game. He caught rabbits, coons an possums. He would work all day and hunt at night” (Griswold 1993, 21). In the period just after emancipation in 1863, the proportion of two-parent black households in the antebellum South was never below 65 percent, and in urban areas it was closer to 80 percent. There is clear evidence that, beginning in the late eighteenth century in both the North and the South, fathers among the middle and upper classes began to exert less and less control over their daughters’ marriages, and that by the early 1800s, young women and men courted without the express permission of parents. However, a father’s blessing, if not his formal approval, was generally sought upon entering into an engagement. As in the colonial period, fathers, even though they may have been appealed to in the event of an engagement, seem to have been less concerned with their daughters’ sexual behavior than their mothers were. Indeed, there is evidence that many fathers remained quite aloof from the unfolding drama of courtship—leaving their girls unchaperoned when it suited them and generally paying little attention to public perceptions or rectitude—much to the frustration of many mothers. Nonetheless, letters and diaries from the nineteenth century show that many daughters maintained close and loving relationships with their fathers. Daughters sought their fathers’ advice, held their opinion in high esteem, and clearly wanted to please them. It is also perhaps worth noting that the two most famous

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women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—had very close relationships with their fathers. In Anthony’s case, her Quaker father pulled her out of public school because the teacher would not instruct her in long division along with the boys; he eventually found her a private school that would give her the full education she needed to become a schoolteacher and, eventually, a leader in the cause for woman suffrage. Stanton adored her father—however, it was in large part her father’s frequently expressed regret that she had not been a boy that inspired her to try to achieve all that a boy could early in life. Indeed, her father’s disappointment in her sex helped fuel her lifelong driving desire to give women the chance to live up to their human potential on equal footing with men. Meanwhile, among many immigrant groups—particularly Jews and Italians— fathers continued to hold a place in the family much more akin to the lateeighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century models. The reasons for this were several. In part, fathers from the old world simply maintained patriarchal customs in the new world that had undergone little change in Europe. But some immigrant fathers also felt threatened by their daughters’ superior English and ability to adapt to American culture, while they remained cut off from their own cultural moorings. Some resorted to exaggerated displays of male authority or became authoritarian figures, demanding and harsh in their judgments. Many immigrant daughters deferred to fathers in all matters, delivered all wages to them, and generally followed their strictures in religious and daily life. In some Jewish communities, the old world practice of

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fathers arranging marriages for their daughters continued well into the twentieth century. With the elevation of the maternal role among the native-born middle classes and the increasing geographical distance between the workplace and home, the father became “almost entirely a Sunday institution” by the end of the nineteenth century, according to Harper’s Bazaar (Pleck 1987, 88). Furthermore, as the middle class began to embrace higher expectations about the amenities of home life, the pursuit of leisure activities, and the responsibilities of providing access to higher education for their children, paternal breadwinning became an even more central factor in family life. According to several studies, the responsibility of providing for the family preoccupied men, and day-to-day interaction with daughters, even interest, seems to have waned. However, just after the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class attitudes toward domesticity underwent yet another transformation. Men began to be encouraged to spend less time at fraternal clubs and all-male enclaves such as saloons and more time with their children. Nevertheless, calls for paternal involvement in childrearing at this time were explicitly geared toward involving fathers in raising boys: psychologists, sociologists, and a whole host of new family experts called for a “retoughening” of American boyhood in the face of the feminizing influence of mothers. Shared activities between fathers and sons—fishing, sports, or building model ships—would ensure the development of boys into “manly” men. At the turn of the century, the relationship between fathers and daughters was perhaps less valued and commented upon than at any other time in U.S. history.

Social interest in the father-daughter relationship reemerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, when sociologists and psychologists began to link fatherly involvement to healthy personality development among girls. Experts claimed that a daughter learned about the “world of men” from her father and that interaction with him led to self-confidence and a better understanding of her own gender identity. Companionship between father and daughter, it was also alleged, would help a girl to pick out the “right kind of man” for a husband. Much like prescriptions for fatherly involvement prevalent at the turn of the century, images of father-daughter companionship in the 1920s and 1930s centered on leisure activities: articles from Parents Magazine show fathers and daughters playing tennis together and working on domestic projects. The notion that fathers should act as sex-role models for their daughters, limited in the 1920s and 1930s to academic studies and parenting magazines, quickly developed into the common wisdom of the postwar period. The popularization of psychoanalysis after World War II, along with a new self-consciousness about proper sex-role identity in the wake of wartime disruptions, helped to produce a new literature and popular culture virtually obsessed with the interactions—both healthy and unhealthy—between father and daughter. Psychoanalysts offered a diagnosis of “Oedipal conflict” to explain the dramatic rise in female juvenile delinquency, and popular culture quickly embraced this perspective. Films like Rebel without a Cause (1955) and magazine stories about “wayward girls” explained female juvenile delinquency as a problem stemming from a father’s lack of attention to his daughter’s “charms.”

Home Sweet Home, an idealized portrait of Victorian family life. (Library of Congress)

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Underlying these narratives was the admonition to fathers that they remain involved in their daughters’ lives, lest their daughters find themselves unable to work through the Oedipal stage. When a father did not live up to his daughter’s “Oedipal wishes,” the results could be disastrous (Devlin 1998, 104). Cheerful images of father-daughter relationships also abounded, however, particularly in depictions of the wondrous possibilities provided by postwar affluence in the United States. For the most part, compliments and the doling out of cash allowances informed interactions between fathers and daughters in popular culture: fathers were shown gazing in admiration as their daughters donned new prom dresses or displayed their ability to walk gracefully in their first pair of high heels. But paternal authority also took on new forms as girls became an ever-growing segment of the U.S. consumer market. When it came to the final say on whether a girl was old enough to purchase a black dress or brightly colored nail polish, a father’s word was usually final. Hence, as older forms of authority—based on moral instruction and strict ideas about subordination—gave way to a more egalitarian and consumer-oriented family structure, paternal authority did not vanish. Rather, it was replaced by new ideas about the psychological needs of daughters and a new form of paternal surveillance of girls’ sexual maturation, particularly in terms of public display. The popular embrace of social-scientific ideas about the father’s critical role in his daughter’s heterosexual development contributed to a popular understanding of the father-daughter relationship in which a kind of Oedipal eroticism was central. And as the perception of the widespread

potential for father-daughter eroticism grew, scientists, fiction writers, and journalists began to speak and write about father-daughter incest—for the first time—in ways that both reflected and helped produce a popular fascination with the topic. In 1953 Alfred Kinsey published the first widely read statistics on father-daughter incest, reporting that approximately 1 out of every 100 girls had had a sexual experience with her father or another male relative in her youth. Yet Kinsey’s report provoked little commentary. More telling were the stories of stepfather-stepdaughter incest in the two most sensational and best-selling books of the 1950s, Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov and Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious. In these novels, stepfathers were seduced by the very kind of teenage allure that fathers of adolescent girls had been directed to encourage, solicit, and superintend in popular and didactic literature since the end of World War II. In Lolita the lusting stepfather, Humbert Humbert, attempts to rationalize his incestuous relationship with his stepdaughter by referring (in his own mind) to social-scientific and didactic literature that taught fathers to recognize their adolescent daughters’ Oedipal needs. Humbert Humbert represented a twisted and malevolent version of the father-daughter relationship at midcentury. Nevertheless, as a parody of American family life, the book reflected some of the very real paradoxes inherent in popular prescriptions of the father-daughter relationship during this period. In the wake of the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, however, American fatherhood came under new scrutiny. Black women wrote some of the earliest and most powerful narratives about father-daughter incest from

Daughters and Fathers the daughter’s perspective, bringing the horror and pain of sexual abuse into the public eye for the first time. In the early 1980s, the psychologist Judith Herman published the groundbreaking book Father-Daughter Incest, in which she examined the psychological damage caused by early childhood sexual abuse, particularly at the hands of fathers. In the early 1990s writers and activists from all sectors of the political spectrum—including those on the right espousing “family values” and feminists on the left calling for a more equitable distribution of household responsibilities—began to promote the importance of paternal involvement in family life. But a consensus on what the “new fatherhood” should look like has yet to emerge. All comers to the debate agree that American men need to spend more time with their families; the question that divides them is what role fathers should play. Feminists have attempted to remake fatherhood in a less sexualized and more nurturing, loving, and supportive mold, particularly when it comes to raising daughters. Experts on adolescent girls have stressed the importance of paternal investment in girls’ achievements— whether they be in school, sports, or extracurricular activities. Inspired studies show that girls benefit when both fathers and mothers take an interest in their ambitions. The Ms. Foundation has organized the National Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an attempt to institute a historically unprecedented connection between fathers (when, as more often is the case, the father is the one taking his daughter to work) and daughters around the issue of work, providing a one-day apprenticeship of sorts. It also represents an effort to get fathers (as well as moth-

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ers) to think of their daughters as people with careers ahead of them other than homemaking. From the perspective of traditionalists and religious conservatives, the feminist agenda for fathers ignores the reality of biological masculinity. In a simpleminded (and futile) attempt to recast fathers as mothers, men are stripped of roles that, if never as “natural” as motherhood, were once more in line with the innate capacities and God-given responsibilities of men. As a result, men have become confused and the contributions of men to family life have been trivialized, if not rendered obsolete. David Blankhorn, the president of the Institute for American Values, believes that the United States fosters “a culture of fatherlessness”—a fact that represents nothing less than a national social and moral crisis (Blankhorn 1995, 3). Fathers, he claims, need to be reintegrated into the family as men—that is, as “leaders” (202). Taking up his call, an organization called Promise Keepers has instituted regular religious revivals geared toward teaching men to regain their status as “spiritual leaders” in their homes and to provide “love, protection, and biblical values” to their wives and children while respecting the authority of wives within the realm of nurture and the care of infants. It is a vision of fatherhood that harks back to the colonial household while attempting, perhaps, to maintain the emphasis on “the loving mother” that emerged in the nineteenth century. Parties on both sides of the debate believe that nothing less than the future of modern gender roles is at stake in the way in which fathers raise daughters. How fathers interact with daughters is part of a larger question of how men interact with women—how the interests,

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A young girl with her father. (Shirley Zeiberg)

learned behavior, and social responsibilities of men and women are (or are not) brought together. Since the mid-nineteenth century, each successive generation in the United States has redefined the mutual obligations and emotional substance of the father-daughter relationship. Indeed, it is difficult to find a social relationship that has been more malleable than this one, which means that father-daughter relationships will most likely continue to change while individual fathers and daughters attempt to forge bonds in the context of unsettled questions about the nature of gender and the family. Rachel Devlin

See also Acquaintance Rape; Daughters and Mothers; Female Sexuality

References and Further Reading Blankhorn, David. 1995. Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. New York: HarperCollins. Demos, John. 1970. A Little Common Wealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford. Devlin, Rachel. 1998. “Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Paternal Authority.” Pp. 83–106 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press. Gordon, Michael. 1978. The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Griswold, Robert. 1993. Fatherhood in America. New York: Basic Books. Herman, Judith. 1981. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. LaRossa, Ralph. 1997. The Modernization of Fatherhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books. Morgan, Edmund. 1944. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England. 1966. Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pleck, Joseph. 1987. “American Fathering in Historical Perspective.” Pp. 83–97 in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Masculinity. Edited by Michael S. Kimmel. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rothman, Ellen K. 1984. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books. Ryan, Mary P. 1981. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ulrich, Laurel. 1980. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Vintage. Wilson, Lisa. 1999. Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England. New Haven: Yale University Press. www.Promisekeepers.com.

Daughters and Mothers

Daughters and Mothers Stories of the mother-daughter relationship are as varied as the diverse circumstances and idiosyncratic personality traits of each mother-daughter pair. From the infant daughter’s early attachment to and mirroring of her mother to the longing experienced by a motherless daughter, the importance of cultural, social, historical, and personal differences cannot be underestimated. However, no matter what the individual differences may be, the mother-daughter relationship plays a central role in the lives of both daughters and their mothers. This complex relationship engenders intense and conflicted feelings of love, guilt, anger, and fear. It embraces a host of paradoxes: intimacy and distance; harmony and discord; nurturing and neglect; dependence and autonomy; and deep attachment and fierce “matrophobia,” the fear “of becoming one’s mother” (Rich 1976, 235). Above all, this unique relationship gives rise to an unavoidable mixture of love and hate, pleasure and pain. Contemporary women scholars theorize that the mother-daughter relationship goes through a number of distinct phases in which boundaries are negotiated, tested, and realigned. In broad strokes, these phases encompass infancy and childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The first phase begins in early infancy, when a shared biology enhances the mother-infant attachment. The adult woman sees her baby girl as an extension of herself. A special relationship starts to take shape as mother and infant daughter mirror each other. Through this process, the daughter develops a sense of relationship as necessary to the development of self and continues to build on this foundation throughout childhood.

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The next significant phase begins with puberty, among the more difficult periods for mothers and daughters. During this time, mothers struggle to balance their need to keep their daughters safe in a hostile world with their equally compelling desire to give them the freedom and confidence to function fully as adult women. Daughters attempt to balance their need to develop as autonomous individuals with their equally strong need to retain their mother’s love. In adolescence, mother and daughter engage in a more sophisticated version of their early mirroring as the daughter seeks confirmation and validation for her newly emerging self. During the third important phase in the adult mother-daughter relationship, shared experiences of work, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting can function to equalize the relationship and often provide daughters with a deeper understanding of their mother as a woman with her own subjectivity. Daughters may seek out their mothers or look for surrogate mothers to help them negotiate their new roles as mothers or professionals. The same tensions adhere in this phase, as in all the others. Fluid boundaries and conflicting needs continue to play a role throughout the life span of this relationship. Looking through a historical lens, it is clear that cultural conditions and ideologies of a given time or place have influenced the mother-daughter relationship. In colonial America and the early years of the republic (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), some historians have reported close and harmonious mother-daughter relationships. During this time, work and family life coexisted in the largely agricultural economy. Husbands and wives and their children often

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formed economically interdependent family units. Daughters learned household skills from their mothers as they assisted them in a myriad of chores. Although this arrangement offered few alternatives to the traditional female roles of marriage and motherhood, it did foster intimacy, friendship, and companionship between mothers and daughters. In the antebellum North, as the population became more urban and capitalist industrialization took hold, work and family life became increasingly separated. Not only did this arrangement lend a special intensity to the mother-daughter relationship and promote tightly knit female communities, but the prevailing ideology of domesticity also gave mothers a special power over their children’s lives. Middle-class mothers became solely responsible for teaching their children social, moral, and spiritual values. They became the glue that held the family together and provided the intimacy. This model was dependent on the labor of the working-class woman—African American, rural, and immigrant women who worked in factories or were engaged as domestic servants. For them the story was different. Their mother-daughter relationships were influenced by economic hardships and substandard living conditions. At around this same time, educational opportunities began to emerge for middle-class girls, and the potential for mother-daughter tensions grew. These tensions were most likely to occur when daughters sought to fulfill personal ambitions in the face of strong nineteenthcentury expectations for family service. In fact, the Victorian “cult of true womanhood” placed unrealistic expectations on all women. Under this ideology, mothers were required to socialize their

daughters to take on roles that demanded high levels of self-sacrifice, submissiveness, and domesticity. Both mothers and daughters suffered individually and relationally in their efforts to live up to these standards. The turn of the century, roughly 1880– 1920, ushered in the era of the “new woman.” Tensions arose between those who espoused traditional attitudes and those who favored progressive ones. Some women used their traditional roles as moral guardians of the family to extend their influence into the public sphere by way of maternalistic philanthropic and political organizations. Many young, middle-class women made choices vastly different from those of their mothers. The proliferation of new opportunities for women in education and employment became sites of conflict between traditional mothers and progressive daughters who sought new aspirations and modern lifestyles. No longer self-sacrificing, the “new woman” rejected traditional female constraints. Not only was she generally well educated and psychologically and sometimes economically independent, but she was considered unladylike and even vulgar by traditionalists. Many college-educated women chose not to marry. For some mothers and daughters, these generational differences exacerbated tensions, but other mothers took vicarious pleasure in their daughters’ unconventional choices. These mothers adopted the role of mentor and supported their daughters’ aspirations. By the 1920s, women had won the vote. The youthful exuberance of the “roaring twenties” lifestyle opened the way for more widespread acceptance of new behaviors and values. Mothers and daughters revised their attitudes to accommodate modern lifestyles. During

Daughters and Mothers this period, the role of mother declined in prestige and power. Daughters developed new outlets—peer groups gained influence, therapists offered alternatives to motherly advice, and fathers provided support. Under these conditions, the special intensity of the nineteenth-century, middle-class mother-daughter bond began to lessen. Between 1920 and 1960, the stresses of the Great Depression, the impact of two world wars, and the postwar 1950s took their toll on the mother-daughter relationship. During the Depression, forced kinship networks and abandonment due to economic hardships put tremendous strains on family relationships of all kinds. Communication between mothers and daughters became more informal, opening the way for role reversals to occur. In these difficult times, some daughters provided emotional support for their mothers. Under the economic stresses of the Depression, upward mobility for daughters in the form of a rich husband or a profession became an economic necessity and maternal imperative for many. World War II brought about painful family separations and housing shortages. During the war, women left home in large numbers and worked in the war industries. At the same time, a psychological discourse referred to as “momism” presented mothers as overbearing, smothering, and even malevolent and destructive. However, just as the war had opened the door to broader opportunities for women, it was quickly slammed shut. The postwar economic boom of the 1950s brought a return to the “cult of domesticity,” setting the stage for rebellion by daughters. During the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, alienated

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daughters expressed hostility toward their mothers. Mothers were portrayed as victims and tools of the patriarchy, complicit in their role as socializers. Feminist scholars have identified the male-dominated society as the cause of much mother-daughter conflict during this period. By the 1980s, however, scholars looked upon these sentiments as expressions of a largely white, middle-class feminist movement. Research into the diverse lives of real women showed that matrophobia was not a universal experience. Women of color described different mother-daughter experiences, pointing to strong motherdaughter bonds. Many daughters of color respected their mothers for their ability to survive in a hostile and racist world. Extended families and surrogate mothering provided much-needed and welcomed support for working mothers and stay-athome mothers alike. This tradition, called “othermothering,” involves sisters, aunts, and grandmothers as well as other adult women from the community in the care of children. Embracing these ideas and others, postfeminist scholars and psychologists in the 1980s and 1990s returned to the idea that strong, positive mother-daughter relationships exist in the lives of real women. Many mothers serve as effective role models for their daughters and adult women function as mentors to young girls. More importantly, the history of mother-daughter relationships since the birth of the nation shows that irrespective of historical changes in American ideology or social conditions, the mother-daughter bond remains as important and complex as ever. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists have tried to understand and explain the nature of the

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A 1950s housewife tends to her daughter. (Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia)

mother-daughter relationship and its role in the development of gender identity. At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud and his followers advocated a deficiency model of women’s psychological development that defined women as inferior to men. The Victorian-era Freud saw women’s anatomy as their destiny. He believed that by nature women became wives and mothers. Much of the change in the theoretical landscape of women’s psychology and mother-daughter relationships is a reaction to this early deficiency model that blames mothers for the psychological ills of their children. Feminist psychoanalytic theorists and developmental psychologists challenged and revised many Freudian assumptions by turning to women themselves for

their data. Adrienne Rich’s influential book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), exposed motherhood as an institution of the patriarchy in which women were required to live up to male expectations of this role. Rich outlined her own feelings and experiences as a daughter and a mother that were markedly different from the prescribed view, not the least of which was her admission of both love and hate for her own children. In Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Nancy Chodorow argued that gender was more than a biological phenomenon. In her view, a girl’s destiny was also shaped by social, cultural, and economic influences. Chodorow theorized that differences in gender identity for boys and girls resulted from their early relationship with the mother as primary caretaker. This exclusively female identification caused boys to move toward separation and girls to gain selfhood through affiliation and connection. Chodorow asserted that the power and intensity of this maternal identification with its threat of engulfment were the source of the ubiquitous mother blame and misogyny. As a remedy, she advocated shared parenting. Many other women have added their voices to this debate. In Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976), Jean Baker Miller attempted to redefine and value traits that under Freudian psychology were considered regressive. She rejected the Freudian model of separation as the only road to maturity and individuation and advocated a model of relationship and connection. Carol Gilligan argued that women make moral judgments on the basis of context and care, suggesting that this was not a lesser condition but a “different voice” available to both men and women. Psychologists at the Stone Center

A member of the National Guard hugs her daughter after returning from a two-week tour of duty in Saudi Arabia in 1990. (UPI/Bettman)

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at Wellesley College developed a model of women’s psychological development that stressed mutuality, a greater capacity for empathy, and reciprocity between mothers and daughters that began with early infant-mother mirroring. In Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (1992), Brown and Gilligan exposed the losses girls experience during the adolescent passage from childhood to womanhood, losses of voice and authentic relationship. These works and others led to a redefinition of the mother-daughter relationship. Since the 1970s, the mother-daughter relationship has experienced an explosion of attention in scholarship and in representation, for example, fiction, drama, motion pictures, television, newspapers, and magazines. Scholars and artists alike have sought out new visions for this important relationship. Some have written about newly discovered archaeological evidence of prepatriarchal goddess cultures. Others have reinterpreted ancient myths of the motherdaughter relationship. Feminist dramatists and folklorists have revised the classic myth of Persephone and her mother Demeter, the goddess of fertility and nature, by placing the focus on the continuity and power of the motherdaughter bond. Feminist writers have created or adapted stories of all kinds to provide strong female role models for their young readers. Storytellers have rewritten fairy tales and folktales to change the witch from a solely evil character to one that is also a source of maternal power and feminine wisdom. Their stories give young female heroines the agency to determine their own destinies. The patriarchal model for motherdaughter relationships split a woman’s

identity into two extremes—a pure-loving, nurturing, and entirely self-sacrificing self and a fearful, malevolent self with the power over life and death or with a threatening sexuality. Writers and artists today have attempted to shift representation away from this demonized or idealized maternal woman to a mentoring figure, challenging all manner of stereotypes of both mothers and daughters in the process. Through these mentor figures, artists and writers unify the split mother into a woman comprised of both positive and negative qualities, one grounded in a historical and personal milieu that stresses the lived social experience of real women. With similar objectives and strategies, these women artists have created young, action-oriented female heroines with drive and courage, characters who challenge the “perfect girl” syndrome of past representations. In doing so, they continue to honor the enormous complexity and diversity of the mother-daughter relationship. Susan R. Applebaum See also Daughters and Fathers; Depression and Girls; Domesticity References and Further Reading Apter, Terri. 1990. Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters during Adolescence. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Brown, Lyn Mikel, and Carol Gilligan. 1992. Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. New York: Ballantine. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1993. “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships.” Pp. 42–60 in Double Stitch: Black Women Write about

Depression and Girls Mothers and Daughters. Edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, Beverly GuySheftall, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Janet Sims-Wood, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, and Lucille P. Fultz. New York: HarperPerennial. Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books/HarperCollins. Debold, Elizabeth, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malave. 1993. Mother Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine. Gilligan, Carol. 1993. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 2d ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jordan, Judith V., Alexandra G. Kaplan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene P. Stiver, and Janet L. Surrey. 1991. Women’s Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center. New York: Guilford Press. Miller, Jean Baker. 1976. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon. Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton. Rosenzweig, Linda W. 1993. The Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880–1920. New York: New York University Press. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. 1992. Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Depression and Girls The study of depression can be traced back to the time of Hippocrates, but the interest in the study of child and adolescent depression is relatively recent. Early classic encyclopedic texts did not list “childhood depression” as a category, but since 1985, a growing body of knowledge has emerged. The classic psychoanalytic view held that childhood depression could

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not exist because the necessary psychic structure, the superego, was not yet sufficiently developed. Another view held that depression in children differed from depression in adults because it was masked or expressed in depressive equivalents, such as hyperactivity, aggressiveness, school failure, and temper tantrums. Still another view held that depressive features in children reflect a developmental phenomenon rather than a clinical syndrome and thus disappear with time. The consensus view at the turn of the twentyfirst century is that depression in children can be diagnosed according to the criteria used in the diagnosis of adult depression. About 10 to 15 percent of all children report moderate to severe signs of depression (Nolen-Hoeksema and Girgus 1994), and depression onset is occurring earlier in life. Before adolescence, equal numbers of boys and girls are depressed. By age thirteen, however, more than twice as many girls as boys are depressed, a proportion that persists into adulthood (Rao, Hammen, and Daley 1999). This two-toone ratio exists regardless of racial or ethnic background, and the same ratio has been reported in other countries (Weissman et al. 1993). There are three types of depressive disorders applicable to both genders and to all ages. In major depression, also known as unipolar or clinical depression, individuals have some or all of the symptoms listed below for at least two weeks to as long as several months or even longer. Episodes of the illness can occur once or more in a lifetime. Dysthymia produces the same symptoms in a milder form, but this second type of depression lasts at least two years. People with dysthymia can also experience major depressive episodes. Manic depression, or bipolar ill-

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There are many causes of depression in girls and young women; often it takes them well into adulthood to sort out these causes and to heal. (Shirley Zeiberg)

ness, is not nearly as the common as the other two forms of depression. It involves cycles of depressive symptoms that alternate with euphoria, irritable excitement, or mania. Men and women have about the same rate of bipolar disorder, though its course in women typically has more depressive and fewer manic episodes. Symptoms of depression common in adults as well as children and adolescents include a persistent sad or irritable mood, loss of interest in activities once enjoyed, significant change in appetite or body weight, difficulty sleeping or oversleeping, physical overactivity or lethargy, loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, difficulty concentrating, and recurrent thoughts of

death or suicide. Five or more of these symptoms must persist for at least two weeks before a diagnosis of depression is indicated. In children and adolescents, the symptoms may be manifested in frequent vague physical complaints (headaches, muscle aches, tiredness); frequent absences from or poor performance in school; talk of or efforts to run away from home; outbursts of shouting, complaints of boredom, or crying; and lack of interest in playing with friends. In addition, adolescents with depression may be socially isolated, communicate poorly, fear death, be sensitive to rejection or failure, abuse alcohol or drugs, or engage in reckless behavior. A dramatic gender shift occurs in adolescence, when depression occurs twice as often in girls as in boys. A number of explanations have been proposed: the pressure of the increased developmental demands of adolescence and other factors unique to the lives of girls may contribute to their greater risk for depression. It is not likely that the gender difference is due to only one cause. A genetic component to depression is apparent in many girls. Studies have found a higher percentage of depression and other mental disorders in the families of people diagnosed with depression than is found in the general population. With regard to girls, some research suggests that genetic factors in combination with negative life events are associated with depression more strongly among pubescent girls than boys (Silberg et al. 1999). Since hormone levels increase dramatically during adolescence, it seems obvious to question whether depression is caused by hormonal fluctuations. The specific influence of hormone levels is, however, difficult to determine. Although researchers report that hormones have an

Depression and Girls effect on the brain chemistry that controls emotions and moods, a specific biological mechanism explaining the role of hormones in depression has not been identified. Furthermore, the effects of hormone levels on depression have been found to be minimal compared to the influence of social factors (Brooks-Gunn and Warren 1989). Puberty has different meanings for boys and girls, although both experience the impact of simultaneous changes in biological and social context. The onset of puberty is more accurate than chronological age in predicting depression (Angold et al. 1999). Girls who mature physically earlier than their peers are more likely to feel self-conscious and to have depressed moods (Rierdan and Koff 1997). For some girls, behavioral and physical changes are associated with menstrual cycles, and menstruation can be accompanied by feelings of tension, the perception of loss of control over their bodies, and irritability. Boys view body changes, such as increased muscular development, as positive. Girls view body changes, such as increased fat layers, as negative. Girls are more critical of themselves than boys, and their selfesteem depends more on how they perceive their bodies. Concerns about physical appearance start surprisingly early; by the age of nine many girls report that they are dieting to lose weight. This overemphasis on the body diverts many adolescent girls from developing other talents. It is possible that a traditional upbringing fosters certain traits that may be a factor in the development of depression in girls. Sex roles take on new importance as adolescents’ bodies become more sex-differentiated. In early adolescence, girls compare themselves with the

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standard female stereotypes, and many become dissatisfied with their bodies, which in turn leads to increases in depressed mood, lowering of self-esteem, and disappointment with their physical appearance. During adolescence, the selfesteem of many formerly self-confident and assertive girls gradually becomes eroded. Self-esteem in girls peaks at the age of nine and then begins to plummet (Hancock 1990). In addition to low selfesteem, some adolescent girls develop certain characteristics—pessimistic thinking, a sense of having little control over life events, and proneness to excessive worrying—and are more likely to develop depression than boys. These attributes may exaggerate the effect of stressful life events or interfere with taking action to cope with them. It has also been suggested that higher depression rates among girls occur when they start to interact with boys more frequently. Intelligence, assertiveness, and competence are seen as liabilities rather than assets by some adolescent girls. Fearing that competition with boys may interfere with their relationships, they may try to please boys and build up a boy’s selfesteem rather than their own. These attitudes are subtly encouraged by society and reinforced by the media. Movies, sitcoms, and teen magazines feature articles about techniques of getting and holding a man as the key to a successful life. Also critical are family factors, such as the quality of the marriage, parenting style, and role modeling. The emotional status of the parents, particularly the mother, is related to depression in girls. It has been found that daughters of parents who have an egalitarian relationship and are supportive, attentive, and receptive to emotions and guidance, rather than prone to assign punishment

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show lower levels of depression (Obeidallah, McHale, and Silbereisen 1996). Girls learn about being female by modeling themselves on their mothers. Female development is based on the importance of attachment and relationships throughout the life span. Closeness and connection, although admirable qualities, can also be interpreted as overdependence or smothering or an excess of emotion. Some experts think that females’ tendency to place greater value than males do on interpersonal connection and relationships with other people renders them more vulnerable to losses and depression. Girls are more likely than boys to experience negative events in the family, and childhood experiences are more highly predisposing for depression in females than in males (Hankin and Abramson 1999). Most parents give their adolescent sons more independence than their daughters, thus easing their separation from the family. For example, boys are more likely than girls to report that they do not need their parents’ permission to stay out late, that they were left at home alone, and that their parents expected them to act older. Adolescent girls, more closely bound to their families, may be exposed to family stresses over a longer period of time. Daughters of depressed mothers are vulnerable to emotional problems because depressed mothers tend to withdraw and are therefore less attuned to their child’s emotional needs. They are more likely to command and to criticize rather than to be warm, playful, and encouraging. Early interference or disruption of attachment bonds can lead to enduring problems with depression. A chronically depressed mother may be unable to help her daughter tackle the tasks of growing up—to develop a posi-

tive sense of self, form friendships, and learn ways of interacting with peers and adults. Daughters of mothers with a history of depression and who are controlling without showing much affection are more likely than sons to have low selfesteem and depression (Powers and Welsh 1999; Miller et al. 1997). Stress plays a critical role in the development of depression, and adolescent boys and girls react to stressful life events in different ways. The depressed mood of girls, not boys, which increases after the age of thirteen, correlates with stressful life events. Childhood sexual abuse is an important early stressor, and the rates of sexual abuse in girls increase substantially in early adolescence, with the greatest increase in rates occurring between ages ten and fourteen. Sexual abuse may result in heightened physiological responses in females, making them more vulnerable than boys to depression (Weiss, Longhurst, and Mazure 1999). Sexual abuse undoubtedly has a major psychological impact on its victims, although not all individuals are traumatized in the same way or for the same length of time. The effects depend on the type of abuse, whether the abuser was a family member or a stranger, whether the abuse was short- or longterm, and the age of the child at the time of abuse. Children’s reactions to sexual abuse may be immediate or delayed or both. In general, sexual abuse causes young children to become very anxious, and adolescents often act out. Long-term reactions occur in two-fifths of sexually abused girls. For many victims of sexual abuse, long-term psychological symptoms include depression, substance abuse, and sexual problems. Cognitive theorists believe that an individual’s interpretation of stressful

Depression and Girls events affects whether or not she will become depressed. If girls feel they cannot anticipate or predict what will happen to them, they are likely to feel helpless and unable to make changes. A girl who feels helpless sees problems as insurmountable; she becomes overwhelmed and gives up, feeling that she is ineffective and unable to influence the events in her life. Then when something bad actually does happen, it provides her with further proof that her efforts are useless. In contrast, when a girl who does not feel helpless meets with difficulty, she does not give up but tries harder and thinks of other ways to tackle the problem. The pattern of helplessness results in depression only for some. One important factor is how a girl explains the causes of bad events. Girls and boys typically explain their experiences to themselves in different ways. At a young age, boys tend to have a more negative explanatory style than girls. Then in the upper elementary grades, more girls than boys show a helpless cognitive style. A girl who blames herself or expects that times will always be hard is more likely to become depressed than a girl who does not believe bad events are her fault and will always happen to her. Coping strategies also make a difference in whether a girl becomes depressed when stressed. During early adolescence, boys and girls develop different styles of coping in stressful situations. Rumination (thinking and talking about a problem rather than seeking out a distracting activity or solution) is one of the risk factors associated with higher rates of depression among adolescent girls (Broderick 1998). In contrast, boys use more problem solving and distraction. A number of studies show that individuals who ruminate when distressed show longer

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and more severe periods of depression and are more likely to develop a depressive disorder (Nolen-Hoeksema, Larson, and Grayson 1999). The importance of intervention is highlighted by research that shows substantial continuity in depression from adolescence to adulthood. The risk for both a new onset of depression and recurrence is high during late adolescence and continues throughout early adult years (Rao, Hammen, and Daley 1999). Depression can be treated effectively. Both medication and psychotherapies such as interpersonal therapy and cognitive behavior therapy, either alone or in combination with medication, have been shown to be useful in helping girls develop more effective ways of dealing with life’s problems. Anita Gurian See also Acquaintance Rape; Body Image; Eating Disorders; Psychotherapy; Substance Abuse; Suicidal Behavior in Girls; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading American Psychological Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Angold, Adrian, E. Jane Costello, Alaattin Erkanlli, and C. M. Worthman. 1999. “Pubertal Changes in Hormone Levels and Depression in Girls.” Psychological Medicine 29, no. 5 (September): 1043–1053. Broderick, Patricia. 1998. “Early Adolescent Differences in the Use of Ruminative and Distracting Coping Strategies.” Journal of Early Adolescence 18, no. 2: 173–191. Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, and Michelle P. Warren. 1989. “Biological and Social Contributions to Negative Affect in Young Adolescent Girls.” Child Development 60: 40–55. Ge Xiaojia, Frederick Lorenz, Rand Conger, and Glen H. Elder. 1994.

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“Trajectories of Stressful Life Events and Depressive Symptoms during Adolescence.” Developmental Psychology 30:467–483. Hancock, Emily. 1990. The Girl Within. New York: Ballantine. Hankin, Benjamin, and Lynn Abramson. 1999. “Development of Gender Differences in Depression: Description and Possible Explanations.” Annals of Medicine 31: 372–379. Jordan, Judith, et al. 1991. Women’s Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center. New York: Guilford Press. Miller, Lisa, Virginia Warner, Priya Wickramarane, and Myrna Weissman. 1997. “Self-esteem and Depression: Ten Year Follow-up of Mothers and Offspring.” Archives of General Psychiatry 54: 932–942. Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan, and Joan S. Girgus. 1994. “The Emergence of Gender Differences in Depression during Adolescence.” Psychological Bulletin 115: 424–443. Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan, Judith Larson, and Carla Grayson. 1999. “Explaining the Gender Difference in Depressive Symptoms.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 5: 1061–1072. Obeidallah, Dawn A., Susan M. McHale, and Rainer K. Silbereisen. 1996. “Gender Role Socialization and Adolescents’ Reports of Depression: Why Some Girls and Not Others.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 25, no. 6: 775–785. Powers, Sally, and Deborah P. Welsh. 1999. “Mother-Daughter Interactions and Adolescent Girls’ Depression.” Pp. 243–281 in Conflict and Cohesion in Families. Edited by Martha J. Cox and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rao, Uma, Constance Hammen, and Shannon Daley. 1999. “Continuity of Depression during the Transition to Adulthood: A 5-year Longitudinal Study of Young Women.” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 38, no. 7: 908–915. Rierdan, Jill, and Elissa Koff. 1997. “Weight, Weight-related Aspects of Body Image, and Depression in Early Adolescent Girls.” Adolescence 32, no. 127: 615–624. Silberg, Judy L., et al. 1999. “The Influence of Genetic Factors and Life Stress on Depression among Adolescent

Girls.” Archives of General Psychiatry 56, no. 3: 225–232. Weiss, Erica, James Longhurst, and Carolyn M. Mazure. 1999. “Childhood Sexual Abuse as a Risk Factor for Depression in Women: Psychosocial and Neurobiological Correlates.” American Journal of Psychiatry 156, no. 6: 816–828. Weissman, Myrna, Roger Bland, Peter R. Joyce, and Stephen Newman. 1993. “Sex Differences in Rates of Depression: Cross-national Perspectives.” Journal of Affective Disorders 29, nos. 2–3: 77–84. Wichstrom, Lars. 1999. “The Emergence of Gender Differences in Depressed Mood during Adolescence: The Role of Intensified Gender Socialization.” Developmental Psychology 35: 232–245.

Diaries Diaries are typically pocket-size bound books with blank pages in which girls write thoughts and feelings. The functions of diaries, however, have changed over the past 300 years. Initially serving as spiritual chronicles in the eighteenth century, Victorian diaries charted the path of self-discipline and moral development for middle-class girls. Though their mothers often read what they wrote, Victorian girls nevertheless used diaries in order to nurture an identity separate from family. In the twentieth century, diaries became intensely private testimonies of intimate concerns, fantasies, and activities. In the seventeenth century, dissenting religious groups (e.g., Puritans, Quakers, Methodists) who privileged rigorous spiritual self-examination and personal belief over external authorities transformed the genre of medieval spiritual autobiography into the spiritual diary as a means by which individuals could regularly examine their conduct and conscience. Large-

Diaries ly settled by dissenters, colonial America fostered a rich literary tradition of spiritual diaries that documented religious conversions and the struggles of believers to live piously. Diary keeping by girls in the early 1800s reflected the emergence of the postrevolutionary notion of republican motherhood, which emphasized the importance of education in the lives of young women. Educated girls would be the future wives and mothers of citizens in the new democratic republic. The rise of private female seminaries and the spread of public schools in the nineteenth century increased literacy rates among middleclass girls. As Enlightenment thought influenced educational reformers, girls were taught how to write expressive narratives at the many public schools as part of a new pedagogy that flourished in the antebellum United States. With industrialization and the employment of servants, girls’ leisure time also increased. Though middle-class girls were still expected to do their chores, the more arduous and time-consuming tasks were now undertaken by domestics, leaving girls with more time on their hands. Parents and advice experts encouraged keeping diaries (which they often gave for birthdays) because they believed that diaries would contain their daughters’ selfish desires, nurture their good character, teach regular habits of order, and promote conformity to social expectations (e.g., improvement and refinement). Diaries were also the consequence of the rise of romanticism and the decline of orthodox Calvinism. No longer were diaries to document the route to religious conversion (as had been the case in the eighteenth century); nor were diaries meant to promote introspective romanticism. Instead, Victorian diaries were

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intended to regulate as well as demonstrate the development of moral character. Entries—written daily, often in the bedroom at night—were intended to build character and improve the self through the discipline of writing. This work of character development through diary keeping could begin quite early among girls. Sarah Gillespie, a young woman who grew up in eastern Iowa in the 1870s and was a lifelong diarist, began journal keeping at the age of five when she received her first diary, a small (3-inch by 5-inch) copybook handsewn by her mother. Sarah’s earliest entries include handwriting exercises and short sentences, such as “I am a good girl” and “Learn your lessons well.” Later volumes include writing exercises, such as “Be gentle, Ever be kind” and “Sarah is a nice girl in school,” that were to serve the functions of character building and self-discipline (quoted in Temple and Bunkers 1995, 202). Similarly, Charlotte Forten, a middle-class black woman who taught freed slaves on the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast during the Civil War, began keeping a diary to monitor her academic progress and intellectual development when she entered a boarding school in Salem, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen. Forten wrote: A wish to record the passing events of my life, which even if quite unimportant to others, naturally possesses a great interest to myself, and of which it will be pleasant to have some remembrance, has induced me to commence this journal. . . . Besides this, it will doubtless enable me to judge correctly of the growth and improvement of my mind from year to year. Salem, May, 1854. (quoted in Gannett 1992, 131–132)

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Just as girls were exhorted to keep diaries, they were also advised to include topics acceptable for girls on their path to domestic womanhood. In popular magazines, advisers urged them to record the weather, correspondence, any exchange of money, visits made, and books read but not to indulge in fantasy (and certainly not at the expense of others). Resolutions to do “this” and not “that” were widespread attempts to follow a charted path of self-discipline. Girls followed this protocol in part because parents had access to their daughters’ diaries. In fact, in order to ensure the proper upbringing, middle-class Victorian mothers vigilantly monitored their daughters. Thus they thumbed through diaries for signs of character development as they had for evidence of spiritual growth in the previous period. That Louisa May Alcott’s parents not only read their daughters’ diaries but also wrote in them was not unusual. Diaries were partly public documents: sometimes Louisa and her sisters even read them out loud. That diaries were partly public documents can also be seen in the example of the Gillespie family. Sarah Gillespie, a young rural schoolteacher in 1886, wrote in her diary of the isolation and discouragement that were pervading her life during the winter months. Her mother, Emily, responded by writing an encouraging entry in her daughter’s journal: Sarah, you said last night, “Ma write in my Journal. I can’t.” I just thought I would write a line as I saw it in the Drawer. I tried to not read a word, but Sarah my eyes do take in so much that the above could not quite escape. I get lonesome every day—only that I think of Henry & you. how you are getting along so well. His letters and

your Sunday visits I should almost give up. I am so thankful that you are both all my heart could wish and can I really appreciate the blessing. You must never get discouraged with the annoyance which some pupils are ever ready to give. do only the best you can and their cutting words and misdemeanor will give them the most inconvenience. (quoted in Temple and Bunkers 1995, 204) For all these reasons, nineteenth-century diaries are often devoid of intimate details. Girls would have been reluctant to write about subjects such as sex or to explore their ambitions. For example, girls were very reluctant to express their thoughts and feelings about their body, its changes, and their pains and pleasures. They recorded little about their intimate relationships with boys and men. Instead of frank confidences, girls used a variety of codes: vague expressions, asterisks for kisses, or squiggles for squeals. Victorian gender ideology defined what was acceptable (innocence) and what was not (seduction), inhibited thoughts and feelings, and deprived girls of a usable vocabulary to express themselves. Instead, diarists steeped in religious morality acquired at home, at school, and through social organizations often tended to confide their spiritual problems and pleasures more than other personal concerns. Some extant diaries reveal evidence of a more candid exploration of sexual desire. As historian Jane Hunter has shown, many girls who kept diaries were able both to satisfy their parents and to develop their separate selves by negotiating between obedience and autonomy. Diaries provided “a way of integrating feelings of independence with social expecta-

Diaries tions for appropriate behavior” (Hunter 1992, 70). Though diaries give testimony to girls’ attempts at self discipline, they also reveal a growing understanding of who they were and who they were becoming. According to Hunter, diaries functioned as transitional objects for girls in the process of separating from the family and investing in peers. In fact, though often a solitary activity, diary writing was occasionally social. Together in their bedrooms, at boarding schools, or on New Year’s Eve, girls wrote in their own as well as in each other’s diaries. Often, they wrote about each other without the stiffness of spoken communication that conveyed civility at the cost of intimacy. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, sharing diaries was a sign of special friendship among girls, and she cites the comments of a young girl growing up along the Ohio frontier who found that sharing her diaries with “Sisters CW and RT . . . [was] a very great privilege indeed as well as very improving, as we lay our hearts open to each other, it heightens our love & and helps to cherish & keep alive that sweet soothing friendship and endears us to each other by that soft attraction” (1986, 240). In addition to serving as an audience for the diaries of their peers, girls could become the audience for their mothers’ diaries. Judy Nolte Temple and Suzanne L. Bunkers have noted that “some diarists kept their books as a form of ongoing communication with a daughter still too young to be a companion” (1995, 199) and that the diary of a deceased mother could serve as a form of communication with her daughter that transcended the grave. In their detailed analysis of the diaries kept by Emily Hawley Gillespie and her daughter Sarah over the course of ninety-four years, Temple and

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Bunkers note that the journals of the Gillespie women were “collaborative and interactive” while Emily and Sarah were alive and that after Emily’s death, Sarah and her brother reread the diaries that documented their father’s abusive behavior toward his spouse. In the margins, the children annotated their mother’s writings with comments such as “O, how she suffered” (204). Even when diaries were not actually shared with friends or family, young female diarists posited the journal itself as a particularly intimate audience for their thoughts and emotions. The young Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “In order to enhance in my mind’s eye the picture of a friend for whom I have waited so long, I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do, but I want this diary itself to be my friend, and I shall call my friend Kitty” (1952, 13). Fourteen-year-old Helen Ward Brandreth, the daughter of a prominent family in Ossining, New York, similarly named her daily journal in honor of her favorite author. She wrote in her 1876 diary: “I have determined to keep a journal. I shall call it Fannie Fern” (quoted in Culley 1985, 149). Diary entries began to change after around 1900 because of the rise of a heterosocial culture, changing sexual mores, increased high school and college attendance, more egalitarian marital ideals, and the influence of feminism. As peers and the consumer culture became far more important and influential in the lives of American youth by the 1920s than before, high school–age girls (rather than preadolescents) included more intimate entries in their diaries. They included such topics as boys and sex along with franker entries on their bodies and how (through the use of hairstyles,

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clothing, and cosmetics) they could make themselves more sexually alluring. These changes trickled down to girls in junior high school in the postwar period, who began to use a more clinical vocabulary when they wrote about the anatomy of their bodies. When they wrote about the boys they adored (which they did in great detail), they drew upon the melodramatic language of movie and magazine romances. The sexual revolution and the second wave of feminism influenced girls whose diary entries by the 1980s were far less romantic than those written in the 1950s. Girls’ uninhibited entries about sexual encounters with boys and girls became far more graphic. Preadolescent girls keep diaries because they find it a useful way of exploring and expressing their private thoughts and feelings to an unjudgmental listener. They can write about or “say” whatever about whomever with the assurance that others will not know. Unlike a friend, sibling, or mother, a diary will not feel hurt or get angry at the expression of direct feelings. Girls can express themselves and at their own pace. Diaries do not demand logical thought and do not interrupt. Girls can write about whatever they want, typically siblings, parents, teachers, movies, friends, fantasies, fears, sex, and love. That diary keeping has become a highly gendered activity is illustrated by an anecdote related by Cinthia Gannett. The teacher of her son’s combined fourth- and fifth-grade class described how she had tried to reward well-behaving students with some blank books for their personal use. According to Gannett, when the teacher held up the books, “someone called out that only girls would want them, because the boys would certainly not be interested. There

was a chorus of agreement” (1995, 122). Jane DuPree Begos also quotes a young man who tersely noted: “Diaries are sissy things” (1987, 69). Pocket-size diaries of blank pages kept closed with lock and key are widely available and most often marketed to preadolescent girls. They are even included among books that can be ordered by elementary school children through their school. Diaries may be decorated with recognizable characters from American popular culture or printed in pink shades and pastel colors. In seeking models for diary keeping, girls throughout history have been able to turn to a number of published diaries, both real and fictional, including twentyyear-old Mary McLane’s 1902 account of her passionate inner life, which sold more than 80,000 copies in its first month and was variously hailed as obscene, brilliant, and mad (Culley 1985, 187); Marie Baskirtseff’s account of her life as a young artist in Russia; Anne Frank’s tragic account of her family’s attempts to avoid being found by the Nazis; and Joan W. Blos’s A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal, 1830–32 (Gannett 1995, 121). Diaries can be enormously useful historical sources that shed light on a wide variety of topics of concern to girls and female adolescents. Joan Jacobs Brumberg researched 200 diaries stored in libraries, archives, and attics in order to explore girls’ attitudes about their bodies and menstruation in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997). Reading diaries as historical texts enabled historian Jane Hunter to speculate that diary keeping allowed Victorian girls to develop autonomous selves within the context of family relationships. With an enhanced sense of self, many diary keepers pursued higher education and public

Disabilities careers as new women. Girls’ diaries can also serve as a fruitful site for posing questions about the construction of private and public voices, the role of language and narrative in constructing identity, and the development of female traditions of writing. As Barbara Crowther has wisely noted, though, those making use of girls’ diaries must be cautious. Diary keeping can be a highly performative act for young women as they represent themselves, constructing and censoring how they wish to be viewed. The myth that diaries are bearers of truth and the use of diaries as forensic evidence are highly problematic. Referring to the use of girls’ diaries in legal trials and custody cases, Crowther writes, “It would be dangerous if the myth and mystique of a young girl’s diary afforded it special status as material evidence, without reference to the range of possible activities besides record-keeping and self expression involved” (1999, 215). Jane Greer and Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Daughters and Mothers; Literacy; Reading References and Further Reading Begos, Jane DuPree. 1987. “The Diaries of Adolescent Girls.” Women’s Studies International Forum 10: 69–74. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. ———. 1998. “It’s Okay to Talk to Yourself.” Chapter 17 in 33 Things Every Girl Should Know. Edited by Tonya Bolden. New York: Crown. Crowther, Barbara. 1999. “Writing as Performance: Young Girls’ Diaries.” Pp. 197–220 in Making Meaning of Narratives in the Narrative Study of Lives. Edited by Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Culley, Margo, ed. 1985. A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American

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Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: Feminist Press. Frank, Anne. 1952. The Diary of a Young Girl. Translated by B. M. MooyartDoubleday. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gannett, Cinthia. 1992. Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1995. “The Stories of Our Lives Become Our Lives: Journals, Diaries, and Academic Discourse.” Pp. 109–136 in Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Edited by Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hunter, Jane. 1992. “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America.” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March): 51–81. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1986. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Pp. 229–249 in Feminist Frontiers II: Rethinking Sex, Gender, and Society. Edited by Laurel Richardson and Verta Taylor. New York: Random House. Temple, Judy Nolte, and Suzanne L. Bunkers. 1995. “Mothers, Daughters, Diaries: Literacy, Relationship, and Cultural Context.” In NineteenthCentury Women Learn to Write. Edited by Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Disabilities To begin a discussion of girls and disabilities is to take into account the tremendous changes that have occurred in the way Americans have come to think of both disabilities and girls in general. Late in the twentieth century, disability rights activists presented the United States with a challenge: disabilities, formerly a moral or medical problem, needed to be addressed as a social problem, one that could be ameliorated by a concerted

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effort by civic, social, educational, and individual parties. Once viewed by the majority (including the disabled themselves) as a fixed, static condition, disability has been increasingly described as a social or cultural construction, one that requires not medical intervention but social and institutional modifications. Further, although disability activists and scholars agree on certain clearly defined disabilities—deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and paraplegia, to name a few obvious categories that American society defines as disabling conditions—a few experts define eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, as well as self-destructive behaviors such as scarification, as disabling conditions that prey on American girls in particular. As they have been treated by medical doctors and psychologists as disabling conditions, eating disorders, emotional disorders, and anxiety disorders have become ripe topics for research and in society as a whole. Even as panic attacks and anxiety disorders have become prevalent diagnoses among young people, especially young women, much more attention is needed to understand girls’ images of their own bodies, the significance of those bodies, and indeed the cultural meanings and significance of girls and girlhood in the United States in the twenty-first century. Some research has been done in the history of children with disabilities (see, for instance, Safford and Safford, A History of Childhood and Disability, 1996) but none differentiates between girls and boys. Most scholars believe that in ancient times, defective infants were exposed and left to die, but there seems to be no indication that disabled girls were exposed more often than disabled boys. In Roman times, blind girls were

often sold into slavery as prostitutes. With the introduction and spread of Christianity, which dictated that everyone born of woman had an immortal soul, the exposure of infants waned throughout the next centuries and the Holy Roman Empire. A similar process occurred more than a millennium later in the Americas after the introduction of Christianity through European settlement. Abandonment, however, did not decrease, as foundling hospitals and asylums grew in number. Many unwanted, defective, and abandoned children were provided some minimal care in large institutions, although infant mortality within this group remained high for centuries. Rudimentary efforts to educate and understand the disabled child occurred gradually throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Europe. The onslaught and aftermath of worldwide epidemics of such diseases as scarlet fever brought about the establishment of institutions that could treat, train, and educate those left deaf or blind by disease. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, blind and deaf boys were proven educable; the outcome of the successful education of these individuals lead to a more tolerant attitude toward the deaf by the end of the eighteenth century. However, in Europe, public education of blind and deaf girls did not immediately follow because it was thought that boys benefited more from specialized training. In nineteenth-century Europe, for example, deaf daughters were kept at home or sent to convents. In marked contrast, nineteenth-century American hearing-impaired girls, along with their male counterparts, were sent to special schools by concerned parents who advocated education over contain-

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Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. Helen Keller toured the United States raising public awareness about people with disabilities for much of her adult life. (Photofest, 1962)

ment. In fact, the Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons, established in 1817 in Connecticut, was founded by three men, one of whom was the fond father of a deaf daughter. The Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind (founded 1832) made both boys and girls welcome. Its success in training Laura Bridgman, a young girl who had contracted scarlet fever in infancy that left her deaf and blind with no sense of smell, proved that girls with multiple disabilities could be educated and made useful to society. Laura Bridgman entered Perkins in 1837

and stayed until her death, learning how to finger-spell, read Braille, and interact with the other children in a limited fashion. Perkins Institution became internationally famous for its education of one Anne Sullivan (1866–1936), who went on to train her even more famous pupil, Helen Keller (1880–1968), also educated at Perkins. By the mid-nineteenth century, many states, especially along the eastern seaboard, had founded special schools called asylums for the blind and the deaf. Gallaudet College (founded 1864), later Gallaudet University, is the most well known

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of these asylums. Although scarlet fever and other viral illnesses made the care and education of all children with hearing and visual impairments crucial, there was a recognition of the need for minimal care for children whose disabilities responded less to training than did blindness or deafness. These were so-called feebleminded and insane children. Special schools and asylums for the care of insane and feebleminded children were established, funded, and staffed during the latter part of the nineteenth century, partially in response to eugenic concerns. Scientists and anthropologists were deeply interested in the question of hereditary acquisition and so studied the feebleminded, concentrating their efforts on the study of mentally impaired girls and women of childbearing years. Henry H. Goddard, author of The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness, published in 1912, conducted his research on a family he dubbed the “Kallikaks” at the Training School for Backward and Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland, New Jersey. Deborah “Kallikak” had been admitted to Vineland at eight years of age and classified as a moron. With time, however, Deborah’s skills improved. She learned to read a little, play an instrument, sew, garden, and excel in wood carving. Deborah’s condition was thought to be the result of her ancestors’ indiscretion in marriage, thus fulfilling prophecies of early-nineteenth-century eugenics. It was thought that one single mistake in marriage would produce feebleminded offspring for decades, with the deformity or affliction increasing in its intensity. Alleged feebleminded ancestors were studied during the early twentieth century by American anthropologists bent on determining the extent of inherited

traits. Girls and young women, especially, had to take precautions so that taints would not be passed down from one generation to the next. Certain physical disabilities responded neither to special education nor to the medical expertise of the times. Hence, children exhibiting deformities or conditions that nineteenth-century American culture considered too freakish or monstrous were often sold to sideshows and circuses. Girls with conditions perceived by their culture as abnormal lived markedly different lives than other girls within similar socioeconomic backgrounds and were exhibited in sideshows or freak shows. Interestingly, they were photographed in such a way to make the most of both their affliction and their natural femininity. In literature, especially children’s fiction, invalid girls abounded in the nineteenth century, one of the best known being Beth March, the epitome of the nineteenth-century dying girl, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). The nineteenth-century invalid or dying girl bestowed salvation, redemption, and forgiveness on others. Beth March’s illness and death were a constant reminder to her family that life was short, forgiveness was essential, and suffering was the way of the world. Similarly, Kate Douglas Wiggin’s The Birds’ Christmas Carol (1886) features Carol Bird, lame since birth, who spends her short life emulating the Christ child, on whose birthday she too was born. She dies at the age of ten, having enriched the lives of her own family as well as those of a poor immigrant family, the Ruggles, in untold ways. In fiction, tomboys and hoydens who strayed beyond the control of their parents or guardians needed to be reminded of the consequences of unladylike and

Disabilities unwomanly behavior. Hence, in some novels marketed to young female readers of the nineteenth century, wayward, boisterous, and willful girls were crippled by swings or sleds; endured a long, painful recovery; and eventually came to terms with the limitations of nineteenth-century womanhood. Janey Pecq in Jack and Jill by Louisa May Alcott (1881) and Katy Carr in What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge (pseudonym for Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, 1872) endure the pain of spinal injuries that leave them bedridden for months—in Katy Carr’s case, years. In their beds, the little girls learned how to be genteel young ladies: meek, quiet, biddable, patient, and longsuffering. Once they shed their former roughhousing behavior, they experienced a miraculous cure and could walk again. Literary use of disabled characters was by no means limited to the martyr figure, nor were stereotypical ideas about girls with disabilities confined to the nineteenth century. Then as now, not only was the fictional girl with a disability an object of pity, but also she was saintly and morally superior to the able-bodied around her. If, however, she fought her disability or denied the reality of it, she functioned as her own worst enemy. Katy Carr and Wilmadeene Fenner of Judy Blume’s Deenie (1973) cope with their spinal injuries with bad grace. Both must learn how to accept their condition cheerfully, the first step on the road to recovery and ladylike behavior. The embodiment of this cheerfulness in the face of adversity is Pollyanna in Eleanor Porter’s eponymous novel (1913), who after being hit by a car, finally wins her aunt’s love and receives numerous affidavits from the townspeople attesting to the little girl’s near-magical ability to bring optimism and happiness to every-

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one around her. Though Pollyanna’s use of crutches is understated in the novel, the 1920 film emphasizes the disability, perhaps in deference to Mary Pickford, famous for her portrayals of physically frail, unwanted, unloved, yet resilient waifs. In the United States, the 1920s to the 1960s saw an increase in the institutionalization of young people for many different medical and nonmedical reasons. Children diagnosed as insane or feebleminded were routinely committed to various institutions. The 1930s in particular saw a rise in the acceptance of psychiatric treatment, a result of the popularity of Freudian theory. Special clinics were staffed and funded expressly for the “problem child,” which included the mentally retarded, incorrigible, and social misfit. Many of these children and young adults were girls from dysfunctional homes, runaways, and prostitutes who were incarcerated in these asylums as a way to control their “antisocial” behavior. At the same time that vast institutions threatened to swallow up the individual, offering at best only minimal treatment for the disability or disorder, American fiction and cinema offered audiences compassionate images of girls with disabilities. The 1940s saw a host of young heroines in children’s and young adult novels who used wheelchairs and crutches as a result of the ravages of polio, tuberculosis, and scoliosis. Postwar films focused on the girl’s ability to adjust herself to her disability and to the physical restrictions imposed upon her by her culture. For instance, Jane Wyman’s character Belinda in the 1948 film Johnny Belinda teaches both the small-minded people of her town and, by extension, the audience that people with hearing dis-

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abilities are essentially no different from them. Experiencing the film, American audiences unfamiliar with sign language were exposed to its power and beauty when Belinda signs the Lord’s Prayer. The 1960s witnessed fewer fictional representations of young heroines who used crutches, wheelchairs, canes, and seeing-eye dogs. “Hidden” disabilities or disabilities whose complexities could not be neatly cured, such as learning disabilities, emotional dysfunction, and mental impairments, appeared increasingly in fiction and cinema as a response to an increase in diagnoses of mental and emotional impairments among American teens. Theodore Isaac Rubin’s successful novel and film, David and Lisa (1962), treats the growing friendship and mutual dependence between two mentally impaired teens in an adult world characterized by indifference and alienation; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green (1964; made into a movie in 1977) details a sensitive girl’s experience of the horrifying trauma of institutionalization. In popular fiction, the novels of Shirley Jackson present frightening excursions into the mental imbalance of teenaged heroines. Her critically acclaimed novels—The Road through the Wall (1948), The Bird’s Nest (1954), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)— struck a chord with teenaged girls who recognized themselves—if not in the fullblown conditions of psychosis and multiple and borderline personalities—then in the anger, rage, and dissociation that produced these disorders. In general, cinematic representations responded to audience desires, expectations about disabled people and their capabilities, and the knowledge of particular disabilities represented in films

and its relative importance to the times. A disabled girl’s social position as an adolescent or child made her even more vulnerable than a boy or a grown woman to familial and societal pressures. Abused and ridiculed by others who see only her limitations, the teenage protagonist in A Patch of Blue (1965) falls in love with a black man, whom, of course, she cannot see and does not judge on his race alone. Isolated, overprotected, and limited to an existence redundant with needlework and beading, her life before her involvement with the man who liberates her from a living hell is a cinematic echo of the never-ending entrapment of those very real institutions where people with disabilities, living a diminished existence with little love, care, or recognition, learned a trade to be useful to society. When not functioning as an example of a long-suffering saintly heroine, the girl with a disability could also show what disabled people, especially females, ought not to be. Helen Keller at age seven, incorrigible and willful, met her match in the equally stubborn Anne Sullivan. In the famous 1962 film The Miracle Worker, pupil and teacher engage in a form of combat until Helen is forced to recognize the meaning and importance of language. During the “water pump” scene, she abandons her hoyden ways and finally communicates with her teacher. (The real Helen Keller, however, had a much less combative relationship with Anne Sullivan, as evinced by a photograph in Dorothy Herrmann’s 1998 biography of Helen Keller.) In twentieth-century motion pictures, films continued to romanticize disability and offer audiences a heroine who was morally better than others because of her disability. Recently, in the 1990s, The

Disabilities Other Sister (1999) assured audiences that a mentally impaired girl could find happiness in a fulfilling love relationship and marriage, albeit with a mentally impaired young man. The ten-year-old heroine of Do Not Disturb (1999) cleverly eludes and outwits professional hired killers despite being mute. Some films, however, explore the pain of having a disability that severely limits a girl’s chances of living a normal life. The teen heroine of Niagara, Niagara (1997) is tormented by both Tourette’s syndrome and the alienation that it brings her. Two recent memoirs, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (1993; made into a movie in 1999) and The Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy (1994), explore the emotional agony caused not only by disabling conditions, whether mental or physical, but also by medical intervention their conditions warrant. As seen in so many other fictional depictions of asylums, mental institutions, and hospitals, the girls are dehumanized by the very institutions that are in place to help them. These cinematic representations of girls with disabilities as complex individuals with the right to live their own independent lives and the right to claim their own attractiveness and sexuality owe a debt to the civil rights activism of the 1960s and beyond. Changes in the social and legal perceptions of persons with disabilities were taking place throughout the United States by the 1960s and 1970s. Disabled people were emerging from the shadows of invisibility and demanding their civil rights. Activists fought for equal treatment under the law in terms of physical modifications and access to buildings, elevators, washrooms, and other physical structures. The 1970s were watershed years for the disabled as a number of important acts

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and amendments made their way through Congress, and the decade was critically important in terms of facilitating equal and increased opportunities for employment and the pursuit of higher education by persons with disabilities. The 1977 Rehabilitation Act, a law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in federally funded or administered programs and in federal employment, set the tone for the elimination of discriminatory practices. Highly significant for federally funded schools was the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 504 and the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act laid the groundwork for the mainstreaming of children who formerly would have spent their formative years in “special classrooms,” or in some drastic cases would have languished at home or in institutions, receiving little or no education and social interaction with other children. In an atmosphere of accommodation and accessibility, unique “alternative” schools were founded. In 1974, Harmony House in Oyster Bay, New York, opened its doors to girls with emotional disorders, learning disabilities, and severe depression. Here, young women could concentrate on their education and emotional well-being without the usual distractions of typical teen life in a public school. The 1980s saw an increase in attention given to girls and young women with disabilities. In the early 1980s, the National Disabled Women’s Education Equity Project conducted regional training programs for young disabled women in various cities throughout the United States. In addition, the Networking Project on Disabled Women and Girls was founded at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in New York City. Though

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these organizations addressed the inequities in the treatment of the disabled, particularly women, more inclusive measures needed to be taken. At the end of the decade, in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, in which specific modifications in housing, education, accessibility, and telecommunications became federal mandates. Further, since the passage of the ADA, accommodations have become part of the infrastructure of American life. Computers, books on tape, electric wheelchairs, cutouts in sidewalk curbs, elevator buttons with Braille messages, voice-activated answering machines, electronic doors, and handicapped parking spaces are accommodations that many besides those considered disabled have come to enjoy. Though the study of disabilities has found its way into graduate programs at many universities, and classes introduce undergraduates and graduate students alike to some of the theories of disabilities and their effects on individuals and our culture, few scholars and theorists have researched girls with disabilities. Quite a few scholars have begun to champion “girls’ culture” as a legitimate field of study, however. In recent books such as Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture (1998) by Sherrie A. Inness and The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997) by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the authors claim that the study of girls and their concerns is crucial not only to American culture’s understanding of young women in general but also to the complex role of gender. Sadly, few, if any, scholars have analyzed the complex role disabilities have played in either fictional or cinematic representations of girls with disabilities or in the

lives of real American girls. It remains an area ripe for historical and literary study. Fran O’Connor See also Body Image; Girls’ Fiction; Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls; Sports References and Further Reading Baskin, Barbara. 1977. Notes from a Different Drummer: A Guide to Juvenile Fiction Portraying the Handicapped. New York: R. R. Bowker. ———. 1984. More Notes from a Different Drummer: A Guide to Juvenile Fiction Portraying the Disabled. New York: R. R. Bowker. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Davis, Lennard J., ed. 1997. The Disabilities Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Donley, Carol, and Sheryl Buckley, eds. 1996. The Tyranny of the Normal: An Anthology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Inness, Sherrie A., ed. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Culture. New York: New York University Press. MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1994. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Norden, Martin F. 1994. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Safford, Philip L., and Elizabeth J. Safford. 1996. A History of Childhood and Disability. New York: Teachers College Press. Saxon, Ruth O. 1998. The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press. White, Barbara A. 1985. Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

Dollhouses

Dollhouses When Mary Jane Sweeney of Omaha, Nebraska, saw film star Colleen Moore’s dollhouse in the late 1930s, the girl responded with pleasure. “Oh, boy, would I like to have a doll house like that,” she enthused, adding that “my playmates at Dundee school and I would have such good times.” Like many American girls, she fantasized about a miniature world of opulence. But few such girls have owned anything remotely as elaborate as Moore’s Fairy Castle, which came complete with miniature antiques, running water, and electricity. In fact, in the history of girls’ toys, dollhouses have been exceptional rather than common acquisitions. Even so, the history of American dollhouses and girls’ use of such possessions have much to tell us about the history of consumer culture, toys more particularly, and the conditions of girls’ play. A fascination with the domestic world made small has ancient origins. Indeed, models of rooms and shops date from ancient times and may have served adults’ needs—such as funerary rites— more often than those of children. The earliest European dollhouse on record is that of Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria. The duke commissioned a four-story dollhouse for his daughter around 1558, but she was ultimately not its recipient. When the miniature palace was complete, the duke decided to place the finished structure in his art collection. The miniature rooms included a stable, cow barn, office, larder, wine cellar, and coach house on the first floor; bathroom, kitchen, courtyard, and orchard on the second; ballroom and bedroom on the third; and on the top floor, a chapel complete with priest and musicians. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, large and extravagant “baby hous-

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es” or “cabinet houses,” as they were called, were built for European royalty and the wealthy—not for children but for adults. These miniature houses displayed not only tiny furnishings but also their owners’ taste and wealth. In the United States, children’s dollhouses were relative rarities until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most early dollhouses were constructed by local cabinetmakers or by family members, and relatively few of them have survived to the present day with their furnishings intact, particularly those that were well loved and used by succeeding generations. Examples of such dollhouses include the one that Caspar Morris made and furnished around 1820 for his Philadelphian granddaughters, Sarah and Elizabeth Morris, when the girls were about six or seven years of age. The little house he made for them had hinged doors that opened like a cupboard to reveal four rooms inside. The dollhouse survived intact over the generations, but the furnishings were added to by subsequent generations of descendants who enjoyed the toy and treated it not as a museum piece but as a treasured plaything. In the United States during the nineteenth century, manufactured dollhouses, as well as miniature shops and kitchens, usually came from Europe, especially Germany, which was the center of the toy industry worldwide until the early twentieth century. Because most ready-made doll furniture and houses were imported, such toys were prohibitively expensive for middle-class families. The rise of dollhouses in the postbellum United States, like the rise of toys more generally, reflected larger social shifts. First, as more Americans experienced increased affluence, more parents could afford special children’s

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Three Indian girls of the Plains region play with small tipi dollhouses and dolls. (Library of Congress, ca. 1909)

playthings. Second, new consumer outlets, including department stores and mail-order catalogues, allowed the modest but expanding toy sector to find an expanded audience in both urban and rural areas. Third, attitudes about childrearing were in flux. Middle- and upperclass families were choosing to have fewer children and saw their children as more individually precious as children. These parents privileged notions of extended childhood and a special children’s culture that included toys, emphasized formalized play, and would allow their children to imitate (and learn from) adult social rituals (including genderappropriate skills). The rise of dollhouses reflected this new emphasis on children’s right (and need) to play.

Dollhouse owners of the late nineteenth century included Juliette Gordon Low, who went on to found the Girl Scouts in the 1910s. “Daisy,” as she was then known, shared a dollhouse with her sisters in the early 1870s in Savannah, Georgia. When President Rutherford B. Hayes was in office, his daughter Fanny Hayes was presented with two dollhouses, one in 1877 and the other in 1878. She and her younger brother Scott played with them. Less elite children had fewer, but improving, opportunities to “play house.” As early as the 1790s, Maine tin makers had turned out toy tinware, such as miniature kitchens, for children. In its 1868 catalogue, the J. and S. Stevens Company of Cromwell, Connecticut, offered iron toys in dollhouse sizes,

Dollhouses including washstands, fruit baskets, and sofas. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, American toy companies began making their own toys in addition to importing European playthings and produced more affordable items for mass consumption. In the late nineteenth century, the first American mass-produced dollhouses, following the German example, were simple wooden structures to which colorful, lithographed paper scenes had been applied. The finished products created detailed effects but were inexpensive to produce. In 1869, Harper’s Bazar (as the name of the magazine was then spelled) described big tin dollhouses with real glass windows and doors that sold for $40. But by 1895, Americans could also purchase a lithographed two-story house made by the R. Bliss Manufacturing Company, which came complete with ten pieces of furniture, for $1. Similarly, in the 1890s Dunham’s Cocoanut, a New York City firm, packed its wares in crates that could be converted into dollhouses complete with lithographed decor. The company also sold miniature furniture in exchange for proofs of purchase of their coconuts. In 1912, the Ladies’ Home Journal tried a similar sales strategy, exhorting girls to sell three new subscriptions to the magazine in exchange for “Lettie Lane’s Doll House: The Wonderful New Bungalow Home of a Delightful Lady,” a four-room cardboard dollhouse and furniture, which included a German bisque doll who could live inside it. Other dollhouse lovers built miniature homes with what was at hand. In the 1910s, for example, dollhouses made out of recycled wooden cigar boxes were common home projects. In the early years of the twentieth century, popular periodicals such as Ladies’ Home Journal regularly published patterns for dollhouses

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made of paper, cardboard, or wood and explained how to make dollhouse furniture as well. Sometimes, these dollhouse patterns were quite ambitious, boasting such technological innovations as running water and electric lights (features that many “full-scale” homes would not have for decades). Homemade dollhouses, like handmade dolls, combined parents’ (and girls’) skill, creativity, and ingenuity. During World War I, when German imports were barred from the country, American toy makers dramatically expanded their market share. The growing toy market was one marker of the rising consumer culture of the period, a time when American retailers began to focus on and market more seriously to children. By the 1920s many department stores began to feature toy departments year-round instead of seasonally. Store-bought dollhouses and furnishings were now available in increased numbers. Tootsietoy furniture, inaugurated in 1922, was modeled on real furniture; made of metal and plastic, the line expanded to include, by 1936, an eighteen-piece kit including clock, flower vase, model ship, a parrot on a stand, a violin, and a banjo, all for $1. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Tynietoy produced miniature wood reproductions of real antique furnishings, along with dollhouses and dolls, and from 1925 to 1936, the Arcade Company made iron dollhouse furniture. In the postwar era, starting around 1945, plastic dollhouses and dollhouse furnishings would reflect the preeminence and economical price of this new material. In the second half of the twentieth century, girls (and sometimes boys) have played with Fisher Price dollhouses and Barbie’s Dream House, among others. Despite the expansion of the industry, dollhouses have never been the biggest toy sellers or the most common chil-

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A girl playing with her handmade colonial-style dollhouse. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos, ca. 1955)

dren’s toys. Playthings, an industry journal, suggested in 1935 that dolls ought to comprise just over a quarter of a store’s inventory and that dollhouses and dollhouse furniture ideally represented 1 percent of inventory. Yet if they were not the most popular toys, they remained important icons of childhood wonder and of consumerism. The prevalence of dollhouse displays in store windows, for

example, points to the ways that miniatures have incited consumer appetites and fed spectators’ imaginations. Some historians have concluded that dollhouses, like baby dolls, have encouraged girls to focus on domesticity and homemaking and were thus tools of traditional feminine socialization. Certainly, the process of furnishing dollhouses encouraged girls to learn consumer habits

Dollhouses and craft skills and to focus energy on the home. It is likely, however, that girls also used dollhouses—as they used dolls—as symbols of their own power and control over their environment (if, admittedly, within a limited and miniature domain). Catherine Dorris Callicott was, as a girl, presented with a sort of dollhouse: an open-front cabinet with three shelves, which she was allowed to paper and partition as she chose. Although she was not authorized to change the exterior of the cabinet in any way, the interior space of the dollhouse provided a venue through which she could control domestic space and rearrange it to her liking. The appeal of miniature objects has transcended age and gender divides. Dollhouses have been marketed primarily to girls, just as toy trains have been marketed to boys, but boys have occasionally played with dollhouses as well. Both boys and girls have enjoyed miniature Noah’s Arks. And it is adults, more often than children, who can best afford to indulge their miniature fantasies, whether for finely wrought train sets or for dollhouses and their furnishings. Scholars have disagreed about whether miniatures accurately reflect the social life of their period. To some extent, dollhouses have showcased new trends in design and ideologies of the home. For example, the first Tootsietoy home, introduced in 1925, was a brick colonial house, followed by a Spanish mansion in 1930. Both dollhouses emulated popular architectural revivals of their era. Yet both, gesturing as they did to earlier times, suggested nostalgia as much as contemporary ideologies of domestic life. Dollhouses, in other words, tell us more about the domestic fantasies of their creators than the living conditions of particular periods. In their inclusions and absences, they have gestured toward

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what was desirable or inappropriate for public display (for example, miniature toilets, which became more common only in the early twentieth century). At the same time, dollhouses have provided smallscale fantasies of grandeur, allowing girls, on a small scale, physical domination of their own environments. Leslie Paris See also American Girls Collection; Barbie; Consumer Culture; Dolls; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Rooms; Play References and Further Reading Callicott, Catherine Dorris, and Lawson Holderness. 1978. In Praise of Dollhouses: The Story of a Personal Collection. New York: William Morrow. Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jackson, Valerie C. 1988. Dolls’ Houses and Miniatures. London: John Murray. Jacobs, Flora Gill. 1953, 1965. A History of Dolls’ Houses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1974. Dolls’ Houses in America: Historic Preservation in Miniature. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. King, Constance Eileen. 1983. The Collector’s History of Dolls’ Houses, Doll’s House Dolls, and Miniatures. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Leach, William. 1993. “Child-World in the Promised Land.” Pp. 209–238 in The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture. Edited by James Gilbert, et al. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Paris, Leslie. 1998. “Small Mercies: Colleen Moore and the National Doll House Tour, 1935–1939.” In Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. Edited by Miriam Formanek-Brunell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rountree, Susan Hight. 1996. Dollhouses, Miniature Kitchens and Shops. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zillner, Dian, and Patty Cooper. 1998. Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and Their Furnishings. Atglen, PA: Shiffer Publishing.

Dolls As objects of girls’ ordinary lives, dolls are readable “texts” that shed light upon the intentions, beliefs, and values of producers, parents, and players. Though popularly conceived of as impassive and mute, dolls provide a body of evidence as well as a method of analysis for studying the history of American girlhoods. A reading of dolls as cultural sources reveals that their role in gender-role socialization in early America was limited by the economic exigencies of subsistence and semisubsistence cultures, both indigenous and transplanted. Increasing prosperity, leisure, and perceptions of childhood innocence among AngloAmericans led to more people buying dolls in the late eighteenth century. The rise of industrial capitalism and the spread of the ideology of domesticity in the nineteenth century further contributed to the increasing availability of dolls, their centrality in girls’ lives, and their role in gender-role socialization. European producers competed with American businessmen and businesswomen, with striking differences in regard to doll aesthetics, production, and purpose. But girls who received dolls on birthdays and for Christmas were often indifferent to them, preferring other forms of more active play. Unable to reject dolls entirely, others vented their anger over limited opportunities for girls in widespread funereal scenarios. In the

early twentieth century, American businessmen achieved industry dominance after World War I, eliminated their European competition, and marginalized independent women producers. Dolls produced were predominantly white and also embodied an idealized femininity. Representations of submission, domesticity, maternity, and consumption have continued to triumph, despite changing roles for women and girls since the 1960s. Although more dolls of late aim to represent power, sexuality, agency, and education, all continue to reflect cultural ambivalence about girlhood in the postmodern era. Little is known about dolls made by Native Americans or the role they played in the lives of children of different tribes during the millennia before European contact. Carved wooden Navajo figurines that look like “dolls” were found on the rubble mounds of the prehistoric Anasazi throughout Arizona and New Mexico. But what role—if any—they served in the lives of girls or boys is unknown. Hopi Indian kachina dolls (one of the many Hopi arts and crafts made since the tenth century in the American Southwest) were used for educational or religious purposes until they began to be sold commercially in the 1850s. Girls of the Plains played with toy miniatures, but Chickasaw girls of the Southeast were busy assisting mothers and other females gathering wild food, tending gardens, hauling water, and performing other agricultural tasks. Iroquoian cornhusk dolls were made from materials native to the region, as were the dolls that belonged to AngloAmerican children. Nevertheless, dolls were scarce in seventeenth-century North America, where play was also limited by participation in labor-intensive economies. Believing in

Dolls the association of “poppets” with the supernatural and fearing that his children would think “diversion to be a better and nobler thing than diligence,” Puritan minister Cotton Mather did not encourage his children to play (Mather 1911–1912, 536). Yet over the course of the eighteenth century the doll population grew, especially among daughters of the colonial elite. Increased prosperity, international trade, secularization, and the influence of Enlightenment notions were a number of forces that gave rise to a new ideological construct of girlhood in colonial America. For example, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau encouraged parents to provide their daughters with dolls so as to nurture their innocence and promote gender-role training. Especially popular between 1750 and 1800 were wooden dolls resembling adults (known to collectors as Queen Anne dolls), with peg joints, high foreheads, glass eyes, and flax or human-hair wigs. The daughters of prosperous sea captains in Salem, Massachusetts, were among girls who received “babies” transported to New England. Well-to-do parents such as George Washington ordered dolls from a London toymaker for his stepdaughter. With greater acceptance of childhood individuality, more colonial parents celebrated their daughters’ birthdays with dolls that required a corps of sartorial experts. Milliners sewed the dresses and shifts-petticoats, whalebone men made stays, and hairdressers created wigs or chevelures. The new idealization of American girlhood that developed can be seen in the family portraits painted by eighteenth-century artists such as John Singleton Copley and others. In these representations girls clutch, but do not yet cradle, fine dolls. Early in the nineteenth century, the developing market economy fueled an

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international doll economy that connected the “new” middle class in the United States to doll producers abroad. Perfected techniques and improved methods of mass production led to increasing numbers of papier-mâché, porcelain, and wax dolls. Fashionably dressed and waspwaisted dolls were imported from German manufacturing towns. Customers typically purchased doll heads (often with molded hairstyles) in newly established toy shops and other small stores and attached them to homemade bodies. Antebellum experts railed against these refined European dolls, fearing that they would promote political degeneracy among the nation’s young. To instill democratic values and domestic skills instead, experts such as Catharine Beecher promoted doll making in widely available domestic treatises. Thus over the course of the nineteenth century, dolls, doll play, and the functions that dolls served in middle-class girls’ lives changed along with notions about girlhood, gender, family relationships, and motherhood. Because daughters were expected to contribute to the household economy, produce what they could, run errands when they must, and attend to younger siblings, the role of dolls was circumscribed. School attendance and Sabbath observance further restricted the amount of time devoted to doll play. Moreover, many girls often preferred to frolic outdoors instead. Whether they wanted to play with them or not, middle-class girls were not allowed unrestricted access to their imported dolls. Made out of a combination of cloth, wax, kid leather, and wood, these highly fragile dolls were often kept out of the hands of children. Sometimes dolls were locked in cupboards by parents who considered them valuable enough to

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mention in their wills. Although an inaccessible doll might have been more desirable to some, many girls preferred dolls of their own making. On the frontier, girls made dolls from mattress ticking and other scrap materials. They also played with dolls made from natural materials such as dried cornhusks, corncobs, and pinecones. They used dried leaves and logs as doll beds and hollowed out stumps for stoves. Native American girls on the Plains made dolls out of buckskin and glass beads, and Seminoles used materials native to the South to make palmetto leaf dolls and cotton textiles for colorful patchwork clothing. The plantation South is credited as the origin of the Topsy Turvy doll, named after the slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). A white doll and a black one typically represented as a “mammy” were united at the waist. “Mammy” dolls were also made out of a wide variety of materials, from nipples to bottles, and were even put into service as doorstops. Racist representations of female African American house servants, sporting colorful bandannas and holding white babies, endured into the twentieth century. American men also created dolls. In 1844, Charles Goodyear applied his newly patented process of vulcanization to make rubber dolls painted white or dyed black. In 1858, Ludwig Greiner patented his papier-mâché doll heads. In rural New England, manufacturers and machinists also produced dolls. In Springfield, Vermont, Joel Addison Hartley Ellis (1830–1898), an inventor and carriage manufacturer, utilized the region’s abundant waterpower, rock maple timber, labor, and local whittling traditions in order to produce flexible and durable wooden dolls with heavy metal

hands and feet. Unable to survive the depression of 1873, however, Ellis’s venture failed after one year. Thomas Edison was hardly more commercially successful with the screechy phonographic talking doll he produced in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. In response to the conspicuous consumption, ritual, and display of the gilded age, mothers drew upon the simpler toys of their preindustrial girlhoods. Many customers of dry goods stores purchased rag doll prints (produced by Arnold Print Works and Art Fabric Mills) ready to be cut, stitched, and stuffed instead of making them from scratch. But others inspired by a discourse in popular magazines applied the emerging ideology of “scientific motherhood” to create safe, soft, and sanitary dolls for the marketplace. Drawing upon antebellum domestic values, Martha Jenks Wheaton Chase (1851–1925), among other women, produced white and black “stockinet” dolls of girls and boys. At the M. J. Chase Company in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, women workers produced dolls that sold from coast to coast. Though too costly for working-class girls, Chase “hospital dolls” were used in Progressive-era baby clinics and settlement houses to teach immigrant children how to adjust to the new urban and industrial order. Despite the efforts of American men and women, French and German “composition” doll bodies attached to unglazed porcelain “bisque” heads flooded toy and department stores in the decades after the Civil War. Produced by firms such as Jumeau, Bru, Huret, and Steiner, idealized girl dolls (bébés) replaced romanticized representations of Victorian women in the 1870s and 1880s. Many dolls could now be purchased wearing up-to-date con-

Dolls tinental fashions. Contributing to the Europeans’ success abroad were the printing revolution that gave rise to fashion magazines, textile mills, and the invention of the sewing machine. These new machines were operated by an army of dolls’ dressmakers, or “out workers,” who were paid a pittance for their elaborate handwork. This golden age of dolls closely correlated with the steadily decreasing size of American middle-class families, the expanding consumer culture, and changing notions of childhood and the role of play. The first child psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, posited that dolls had assumed a more central place in the lives of girls and boys. But memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, oral histories, and the “language” of play suggest that girls challenged their elders’ expectations. Some preferred black rag dolls to white bisque ones. Many enacted doll funerals instead of playing house. Increased invention, production, and distribution of new toy technologies and the acceptance of active recreation by the early years of the twentieth century decreased doll desirability. Many girls preferred to bike and skate. As separate spheres eroded more rapidly after the turn of the century, young, educated, “new women” artists from small towns west of the Mississippi found employment in burgeoning commercial industries. Rose O’Neill, the best-known female commercial artist at the time, also created the Kewpie, the most widely recognized character in popular culture until Mickey Mouse. She infused the cupidlike cartoon character with a maternalist ethos, suffragist politics, and a whimsical sense of humor. When it was made into dolls, figurines, and numerous spin-offs, the Kewpie

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made Rose O’Neill a millionaire. Images of children like the Kewpie drawn from popular and commercial culture provided businessmen with an unending source of recognizable images. Grace Drayton’s advertising illustrations of the Campbell’s Soup Kids that first appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1905 were also made into dolls. Immigrant girls were less likely to purchase Campbell’s dolls than to produce them, however. They snipped and sewed at home along with their mothers and brothers, who were also pressed into service as industrial workers in immigrant families. New Kid dolls, like the Campbell’s Soup characters, were marketed as adventurous, androgynous, optimistic, intelligent, and humorous, whereas European “character dolls” boasted greater realism. Influenced by similar cultural and social transformations, however, the European bent-limbed baby dolls portrayed a greater range of children’s emotions. Some were even made in black versions. But when the African American community called for more black dolls, demeaning pickaninnies and mammies produced by American businessmen were probably not what they had in mind. A study of department store catalogues published from the early 1890s through the Depression years reveals that black female dolls were characterized differently than white ones. Throughout this period, black dolls appear to have disseminated racist notions and gender norms about African American women. Rather than compete over race and realism, however, veteran companies and newcomers who attempted to dominate the doll industry during World War I tried to imitate European bisque with materials such as “biskoline.” In an effort to discredit foreign competition, the indus-

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try also promoted patriotic advertising, marketing campaigns, anti-German sentiment, and harmful protective tariffs. After the war, trade associations orchestrated campaigns, intimidated striking workers, and marginalized women producers. The success of American toymen was evident by the 1920s, when more women entrepreneurs such as Madame Alexander (creator of high-priced dolls) delegated authority to male relatives, typically husbands. Women designers were forced into unsatisfactory compromises with male manufacturers both in the United States and abroad. Much to the chagrin of Grace Putnam, the Bye-Lo Baby (1923) she modeled after a newborn baby was compromised by commercial considerations and conventional male aesthetics. Traditional values about women’s roles in the 1920s also led American businessmen, who now dominated the industry, to market cute and content baby dolls that promoted materialism, femininity, and domesticity. In order to combat decreased interest in dolls as well as eliminate the tradition of repairing older ones, industry-orchestrated marketing campaigns generated needs and stimulated desires among girls for new dolls and more of them. Though Raggedy Ann dolls and those based on comic strip characters were also popular (especially Little Orphan Annie in the 1930s), instructional booklets such as “How to Play with a Doll” aimed to teach girls how to play house. The steadily declining birth rate made dolls like Patsy into symbolic siblings, and her wardrobe of ready-made clothing promoted girls’ participation in the expanding consumer culture. Despite the proliferation of commercially produced dolls, many continued to be made by girls and grownups, especial-

ly among those who were unable to afford store-bought dolls or who wanted an outlet for creativity, more practice in sewing skills, or dolls that featured racial, religious, or ethnic diversity. These factors contributed to the continued popularity of rag dolls (which were occasionally based on commercially produced ones). Raggedy Ann dolls proliferated after the publication of John Gruelle’s classic children’s book by the same name in 1915. But Amish and Mennonite communities had been producing faceless cloth dolls in keeping with religious customs and beliefs about the sinfulness of representing one’s likeness. Two Mennonite sisters named Lizzie and Ellen Carper had played with their rag dolls in the nineteenth century. Dolls that resembled Asian American children were made in California, Colorado, New York, and other communities where Chinese families settled. Dolls made by the Navajo, Sioux, and other Native American tribes not only reflected indigenous customs, beliefs, and values but also shed light on the nature of cultural exchange and domination. Extant handmade dolls (often made for the tourist trade) combined traditional Native American artifacts with those of the dominant culture. Yuma Indians who lived on the west bank of the Colorado River from 1774 to the 1850s created ceramic dolls, dressed differently before the reservation period than after it. Tourist miniatures produced in the Northeast reflect the shifts not only in European concepts of native peoples but also Native Americans’ representations of themselves. The arts and crafts tradition did not deter the commercial doll industry, which continued to produce dolls that aimed to be more realistic. In 1934 Effanbee adver-

Dolls tised its Dy-Dee Baby doll that drank and wet as “almost human.” Though based on a real girl, the Shirley Temple doll first produced by the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company in 1934 represented a rather fantastical version of American girlhood. Ideal’s enormously popular product enabled girls to identify with the film star’s agency, adventure, and achievement. Close cooperation among the film’s producers, movie theater owners, and the doll company led to a marketing extravaganza in 1936. Despite constraints on the family budget, the doll still grossed more than $6 million. For those who could not afford the doll, Shirley Temple paper dolls were widely available. Despite the doll’s success, however, severe cutbacks in consumer spending forced many doll firms to close. Such was not the case for the Madame Alexander firm, which manufactured dolls based on the Dionne quintuplets and Sonja Henie, the Olympic figure skater. World War II further disrupted the industry. Some retooled firms produced prosthetic devices for injured soldiers. Others looked to the consumer application of wartime inventions. Some firms continued to experiment with rubber in order to make inexpensive dolls that did not chip, peel, or flake. But it was the invention of hard plastic that revolutionized the doll industry in 1949. Early industry leaders were Betsy Wetsy, who urinated, and Tiny Tears, who cried. Changing the nature of play for millions of postwar baby boomers were dolls made out of plastic or soft vinyl, with synthetic hair, expansive wardrobes, and accessories. Drawing on Gillette’s do-ityourself permanent wave product, the Toni doll enabled girls to wash, set, and curl her “Magic Nylon ‘Hair.’” Ginny, a little white girl doll created by Jenny

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Grave’s Vogue, was one of the most popular of the period. Although most mainstream companies produced few black dolls, if any, fledgling companies influenced by changing wartime race relations and the emerging civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which decried the paucity of black dolls, produced realistically featured dolls such as Patti-Jo, Saralee, and Amosandra. In the early 1950s, Sara Lee Creech created the Sara Lee doll, which reflected issues of race, commercialization, and popular culture in the postwar United States. In 1951, Creech successfully convinced the Ideal Toy Company to market the African American doll. The difficulties of creating an “anthropologically correct” prototype, however, led to its commercial failure. It would be another decade and a half before another black doll would be manufactured in the United States. The paucity of black dolls probably contributed to the preferences of black children for white dolls as revealed in Kenneth and Mimi Clark’s 1950 study. Their conclusions that black students’ low self-esteem could be read in their doll preference played an important role in Brown v. Board of Education (1955). In that case, initiated on behalf of an African American girl named Linda Brown, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the separate, segregated American education system was unconstitutional. The Sara Lee doll and Creech’s social activism on behalf of African Americans influenced public attitudes about race in the United States. Studies conducted in the 1960s and the 1970s would suggest that black children now preferred black dolls. By the early 1960s, Mattel’s teenage titanic blonde bombshell, Barbie—the exemplar of postwar gender roles, materi-

A Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue page advertising dolls. (Library of Congress)

Dolls alism, consumerism, sexuality, and teen culture—emerged as a triumphant industry leader. Unlike the many generations of girl and baby dolls that engendered maternal behaviors, Barbie’s world was one of enthusiasm, opportunity, adventure, aspiration, accessories, and an education in consumption (much to the chagrin of parents, experts, and critics, then as now). Based on a European sex symbol but marketed as an autonomous American fashion model always dressed to the nines, Barbie’s chic wardrobe and accessories rivaled the French fashion dolls of the opulent gilded age. Although feminists either rejected dolls for their patriarchal messages or promoted their usefulness in raising sons, Barbie’s fluid identity over the course of forty years appropriated selective aspects of changing gender roles. Mod Barbie became a freewheeling disco queen in the 1970s. Shaped by a variety of contemporary forces, an even more glamorous Barbie represented women in the workplace in the 1980s. Barbie became especially popular among the daughters of postwar baby boomers, themselves former Barbie owners. African American and Latina Barbies also represented changing demographics and the commercialization of cultural pluralism. It would not be until the early 1990s, however, that toy companies launched by black entrepreneurs would produce ethnically correct black dolls aimed at instilling a positive sense of self in black children. The postwar market in baby dolls plummeted until the rise of Cabbage Patch dolls in the 1980s. The success of Cabbage Patch dolls can be attributed to a number of factors. First, the cloth-bodied baby doll personified innocence and vulnerability. Scholars who have studied the women consumers who furiously

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fought toy store crowds argue that women’s desire to parent was exploited by the firm’s marketing campaign. Social psychologists posited the view that a collective national wish for a symbolic rebirth motivated both parents and children. Despite the market-driven mania that surrounded their sale, Cabbage Patch dolls seemed to embody an appealing anticommercial ethic, coming on the heels of 1970s glitz and in the face of 1980s extravagance. In the 1990s, dolls continued to promote self-fulfillment through adornment and consumerism. Some could be made up or have their hair combed, curled, crimped, and dyed. Still others embodied masculine messages about female sexuality. For example, Susie Cupcakes’s undergarments—eroticized and sanitized—were scented to smell sweet. When manufacturers produced Baby Spice and Ginger Spice as action figures after the pop music group in the 1990s, however, they relied on the Barbie paradigm and merely replaced the pumps with platform shoes. Combining sexuality with power has not been easy for doll manufacturers. In their attempt to respond to consumer demand for more powerful female figures that embodied a “girl power” ethos, Hasbro produced a surprisingly androgynous doll, suggesting that for them power and sexuality were still at odds in the doll world. Such moneymakers as the high-priced American Girl dolls (purchased by Mattel for $700 million in 1998) emphasize girls’ self-esteem, education, and agency. More like Cabbage Patch kids than Barbies, these catalogue-only dolls aim to represent innocence and an anticommercial tradition. But continued anxieties about changing roles for girls and women in the new

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Three- and four-year-olds play with a doll at a day care center in New Rochelle, New York. (Shirley Zeiberg)

millennium continue to find expression in dolls. “Barbie for President” was marketed during the 2000 presidential election, when delegates at the Republican convention received Barbies dressed in Nancy Reagan red. While presidential candidates battled for support of the heartland in political campaign ads, Barbie “Dorothy” also appeared in television spots. Wearing a dress that exemplified midwestern girlhood innocence but sporting eye-catching ruby slippers, this doll reminded girls: “There’s no place like home.” Miriam Forman-Brunell

See also American Girls Collection; Barbie; Consumer Culture; Dollhouses; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Rooms; Play References and Further Reading Beisel, David R. 1984. “Thoughts on the Cabbage Patch Kids.” Journal of Psychohistory 12, no. 1: 133–142. Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Formanek-Brunell, Miriam. 1998. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gillespie, Fern. 1991. “Black Dolls: The Christmas Wish of African-American

Domestic Service Children?” American Visions 6, no. 5: 27–31. Jacob, James E., Paul Rodenhauser, and Ronald J. Markert. 1987. “The Benign Exploitation of Human Emotions: Adult Women and the Marketing of Cabbage Patch Kids.” Journal of American Culture 10, no. 3: 61–71. Mather, Cotton. 1911–1912. “The Diary of Cotton Mather.” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 7th series, vol. 7. Cited in Pollock, Linda, 1987, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries. Hanover: University Press of New England, 148. Patterson, Gordon. 1994. “Color Matters: The Creation of the Sara Lee Doll.” Florida Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2: 147–165. Pollock, Linda. 1987. A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries. Hanover: University Press of New England. Wilkinson, Doris Y. 1987. “The Doll Exhibit: A Psycho-Cultural Analysis of Black Female Role Stereotypes.” Journal of Popular Culture 21, no. 2: 19–29.

Domestic Service Domestic service was the number one job category open to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American girls of all races. Serving girls of these centuries were given responsibility for cleaning houses, caring for children, and waiting tables, as well as sewing and mending, ironing, and running errands. Few were asked to shoulder the demanding jobs of cook and housekeeper, but all were expected to live with the families they served and be almost constantly “on call.” In the nineteenth century, servants in the urban Northeast were called “domestics,” whereas those in rural homes of the North and West preferred to be labeled “help.” Both domestics and “help” could be wage earners or “bound.” The latter were usually paid only in room

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and board and were legally required to serve until they reached the age of eighteen or twenty-one. Girls of all races were “bound” servants; the criterion was their parents’ inability or unwillingness to provide them with a home. In the southern states, domestic service was usually performed by slaves; it was common, though, for slaveholders to refer to their household staff as “servants.” In the twentieth century, when fewer American girls went into service work, most were “day servants” who lived somewhere other than their employers’ homes. The majority of girls who served in the twentieth-century United States were of African, Asian, and Latina descent. In all these centuries, relying on a servant who was waged, “bound,” or enslaved was a way to insist on one’s membership in the middle or upper class. Thus, although most Americans used serving girls to do necessary household labors, those who had enough money also employed servants to display privilege, leisure, and status. One-function servants such as hairdressers and seamstresses were costly but were not often young. Housemaids who were preteens or teenagers earned relatively good money and did not have to pay for room and board, which meant that the thrifty could save. Oral histories of African American women who had been servants, which were collected by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis and Susan Tucker, recall how a servant’s wages could help out kin, make marriage possible, or finance education. Similar experiences have been reported by Irish immigrants who served in the nineteenth-century United States and by some native-born white servants, too. It was harder to save money as a children’s nurse because this job was poorly paid or as a “bound” servant because

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A portrait of the Stevens family servants, Castle Point, Hoboken, New Jersey. (Byron/Museum of the City of New York/Archive Photos, 1895)

these workers usually were not paid. Girls who worked as “help” often were not paid in wages but instead were recompensed by being allowed, for instance, to run a tab at local stores. The hardest job of all, for American serving girls, was to be a “maid-of-all-work.” These all-purpose servants were forced to work very hard and were usually paid very little if young or untrained. Trying to find out how many girls have served, in how many homes, throughout American history is not easy because early census takers did not distinguish between servants and the families who relied on their work. The best estimates about domestic workers in the antebellum United States are Faye E. Dudden’s suggestion that 15 to 30 percent of urban households relied on nonkin staff and

Eugene Genovese’s proposition that about one-quarter of the slaves in the South worked as cooks, maids, childnurses, and seamstresses (Dudden 1983, 1–2; Genovese 1969, 328). However, these figures are not age-specific. In addition, they do not include the girls sent off to western states on “orphan trains” to reduce the number of America’s urban poor, the rural “hired girls” in nonslave states, and servants who lived with and labored for relatives other than their own nuclear families. Recognition of these domestic workers makes it clear that the number of American girls laboring as domestic servants was at least as high in the eighteenth century as it was in the nineteenth and that the number dropped significantly from about 1900 as a result of new attitudes toward family life and

Domestic Service child labor. Social changes such as enhanced job opportunities and compulsory education were influential, too. Finally, the development of “labor-saving” equipment and of service industries such as commercial laundries helped to reduce the number of girls in domestic service posts. The nineteenth century was the heyday of serving girls and of the so-called servant problem, a social tension that grew out of new expectations for service workers. In this era, employers commonly used the word girl to mean “female servant” (as in the complaint “My new girl sweeps dust beneath the rug”) though many such “girls” were adult women. A smaller number were juvenile delinquents or teenagers who were thought to be at risk. Indeed, some female reformatories trained inmates as laundresses. The theory behind this kind of service was that it was good for all girls to learn household chores, but it was especially good for girls with criminal tendencies to appreciate cleanliness and purity. An extrapolation of this idea persuaded some philanthropic societies to find service jobs for young women convicted of theft and vagrancy. The hope was that life in a “good” family would rehabilitate the social deviant. It may seem strange that householders were willing to employ juvenile delinquents or even send dirty linen to them. One explanation is that household labor was so unremitting that homemakers were desperate for domestic servants of any kind. Ideologically, though, the key to this practice is the idea that “nice” homes have redemptive powers. The ideal in such cases was that servants from “bad” homes who would otherwise become social problems could be saved by life with a respectable family in a decent home.

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This understanding of domestic service has been used to justify the practice of making poor children do other people’s unpleasant, difficult, and menial chores. In a sense, it was used as a rationale for slavery, too. On the plus side, some see family-style management as a good way to counter the heartless exploitation of in-house workers. However, the idea that privileged homemakers should act as surrogate parents to their servants could make it difficult for those dependent on servants to see these workers as “real” labor. Carelessness about paying servants and even resistance to paying them arose out of employers’ tendency to equate domestic servants with daughters and wives who did not expect to be paid for doing household chores. Diaries, letters, interviews, and autobiographical statements left by U.S. domestic servants suggest mixed opinions of homemakers’ desire for servants who live and serve as “part of the family.” Many of these records show resentment of the assumption that servants have no family lives of their own. Others complain of the emotional energy that servants are asked to expend on their employers. A few note that servants are the only members of “a family” who can be laid off or dismissed. However, some records left by domestic servants express gratitude to employers who displayed an interest in their welfare. African American women, in particular, recall domestic service as a stepping-stone to a better life. Reports from white servants are scattered, but David Katzman includes a few in his history of domestic service in the United States. Early studies of domestic service focused on the “restless” servants who changed jobs frequently. But in recent years, scholars sympathetic to American

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workers have shown that domestic workers may have had good reasons to leave a post. Unkind treatment was one concern, and employers’ demands for ego boosting was another; loneliness was a common complaint, and sexual harassment was rife. Perhaps the most pressing issues for girls in domestic service was that employers did not always respect the contractual agreements they made with teenagers. Matters were even worse for very young children who were “bound” to service in other people’s homes, especially if their parents were far away. “Our Nig,” an account of “bound” service from 1859, shows how one young servant was virtually tortured by a cruel mistress with little chance for self-defense. Part of Harriet Wilson’s problem was that she was of mixed-race parentage, which made her an object of racist spite. Just as important, though, the status of “bound girl” left her open to a mistress’s violent whims. Sadly, after Wilson served her term and became legally free to pursue her own goals, she was unable to find work that her weakened body could perform. The loss of health brought on by heavy labor and little recreation was common among domestic servants. In some cases, it led to abrupt dismissal; in others, it made prostitution look like an easier way to make a living. American girls’ move out of domestic service has been gradual and staggered. The most important variables have been the worker’s race and place of birth. Though British North American colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put five- and six-year-old children of any race—Native American, black, and white—to work in nonkin homes, most boys left domestic service when they were old enough to be apprenticed to a trade. Girls usually served until

they married or died, regardless of their race, up to the 1840s. Then white girls started to find work in factories and mills. White girls’ preference for nonservice jobs was based on the perception that domestic service was degrading because it was like slavery. This perception explains why domestic service jobs were and are dominated by Americans of African descent and by recent immigrants. Some of the latter have been able to serve for a few years or even a generation and then move up the social ladder. But not all have been so lucky. A good source of information on serving girls in U.S. history is memoirs left by women who cooked and cleaned for other people when they were young. In addition to “Our Nig,” three important accounts are Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), A Lifetime with Mark Twain (1925), and Idella (1991). The first, a narrative of slavery written by Harriet Jacobs after she became free, describes the life of a house slave rather than a wage-earning servant. Yet because house slaves were exposed to some of the same trials that wage-earning servants faced, this chronicle illuminates aspects of all nineteenth-century servants’ lives. So does A Lifetime with Mark Twain, though as the title indicates, this book was written to chronicle the life of someone other than its narrator, Katy Leary. Idella Parker resisted this skew in her memoir. She wrote Idella to counter a former employer’s one-sided view of her as “the perfect maid.” After the abolition of slavery, the biggest innovation in U.S. service was “day service.” This form of service was the norm from about 1945. More recently, laws intended to put domestic service on a par with other kinds of labor have been passed. Servants do not always

Domesticity cooperate with these laws because they do not see them getting at the root of their concerns. The laws create new complications for employers, which can be to the disadvantage of the employee in finding a position. Barbara Ryan See also Captivity; Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Free Girls of African Descent; Indentured Servants; Work References and Further Reading Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. 1994. Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Dudden, Faye E. 1983. Serving Women: Household Service in NineteenthCentury America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Genovese, Eugene. 1969. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books. Jacobs, Harriet. 1861. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Jean Fagin Yellin. 1987. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katzman, David M. 1981. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lawton, Mary, ed. 1925. A Lifetime with Mark Twain: The Memories of Katy Leary, for Thirty Years His Faithful and Devoted Servant. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Parker, Idella. 1991. Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ “Perfect Maid.” With Mary Keating. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Romero, Mary. 1992. Maid in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge. Stansell, Christine. 1986. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tucker, Susan. 1988. Telling Memories among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wilson, Harriet. 1859. “Our Nig”; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North.

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Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1983. Reprint, New York: Random House.

Domesticity Domesticity was a central component of the Victorian ideology of gender in the nineteenth-century United States. The ideology of domesticity established for white, middle-class girls the boundaries between what was considered acceptable female behavior and what was not. Despite the decline of Victorianism, the legacy of domesticity underpins twentieth-century gender-role socialization theory and practice. Nineteenth-century fiction was one among a wide variety of cultural products that extolled domesticity. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin promoted domesticity as a force against slavery. Elsewhere in prints, pictures, poems, magazines, and manuals, experts, writers, artists, and others delineated idealized spheres of influence based on sex. In the public sphere men ruled because they were believed to be innately aggressive, assertive, competitive, and protective. In the domestic realm or the sanctuary of woman’s sphere, it was women—widely considered to be more tender, nurturing, submissive, emotional, virtuous, pious, and chaste—who reigned. Middle-class housewives were urged by Catharine Beecher (author of the highly influential Treatise on Domestic Education [1841]) to apply scientific methods and religious precepts to the domestic realm over which they exercised control. The ideology of domesticity that took shape between 1780 and 1830 did so within the wider context of major transformations: representative democracy,

Girls are taught at an early age to aspire to domestic roles that serve a patriarchal culture. (Library of Congress)

Domesticity the growth of capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing marital ideals, declining family size, and the rise of the “new” middle class. In the face of these unsettling social, economic, political, and cultural changes, the chief task of the efficient middleclass housewife was to use her domestic skills and moral suasion to create a refuge from moral degeneration, spiritual degradation, and political destruction. The newly devised responsibility of middle-class mothers was to raise her pliant children according to the canon of domesticity, which contrasted the safety of the home to the commercial ethos of the individualistic (masculine) world. Shaping children’s characters, instilling piety, teaching them habits of order and self-control—these were to be accomplished by mothers along strict gender lines. Unlike sons, daughters were raised to follow in the footsteps of their exalted Victorian mothers, whose domestic activities set a standard for them to emulate. Qualifying them for their future roles as mothers, daughters sewed, mended, cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, ran errands, and tutored and cared for younger siblings. While adolescent brothers served as apprentices or, increasingly over the era, attended school for longer periods, housekeeping and child care most often constituted a girl’s informal apprenticeship. They learned about the fundamentals of domesticity from female family and kin as well as from a vast didactic literature. Moralistic children’s books, housekeeping manuals, and advice books written primarily for adolescent girls, such as Letters to Young Ladies (1837), defined proper feminine behavior and domestic management. Lydia Maria Child’s The Girl’s Own Book

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(1833) is one such publication that made domesticity relevant to “little women.” Though it emphasized the importance of physical fitness and sound health, the intention was to make American girls into “true women.” Under certain circumstances, domesticity could empower women and girls within the family and beyond the household. Within companionate marriage, “true women” could exert moral influence over husbands, control sexual reproduction, and engage in voluntary activities beyond the household. Cultural and literary historians have recently argued that domesticity as a movement sought to reorder American culture from a distinctly female point of view and from the seemingly apolitical place called “home.” For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin also explores a variety of households, North and South, free and slave, to argue for the abolition of a system that breaks apart families, both black and white. Many women, with their daughters following in their footsteps, also engaged in a variety of voluntary social reforms precisely by extending the notions of home and family to the world and thus engaging the larger “human family” to be nurtured, adopted, and raised through such antebellum reforms as education, temperance, abolition, and, of course, women’s rights. Within the boundaries of acceptable female behavior were resources to expand those boundaries that at one and the same time circumscribed and empowered their inhabitants. Although aspects of the domestic ideology more relevant to Victorian culture fell away in the twentieth century, the importance of domestic training for girls persisted in institutionalized forms (e.g.,

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home economics), in recreation (e.g., miniaturized household technology and dolls), and as a cohesive philosophy dictating feminine behavioral standards. Although domesticity served utilitarian purposes during periods of economic retrenchment, prosperity also reinforced domestic ideals. For girls growing up after World War II, a modernized version of domesticity shaped recreation and education and was embedded in the material culture of girlhood and female adolescence. In Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (1992), however, Wini Breines examines how sites of male cultural resistance— rock and roll and the Beat movement— enabled discontented middle-class girls coming of age to negotiate domesticity’s more restrictive influence. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Shirley Teresa Wajda See also Girls’ Culture; Little Mothers References and Further Reading Boydston, Jeanne. 1991. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press.

Breines, Wini. 1992. Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. New York: Beacon Press. Child, Lydia Maria. 1833. The Girls’ Own Book. New York: Clark Austin. Cogan, Frances. 1989. All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in MidNineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cott, Nancy. 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, chap. 2. Green, Harvey. 1983. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon. Matthews, Glenda. 1987. “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Claudia, and Lynne Vallone, eds. 1994. The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Pollock, Linda. 1987. A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries. Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. Vallone, Lynn. 1995. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Welter, Barbara. 1966. “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18: 151–174.

E Eating Disorders

cardiac edema, or heart failure; dehydration and electrolyte imbalance; anemia; weakness or hyperactivity; and hypothermia. Menstruation may stop or fail to develop. Dry or yellowing skin, dental problems, thinning hair, and the growth of fine downy hair can also appear. In bulimia, girls may try to restrict their food intake for hours or days at a time, but this attempt is invariably followed by periods of binge eating in which unusually large amounts are eaten rapidly. These binges are physically and emotionally distressing, so the girl responds by purging in an attempt to get rid of the calories. She will make herself vomit, abuse diuretics or laxatives, drink too much or too little, or exercise too much in an effort to “burn off” the calories. The pattern of bingeing and purging may be repeated many times a day. The medical complications of bulimia include severe gastrointestinal distress, constipation, electrolyte imbalance, and cardiac abnormalities. In binge eating disorder, or compulsive overeating, girls eat large amounts of food, often in a short time, but do not attempt to purge afterwards. They may overeat throughout the day or binge at particular times of day, usually after school or in the evening. This disorder can lead to obesity, which increases an individual’s lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.

One of the most troubling aspects of contemporary girls’ development is the extent to which their growing exuberance and skills are burdened by worries about weight and body size. Preschoolers have been heard to ask about the “fat” on their tummies and thighs, and by elementary school many girls have put themselves on diets. These concerns intensify at puberty, and by adolescence a majority of girls say they dislike their bodies and make efforts to change them through diet and exercise. For some girls, these efforts lead to serious, sometimes life-threatening, eating disorders. Four variants of eating disorders are common today. In anorexia, girls restrict their food intake to far below what is needed to sustain growth or a healthy metabolism. This restriction is accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with weight, calories, and the amount and kind of food or liquid consumed. Bizarre rituals around eating may develop. As malnutrition and starvation increase, these behaviors and preoccupations intensify. The girl has no insight into how distorted her body image and eating behavior have become and is likely to complain that she is fat even when she is starving. The medical complications of anorexia include gastrointestinal distress and constipation; cardiac arrhythmia, a slowed heartbeat,

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In overactivity disorder, girls do unusually intense or lengthy periods of exercise in an effort to lose weight, build muscle, or lose body fat. The exercising is done compulsively rather than for pleasure, sport, competition, or skill building. Estimates of the prevalence of eating disorders vary, but the incidence of the illness has increased dramatically since 1980: 90–95 percent of the cases of eating disorders occur in females; 0.5–1 percent of all women, or at least 1 million women, will have anorexia at some time in their lives. Bulimia affects 1–3 percent of adolescents and young women: 1–2 million women have bulimia, and twice as many have bulimic-like symptoms. Although eating disorders were originally identified in girls from affluent, white households, they now affect youngsters from all races and socioeconomic groups. Anorexia is the most lethal of all psychiatric disorders. From 5 to 10 percent of people with chronic, severe anorexia will die. The medical complications of bulimia can also be fatal. Eating disorders develop out of a complex interplay of sociocultural, psychological, family, and biological factors. Although many girls struggle with the pressure to be thin, feel too fat, or try to diet, a number will develop eating disorders because of a specific combination of psychological or family vulnerabilities with biological risk factors. Historical Perspectives Women’s preoccupations with eating and body size have been recorded throughout Western history. Greek women believed that the Cretans had drugs that permitted them to eat without gaining weight. Roman women starved themselves in order to be thin and may have used the vomitorium to purge after eating.

Students of anorexia have pointed out similarities between modern girls’ refusal to eat and the asceticism of medieval saints. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, some young women fasted in penance or to intensify their prayer. Ecstatic or trance states often accompanied their fasts. Some licked or ingested repulsive matter to mortify themselves or to share in Christ’s suffering. The obsessiveness often noted in anorexia could be seen in rituals around praying, self-flagellation or mutilation, and silence. The poor insight into these behaviors and resistance to change characteristic of anorexia were apparent in the fasting saints’ resistance to direct orders from their superiors in the church to change their behavior. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stories spread of girls who were able to fast for long periods of time. These girls were not nuns or saints, but their apparent ability to refrain from eating was seen as a sign of purity and, sometimes, miraculous intervention. With the beginning of the study of psychiatry in western Europe, anorexia was often described as a prominent aspect of the newly diagnosed illness of hysteria. Pierre Janet reported several cases of anorexia. Sigmund Freud’s and Charles Breuer’s early case histories of hysterical adolescents and young women included descriptions of patients who refused to eat or who ate in odd, ritualized ways, such as eating only certain foods or drinking only from the wrong side of the glass. Charcot described a girl who tied a ribbon around her waist so she would not become heavier than her mother. The modern illness called “anorexia nervosa” was first described in 1874 by William Gull in England, and a similar set of symptoms was described in 1873 by Charles Lasègue in France.

Eating Disorders Although the anorexics of the continent were portrayed as hysterics, the anorexia occurring in the midst of dramatic symptoms such as paralysis, inability to speak, and dissociative states, found in the “fasting girls” of Britain and the United States and described by the contemporary historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, was depicted as less dramatic but caused as great a stir. Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of individual cases emerged in Britain and the United States in which young girls were reported to live for extended periods of time with no food. They became objects of spectacle and were visited by sightseers, religious and medical leaders, and reporters. Fierce controversy emerged over whether their survival was a hoax, and one young woman died of thirst after a watch was kept to guarantee that she neither ate nor drank. Brumberg documents the transition between an earlier view in which fasting was interpreted as miraculous and a later view, shaped by the emergence of spiritualism, in which fasting was seen as proof of the separation of the soul and the body. As it became accepted that fasting did lead to death by starvation, girls who did not eat came to be seen as ill. Brumberg describes how by the end of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the middle-class family, increasing numbers of girls refused to eat in response to their families’ coddling and encouragement of dependency. By the beginning of the twentieth century, eating very little was associated with the wish to have a slim figure in order to be attractive to potential mates. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, women’s growing independence, changes in fashion, and increasingly free relationships with men joined with a new “sci-

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entific” attitude toward food and health to create an interest in dieting. Plump girls were encouraged by their families to diet, and increasing numbers of adolescents dieted in ways that led to striking changes in the number of reported cases of anorexia. The increased prevalence of dieting also led to the emergence of bulimia as a recognized eating disorder. Although Brumberg gives anecdotal evidence, derived from diaries and personal letters, that girls shared the “secret” of controlling their weight by making themselves vomit as early as the 1920s, demographic studies show the emergence of bulimia as a significantly frequent psychiatric diagnosis beginning in the 1960s. There was a rapid rise of the incidence of bulimia in the 1970s, and the diagnostic label “bulimia nervosa” was coined by Gerald Russell in 1979. Sociocultural Perspectives As this historical survey suggests, eating disorders have developed in a variety of different social and cultural contexts. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, eating disorders are more widespread than they have ever been, and their frequency has been accompanied by a heightened awareness of the impact of social forces on girls’ development. Studies of the eating disorders of adult women have emphasized the difficulties contemporary women have in integrating work, sexuality, and mothering, and girls, too, face these challenges. One important factor in the current epidemic is that girls are raised by mothers who have their own serious concerns about weight and body size. They may have grown up watching their mothers diet or may have been put on diets by their mothers when they were very

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Idealized beauty, as in this portrait of “allAmerican girl” Sandra Dee, encourages girls to diet in order to achieve a certain body image. (Columbia Pictures/Archive Photos, 1959)

young. What the mothers may not have realized was that the developing girl’s view of her body was shaped by a culture very different from the one in which she herself grew up. Girls today grow up in a media-saturated society and are bombarded by images in which thinness signifies female beauty, sexual appeal, and power. Thinness may have an androgynous quality or reach a point of outright emaciation. Not only have models, film stars, and musicians become thinner than in past

decades, but they are also much younger. In the past, girls could tell themselves “that’s how beautiful grownup women look,” but now they are forced to compare themselves directly to images of girls their own age, and they often end up feeling inadequate. The expectation that contemporary girls will begin having boyfriends and engaging in sexual activity during their teenage years makes the need to match this ideal of beauty especially urgent. Fears of pregnancy and long-term anxieties about achievement and competition may be hidden in concerns about thinness. The increasing freedom girls have to participate in sports also leads to conflicting feelings about their bodies. They may strive to be lean or to have the bodies of gymnasts, figure skaters, or ballet dancers. Girls who participate in sports and do become strong and muscular experience conflicts about how their athletic bodies differ from the more slender ideal. As girls try to learn how to eat to achieve the ideal body, they are faced with a conundrum. Food in the United States and the West is more abundant than it has ever been. Seasonal foods are available year-round, and family meals have been replaced by fast food, takeout counters, all-you-can-eat buffets, and restaurants that serve extremely large portions. Gourmet cooking is popular and presented on how-to television shows and in specialized magazines. At the same time, the growing health consciousness of the last few decades has shaped girls’ views of eating in a more restrictive way. Because both accurate and faddish information is widely publicized, many girls grow up with the idea that they should not eat fats, sugars, meat, or starches. They may grow up in families in which parents have adopted

Eating Disorders special diets. As the culture at large has responded to this emphasis on diet, expectations and manners have changed. Although in the past it was considered polite to eat what was served, now it is seen as the host or restaurant’s responsibility to accommodate guests’ health, religious, or ethical restrictions. The weight loss industry and diet pills add to the dangerous and confusing messages young girls hear every day. A final and increasingly important cultural influence takes the form of popular media depictions of eating disorders. Beginning in the late 1960s, a number of books written for young adults took anorexia as their theme. In books like Steven Levenkron’s The Best Little Girl in the World, anorexics were pictured as high achievers out of touch with their emotions and bodies, whose self-starvation was one more effort at perfection. The character of the books and movies that followed changed in the 1980s and the 1990s. Novels and memoirs began to address the topic of bulimia as well. These books tended to present eating disorders as part of a spectrum of impulsive behavior that included drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, and promiscuity. Marya Hornbacher’s book Wasted vividly illustrates these themes. By the end of the twentieth century, eating disorders had become “news,” and girls had access to both factual information and sensationalized accounts of the illness. With this widespread popularization of the illness, susceptible girls could be heard to say, not “I want to be thin” but “I want to be anorexic.” Emotional and Developmental Perspectives Unfortunately, most girls in our culture respond to the idealization of thinness by

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An anorexic young woman looks at herself in a bathroom mirror. (Shirley Zeiberg)

becoming concerned about their weight and body size. For some more vulnerable girls, this concern can lead to a serious eating disorder. Their vulnerability comes from a combination of emotional and biological factors. Eating disorders tend to begin around the time a girl enters puberty. The increased emotional instability caused by shifts in hormone levels can make it hard for girls to integrate important changes in their bodies and relationships. As they approach menstruation, experience new genital sensations, and notice that their breasts are developing and their stomachs, hips, and thighs are becoming rounded, their anxiety about becoming sexually mature finds easy expression in a fear of becoming “fat.” A girl’s sense that she is fat does not come only from

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seeing her reflection in the mirror or her weight on the scale but also from the diffuse quality of women’s body feelings. Premenstrual tensions, sexual sensations, and emotional reactions can all be labeled “fat.” Because of this, the longing to be thin may be an attempt to disown all the new, troubling experiences by returning to the more androgynous body of the little girl. Fears of growing up can also stem from relational issues. Being more independent from her parents, especially if her family is highly enmeshed, can be threatening for a girl who is not yet secure in her peer relationships. Conflicted family loyalties or family secrets can make it especially hard for a girl to become more autonomous. Girls who have experienced their parents’ divorce, physical or sexual abuse, or significant losses may find that adolescent development brings up unresolved early conflicts in ways that are still hard to manage. Carol Gilligan’s observation that girls try to maintain relationships at the expense of their own voice and knowledge is relevant, as well, to their management of their hungers and body needs. The development of anorexia or bulimia may reflect the different personal styles with which girls handle these developmental and relational pressures. Girls who become anorexic are more likely to be perfectionist and achievement-oriented, to value self-control, and to be timid or inhibited. Girls who develop bulimia are likely to be more impulsive, more emotionally reactive, and more focused on social relationships. Once an eating disorder becomes established, though, a number of common reactions can be expected. Girls with either anorexia or bulimia become highly invested in self-control and in controlling

others. They become secretive and experience intense shame about their behavior. They may also experience secret feelings of superiority. The eating disorder may become their identity or provide the only meaning in their lives. Biological Perspectives Physicians and scientists faced with the intractability of serious eating disorders have speculated about the influence of biological factors on the development of the illness. In the seventeenth century, patients were given “aromatic bags” and “stomach plaisters” of mixed herbs and minerals, to little effect. Early in the twentieth century, eating disorders were attributed to a hormonal deficiency, and patients were treated with thyroid and pituitary extracts, again with little success. In the early 1970s, Gerald Russell explored the possibility that disorders of the hypothalamus led to eating disorders. Contemporary medicine has made two kinds of contributions to the understanding of eating disorders. First, it has been increasingly understood that restricting the intake of food, by itself, creates many of the symptoms of eating disorders. In the landmark Minnesota study of the 1940s, healthy male volunteers who ate a below-subsistence diet began to exhibit cravings and preoccupation with food, bizarre eating habits and rituals, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, significant depression, and a distorted body image. When the experiment was over, their disordered eating continued, and many developed bulimia. Subsequent work on nutrition and weight led to the concept of “set point” and to an understanding of the physiologically based difficulty people have in maintaining a diet or a weight that is too low. Studies of gastric emptying have demonstrated that both anorex-

Eating Disorders ics and bulimics tend to keep food in their stomachs much longer than normal. This leads to a distorted perception of hunger and satiety that, in turn, contributes to patients’ disturbed eating behavior. Second, research has demonstrated that both anorexia and bulimia happen more often in girls who have obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and anxiety. This suggests that girls who have family histories or early childhood episodes of these problems, especially obsessive thoughts or compulsive rituals (for example, hand washing, counting, or checking rituals) are more likely to develop eating disorders if they become overly concerned about their weight or begin to diet or exercise too much. Treatment Perspectives In addition to medical treatments, behavioral interventions have been a mainstay of the treatment of eating disorders. Since treatment must focus on helping the anorexic eat more and helping the bulimic refrain from purging, older treatments have many features in common with contemporary ones. In the late 1800s, physicians spoke of the importance of separating an anorexic girl from her family and recommended that the “moral authority” of the doctor and carefully trained nurses or midwives be used to encourage the girl to eat a nutritious but bland diet. The girl was kept warm and calm and was encouraged not to be active. This was often very effective, but if the girl did not eat, forced feeding was threatened or used. A specialized form of this general treatment was developed in the late 1800s by Silas Weir Mitchell. Today, in cases that have become lifethreatening, girls as well as boys are hospitalized and treated in a group setting

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that resembles nineteenth-century treatment. Meal plans with increasing calorie levels have replaced the bland milk diet and are prescribed with the goal of helping the patient gain weight at a steady weekly rate. Nutritional supplements are used if the girl will not eat or drink food, and nasogastric tube feeding of these supplements may be necessary if all nutrition is refused. When a girl’s health is severely compromised, surgically implanted tubes may allow the infusion of nutrients and fluids directly into the stomach or subclavian artery. Girls are carefully monitored to prevent purging or obsessive-compulsive rituals around eating. Overactivity and exercising are limited until girls reach a healthy weight. The current epidemic of eating disorders has also led to the development of many forms of outpatient treatment. These treatments generally involve following a meal plan, recording what is eaten throughout the day, and engaging in planned, increasingly strenuous exercise. Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps girls recognize, question, and change destructive automatic thoughts about their bodies. Behavioral techniques aim at desensitizing girls and boys who have become very anxious about eating or at interrupting compulsive rituals. Education about the cultural pressure to be thin, the dangers of dieting, and the need for adequate nutrition can help girls see the illness more objectively. Once the eating behavior is stabilized, individual, group, or family psychotherapy may help patients explore the emotional factors that led to the development of the eating disorder. In addition to professional treatment, there has been a proliferation of support groups and self-help books and programs for women with eating disorders, and girls

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with this illness may also find these approaches helpful. The treatment of eating disorders can be very difficult for girls, their families, and their health care providers. The strong emotions evoked by treatment can be painful, but they provide an opportunity to explore and resolve the vulnerabilities and conflicts that led to the development of the problem. Sharon H. Nathan

See also Body Image; Consumer Culture; Cosmetics; Psychotherapy; Suicidal Behavior in Girls; Substance Abuse References and Further Reading Bruch, Hilde. 1978. The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1988. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Gardner, David M., and Paul E. Garfinkel, eds. 1997. Handbook of Treatment for Eating Disorders. 2d ed. New York: Guilford Press. Hornbacher, Marya. 1998. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: HarperCollins. Levenkron, Steven. 1978. The Best Little Girl in the World. New York: Warner Books. Minuchin, Salvador, Bernice L. Rosman, and Lester Baker. 1978. Psychosomatic Families: Anorexia Nervosa in Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Palazzoli, Mara Selvini. 1978. SelfStarvation. New York: Jason Aronson. Pipher, Mary. 1994. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine Books. Wolf, Naomi. 1991. The Beauty Myth. New York: William Morrow. Zerbe, Kathryn J. 1993. The Body Betrayed: Women, Eating Disorders, and Treatment. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

Education of Girls Primary and secondary education for young women was initially limited to preparation for the roles of wife and mother; it is now seen as the primary means to social and economic advancement. In the mid-1600s, early settlers were responsible for educating their own children, and educational standards were modest. A girl received just enough instruction to fulfill her duties as wife and mother. For the next two centuries, most communities saw no point in educating women or in paying for their education because until the mid-1800s, most girls were destined to work inside the home. Private and religious groups were the first to see value in educating girls. Dame schools, initiated around 1650 in Massachusetts, offered girls from well-to-do white families education outside the home for the first time. In 1727 Catholic nuns in the Order of Saint Ursuline started the first school for girls in New Orleans. By 1750, a few girls were allowed tutoring in public schools but only while the boys were on summer recess, and the curriculum was limited to subjects that would improve girls for motherhood. The period between 1787 and 1837 was a time of great educational expansion on behalf of young women. Founded during this time were the earliest private and public high schools, the first school established by a woman, schools for minority girls, and the first private school to subsidize education for poor girls. However, it was not until after the Civil War that girls attended public high schools in large numbers. By the late 1800s, a major shift had taken place across the curriculum. Young women began to go to school to prepare for work outside the home. The

Education of Girls focus of their education shifted to new roles open to women in the community, commonly teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. Secondary classrooms were segregated by gender for certain classes. By 1900 many colleges began to accept women and by 1930 women undergraduates outnumbered men. The 1960s and early 1970s saw positive changes for women. For African American girls in particular, the change in the high school environment was profound. Enforcement of desegregation rulings mandated racial integration in public schools for the first time. In 1972, propelled by civil rights legislation, many gender barriers in education and school sports were lifted. Since the beginning of the women’s movement in the 1960s, more attention has been paid to girls’ educational achievements, particularly in math and science. By 1990 social gender biases were drawn to teachers’ attention, making the classroom more conducive to the way girls learn. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, teachers are working more diligently to teach and encourage girls more fairly. Career opportunities for women are principally founded on academic achievement and are more diverse than ever. Economic advantage and social expectations still form part of educational opportunities for young women, but society no longer overlooks the importance of promoting the well-being of girls through education. 1600 to 1700: The Early Settlers In the early years of the European settlement of the Americas, there was no public education system. The idea of a free public system of education for all children in every community was centuries

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away from full implementation. Families, rather than the state, bore the responsibility for educating children. Unfortunately, many of those who ventured to this country were illiterate and therefore incapable of passing reading skills to their children. The majority of children would not have had any opportunity for basic education during the very earliest days of immigration. It was mandated in Massachusetts in 1642 that all children should be able to read, understand the law, and be prepared for work. Because of the centrality of religion in the lives of the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, the Christian Bible was the book children learned to read. Parents were responsible for completing this task and bore the brunt of criticism if they did not fulfill this social and moral responsibility. The case of orphans raised an interesting issue because there was no parent to fulfill this social obligation. It is perhaps because of these orphans that the initial idea of gathering children together with a single guide, or tutor, emerged. By the mid-seventeenth century, “dame schools” brought together children whose mothers were occupied with work. Dame schools offered what Americans today might call the first day care centers. Both boys and girls memorized passages from the Bible. Some learned to read, along with learning domestic skills. Boys cut wood, carved, and helped with outside chores. Girls learned to cook and sew, help with the little children, and work inside the house. It is probable that the work these children contributed was payment for the teaching that took place. Gradually, the education of children became a public issue rather than a family one. In villages of fifty families or

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more, town schools were required by law in Massachusetts. These were open only to boys who already knew their ABCs. Grammar schools were mandated in towns of 100 or more families and had as their stated goal the preparation of boys for studies at Harvard College. Early religious education meant Protestant education, principally under the Puritans or Anglicans. Gradually, other religions began to establish themselves in America, including Lutherans, Quakers, and Catholics. Religious instruction was still primarily learned within the family or in the church. Before long, churches established schools to provide religious and academic instruction. The first to bring Catholic education to America were the Franciscan missionaries, who founded a school in St. Augustine, Florida, as early as 1606. The Jesuits, who were first established in the Americas in Canada, expanded into Maryland as early as 1634 and began to lay the foundation for Catholic secondary education. However, it would be 200 years before Catholic education was formally organized and widespread. These early schools educated boys only, as was their tradition in Europe. 1700 to 1800: Western Expansion Early in the eighteenth century, the society of the day determined that boys needed different schooling from girls. Boys needed arithmetic, reading, and writing, the skills necessary for commerce. Buildings were constructed, male teachers prepared, and public education began in support of the formal schooling of boys. Girls, it was thought, needed to learn about household duties and rarely needed to go outside the home for additional training. Many believed that the educa-

tion boys received would be detrimental to females because it was overly rigorous and demanding of the mind. In addition, educating girls would waste the teacher’s time. However, dame schools were spreading west as girls from wealthier families gathered at the teacher’s house and were instructed in the tasks of maintaining a home. The teacher, a woman accomplished in certain skills, would not have had any formal education herself. Subjects included reading, memorization, sewing, and ornamental needlework; some girls learned letter writing and etiquette. Roman Catholic missionary priests were among the very first formal teachers in the new land. Catholic schools were started within parishes to serve the families of congregations. With the rapid western expansion of the United States, the church population quickly grew. Although priests initiated schools, soon Catholic sisters staffed them. The Ursuline nuns came to the United States in 1727 and began a school for young women in New Orleans. Over the next fifty years, the Ursulines, coming from Ireland and France, established academies of learning for young women in numerous southern and eastern cities. Aware of the deficiencies of the training girls received in comparison to boys, some parents wanted more for their daughters. By the 1750s, a few girls were allowed into public school buildings but only while the boys were on summer recess. There are accounts of girls being smuggled into the boys’ schools under disguise. Some families hired teachers to act as tutors for girls, meeting before and after the regular school hours of eight to

Education of Girls four. This would mean additional money for teachers and a sacrifice for the girls. But for some, it offered the only chance to learn to read and write. It was not until after the Revolutionary War that town schools across New England manifested a more liberal spirit toward the education of girls. The ideals of freedom and democracy led to the creation of the new nation and schools. After the war, children were expected to be educated to a higher standard so that they could more fully participate in the new society. This meant that the American mother needed to be educated at least to the standard that would prepare her male children for their duties as citizens, and her female children for marriage and motherhood. There was greater openness to the integration of girls into the public school classroom so that those young women could be better mothers and teachers of their children. It was expensive to build two schools, so typically boys and girls were educated together in primary school. The second half of the eighteenth century ushered in very important developments in the private education of girls, the female academy and seminary. These institutions trained almost all girls who received formal education up to the Civil War. In 1787, the Young Ladies’ Academy was founded in Philadelphia. Radical for its time and unaffiliated with any religion, this academy gave young girls the opportunity to be taught a curriculum almost identical to that for the best-educated boys. Founded by a group of men who believed that women were as intellectually capable as men, this school offered a completely new opportunity for the daughters of wealthy merchants. In 1778, a Quaker grammar school opened

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to educate mothers so that they could educate their children properly. The Quakers had never restricted church leadership to males only. Their schools, like other parochial schools, were internally administered and were free of the restrictions of school committees and boards. 1800 to 1900: Immigrants and Industry This century witnessed the greatest expansion of education for girls. The curriculum for males centered on the classics—Greek, Latin, math, history, science, and writing—but vocational training was often included. Schools were built at a rapid rate, and large numbers of boys attended, even if only for a short while. When they left school, often at a young age, it was because they were headed to work or, in the second half of the century, to war. Early in the nineteenth century, many cities began to provide secondary educational institutions for white, middleclass girls, which were soon known as high schools. The goal of the curriculum in the early 1800s was to prepare women for motherhood. Later, girls were taught enough skills to enter the job market and often shared the classroom with boys. Around 1855, normal schools were established to train girls as teachers. By 1900, girls dramatically outnumbered boys in secondary schools as boys left to work. Girls were soon to follow, but with the expectation that, once married, middleclass women would remain at home. However, education still was not equally distributed across social and racial lines. Poor and immigrant girls received very little formal education, and even if an education was available, many left in

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order to earn money for their families. It was against the law to teach slave children to read from about 1830 until after the Civil War, but Angelina and Sarah Grimké are credited as having done so in defiance of these laws. The 1800s were the age of the academy and the female seminary, which offered middle- and upper-class families an alternative to the public coeducational high school. Young women were taught Latin, French, mathematics, history, geography, and science, as well as manners and morality. Some seminaries offered music and drawing. Although not often owned by congregations, these educational institutions were typically supported by wealthy church members and religious benefactors. In 1821, Emma Willard established the Troy Female Seminary in New York, with a curriculum that initially focused on training for motherhood. Eventually, the school put more emphasis on education and teacher training. Many of the early women teachers in the United States got their start at the Troy Female Seminary. Oberlin College was the first to admit women, black and white, in 1833. The curriculum for women was simpler than the more difficult courses for men, but Oberlin was years ahead of its time by admitting women students from its founding. In 1837 Mary Lyon established Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first to allow poor girls to be educated alongside wealthy ones. Its goal was to prepare women for teaching and for missionary work. In Oklahoma in 1850, the Cherokee Female Seminary, modeled after Mount Holyoke, aimed to give Native American girls a chance to succeed in the predominantly white world by providing education at a high standard. In the 1850s in Washington, D.C., the first seminary was

opened for black women. The Miner Normal School for Colored Girls eventually became Miner Teachers College. Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles started Spelman Female Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881. Like other seminaries, Spelman prepared many of the first black teachers in this country. Today this school is known as Spelman College and has a long tradition of educating black women. These and other early seminaries not only allowed generations of women a chance to move outside the domestic sphere but established the influence of women in the field of education. Prior to this time, men were not only the teachers but also the administrators and textbook writers. Noted early contributors to women’s education include Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, Prudence Crandall, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emma Willard. These women and many others revolutionized instruction by incorporating new teaching methods, writing new textbooks, and improving the learning environment. Catholic schools for boys began to expand to postsecondary seminaries in the hopes that soon there would be a native clergy. In boy’s schools, priests were the teachers. Nuns made up the majority of the primary school teachers and were the only teachers in secondary girls’ schools, now frequently referred to as academies for young women. The number of sisters sent from Europe to teach expanded rapidly in the 1800s. Early teaching orders that expanded Catholic education across the Midwest included the Sisters of Loretto, Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of St. Joseph. Catholic sisters educated girls according to the expectations of the times. Early in the century, the girls’ curricu-

Education of Girls lum was not the same as the boys’. Boys in frontier schools were taught basic education, with a vocational emphasis on the trades and practical arts. Girls were educated for the private realm, emphasizing the skills needed to be a moral wife and mother. By the end of the nineteenth century, the school curriculum had given way to academic and practical studies. Many girls were prepared for secretarial jobs and teaching, and a few went on to college. 1900 to 2000: Suffrage, Wars, and the Women’s Movement In 1900 large numbers of women were beginning to enjoy access to public education, although it had numerous critics. Some questioned the effect that strenuous thinking had on women’s fertility, whereas others disliked the shift to vocational preparation with less emphasis on preparation for motherhood. Two world wars and women’s suffrage radically changed the roles of women in American society in the first half of this century. The public high school was becoming common, and many students attended for at least a year or two. The curriculum was a combination of the classics and job preparation as education for young women in public schools became more standardized. At the beginning of this century, many girls received more years of education than boys because boys were leaving high school to learn a trade or enroll in business school. Commercial and trade schools prepared boys for work, and some began to enroll girls. Subjects included bookkeeping, typing, and shorthand. Some critics suggested that women would take jobs from men. Enrollment of female students in colleges soared after the Nineteenth Amend-

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ment, giving women the constitutional right to vote nationwide, was passed. In 1920, nearly half the U.S. undergraduate population was female. Not for another fifty years would women represent such a large percentage of the college population. Reflective of the values of society, as education continues to be, girls were not educated in the same manner as boys. After World War II, most high school courses were open to boys and girls, but part of the curriculum remained genderspecific. The boys went to shop to learn woodworking and lamp making, whereas girls went to home economics classes and learned to cook and sew. During the 1960s, the civil rights movement drastically changed the position minorities and women held in many fields, not the least of which was academia. Desegregation laws granted access to schools, jobs, and positions of leadership for black and minority students. At the same time, the women’s movement further expanded the opportunities for women. Education served as a springboard for those who wanted to escape traditional gender roles. In 1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments was passed, which penalized any educational institution receiving federal funds that discriminated based on gender. No longer could admissions, scholarships, equipment, and other resources be allocated unfairly in favor of men. However, getting these ideals into reality in every single classroom was quite another matter from passing laws. Just as in the case of racial discrimination, the school environment has never become free of inequalities. Another shift that has taken place in public education since 1970 is the role of schools in the lives of students. No longer are they just about the classics and career

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A thirteen-year-old student practices her writing skills. (Skjold Photographs)

training. Schools fulfill broader social functions. As more parents work outside the home, the role of the school has expanded to include feeding children breakfast and offering day care, life skills training, and lessons in conflict resolution. Meanwhile, criticism has been levied against the standard of education in public schools. School grounds are no longer free from the social environment of violence (e.g., sexual harassment and school shootings). Many parents have demanded greater accountability in public schools and more involvement on school boards. Some parents have chosen to send their children to private religious and secular schools or to home school them. Many parents prefer single-sex schools for their daughters, believing these insti-

tutions to be superior at educating and acculturating girls to assume fulfilling careers. Private and parochial schools continue to offer an alternative to public education. Educating students is costly, and no school is free from the concerns of budgeting. In the 1990s some cities have begun to implement a voucher system to allow parents to choose a private education for their children without additional cost. Technological advances in the workplace demand more expensive equipment in the classroom. More and more service economy jobs require a college education, but college placement and job placement have become more competitive. It is almost impossible to predict what direction the education of girls will take

Emotions in the twenty-first century. Current debates include the issue of single-sex classrooms and the different learning styles for girls. Recent studies have isolated problems for girls in today’s classroom: teacher gender bias, low achievement in science and math, and the decline in girls’ self-esteem during adolescence. However these issues turn out, education will continue to be an important part of the lives of girls in American society. At the same time, society will continue its work of determining the best way to educate young women and enabling them to succeed in the world of our times.

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Deferrari. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Riordan, Cornelius. 1990. Girls and Boys in School: Together or Separate? New York: Teachers College Press. Sadker, Myra and David. 1994. Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Shmurak, Carol B. 1998. Voices of Hope: Adolescent Girls at Single Sex and Coeducational Schools. New York: Peter Lan Publishing. Tyack, David, and Elisabeth Hansot. 1990. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press. Woody, Thomas. 1929. A History of Women’s Education in the United States. New York: Science Press.

Anita Reznicek

See also Advice Books; African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; Asian American Girls; Chicana Girls; Child Guidance; College Girls; Home Economics Education; Hygiene; Jewish Education of Girls; Latina Girls; Literacy; Mathematics and Science; Native American Girls; Reading References and Further Reading Berkin, Carol Ruth, and Mary Beth Norton. 1979. Women of America: A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bernikow, Louise. 1997. The American Women’s Almanac. New York: Berkley Books. Bryk, Anthony S., Valerie E. Lee, and Peter B. Holland. 1993. Catholic Schools and the Common Good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goebel, Edmund J., Rev. 1937. A Study of Catholic Secondary Education during the Colonial Period up to the First Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1852. New York: Benziger Brothers Press. Goodsell, Willystine. 1923. The Education of Women: Its Social Background and Its Problems. New York: Macmillan. McNally, William P., Rev. 1942. “The Secondary School.” Pp. 118–140 in Essays on Catholic Education in the United States. Edited by Roy J.

Emotions Emotional expectations and ensuing emotional training have formed vital aspects of American girlhood from the early nineteenth century onward. Growing concern over gender differentiation, a staple of nineteenth-century middleclass life, seized on emotional criteria as a crucial divide, though prescriptive writers were also eager to make sure that emotions could help prepare girls for connections with men in marriage. From this vivid tradition, twentieth-century standards setters worked to effect reforms that would reduce, without eliminating, specifically girlish emotions. Girls and emotions thus form a dynamic pairing in American history, and key definitions evolved at a number of specific points. Historians have only recently begun to devote explicit attention to the history of emotions, and there are many facets still to be probed. Best known are the pre-

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scriptions urged on the most articulate segments of society. These are important: they help set standards for judging appropriate behavior in oneself and others, and they guide laws and social institutions such as schools. Less is certain about how standards relate to actual experience—a crucial question for girls, often held to demanding rules of emotions management that they may not have fully internalized. And various subcultures undoubtedly articulated different standards for girls because of different expectations of what roles girls should be prepared for. Colonial American society did not offer detailed emotional rules for girls. Conduct literature, insofar as it applied to women, focused mainly on adults, particularly in marriage. It was doubtless assumed that girls would be urged toward deference and humility joined with piety. This expectation was particularly true for girls in domestic service, including slaves, but again the assumptions ran sufficiently deep, associated with widely accepted age and gender hierarchies, that elaborate concern seemed unnecessary. Certain gender distinctions were assumed. A hierarchical emotion like anger might be permitted to boys in dealing with inferiors but not normally to girls. Girls might more legitimately display emotional turmoil through sadness or even jealousy (though a jealous defense of honor was a male prerogative). Certain changes in a religiously guided emotional regime began to appear in the early eighteenth century, but they did not explicitly apply to females. Men began to be urged, as part of an increasingly commercial society, to develop new forms of emotional control. Cheerfulness was one of the injunctions now recom-

mended to help men get along with others and animate successful self-presentation. The same changes were not applied directly to girls and women, who had less of a public role and less contact with strangers. By the 1760s, however, more elaborate redefinitions began to develop as part of the formation of a new middle class no longer confined to traditional patterns of hierarchy and deference. Manners books urged a new level of emotional and bodily control on both genders as part of polite respectability. A genteel person did not let emotions contort the face or lead to unseemly body movements (it was for this reason that etiquette writers argued against the desirability of laughter). Men, increasingly schooled for a competitive world in which any emotional display might suggest vulnerability, were particularly held to a display of calm. But women, in part because they too faced new challenges as arranged courtships and marriages declined in favor of greater public contact and competition, had similar obligations. Anger was bad for them too, though the justifications varied. According to James Forrester, girls should be taught that anger was “a prodigious enemy to beauty”: “it ruffles the sweetest features, discolours the finest complexion, and, in a word, gives the air of a fury to the face of an angel. . . . I never knew an angry woman preserve her beauty long” (Forrester 1848, 106). The new emphasis on emotional obligations associated with appearance formed part of the larger reevaluation of women as particularly responsible for beauty. Only in a newly explicit emphasis on the need for modesty were respectable girls held to gender-specific standards in the late eighteenth century. Girls must

Emotions be taught to be delicate and to maintain a modest countenance. The goal was to please men but also, in an increasingly open society, to discourage unwanted male advances. Manners writers strongly recommended that girls blush as a sign of emotional delicacy while keeping careful control over their eyes. Thus when a girl talks with men, “she must look a little downwards, or on one side, not stare in their faces, lest it be interpreted in the worst sense” (Arthur 1848, 22). The belief in overall similarities in emotional goals for both genders extended into childrearing advice through the first decades of the nineteenth century. Childish innocence rather than distinctions between girls and boys gained primary attention. Children should not be upset by the use of fear in discipline—a new prompting to parents that would be often repeated in decades to come. If they were not exposed to anger, in turn they would learn to avoid anger themselves. Although advice literature increasingly emphasized the primary role of mothers in bringing up children, the standards applied to children themselves remained roughly the same for girls and boys. This pattern shifted by the 1840s. An increasingly urban and industrial society seemed to require more differentiated roles for men and women—men in public, work-oriented settings and women at home now shorn of most productive functions. Emotional preparation of children varied accordingly. Boys who seemed emotionally effeminate could now be given a new label, “sissy,” whereas girls who displayed boys’ rough-and-tumble emotions were (slightly less critically) called “tomboys.” Overall, girls were allowed to be more emotionally open than boys. In fearful

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situations, it was assumed that girls would and should display fright and tears as part of appropriate female modesty and frailty, whereas boys should summon up a dominant courage. Indeed, girls learned that displaying a bit more fear than they felt was a good way to seem feminine. Jealousy, though disapproved, was another outlet. The emotion was labeled female, a sign of a possessive love by the weaker gender. And girls were definitely expected to learn grief, now expressed in abundance on the occasion of loss, with women leading the way. By the 1870s, families could acquire mourning clothes, coffins, and other appurtenances for girls’ dolls to help in this aspect of emotional training. And of course girls were urged to be loving toward parents, friends, and siblings. Love was an emotion both genders should ultimately share, but it was the quintessential female emotional responsibility. And maternal love, for which girls should be prepared, was outside the male repertoire altogether. Only in anger was female emotionality to be clearly constrained, for here boys had outlets that girls lacked. Anger was unfeminine, and a good girl neither felt nor expressed it. Older ideas about female delicacy shone through clearly, whereas a boy who felt no anger might be a “sissy.” These distinctive emotional standards were endlessly preached to girls (and boys). They showed up in literature directed at parents. They informed stories about good and bad girls. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for example, vigorously approved of girlish efforts to keep anger in check, and stories of boundless female love and grief were even more common. They underwrote

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distinctive children’s toys, as was mentioned earlier. And they mattered. Girls wrote enthusiastic letters about their love and their hopes for love. They used their rights to jealousy, even against each other. Thus a jealous sister wrote to her mother: “I suppose Papa told you of how jealous I was when I heard you are going to allow Emily to go to the Phi Psi musical for it did not seem at all like you to let a child like her go to any such things. . . . I am very jealous of Emily for I think she has more than her share of gaiety when I am away” (Stearns 1985). And they dutifully recorded struggles against anger or a bad temper. It is impossible of course to say how many girls thought they lived up to the emotional standards that were supposed to define their sex. The experience of girls in the lower classes or the countryside is particularly elusive, though ongoing work in emotional history will push back some of the current limitations on our understanding. There is no question, though, of a well-defined set of values for girls’ emotions by which good girls were praised and bad condemned. Use of angry curses by female convicts thus seemed far more shocking than similar language by male prisoners and at the same time confirmed the justice of labeling these girls and young women deviant. Emotional rules conjoined with sexual standards lay at the center of gender differentiation in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Then the signals changed again, particularly by the 1920s. Childrearing literature began to reduce gender distinctions in emotions in favor of common problems and common goals. The evolution was not always clear-cut, and the impact certainly had to do battle against older standards, but the movement was definite.

Jealousy is one example. Prescriptive writers greatly intensified the attack on this emotion, considered to be both childish and dangerous. Jealousy was bad for children, who might do harm to siblings in the grip of newly defined sibling rivalries, and bad for prospective adulthood, for children who failed to control jealousy would not have satisfactory relationships as adults. These messages were identical for girls and boys. But 1920s researchers long contended that girls were far more likely to suffer from sibling rivalry than boys, and the female pronoun long predominated in popular commentary on the subject. By the end of the twentieth century most of this research had been discounted because intense sibling jealousy was both less common and less gender-specific than the transitional researchers allowed (Stearns 1985). Fear and anger suddenly seemed less gendered. Boys were often irrationally afraid, just as girls might be, and fear was dangerous to children in general. Girls should not be encouraged to be artificially skittish, and they might demonstrate courage on occasion. The rules for managing what was seen as a harmful but common emotional issue merged. Boys were no longer given greater leeway for anger, and at the same time the idea that girls were magically anger-free was abandoned as well. Anger was not good, and children of both sexes should be encouraged to identify it and overcome it, but an occasional mild outburst from a girl did not warrant emotional policing. The merger of gender standards for children resulted from several trends. Increasingly, emotional advice was based on scientific inquiry, which often overturned nineteenth-century beliefs. Role differentiation between middle-class

Emotions men and women was narrowing, even before the great movement of adult women into the labor force. The prestige associated with motherhood declined, in part because of a steadily falling birth rate; correspondingly, the emotions associated with motherhood, in which girls should be schooled, were downplayed. “Smotherhood,” indeed, was a derisive term applied to a dangerous level of maternal affection. Coeducation brought boys and girls together in new ways, and so did a common pattern of work, at least for a few years. Here were additional reasons to seek girlhoods less fully defined by the emotional emphases of the previous century. But past standards were not easily set aside, and some argued that key differentiations also reflected some differences in standard emotional makeup. Girls continued to be more constrained in anger than boys were. A girl’s anger less fully predicted adult personality than did a boy’s, which meant that angry males showed their colors earlier. Girls concealed anger lest they seem unfeminine. They were also much more likely to cry when angry than boys were, and this difference extended into adulthood. Crying, indeed, posed something of a dilemma for twentieth-century emotional participants. Insofar as girls were to think of themselves as emotional equals of boys, ready to join in similar activities and ultimately work, crying seemed distracting, a sign of weakness. But girls did cry more, and at points feminists would argue for the good health of this emotional release and say that boys should be encouraged to cry too, lest they bottle up dangerous frustrations. Late in the twentieth century, as rates of depression among women increased or were more widely reported, concern

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about sadness in girls gained new attention as well. Love presented another dilemma. Growing concern about emotional intensity targeted love along with other nineteenth-century staples. Too much love could be risky. The idea of love was increasingly associated with sex more than with intense emotion (the evolution of the word lover indicated this clearly). Even granting great individual variation in each gender, girls reacted to this change of standards less completely than boys did. Girls’ culture continued to be filled with stories of love supplemented by Hollywood films. By adolescence, girls frequently wrote of their tension between a quest for intense love with the perfect man and a desire to be modern and nonchalant. It was a difficult negotiation that often led to tensions later, when girls evaluated marriage proposals. Girls also faced tensions concerning friendship. The flowery terms linked to nineteenth-century friendship gradually declined in favor of less vigorous expressions. Concern about homosexuality—reported by many college women by the 1920s— helped qualify female friendship, though young men were more affected. A recent study suggests that, by the 1920s, young women’s friendships were indeed loosening, in part because of concern about emotional intensity and in part because social patterns increasingly pointed young women to dating and other activities with men (Rosenzweig 1998). Changes in girls’ recommended emotional standards were real and led to some definable shifts in emotional expressions and experiences. But they did not merge girls and boys, on average, into a common emotional style. Girls as well as observers, including later twentiethcentury feminists, debated this result.

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A thirteen-year-old African American girl being comforted by a friend. (Skjold Photographs)

The tension between being more similar to boys and displaying a feminine range related to nineteenth-century emphases could be very real. But having these two choices also provided a certain leeway to find a personally appropriate mixture. As in the nineteenth century, middleclass standards did not touch all girls. In the 1950s, for example, African American leaders began to highlight a more assertive emotional style, which affected boys particularly but girls as well. Even earlier, many African American churches had encouraged girls to display an expressive religious emotionality different from the white, middle-class mainstream. Immigrant groups often struggled be-

tween emotional values imported from traditional cultures and the complex values urged in American media and in prescriptive literature. Again, diverse mixtures resulted. Most groups of girls did participate in a final emotional pattern in the twentieth century: the interplay between emotional spectatorship and their own emotional rules and experience. From infancy onward, American children were increasingly encouraged to attach emotional meaning to purchased goods and experiences. Cribs were filled with stuffed animals. Experts early in the twentieth century briefly debated this pattern, but the consensus was that attachments were emotionally healthy and would aid later control in interpersonal relationships. Movies and, soon, television provided an unprecedented array of represented emotions. The combination of growing consumerism and considerable concern about uncontrolled emotions in real life led to increasing involvement in emotional fantasy worlds. For very young children, these worlds were not particularly gender differentiated, but by school age they were—often, ironically, replicating nineteenth-century distinctions such as military emotions for boys and domestic affections for girls. This gap was subject to intense debate in the later twentieth century, but it was not substantially reduced. Girls poured emotion into different symbols from those that drew boys, even though a basic commitment to surrogates was common to both genders. Peter N. Stearns See also Communication; Female Sexuality; Suicidal Behavior in Girls References and Further Reading Arthur, T. S. 1848. Advice to Young Ladies. Boston: Putnam.

Enslaved Girls of African Descent Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1988. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forrester, James. 1848. Practical Morality. Hartfort, CT: Andrews. Hemphill, C. Dallett. 1998. “Class, Gender, and the Regulation of Emotional Expression in RevolutionaryEra Conduct Literature.” Pp. 33–51 in Emotional History of the United States. Edited by Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis. New York: New York University Press. Hiner, N. Ray, and Joseph M. Hawes, eds. 1985a. Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1985b. American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. MacLeod, David I. 1998. The Age of the Child: Children in America 1890–1920. New York: Twayne. Rosenzweig, Linda W. 1993. The Anchor of My Life: Middle-Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880–1920. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1998. “‘Another Self?’: MiddleClass American Women and Their Friends, 1900–1960.” Pp. 357–373 in Emotional History of the United States. Edited by Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis. New York: New York University Press. Stearns, Peter N. 1985. Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History. New York: New York University Press. ———. 1993. “Girls, Boys and Emotions: Redefinitions and Historical Change.” Journal of American History 80 (June): 66–89. ———. 1994. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style. New York: New York University Press. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child. New York: Basic Books.

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Enslaved Girls of African Descent Enslaved girls in the United States belonged to a category with an extraordinarily high infant disease and mortality rate, yet the growth from 20 Africans (3 women and 17 men) in 1619 to nearly 4 million African Americans in 1860 is the most distinctive feature of bondage in North America. The fact that they survived and procreated makes a study of enslaved girls important, since natural increases were primarily responsible for the growth of slavery after 1808, when the United States banned the competitive, brisk business of importing slaves directly from Africa (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, 18). European traders channeled more than 10 million Africans who had been convicted of crimes or were prisoners of war or victims of kidnappings through the Atlantic’s middle passage to the new world. Fewer females than males made the journey, and there is no satisfactory explanation for this occurrence. One argument claims that females were less desirable for heavy plantation labor in the Atlantic world. Another theory suggests price differentials along with supply and demand as the determining factors in creating disparities. Finally, historians posit that Africans limited the number of females they offered for sale because of their own interests in the girls and women, who were highly prized as agricultural workers. A narrative written by the African-born Olaudah Equiano describes the 1756 raid upon his village, when he and his young sister were captured by a woman and two men. The raiders eventually separated the eleven-year-old boy from his sister and sold him into the new world. “Your image,” he wrote as he remembered her, “has been always riveted in my heart,

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from with [sic] neither time nor fortune have been able to remove it; so that, while the thought[s] of your sufferings have damped my prosperity, they have mingled with adversity and increased its bitterness” (Equiano 1995, 51). Without a comparable narrative by the Equiano girl, her response to the shock of capture, travel overland through the interior of Africa, sale to a slave owner, or detachment from loved ones remains unknown. Neither will anyone know whether she was enslaved in Africa or was sold into the Americas. But it is reasonable to think that the girl whom Equiano described as his dear partner in all childish sports and his companion in joys and sorrows also experienced the traumatic disengagement he chronicled. What happened to girls remaining in Africa was as important as what lay ahead for those taken away. Upon arrival at the seacoast, Africans remained imprisoned while awaiting the final processing before sailing through the Atlantic’s Middle Passage. Without regard for age or modesty, traders examined and separated the able-bodied from those who were less able before branding and loading them on oceangoing vessels. Trembling and terrified when taken aboard, they were vulnerable to the wanton rudeness of crew members, who silently divided their prey and waited for an opportunity to abuse them sexually. In some instances girls remained in a squatting position throughout the day to hide their nakedness. If offered canvas to cover their persons, they accepted it willingly. But it was no protection against the frequent exploitation that followed during voyages lasting thirty to thirtyfive days or longer. Unfettered females traveled on the quarterdeck, while males were chained

in the ship’s hold. Descriptions of the Middle Passage mention crowded hulls, limited supplies of food, stifling odors, filthy living conditions, and contagious diseases. Furthermore, an eyewitness wrote, “The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable” (Equiano 1995, 56). Protests from slaves aboard ships of horrors sometimes escalated into mutinies. Crews anticipated revolts, since they did not expect slaves to accept their situation calmly. Teme, Kague, and Margru, girls ranging from seven to twelve years of age, survived a mutiny aboard the Amistad in 1839. The uprising and death of crew members must have frightened the children. Margru explained that one of her fellow prisoners, whom she later called Charlotte, comforted her and said repeatedly, “One day we shall [again] all see our native land” (Sarah Margru to George Whipple, September 18, 1847, American Missionary Association, Tulane University, Louisiana). Following an 1841 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the girls and other Amistad survivors did return to Africa. By contrast, the majority of African girls neither witnessed a mutiny nor went back to their homelands. Instead, they and their progeny remained on plantations or in public establishments and private homes in the new world. In 1662, the Virginia Assembly declared that children born in the colony were bound or free according to the mother’s status. This legislation, which other colonies imitated and which resulted from concern over the legal condition of children born to black and white couples, was contrary to English common law but in keeping with British ideas about property rights. Enslaved mothers reproduced

Selling Females: Negro Slaves by the Pound. Woodcut in Bourne, Pictures of Slavery, 1834. (Library of Congress)

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chattel who belonged to their owners rather than to themselves. In this context, it is understandable that the slaveborn Harriet Jacobs concluded that slavery was terrible for men but worse for women in terms of the exploitation of their reproductive rights and the relegation of their offspring to bondage in perpetuity. When told that her newborn infant was a girl, the nineteen-year-old Jacobs said her heart was heavier than ever (Jacobs 1987). If Jacobs’s daughter and other enslaved children survived more than a few days, they received names linking them firmly to their kin network, as in the African tradition. Girls received a grandmother’s name more frequently than their own mother’s name. Parents also gave their daughters the names of respected “aunts” and “cousins” among their “fictive” kin within the larger slave community. As mothers returned to work, ordinarily a month after giving birth, they either carried their infants along or left them in the care of slaves who were too old or too young to work elsewhere. Since there were no gender distinctions associated with the earliest tasks performed by enslaved children, girls and boys cared for children younger than themselves. They also fed chickens, gathered eggs, milked cows, churned butter, gathered wood, carried water, and ran errands. When old enough to follow along and make some contributions to the larger workforce, girls joined pregnant women and “fractional” hands, persons designated as “one-quarter” or “one-half” hands because of their inability to complete full responsibilities, in “trash gangs.” These predominantly female labor units provided teaching-learning experiences for girls, who were taught to perform chores

satisfactorily along with the value of cooperative labor in a hostile environment. Furthermore, participation in the trash gang raised their consciousness about gender-related concerns, such as family obligations. Slave owners initially used youngsters to complement less productive workers, but as they both grew older, the girls became experienced substitutes for aging adults and ultimately replaced them. According to Works Progress Administration testimony collected in the 1930s from former slaves, many of whom were children when slavery ended, few gender distinctions existed in the workplace. One interviewee said she split rails “like a man,” and another claimed her mother plowed with three horses. “Ain’t dat somp’n,” she asked rhetorically before adding, “thought women was ’sposed to work ’long wid men, I did” (Perdue, Barden, and Phillips 1980, 292). Many enslaved girls and women did work alongside boys and men. They shared a mean sort of equality: all of them were exploited. The greatest gender distinctions and absence of labor exploitation existed in the skilled crafts, a male preserve. Girls could have learned these techniques, but they did not have the opportunity. Childbearing prevented access to trades, since the crafts of artisans, unlike domestic or agricultural chores, could not be completed by substitute workers. Skilled females specialized in domestic and housewifery chores, which could be combined with child care responsibilities. Without the skills of artisans, girls had fewer opportunities for selling their own time, living away from owners, and earning extra money to buy necessities, luxury items, or freedom.

Enslaved Girls of African Descent Regardless of the jobs performed, entry into the workplace meant additional food for the newest worker’s family, but it truncated childhood by increasing responsibilities and making the girl vulnerable to arbitrary punishment, sexual abuse, and sale. Resistance to these facets of bondage were evident among parents who did whatever was possible to delay their children’s entry into the workforce. When their efforts failed, youngsters protested by working slowly, haphazardly, or running away. Although fewer girls than boys appeared in runaway advertisements, this does not mean girls had no hopes for and dreams of freedom or were more willing to endure bondage. Females traveling alone attracted more attention than males and were probably caught and returned to owners before advertisements appeared in newspapers. Until freed from bondage, girls learned lessons necessary for surviving slavery, including how to wear the “mask.” This expression camouflaged slaves’ true feelings and allowed them to pay deference to whites while maintaining self-respect. At early ages, girls also learned when to speak, what to say, and to whom it could be said. Other survival tactics came from folklore, which was designed to entertain and educate. Animal trickster tales, an integral part of the slave’s oral tradition, taught lessons of survival and self-confidence. The objective was not to become tricksters but to avoid victimization by them. During their leisure time, some enslaved girls learned to read and write, but the general bias against female literacy and the paucity of opportunities ensured that fewer girls than boys became literate. At other times, girls played with dolls fashioned from corn-

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Women Whip Girls, a nineteenth-century woodcut, shows white women’s complicity in the institution of slavery. (Library of Congress, 1800s)

cobs; jumped rope; joined in ring games; or pretended to cook meals, serve food, and wash dishes. They also engaged in unorganized play and spent time rambling through the woods and swimming in streams or gathering nuts and berries. As girls matured and became attracted to the opposite sex, there were occasions to woo and be wooed after church services, during seasonal celebrations, or at dances. Girls sometimes made themselves more beautiful for the occasions by using blushers made from dried chinaberries and soot for eye shadow. They wore hoops

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African American slaves dancing and playing the banjo, 1800s. (Library of Congress)

made from grapevines under their dresses and tied ribbons on their intricately braided hair. Honeysuckle and rose petals provided sweet fragrances for their bodies. Some parents insisted upon deciding when their daughters could entertain members of the opposite sex. In all probability, they wanted to prevent their daughters from becoming sexually active and giving birth to children destined for a lifetime of bondage. This facet of girls’ lives represented contested terrain in that slave owners often encouraged them to find partners and start families. Children were of little financial worth at birth but became more valuable as they matured into productive workers. When youthful flirtations led to desires for a lifetime together, slaves occasionally married in religious ceremonies or simply “took up” with a partner. In either case, neither churches nor courts sanctioned their unions. Many

couples enjoyed long-lasting relationships, but an estimated 10 percent of them united with persons selected by owners whose primary interests were in the procreation of slaves. North American slaves, unlike those elsewhere in the new world, reproduced naturally under adverse conditions and contributed to a dramatic increase in the population. Greater parity in the ratio of enslaved women to men in the nineteenth century, along with slaveholders’ dedication to providing minimal material and medical help, explains this occurrence. These factors were important, but much credit also goes to enslaved girls who matured, became mothers, and assumed the roles that their own mothers had played in teaching their offspring to work satisfactorily, endure bondage, and maintain the hope of freedom. Wilma King

Enslaved Girls of African Descent See also African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; Free Girls of African Descent; Play; Work References and Further Reading Curtin, Philip D. 1970. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Equiano, Olaudah. 1995. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself. Edited by Robert J. Allison. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. Jacobs, Harriet. 1861. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagin Yellin. 1987. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997. “Within the Professional Household: Slave Children in the Antebellum South.” The Historian 59: 523–540. Kiple, Kenneth L., and Virginia H. Kiple. 1977. “Slave Child Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle.” Journal of Social History 10: 284–309. Klein, Herbert S. 1983. “African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” Pp. 29–38 in Women and Slavery in Africa. Edited

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by Claire Robinson and Martin C. Klein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Parish, Peter J. 1989. Slavery: History and Historians. New York: Harper and Row. Perdue, Charles L., Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips. 1980. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rawick, George P., ed. 1972. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schafer, Judith Kelleher. 1981. “New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in Advertisements.” Journal of Southern History 47: 33–56. Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. 1996. “One Thing, Then Another: The Work of Slave Children in Alabama.” Labor’s Heritage 7: 22–33, 56–61. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1975. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wiggins, David K. 1980. “The Play of Slave Children in the Plantation Communities of the Old South, 1820–1960.” Journal of Sport History 7: 21–39.

F Fairy Tales

victim here. Her use of the gun is unexpected and too contemporary for our sense of fairy tales as being set in a misty past. And her lack of gullibility undercuts the fantasy. The moral tells us that this is a thoroughly modern “little girl.” Once upon a time, there was no concept of childhood and hence no literature produced especially for children. Fairy tales, which people think of as the quintessential children’s literature, were oral tales, told by adults to adults; the violence and sexuality so predominant in the original tales would thus not have been objectionable, given the audience. Fairy tales were not recorded in written form until the late 1600s, when their popularity in the French court led to the publication by Charles Perrault of Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), a collection that includes such familiar tales as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss in Boots,” “Cinderella,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” In 1729, this collection was translated into English and published in Great Britain, yet it would be more than a century before fairy tales entered the canon of acceptable literature for children. It was, of course, the Brothers Grimm who helped achieve this acceptance. Their collection Household Tales (volume 1 in 1812 and volume 2 in 1814) has sold more copies than any other book

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally, a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. “Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?” asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood. When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the MetroGoldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead. Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be. —James Thurber

What is surprising about this version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” written by James Thurber in 1939? What makes us laugh? Perhaps most noticeable is the fact that Little Red Riding Hood, referred to only as the “little girl,” is not a passive

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except the Bible. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out to collect as many tales as possible from oral sources in a nationalistic effort to identify Teutonic origins of the tales. Scholars now believe that they also took tales from written sources, including Perrault, and it is evident that they revised the tales, softening harsh endings and excluding references to sex and violence. Controversy about the appropriateness of fairy tales for child audiences existed almost from the outset of their telling; parents saw the tales as potentially harmful to their children, whom they wished to raise in a religious tradition, shunning the superstitions of the peasant class. And, of course, the cultural script for girls in these early fairy tales was, for the most part, a negative one. As Ruth Bottigheimer has noted, girls and women were depicted as passive and as silenced. The value of beauty is emphasized in many tales; girls and women are often victimized or trapped, and the rescuer is usually a man who sometimes performs the rescue only in return for sex. Alternatively, women are depicted as evil stepmothers, viciously jealous, or wicked witches. In the United States, where the tradition of children’s literature began with stern Puritan warnings about evil, fantasy and fairy tales were considered suspect. Literature for children in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was intended for instructional purposes only. Not until the late nineteenth century did collections of fairy tales become widely available in the United States as part of the revival of interest in the imagination that characterized the era often called “the golden age of children’s literature.” As these collections were based on the continental and British collections

of tales, they continued to carry the stereotypes of women and girls already noted. The United States’ own effort at producing an indigenous fairy tale is epitomized by L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which gained enormous popularity almost immediately and spawned a number of sequels. In the introduction, Baum stated his intention to produce a “modernized fairy tale” without the terrors and the supernatural elements of the original tales. He places a girl, Dorothy, squarely at the center of the story, not unlike the character of Alice in Lewis Carroll’s famous fantasy, which most likely influenced Baum. Dorothy, an orphan as is typical for a character on a quest, is undoubtedly intrepid, but her desire to get back home did little to break the mold in the depiction of girls. And fairy tales continued to be controversial into the 1950s. The sex and violence of the tales were further sanitized by Walt Disney in his cartoon versions. Ironically, this sanitizing frequently had the effect of rendering girls and women even more passive or, alternatively, unrelentingly evil. For example, in the Disney films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950), the figure of the stepmother has become powerfully menacing and the central character seemingly helpless and hapless; no image of an active, vigorous, intelligent, and righteous heroine is to be found. In the 1970s and 1980s, parents and teachers began to take issue with the sexism of tales, which still portrayed girls and women as passive victims, lying back in beds and glass coffins waiting to be rescued by the handsome prince. Scholars of children’s literature have endeavored to create better understanding of the tales,

Fairy Tales their origins, their evolution, and the potentially negative impact of the tales on girls. Marina Warner, whose 1994 book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers explores the attitudes toward women—such as contempt and disdain—revealed in the tales, reads a number of tales having to do with rivalry between women, romance, and marriage. Cristina Bacchilega brings the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism to bear on traditional tales as well as their retellings for adults in recent decades by such writers as Angela Carter, Robert Coover, and Margaret Atwood and in various media versions. A close look at “Little Red Riding Hood” will exemplify some of the more recent critical approaches to fairy tales and will help decode the messages being sent implicitly to girl readers and listeners. This tale is not only one of the most widely read and well recognized of all fairy tales, but it particularly deals with girlhood and features the motifs of clothing, parental warnings, a solo journey, a good deed, deception and victimization, and, in some versions, rescue. Bruno Bettelheim, a psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor, led the reevaluation of fairy tales with The Uses of Enchantment (1977), in which he sought to redeem the tales by demonstrating that they can be healing and reassuring to children. His persuasive argument was that the tales allow children to vicariously experience terror and evil and, through the happy ending, learn that they could manage the danger and anxiety. Bettelheim sees the central themes of “Little Red Riding Hood” as the threat of being devoured and the dilemma faced by a young girl of doing what she wants versus what she should, straying off the path versus staying on. Specifically, Bettel-

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heim reads “Little Red Riding Hood” as a story about a girl at a certain stage of development in which she unconsciously wishes to be seduced by her father. He points out that the father is absent in the tale and hence is present in disguise. He claims that both the wolf and the hunter are the father—the wolf is the father as seductive, violent, and destructive; the hunter is the father as protective, unselfish, social, and thoughtful. Bettelheim further notes that the tale emphasizes red, a color symbolizing violent emotions and sexuality, and that the need to cut Little Red Riding Hood out of the wolf’s stomach introduces the idea of pregnancy and birth by Caesarean section. Bettelheim concludes that Little Red Riding Hood loses her innocence as she encounters the dangers in the world and gains wisdom as she is “reborn” to a higher plane of existence in being cut from the wolf’s belly (1977, 166–183). Jack Zipes has perhaps been the most prolific author of both studies and collections of fairy tales. He calls our attention to the historical context of the Middle Ages in which the tales were originally told; if the tales are about kings and peasants, perhaps they are really about class struggle. Zipes is also one of the earliest scholars to provide readings of tales that attend to the images of women and to the economic and contextual aspects of the tales. He claims that Bettelheim fails to take into account the fact that Little Red Riding Hood is not an archetype but rather the product of gifted male European writers who projected their needs and values onto actions of fictitious characters within a socially conventionalized drama. The purpose and themes of the tales did not concern harmony but the depiction of changing social structures. Central to most tales is the concept of

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Disney films often sanitized traditional fairy tales for twentieth-century audiences. Here, Walt Disney presents Shirley Temple with an honorary Oscar in 1939 for her portrayal of Snow White. (Kobal)

power. Turning again to “Little Red Riding Hood,” Zipes sees this as a tale about male power and, specifically, about rape. Marina Warner notes that Perrault, in his late 1600s version of the tale, ends with these final sentences: “Now there are real wolves, with hairy pelts and enormous teeth; but also wolves who seem perfectly charming, sweet-natured and obliging, who pursue young girls in the street and pay them the most flattering attentions. Unfortunately, these smoothtongued, smooth-pelted wolves are the most dangerous beasts of all” (1994, 182– 183). So the double image of the wolf as simple beast and as seductive predator has existed from the earliest written versions of the tale. Little Red Riding Hood has been reimagined by several authors and illustrators. In the 1950s Tasha Tudor created

a sunny edition of the tale, showing a benign wolf and a rather bewildered Little Red Riding Hood, all framed in a reassuring and beguiling border of apples, birds, and chipmunks, which marks the world of the tale as tidy and contained. Trina Schart Hyman’s 1983 illustrations continue this tradition. By contrast, Sarah Moon’s gritty photographs, also for a 1983 edition of the tale, depict a dark, decayed, deserted urban landscape that is profoundly threatening. The rumpled sheets in the final photograph of the book leave little doubt that a rape has occurred. Jack Zipes’s assertion that “Little Red Riding Hood” provides a “warning about the possibility of sexual molestation” is made palpable in this version (1993, 81). Although Bettelheim argues that tales are beneficial from a Freudian point of view, Zipes argues that they can be dan-

Fairy Tales

Little Red Riding Hood; from a nineteenth-century trading card. (Library of Congress)

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gerous to children. Thus, since 1980, fairy tales have been the subject of much serious scrutiny. In a sense, scholars have found many new reasons to consider fairy tales dangerous, subversive, sexist, inauthentic, violent, and in general, inappropriate for use with children. In an effort to redeem the tales, those beloved staples of childhood for so many decades, contemporary writers have created new versions of old tales or incorporated their motifs into new stories altogether. A review of a few of these new versions is useful in several ways. Not only will it make parents, teachers, librarians, and others who share books with children aware of the availability of these alternatives, but also by studying what has been revised, we come to understand more fully what has been found objectionable. We have already seen one such revision, that by Thurber at the opening of this entry, which uses humor and contemporary props to undercut the depiction of Little Red Riding Hood as helpless. A laudable collection of extant traditional tales that nonetheless boasts women characters who are plucky, witty, clever, and victorious is Tatterhood and Other Tales by Ethel Johnston Phelps (1978). This wonderful volume can be read along with the more familiar tales, enabling children to compare and contrast their perceptions of characters, plot, and outcome. The stories are drawn from many cultures and countries, including South Africa, India, Scotland, Ireland, Pakistan, and Ecuador, and from Jewish and American Indian traditions. Phelps edited a second collection, entitled The Maid of the North (1981), and a similar collection was compiled by Rosemary Minard, entitled Womenfolk and Fairy Tales (1975).

Other writers have used familiar fairy tale tropes to invent their own fairy tales. One such creation, The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch (1980), depicts an apparently stereotypical princess whose betrothed is carried off by a dragon. Elizabeth promptly takes off after the dragon and urges him to demonstrate his prowess at breathing fire and flying. When his powers are completely spent, she rescues Ronald from the dungeon. When he criticizes her garb (a paper bag donned after the dragon burned off her dress) and her tangled hair and tells her to come back when she is “dressed like a real princess,” Elizabeth retorts: “Ronald, your clothes are really pretty and your hair is very neat. You look like a real prince, but you are a bum.” And the narrator’s dry closing line is: “They didn’t get married after all,” a happy-ever-after ending in this instance. Another creator of new tales with strong heroines is Jane Yolen. Among these are Sleeping Ugly (1995) and “The Moon Ribbon,” a 1986 feminist retelling of the Cinderella story, which features a mother who helps her orphaned daughter from beyond the grave, teaching her lessons of self-reliance, courage, and assertiveness. Yet another variation on such revisions is books set in contemporary times and places that use the devices of fairy tales to positive effect. Some very popular examples are the five books by Francesca Lia Block about a character with the improbable name of Weetzie Bat. At first blush, these young adult novels might seem the antithesis of a fairy tale. The initial book in the quintet, Weetzie Bat (1989), takes place in steamy, seamy Los Angeles: the novel is full of punks, gay men, “unwed” mothers, and all the cheap, glittering appurtenances of the movie capital of the world. And yet Francesca Block magically

Fairy Tales makes it perfectly acceptable to believe in genies, cozy cottages, and true love. “Shangri-L.A.,” as Weetzie calls both the city she loves and a film in which she stars, is “a remake of ‘Lost Horizon.’” The film is about time travel and a Hollywood that is forever young with Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Humphrey Bogart, “magic castles and star-paved streets and Christmas lights” (67). Though Los Angeles can at times become “Hell-A,” when Weetzie’s father dies of a drug overdose, when her lover leaves her, or when the reality of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic bears down on her gay friends, overall this novel affirms the possibility of genuine affection and caring, even in unlikely, very nonnuclear families. “In L. A., we have a fairy tale house,” Weetzie declares (73). And she makes it so by growing fairy tale hedges of roses but refusing the glass coffin. Instead, she has a much-wanted baby and adopts another. Weetzie Bat has its very own witch, a “happy [sometimes] ever after” ending, and surfing and sushi. Its postmodern eclecticism creates frisson by grounding the eternal themes in the sleaze of Hollywood. Fairy tales have staying power and are also infinitely mutable as demonstrated by this “upgrade” of a traditional tale for girls: I really didn’t notice that he had a funny nose. And he certainly looked better all dressed up in fancy clothes. He’s not nearly as attractive as he seemed the other night. So I think I’ll just pretend that this glass slipper feels too tight. —Judith Viorst Elizabeth Baer

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See also Advice Books; Girls’ Fiction; Reading References and Further Reading Bacchilega, Cristina. 1997. Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1977. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage. Block, Francesca Lia. 1989. Weetzie Bat. New York: HarperCollins. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 1986. Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hyman, Trina Schart. 1983. Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Holiday House. Minard, Rosemary. 1975. Womenfolk and Fairy Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Moon, Sarah. 1983. Little Red Riding Hood. Mankato: Creative Education. Munsch, Robert. 1980. The Paper Bag Princess. New York: Annick Press. Phelps, Ethel Johnston. 1978. Tatterhood and Other Tales. New York: Feminist Press. ———. 1981. The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from around the World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Tudor. Tasha. 1965. Tasha Tudor Book of Fairy Tales. New York: Platt and Munk. Viorst, Judith. 1986. “And Then the Prince Knelt Down and Tried to Put the Glass Slipper on Cinderella’s Foot.” P. 73 in Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Edited by Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen. Warner, Marina. 1994. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Yolen, Jane. 1986. “The Moon Ribbon.” In Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Edited by Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen. ———. 1995. Sleeping Ugly. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Zipes, Jack. 1986. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy

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Tales in North America and England. New York: Methuen. ———. 1993. The Trials and Tribulations of Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in a Sociohistorical Context. 2d ed. New York: Routledge.

Fan Clubs Fan clubs are both formal and informal associations of enthusiasts who come together around a particular celebrity. Since the early twentieth century, girls have responded to celebrities by joining together in fan clubs. Through their fan activities, girls can assert their preferences and respond critically to particular cultural forms. Girls have most consistently formed clubs to honor motion picture and television stars and musicians. The term fan originally came from the discourse of sports. It referred to those who were aficionados of specific spectator sports in the nineteenth century and was rarely applied to women. The advent of the “stars” created by the new medium of motion pictures changed the nature of fandom. Before 1909, there were no motion picture stars because work in motion pictures was not consistent. Moreover, because of the stigma associated with film work, few actors were willing to be identified to audiences. Some of the larger film companies made a deliberate effort to ensure their actors’ anonymity in order to keep their salaries down. Yet by 1909, fans had begun asking for photographs of their favorite stars and writing “Who?” letters to the film companies to inquire about the identity of the performers. The term “movie fan” was coined in about 1910 to refer to men and women who were regular patrons of the nickelodeons. By 1909, Kalem Film Company offered star photo-

graphs for display to theater owners, and by 1911 many theaters gave away calendars and postcard pictures of stars. In 1910, Carl Laemmle, then an independent producer, staged what is generally considered the first publicity stunt. In the process, he supposedly launched the first “movie star” by staging the “death” of Florence Lawrence, an actress Laemmle had hired from a rival company. On a personal appearance tour shortly thereafter, Lawrence was mobbed by admirers. Thus the movie fan was officially born. Most contemporary film historians, however, consider the story apocryphal because Lawrence had been employed by Laemmle a full six months before his publicity stunt. Moreover, in the same month, another actress, Florence Turner, known as the Vitagraph Girl, was called a “motion picture star” in print after making a personal appearance tour in Brooklyn. After the Lawrence stunt, however, the once despised “Who?” letters had to be taken seriously by film companies. Even after Laemmle’s publicity stunt, some producers of the powerful Motion Picture Trust continued to resist publicizing their stars. Independents were not as hesitant, which ultimately caused a defection of some major actors from the larger studios to the independents. By 1911, the Trust studios began to capitulate to audience demand by issuing film posters bearing the names of their actors. Although roughly between 1910 and 1920 movie fans were both male and female, by the 1920s females predominated in the ranks of fans. Fandom was facilitated by the creation of fan magazines. In 1911 J. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph began the first fan magazine, Motion Picture Magazine, to publicize Vitagraph films and players.

Fan Clubs At first the magazine was distributed only to Vitagraph exhibitors, but the demand for the magazine was so great that it was soon sold on newsstands. Other companies followed with their own publications, and all such publications created star personas through anecdotes, legends, and myths. In 1914, James R. Quirk became the editor of Photoplay, which encouraged artistry and quality in film by critically reviewing films. By the mid-1920s, Quirk also made his readers conversant in the language of the film industry by offering monthly features that included insider secrets and read more like a trade journal than a fan magazine. At first, studio administrators were hostile to fan demands because fans were generally considered a nuisance. Fan mail was regarded as a burden by studios because of the costs involved in hiring clerical support and in answering and sending back photos. Although ambitious actors such as Joan Crawford occasionally answered their own fan mail, they were the exception. By the 1920s, fans began banding together to further the careers of particular stars. Fan club organizers were not allowed within the studio gates in the 1920s. However, by the early 1930s, the situation began to change as studios realized that fans constituted useful pressure groups on local theater owners through which to sell their films via block bookings. Fan clubs offered a free form of publicity, and fan clubs and fan mail were used by the studios to evaluate the popularity of stars. By the 1940s all of the major studios had fan mail departments. Fans and adolescent girls were thought to be identical in the 1920s because girls were a highly visible segment of the fan

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population. In the 1930s and 1940s, 75–90 percent of all fans were younger than twenty-one years of age, and approximately 80 percent of them were female. Audience researchers found that girls were more likely than boys or adults to single out stars for their attention, and they were also more likely to write fan letters. Fans could have an enormous influence on a star’s career. In 1924, Movie Weekly sponsored a contest for its readers to come up with a new name for starlet Lucille LeSeur. One fan’s choice of “Joan Crawford” won the enterprising fan $500. In 1925, Photoplay asked its fans to decide what kinds of roles they wanted to see thirty-two-year-old Mary Pickford play. Twenty thousand fans clearly called for Pickford to continue to play children. When Pickford cut off her trademark curls, fans were quick to criticize and stayed away from her films. Fan clubs operated at international, national, and local levels. For example, the Deanna Durbin Devotees, one of the largest international fan clubs of the 1930s and 1940s, had salaried officers who published the club’s journal, Deanna’s Diary, as well as small branch clubs chartered by the devotees. Some fan clubs were simply informal gatherings of friends with an interest in similar stars. There were also national consortiums of different stars’ fan clubs, such as the International Fan Club League and the Fan Club Federation, which would converge on Hollywood for annual conventions. Fan clubs operated as powerful lobby groups on behalf of stars. A typical fan club meeting might consist of detailing a star’s activities and upcoming film roles, sharing scrapbooks and other memorabilia, writing poetry or fan letters, and perhaps determining which fan most resem-

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Beatles fans scream from the audience during a concert in Seattle, Washington. (Express Newspapers/A313/Archive Photos, 1964)

bled their favorite luminary. By the 1930s, most studios were supportive of such undertakings and funded the publication of certain fan clubs’ newsletters or journals. Sometimes stars themselves supported their fans’ endeavors. Some studios even gave club officers unlimited access to the stars. Fan mail departments at studios assisted clubs further in securing possible names for membership, fan letters, photographs, and other publicity material. Fan activity remained an affordable, easily accessible diversion during the Depression and World War II. Being a member of an organized fan club allowed girls a space to create texts for personal consumption outside the official, market economy and

thus outside the realm of the dominant ideology regarding gender. Fans often produced their own texts, which circulated among them and helped to define the fan community. Such publications might include contributions from fan club members, fan letters, pen pal services, contributions from the stars themselves, fan poetry or prose, or production information. The content itself was usually generated by fans, allowing adolescents a forum for expressing their cultural tastes publicly. Many clubs required members to produce scrapbooks or other collections of memorabilia, such as autographs. Many fan clubs publicly proclaimed and signaled membership. Members might be given

Female Sexuality membership cards and official pins, and some branch chapters had jackets with special insignias. Fan letters sent to stars were quite chatty or full of personal news, the kind of letters that might be exchanged with a friend. Fans also wrote to give advice and could be quite critical, commenting on the star’s film roles, hairstyles, or personal life. With the advent of the big band craze in the late 1930s, many female adolescents also turned their attention to vocalists like Russ Colombo and Frank Sinatra. They would tune in to Your Hit Parade to learn the top ten hits of the week or read the fan magazines Downbeat and Metronome. Fan adulation of musicians would accelerate in the 1950s because of rock and roll stars such as Elvis. By the early 1960s, there were chapters of the Elvis Presley fan club in nearly every major city in the United States. The adoration of the musical star reached its apogee when the Beatles came to the United States as part of the 1960s British invasion. Today, teenage girls continue to follow the exploits of their favorite musicians through the proliferation of music videos. A derogatory designation of female rock fans is that of “groupie,” the fan who is sexually available to the musician. Throughout the century, fans have often been a fickle group, switching allegiance from one celebrity to another. Yet through their fan activities, girls have found cultural authority, agency, and a uniquely creative voice. Georganne Scheiner

See also Girl Power; Punk Rock; Teenybopper; Zines

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References and Further Reading Fuller, Kathryn. 1996. At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of the Movie Fan. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hopkins, Jerry. 1972. “The Fans.” Pp. 161–172 in Things in the Driver’s Seat: Readings in Popular Culture. Edited by Harry Russell Huebel. Chicago: Rand McNally. Jenkins, Henry. 1989. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5: 85–107. Lewis, Lisa. 1990. Gender, Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ———. 1991. The Adoring Audience. New York: Routledge. Scheiner, Georganne. 1998. “The Deanna Durbin Devotees: Fan Clubs and Spectatorship.” Pp. 81–94 in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth Century America. Edited by Michael Willard and Joe Austin. New York: New York University Press. Stacey, Jackie. 1995. Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. Vermorel, Fred, and Judy Vermorel. 1985. Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans. London: Comet Books.

Female Sexuality Female sexuality includes feelings, desires, or experiences of an erotic nature, including but not limited to genital sensations, which girls encounter between infancy and adulthood. Ideas and practices related to girls’ sexuality have changed over time but not always in a progressive fashion. The opposition of old-fashioned and modern sexuality is too simplistic, and it glosses over the range of behaviors at any given time. Sources of information on sexuality, in addition to being relatively rare, require careful evaluation. Female sexuality today is a realm

Puberty by Edvard Munch. (Burnstein Collection/Corbis)

Female Sexuality of conflict, where young people attempt to make sense of contradictory and confusing messages. Before the turn of the twentieth century, researchers did not collect empirical data about sexuality, much less girls’ sexuality. For centuries, women’s bodies were presumed to be first the inverse and then inferior versions of male bodies. Until recent decades, nearly all researchers were men, and most research subjects were also men. Glimpses of girls’ sexuality in the past and present appear in personal narratives, works of fiction, and court proceedings. Girls’ articulation of their sexuality in judicial proceedings and with casework managers should not be taken at face value; in many cases testimony either complies with authorities’ expectations or shocks their middle-class sensibilities. Likewise, clinical data are flawed by bias based on race and class as well as aversion to homosexuality, all prevalent modes of thinking among twentieth-century researchers, and thus produce only a partial and sometimes inaccurate portrait of girls’ sexuality. Personal narratives, especially recollections and memoirs composed during adulthood, are necessarily selective, often omitting embarrassing details and forgotten experiences. Most autobiographies avoid sexual explicitness, and the majority of people— whether literate or not—never record their life histories. Survey data may be slightly more reliable and potentially more inclusive, yet forgetfulness and self-censorship are factors. Finally, much of the evidence of sexual activity is based on pregnancy—a poor measure of all heterosexual intercourse, perhaps a better judge of contraceptive practices, and not helpful in attempts to assess a range of sexual behaviors.

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Very little information about sexuality remains from the period prior to and during European contact with native inhabitants of the Americas. European observers noted relative freedom to pursue sexual relations in Native American societies, but their descriptions were laden with value judgments and a sense of white superiority. Girls and boys in Hopi society witnessed and participated in rituals of a sexual nature as early as the sixteenth century, and the community valued sex positively (Duberman, Eggan, and Clemmer 1979). Spanish conquerors regarded Pueblo nudity and rituals as promiscuous and punished such behavior (Gutíerrez 1991). Among the Iroquois, adults tolerated children’s sexual experimentation. Daughter of Chief Powhatan, eleven-year-old Pocahontas acted as an intermediary between Jamestown settlers and Powhatan natives, eventually marrying John Rolfe at age seventeen to escape captivity (and probably abuse) by the English (Nash 1992). An additional distinctive feature in various Native American societies has been the historical adoption of cross-gender identification and samesex sexuality (in some areas, such people are called berdache) beginning in youth (Roscoe 1998). Notwithstanding the stereotypes of “Puritan” sexual conservatism, young people engaged in sexual behavior in colonial America. Girls’ knowledge about sex stemmed from observation, a consequence of sharing beds and flimsy partitions separating sleeping quarters in homes where young people remained until they married. The tradition of bundling, popular in New England and the middle colonies but abandoned by most communities by the mid-eighteenth century, allowed a courting, unmarried couple to share a bed, either fully clothed

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or separated by a bundling board, at the girl’s home. Parents apparently expected the youth to kiss and fondle one another but did not directly encourage sexual intercourse. The prevalence of premarital pregnancy reveals society’s tolerance of unwed sexual relations. As long as the courting couple married, the sex act was a forgivable sin, at least until the mid1700s. In plantation society, white slave owners were notorious for consorting with female slaves, and enslaved girls were rarely exempt from white masters’ demands for sexual access. In general, white southerners construed black girls and black women as sexually available, as opposed to the allegedly virtuous white girls and women. Sexual freedom for black girls within the slave community was greater than it was for their white counterparts, whose social milieu demanded chastity. Although the state prohibited slaves from marrying, many enslaved young women and men formed meaningful relationships. Defined as chattel, slaves risked being separated from loved ones at the whim of their owners. Rates of premarital pregnancy rose during the eighteenth century, and as the nation grew, so did opportunities for young couples to engage in courtship with less parental surveillance. The process of urbanization and the movement of work outside the home increased unsupervised opportunities for girls and boys to explore their sexuality. Less frequently conducted under the watchful eyes of a girl’s mother, courtship offered a chance for sexual experimentation, usually with a potential marriage partner. In working-class communities, young women—called “girls” by their contemporaries—more openly pursued heterosexual activity in the mid-

to late nineteenth century, with multiple partners over time. Working girls’ adoption of fancy dress suggested erotic maturity, and men commonly beckoned them or forced sexual contact. Whereas almost no young women were self-sufficient in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century working girls lived independent from fathers and husbands. Alarmed by their self-assertion, many Americans associated factory girls with precocity and prostitution. Sometimes prostitution was a means of survival for working-class girls, although many were only “occasional” prostitutes. Nineteenth-century brothels offered child prostitutes to men, and girls as young as ten were arrested for selling sex in the 1850s. On the West Coast, Chinese girls and women often arrived in the United States to discover that they had been sold into prostitution. Girls in working-class urban environments and bourgeois society were vulnerable to abuse by men, usually perpetrated by family or community members rather than strangers (Odem 1995). Grocers and lodgers gave city girls pennies to keep quiet about sexual contact, and elite southern men took liberties with young nieces as they did slaves, exercising patriarchal prerogative (Faust 1982; Stansell 1986). A sexual double standard tarnished girls’ reputations, and although men’s honor in some instances may have suffered, never were they considered “ruined.” Intimate relations developed in the nineteenth century between pairs of girls and young women, a phenomenon known as “romantic friendships.” Although Victorians understood women as lacking sexual initiative, physically affectionate same-sex relationships flourished in the late nineteenth century, replete with love

Female Sexuality letters, kissing, caressing, and bed sharing. Also consensual—but mediated by an economy known as “treating”—were sexual relations between urban boys and girls. Working girls exchanged companionship, affection, sexual favors, and sometimes sexual intercourse for tickets to shows, a new dress, or other commodities that their low wages could not support. Although urban girls were openly engaging in flirtation and forming romantic and sexual bonds, reformers sought to prevent girls’ “seduction.” Having adopted English common-law statutes that set the age of consent for girls between ages ten and twelve, states revised their legal codes during the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Prompted by women reformers who maintained that girls past the age of puberty were too immature to consent to sex and further fueled by eugenic concerns about public health and heredity, state legislators raised the age of consent to sixteen or eighteen (except in Georgia, where the age rose to fourteen). Increasing the age of consent enabled reformers to prosecute charges of “white slavery,” purity activists’ term for the abduction of young women into prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. By far the most frequent perpetrators of sexual abuse against girls were older family members and relatives and, especially for domestic servants, their employers, yet reformers left male authority in the household and workplace unchallenged, instead attacking the lesser incidence of vice visible on the urban streets. Resistance to lowering the age of consent and fears that scheming girls of questionable character (especially African Americans and poor whites) would use such laws against “respectable” men were pro-

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nounced in the Reconstruction South. D. W. Griffith’s infamous novel and movie representation of post–Civil War sexual politics was a sensational depiction of black men’s alleged sexual aggression toward white girls and white women, when in fact white men committed the majority of sexual assaults and black girls and women were the most common victims. Another argument in defense of a lower age of consent for girls was the fact that girls reached puberty and maturity before boys; in the late 1800s, menarche (first menstruation) for black girls occurred around age eleven and for white girls around age fourteen (Odem 1995). In contrast to reformers’ assumptions, working-class young women overwhelmingly chose their unmarried peers of a similar age and class status as sexual partners. They entered such relationships for companionship, enjoyment, and financial reward, with marriage in mind. Parents often objected to their daughters’ participation in sexual activity and nightlife in the early twentieth century, and the creation of the juvenile court system allowed a mechanism for enforcing standards of behavior. New York State’s two reformatories for girls in the early twentieth century could house up to 600 “delinquents” over age sixteen, most of whom had begun their errant ways earlier in childhood and adolescence. In these ways working-class parents and middleclass professionals collaborated to put a stop to youthful promiscuity. During the twentieth century, authorities increasingly held girls responsible for their participation in what was called “sex delinquency.” Crimes linked to sexuality—sneaking out at night, running away, and committing petty theft, among others—constituted a “girl problem,”

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and middle-class reformers sought to modify girls’ behavior by teaching them to be industrious workers and good Christians. Even more disturbing to middle-class sensibility was the spread of illicit behaviors to middle-class youth. Commercialized forms of mixed-sex entertainment swept the nation’s cities at the turn of the twentieth century and provided a ripe environment for flirtation and expression of heterosexual desire. Kissing and engaging in heterosexual contact (short of intercourse)—called “necking” and “petting”—were old activities that gained visibility in the world of cheap amusements. At nickelodeons, dance halls, and amusement parks, sexual expression offended an aging generation of reformers and parents. Many girls—city natives or migrants from rural areas and the South—defiantly rejected Victorian mores about chastity. Sigmund Freud was prominent among twentieth-century thinkers who attempted to understand sexuality, normal heterosexual development, and deviance. He theorized that infants were sexual beings—indeed “polymorphously perverse”—and influenced several generations of thinkers who acknowledged sexual aspects of growing up. Famous for his theories of psychosexual development and penis envy, Freud argued that girls, upon discovery of the male penis during the so-called genital phase, found their own genitals lacking, rejected their mothers, and turned to their fathers as capable of providing them symbolically with the missing male organ. Feminist revisions of Freud have argued that girls envy male power, not male anatomy, and that early influences in girls’ sexual development are social in addition to psychological. Less controversial were new theories about adolescence as a period of struggle

and sexual awakening: psychologist G. Stanley Hall acknowledged girls and boys as sexual beings, contributing to the demise of Victorian notions of female passionlessness but also shaping his profession with sexist ideas about girls’ health and education. Patterns of sexual behavior instigated by urban working-class youth spread across the nation during the early decades of the twentieth century, accelerated by the automobile—both a vehicle of escape and a site for sexual activity. By the 1920s, commentators noted that no less than a “revolution of manners and morals” had occurred. During World War I and World War II, girls congregated around military camps, socialized with soldiers, and earned such labels as “khaki wackies” and “victory girls,” presumably acting out of patriotic fervor to aid the war effort. The prevalence of “pickups,” or casual relations between girls and military men, led San Diego sex educators to warn sixth-grade girls against contact with strangers around military bases. Equally problematic for adults was the trend of “going steady”—studies revealed that girls were more likely to engage in sexual contact with a steady boyfriend than if they dated many boys their age. Teen-oriented magazines advocated group outings and double dating; in order to “rate,” one needed to date more than one person. Providing strategies for dating and finding a mate, midcentury advice literature and family life education reinforced conservative notions about female sexuality. Young men were to initiate dates and sexual activity, and girls were to remain passive but enticing. In contradiction to such advice, biologist Alfred C. Kinsey (1953) discovered that premarital sexual activity, including masturbation and homosexuality, was

Female Sexuality not unknown among his sample of American women from several generations. Twenty-seven percent of female respondents in his 1953 report recalled sexual response before puberty (103); girls more commonly than boys experienced first orgasm through masturbation (106); 40 percent of girls admitted to having masturbated by age twenty (143); 48 percent remembered preadolescent sex play (both same-sex and with boys) (107); and almost half of women married by age twenty had engaged in premarital coitus (287). In the post–World War II era, unwed pregnant girls received different treatment based on race: social service workers treated black girls as promiscuous “breeders” and white girls as psychologically (but reversibly) disturbed. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of girls sought same-sex sexual relationships. Bars in small and large cities provided opportunities for girls to find sexual companions and connect with a growing homosexual community. Although minors were not legally admitted to bars, girls as young as fourteen participated in bar culture. In keeping with Kinsey’s findings, a number of lesbians of this generation recalled sexual feelings toward women from before and during puberty, some of which led to sex play. Following the late 1960s and 1970s movements for gay liberation and feminism, more girls and young women talked openly about their feelings and pursued relationships in other venues. Organizations and centers for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century, offering meeting space and support networks. Over the course of the twentieth century, girls began to reach puberty at an earlier age. Overall, the age of marriage

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rose, and increasing numbers of young people in the late twentieth century have eschewed marriage altogether. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, associated with college students and heterosexual liberation from conception, courtesy of the birth control pill, had an impact on younger people; however, girls also experienced the backlash against sexual liberalism as parents and schools responded to protect youth. Although one generation may have learned to practice contraception and “safe sex,” a subsequent generation was more likely to be taught abstinence as the only way to be safe. Nonetheless, several court victories from the late 1970s protected minors’ access to contraceptives and abortion but allowed states to impose restrictions on the latter. Few people in the early twenty-first century would argue that girls are innately depraved or virtuous, and most recognize that a combination of environmental factors shapes the ways that girls’ sexuality finds expression. From an early age, girls receive mixed messages about sexual values. On the one hand, popular culture eroticizes girl bodies, either by presenting girls in a voyeuristic and desirable fashion or by making adult women appear girlish. Taking this eroticism to its extreme is the child pornography industry, with its ubiquitous presence on the Internet. On the other hand, the dominant conception of childhood and especially girlhood consists of a period of innocence during which sexual gratification (or at minimum heterosexual intercourse) should be delayed. Parents and guardians, generally speaking, continue protecting their vulnerable daughters, revealing a perception of girls as defenseless and molestation and abuse as pervasive. Despite a lack of evidence suggesting its effectiveness, abstinence-only education

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grew popular in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and in 2000, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush promised to increase federal funding for education initiatives promoting abstinence. Conservatives have attacked alternative contraceptive education, and schools have replaced former instruction in the use of contraceptives and “safe sex” methods (which increased in the 1970s and 1980s) with an ideal of postponed participation in sexual activity. Critics of abstinence-only education contend that American society still applauds or ignores young men for sexual bravado and stigmatizes young women who engage in similar activity. Opponents of providing youth with contraceptive information (and knowledge about sexual acts) maintain that such instruction sanctions sexual activity among youth. The fact that American society offers young people mixed messages about sexuality, often with severe consequences for girls, is indisputable. Feminists and scholars who believe that sexuality is socially constructed rather than fixed or innate have shaped discussion of girls’ sexuality. Studies have shown that girls are at greater risk for eating disorders and lose self-esteem around the time of puberty, and feminists have argued that such problems result from conflicting cultural messages about female sexuality. Debunking a male-centered biology and definition of sex, latetwentieth-century feminists have clarified the role of the clitoris in sexual arousal, although many girls undoubtedly lack such information. Feminist analysis of rape and sexual harassment has provided clues to unraveling girls’ struggles with sexuality, and the late-twentieth-century third wave of feminism includes girls testifying about their own

sexual coming-of-age experiences. In addition to being a tool for pornographers, the World Wide Web has become a resource for expert and peer knowledge about sexuality. Susan K. Freeman See also Adolescent Health; Body Image; Child Abuse; Clothing; Dating and Courtship; Hair; Menstruation; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Alexander, Ruth. 1995. The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. 1998. Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century: A Book by and for Women. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Duberman, Martin, Fred Eggan, and Richard Clemmer. 1979. “Documents in Hopi Indian Sexuality: Imperialism, Culture, and Resistance.” Radical History Review 20 (Spring–Summer): 99–130. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 1982. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Gutíerrez, Ramón A. 1991. When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Irvine, Janice M., ed. 1994. Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard. 1953. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders. Nash, Gary B. 1992. Red, White, and Black: The People of Early North America. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Odem, Mary E. 1995. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the

4-H United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pipher, Mary. 1994. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine Books. Planned Parenthood Federation of America. http://www.teenwire.com. Accessed January 11, 2001. Roscoe, Will. 1998. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Shandler, Sara, ed. 1999. Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write about Their Search for Self. New York: HarperPerennial. Stansell, Christine. 1986. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tanenbaum, Leora. 1999. Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation. New York: Seven Stories Press. Thompson, Sharon. 1995. Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy. New York: Hill and Wang.

4-H A nationwide system of task-based voluntary organizations for rural youth, 4-H is directed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Extension Service. This component of USDA rural outreach organized for girls in 1910 was one of several Progressive-era initiatives for encouraging farm families to adopt scientific farming and homemaking practices. Since 1907 legislative mandates, domestic policy priorities, and international events have altered administrative structures, club names and membership criteria, the status of participants, and the projects to which the USDA has assigned top priority. However, active club members have invariably maximized the tangible rewards and educational potential of belonging, constructing meaningful experiences from available opportunities.

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Two national reform currents directly supported the formation of girls’ clubs in the early 1900s. Progressive rural educational leaders promoted agricultural clubs as a complement to formal schooling for rural youths. Reformers hoped to counteract the growing dominance of urban bias in textbooks and to make rural life attractive to the maturing generation. Many northern and western civic leaders and school districts established state or local rural youth organizations prior to USDA involvement. Progressive reformers’ determination to rationalize agricultural practices provided the second impetus for 4-H work. The boll weevil’s attack on southern cotton crops and the USDA’s broader interest in increasing yields and combating extreme rural poverty with scientific agricultural practices prompted the USDA to collaborate with private foundations to assist southern farmers and the region’s agricultural economy. The General Education Board, distributing Rockefeller Foundation money, provided significant funding for much of the initial USDA Extension Service work with southern youth. The first girls’ clubs for whites were usually named either to signify gender or to identify work with specific crops, animals, or homemaking activities. Girls’ canning and tomato clubs, established in Virginia and North Carolina in 1910, spread quickly throughout the South. African American girls enrolled in carefully distinguished homemakers’ clubs. The more inclusive “4-H clubs,” emphasizing simultaneous training goals (head, heart, hands, and health), served as the common title for USDA Extension Service work with rural girls and boys, ages eleven to eighteen, from the late 1920s until the late 1960s. The current umbrella title for USDA coeducational work with youth

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ages nine to nineteen, “4-H,” also includes new special-interest projects for urban and rural participants. USDA 4-H clubs, regardless of their name or source of financial support, have consistently been a vehicle for organizing rural young women to accomplish broader domestic and foreign policy goals. Although the clubs have frequently provided opportunities that coincided with girls’ interests, girls’ self-defined needs have been largely irrelevant to the social, economic, and political goals the clubs were designed to meet. Although the initiative merged contemporary reform currents, the emphasis on national priorities distinguishes tomato and canning clubs from other Progressive-era voluntary youth organizations. Most youth workers designed programs that were explicitly tailored to adolescents’ developmental needs. In fact, the USDA initially involved youth in its programs because of adult reluctance to adopt the scientific farming and homemaking practices that the agency advocated. Extension Service agents hoped to spread new agricultural practices by getting farmers to agree to plant and tend crops according to their specifications. These “demonstration projects” were designed to establish the superiority of scientific farming methods. Administrators and agents expected that the demonstrators’ improved yields would be the most persuasive argument for new practices, leading others to adopt them. Farmers’ reluctance to try the new methods compelled agents to temporarily work with farmers’ sons, who were much more receptive to experimenting with one-acre plots. This improvised strategy produced such impressive results that when the organizers decided to add scientific housekeeping to their agenda, they did not even consider beginning with farm wives.

Ella Agnew and Jane McKimmon, the first USDA home demonstration agents in Virginia and North Carolina, deliberately worked only with girls. Although they ultimately hoped to influence adult women, in 1910 daughters provided the first link between the USDA and farm homes and kitchens. Girls’ canning and tomato club members tended one-fourthacre gardens, kept detailed records of planting and fertilizing activities, learned to preserve tomatoes and other vegetables for their families’ winter meals, and submitted report forms describing their activities and yields. Although USDA administrators’ priorities were adding variety to menus, improving nutrition, and teaching safe, modern canning methods in order to improve the quality of rural life for farmers, girls benefited and took great pride in their gardens, canned produce, profits, and prizes. Congress accepted the USDA administrators’ contention that rural youth had become integral to efforts to reform rural life and reshaped the program for the first time in 1914. The Smith-Lever Act, which stipulated that 25 percent of each state’s Extension Service budget be allocated for boys’ and girls’ clubs, made the successful work nationwide. By the terms of the legislatively mandated cooperative agreements between the USDA and state land-grant colleges, each state home demonstration agent, the woman responsible for all USDA work with white girls’ club members and women within a state, established an office in the home economics department of the landgrant agricultural college or at a nearby women’s college. The Smith-Lever Act expanded the geographic boundaries of the program but altered the conduct of the work in the South. General Education Board funding

4-H had been based on need. In 1914 Congress prohibited the use of private money and restricted agents to counties willing and able to allocate matching funds. As a result, as at least one USDA administrator had predicted, some southern girls could no longer participate. Between 1914 and 1945, legislative mandates and domestic policy priorities exerted the strongest influence on girls’ 4-H club membership and activities. There were numerous organizational changes, but with the exception of the official segregation of southern work in 1916, most affected club agents but not the girls who participated. Prior to the 1945 Bankhead-Flannagan Act, which mandated that a portion of increased allocations be used for African American club work in the South, new resources were rarely directed to African American agents and club members. However, within the white programs, the number of 4-H club agents and initiatives for girls grew at rates similar to those for boys. Domestic policy considerations as articulated by USDA administrators consistently created programs that emphasized traditional gender roles. According to those directing the work from Washington, D.C., an underlying goal of all Extension Service work was to enable the most capable farmers to prosper. A promising farmer, in addition to high yields, needed a happy home. He required a resourceful housekeeper who understood her supportive function and could create an attractive physical setting and prepare good meals. This orientation dictated the staffing and program priorities of the 4-H program for the girls who were to assume the role of farm wife. Federal administrators wanted scientific housekeeping principles to influence the farm home but expressed skepticism

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about hiring women who might disrupt the social status quo. State leaders sought female employees with training in home economics but gave priority to applicants likely to have a “rural viewpoint.” Thus early girls’ canning and tomato club members were not instructed by women who identified themselves to the USDA as feminists. Beginning with tomato and canning clubs, female home demonstration agents worked directly with girls on projects considered appropriate for females. Agents periodically sought greater flexibility, but USDA administrators in Washington, D.C., issued very clear prescriptions on the gendered boundaries of work for white participants. Tomatoes, kitchen gardens, chickens, yard beautification, and household improvement projects were the most common activities. Individual girls sometimes pursued animal projects that took them into boys’ territory, but the only organizational exceptions to the gendered division of labor were poultry clubs, which could be directed by either male or female agents, and the work with African American girls, which typically took place within the context of family- and community-centered initiatives directed by the one local African American agent who might be either male or female. In addition to initiating projects to preserve traditional gender lines and promote scientific housekeeping among rural girls, USDA administrators kept the program responsive to domestic economic and political priorities. During World War I, girls in 4-H clubs took an active role in food production and conservation efforts. Some northern canning clubs actually produced surplus crops for export. Congress also appropriated funds that enabled the Extension Service to hire agents who would organize urban

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girls to support the war effort by planting gardens for home use. Depression-era “live-at-home” campaigns linked 4-H projects to helping rural families survive the economic crisis. Gardens could both conserve and augment the farm income, and organizers stressed the value of the farm family garden. In New York State the average 4-H girl produced $121 worth of vegetables for her family’s table. Other projects emphasized renovating clothing and home furnishings, particularly the girls’ own bedrooms, as ways to improve the quality of home life with minimal resources. Girls contributed to World War II in many ways, some of which blurred gender lines as the USDA tried to meet its responsibility for recruiting farmworkers. Urban and rural girls again planted victory gardens, preserved food to improve family health and nutrition, and sold war bonds. In addition, rural girls helped alleviate the farm labor shortage. The 1943 Annual Report of the secretary of agriculture specifically mentions girls, not just boys, driving tractors as a patriotic contribution. Girls also learned first aid, child care practices, and home nursing skills. Their work was promoted as good training for participation in community projects, a significant change for white participants. Girls had previously been encouraged to focus exclusively on traditional tasks within their own homes. After 1945, foreign policy goals affected the focus of 4-H work in new ways. As markets contracted, the USDA deemphasized production. In the context of the Cold War, the traditional American farm family pattern was celebrated as superior to communist agrarian reform efforts around the globe. Thus it is not surprising that career exploration became a

major program focus for 4-H boys but not for their sisters. Girls, however, could participate in new nonfarming projects designed to shift the program away from its primarily rural focus. “Buymanship and consumer education” was just one of these initiatives. Cold War foreign policy also motivated an expanded program that emphasized youths’ connection to local and national peers. A few 4-H members went overseas to live with farm families, but more hosted foreign youth in their homes under the aegis of the International Farm Youth Exchange, initiated in 1948, and its subsequent expansions. All members are reminded of global responsibilities when reciting the 4-H pledge, revised in 1973. In addition to retaining the traditional commitment to develop one’s head, heart, hands, health, community, and country, the pledge now includes “and my world.” Demographic changes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, urban renewal programs, a recent commitment to include young people with disabilities, and technological innovations ranging from radio to television and the Internet have all altered the contours of 4-H membership for girls. However, regardless of adult priorities, girls since 1910 have consistently made the program serve their individual goals. All who completed projects gained a sense of individual accomplishment, sometimes reinforced by tangible prizes and local, state, or even national recognition. Those who attended state and national camps treasured their contacts with other members and were buoyed by large gatherings, which gave them a sense of participation in an enterprise much broader than their daily experiences might have suggested. The encouragement of adult female agents, who were often significant role

Free Girls of African Descent models, to pursue education outside their rural communities made 4-H a life-altering experience for many young women. Kathleen C. Hilton See also Camp Fire Girls; Education of Girls; Girl Scouts; Home Economics Education; Rural Girls; Summer Camps for Girls; Work References and Further Reading Clark, James W., Jr. 1984. Clover All Over: North Carolina 4-H in Action. Raleigh: North Carolina State University Press. Hilton, Kathleen C. 1987. “Growing Up Female: Girlhood Experiences and Social Feminism, 1890–1929.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, chap. 5. Reck, Franklin M. 1951. The 4-H Story: A History of 4-H Club Work. Ames: Iowa State College Press. True, Alfred Charles. 1969. A History of Agricultural Extension Work in the United States, 1785–1923. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Annual Report of the Secretary of Agriculture. 1910–1999. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wessel, Thomas, and Marilyn Wessel. 1982. 4-H: An American Idea, 1900–1980. Chevy Chase, MD: National 4-H Council. www.4h-usa.org/4h/4h_history.htm.

Free Girls of African Descent “To-day school commenced,” wrote Philadelphia-born Charlotte Forten, who began keeping a journal May 24, 1854, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. Wednesday, September 12, 1855, signaled the beginning of classes and chances to reestablish the legendary camaraderie that existed among schoolgirls. Rather than rejoicing over the renewal of acquaintances among classmates at the predominately white school that she

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attended in Salem, Massachusetts, Forten was “most happy . . . to return to the companionship of [her] studies.” She considered challenging academic assignments her “ever . . . most valued friends” (Stevenson 1988, 139–140). What caused the young girl to prize schoolwork more highly than school chums? As a free person of color in the slave era, Charlotte Forten was an anomaly. Neither she nor nearly 500,000 other free blacks in 1860 belonged to the dominant white society or the black society in the United States. In the first instance, northern prejudices based upon color thwarted free interactions with whites. In the second, customs based upon legal status prevented free associations with slaves. Slavery was not compatible with the natural rights ideology of the American Revolution, yet slavery and freedom coexisted paradoxically in the United States, where it was commonly assumed that all whites were free and all blacks were slaves. Contrary to this popular notion, a few black females and males of all ages were among the free population. In 1790, when the first census of the United States was taken, the number of free persons of African descent in all age groups had increased from several thousand in 1750 to 59,466. The free population constituted 7.9 percent of the 697,624 blacks in the United States at the time. The percentage of free blacks peaked in 1830, when it reached 13.7 percent (319,599) of the total number of blacks in the United States. After 1830, the percentage of free blacks fell to 13.4 percent in 1840, 11.9 percent in 1850, and finally to 11.0 percent in 1860. By that time, the free population had reached 488,070. Of that number, 240,921 were less than twenty years of age, and slightly more than one-

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half (122,193) of the group were females (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1864, 2). Free persons who lived in the urban and rural areas of the North and South attributed their status to their being born of a free woman without regard for color, legal suits, private manumissions, and purchases. A study of 176 notarial records in Spanish New Orleans involving the purchase of enslaved children with the intent to emancipate them reveals that free black women paid for 75 percent more children than did the men. Additionally, nearly two-thirds of these children the women liberated were girls. Clearly, the intent was in the interest of posterity: free women gave birth to free children (Ingersoll 1991, 186). The Revolutionary War was responsible for the largest increase in the free population in the eighteenth century. Afterward, slavery became more firmly entrenched in the South and dissipated elsewhere. States north of Delaware had either manumitted slaves or made provisions for gradual emancipation; therefore, by the end of the 1830s few blacks remained in bondage there. Added to the free black population was an untold number of slaves who “stole themselves.” Fewer females than males of all ages were among successful runaways. Those in childbearing years recoiled from fleeing because of the difficulties of carrying children along and their reluctance to leave them behind. Also, females traveling alone attracted more attention than males and were more likely to be stopped and returned to bondage. Nevertheless, the “theft of self” occurred most easily when fugitives escaped into nonslaveholding areas of the North or melded into the general free population in southern cities such as New Orleans, Charleston, and Baltimore.

Regardless of the manner in which they acquired their liberty, free persons were anomalies in North America. Even more of an aberration among them were the “quasi-slaves,” persons who were legally enslaved but lived, worked, and behaved as if they had been emancipated. “We were free,” declared the biracial North Carolinian Cornelia Smith, who came of age in the home of her paternal grandfather, a white medical doctor and planter, while her mother and young half-brother lived across the yard in the slave quarters. “We were just born in slavery,” Smith added, “that’s all” (Murray 1987, 49, 162). Other “virtually free” girls included Suzanne Metoyer, daughter of the French gentleman Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer and the slave-born Marie Thereze Coincoin; Amanda America Dickson, offspring of the enslaved Julia Frances and slave owner David Dickson, a wealthy entrepreneur and scientific farmer; Imogene and Adeline Johnson, the biracial daughters of the enslaved mulatto Julia Chinn and Richard M. Johnson, attorney, U.S. congressman, and vice president of the United States from 1837 to 1841; and Mary Ann Ellison, daughter of an unnamed slave woman and the wealthy freedman William “April” Ellison, a cotton-gin maker. These girls were hobbled by the absence of legal documents declaring them free—legally. Although they had no papers to prove their status, they suffered little or no interference from their owners, who never threatened them with sales, arduous labor, or corporal punishment. Only legal documents made them chattel. “That’s all,” according to Cornelia Smith (Murray 1987). Free blacks enjoyed the most fundamental rights—to their own persons and offspring—along with the right to own

Free Girls of African Descent property and marry legally. Free persons could also sue and be sued, establish businesses and keep their earnings, pursue an education, and worship in churches of their choice. Despite legal differences between enslaved and emancipated girls, few free persons, including Charlotte Forten, escaped the furies of race-based discrimination in schools, churches, marketplaces, and public accommodations. Given these circumstances, the adolescent Forten remained amazed that African Americans were not misanthropes as a result of living amid racial hostilities and facing routine acts of injustice. “Surely,” she wrote, “we have everything to make us hate mankind” (Stevenson 1988, 139–140). Forten based her observation upon the uneven behavior of classmates who were kind and cordial on the school grounds but ignored her when off campus. Forten responded by ignoring the girls and considered the incidents as “trifles” when compared to the great public wrongs her people endured. Yet Forten admitted that the “trifles” were “most wearing and discouraging” to persons who experienced them. Forten’s contemporary Marchita Lyons had firsthand knowledge of such behavior but was not inclined to ignore it. In 1854 the sixteen-year-old girl moved from New York to Providence, Rhode Island, where she attended school after her mother appealed to the governor to ensure her admission. Under the circumstances, “if any girl tried to put ‘on airs,’” Lyons wrote, “I simply found a way to inform her of my class record.” She flaunted her academic superiority as a way of saying to classmates that she too was entitled to an education and to show that blacks could excel academically if given a chance (Sterling 1984, 188–189).

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Forten and Lyons, like many of their northern free black contemporaries, had access to an education. Barriers to literacy similar to those in the South, such as school closings or the enactment of statutes against teaching blacks to read and write following the 1831 rebellion led by literate preacher Nat Turner, did not exist in the North, but educational opportunities were not always ideal. Some school systems prohibited admitting black children altogether, and others maintained segregation. If protests or direct action did not result in changes, parents and guardians sought alternatives. Frederick Douglass’s young daughter Rosetta attended school away from her Rochester, New York, home because its public schools were closed to blacks until 1857. When the wealthy Philadelphia sail maker James Forten objected to the segregated schools in the “City of Brotherly Love,” his granddaughter Charlotte received private tutoring and attended school in Salem, Massachusetts, between 1853 and 1856. In Salem, she boarded with John and Nancy Remond, who had relocated from Salem to Newport, Rhode Island, in the mid-1830s so that their daughter Sarah and her brother Charles “might not suffer from the discriminatory practices found in the high schools of Salem” (Sterling 1984, 138). While Forten was in Salem, the conditions in Pennsylvania hardly changed. In 1856 her cousin Hattie Purvis wrote to a friend that she had been tutoring her younger siblings at home since “there was no school [in Bayberry, Pennsylvania] . . . for them except a Public School” where they had to sit by themselves “because their faces are not as white as the rest of the scholars.” The seventeenyear-old Purvis said it made her “blood boil” just to think of the unfair treatment.

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When her own private tutoring ended, Hattie attended Eagleswood, a New Jersey boarding school run by abolitionists Theodore D. Weld, his wife Angelina, and her sister Sarah Grimké. At Eagleswood, Purvis mingled with the children and grandchildren of white abolitionists. Although living away from home caused anxiety and feelings of disengagement, Hattie Purvis established meaningful relationships with classmates such as Ellen Wright, who eventually married William Lloyd Garrison (Sterling 1984, 187–188). The curricular offerings at public and private schools included traditional reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and spelling courses. At Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, a classical high school founded in 1837 by the Society of Friends, pupils had a greater variety of courses. The freeborn Sarah Mapps Douglass, a stellar teacher in charge of the Girl’s Department at the institute, enrolled in medical classes at the Ladies Institute of Pennsylvania Medical University between 1855 and 1858 in order to introduce new subjects, including physiology, into the Institute of Colored Youth’s offerings (Lerner 1973, 85–86). Based upon comments about her final examinations given by H. Amelia Loguen, daughter of J. W. Loguen, an African Methodist Episcopal Zion bishop, she studied an expansive curriculum. On April 10, 1862, Loguen wrote: Spring has brought with it as usual, the ever dreaded, yearly school examinations, dreaded because they are so very tedious. Monday I thought of nothing but Chloride of Sodium, Nitrate of Silver detection of arsenic, uses of Zinc etc. etc; Tuesday, Parlezvous francais? Comment-vous

appelez-vouz? And Je me porte tres bien, yesterday oh! Terrible thought Plane Trigonometry; do you wonder then that last night I dreamed of being in France . . . trying to show that Chemistry is one of the most useful and interesting studies imaginable and lastly I was alone in some queer place trying to accertain [sic] the height of a “fort on a distant hill inaccessable [sic] on account of an intervening swamp.” O! how refreshing on awaking this morning to know that all such is for a time past and that vacation is close at hand. (Woodson 1969, 541) Whether it was the end of the academic year or an academic career, many free blacks girls believed it was their social responsibility to acquire an education and use it in the interest of their people. “Knowledge is Power,” said Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a popular freeborn writer and reformer (Still 1872, 757). Moreover, she and Maria W. Stewart, a freeborn lecturer, believed education was vital for the elevation of the black race (Richardson 1987, 30, 46, 47). Both women agreed that it was incumbent upon black females to make a recognizable contribution to that effort. Similarly, Sarah Mapps Douglass penned a pithy reminder in one of her young students’ notebooks that reinforced that idea. “Thou hast youth, health, talents,” she wrote, “So use these precious gifts that when the Great Householder calls for an account of thou stewardship thou mayest return him his own with usury.” Thoughts of accountability at the bar of God were probably enough to dissuade students from misusing their education or ignoring their social responsibilities to others. Once their formal education

Free Girls of African Descent ended, the alumnae often entered the teaching profession, one of the few occupations open to young women. In this way, they could help to uplift their race and earn a livelihood at the same time. A great number of free girls, especially those who were economically deprived, did not attend school regularly. Instead, they entered bound service to whites who agreed to provide food, clothing, and shelter along with domestic and educational training in exchange for their labor. In general, bound free black girls entered service younger, received less educational training, and remained bound longer than their white contemporaries. As a result, the black girls spent most of their formative years performing manual labor outside their own homes. Skills necessary for preparing food and washing clothes, two of the most exacting domestic tasks, were beyond the knowledge and capabilities of most young girls. Ordinarily, they assisted adults with these demanding chores. The autobiographical writings of Nancy Prince, a Massachusetts-born free African American, reveal the tedious nature of her work as a domestic servant in a family of seven, including a patient suffering from fever and another from consumption. Prince wrote: Of course, the work must have been very severe, especially the washings. Sabbath evening I had to prepare for the wash; soap the clothes and put them into the steamer, set the kettle of water to boiling, and then close in the steam, and let the pipe from the boiler into the steam box that held the clothes. At two o’clock, on the morning of Monday, the bell was rung for me to get up; but, that was not all, they said I was too slow, and

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the washing was not done well; I had to leave the tub to tend the door and wait on the family, and was not spoken kind to, at that. The fourteen-year-old girl remained on the job only three months before it took a great toll on her health (Prince 1990, 6–7). The autobiographical fiction Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson, the first novel published in the United States by a black woman, is also illustrative in this regard. Our Nig’s well-developed plot focuses on Frado, a six-year-old girl who became an orphan when her African-born father died and her mother, a white woman, abandoned her. The young protagonist worked for an abusive white family in New England before the Civil War. Wilson clearly shows that racism existed in the North and that Frado’s life as a servant girl was not vastly different from that of her enslaved contemporaries in the South. The conditions under which the character Frado and the historical woman Prince worked were more exacting because they lived under the watchful eye of employers. By contrast, when laundresses and other self-employed women, assisted by young girls, worked in their own homes, they experienced some reprieve and did not assume the “humble pose.” At early ages, emancipated or enslaved blacks learned how to present a self-effacing posture or pay deference to whites publicly while privately maintaining their self-respect. The muchdiscussed “mask,” a protective device for disguising personal convictions and steeling facial expressions and body language, was a significant facet in maintaining associations with whites whose patronage was critical to their economic survival. Sharon G. Dean attributes the

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expression “a humble pose” to Frederick Douglass, who was referring to black businessmen who catered solely to a white clientele and displayed deferential behavior or a businesslike facade to woo and maintain white customers (Potter 1991, xlvi). Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that free persons looked for occupations in which both a source of livelihood and a degree of autonomy were possible. They found such jobs in the needle trade and filled demands for wearing apparel that required more than simple sewing. Because there were no readily accessible and affordable manufactured clothes, dressmakers fashioned garments for black and white clients. Young girls often assisted dressmakers and gained marketable skills as they matured. Earning a living required a great deal of their time, but it was never so all-consuming that free persons could ignore the daily insults they faced because of their color; nor did they forget their sisters and brothers who remained in bondage. As a result, free women and men often engaged in a dual fight against discrimination and slavery. Girls, especially those who came of age in homes where parents and other influential relatives advocated the abolition of slavery, probably joined in the struggle. Certainly, Susan Paul, Mary Ann Shadd, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Parker Remond, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper could trace their social consciousness back to childhood experiences in homes where adults recognized ills within the society and attempted to eradicate them. Reform activities within the James Forten family spanned three generations of activists who assisted in founding, financing, and nurturing six abolitionist societies. More specifically, Charlotte

Forten, along with three of her daughters, was among the founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. And the youngest member of the household, her granddaughter Charlotte, adopted the family tradition. Her insights about racism among her schoolgirl peers reflect her background within an antislavery household. It is virtually impossible to find similar data about free girls in the South, but the absence of empirical evidence does not mean that all free southern families supported slavery. Rather, it suggests that they were not at liberty to express their sentiments within an environment in which proslavery whites abhorred the idea of free blacks in their midst. Whites feared that free persons would have an unsettling influence upon slaves and stimulate their desire for freedom. To avoid repercussions, many free persons toed the line, ostensibly. In reality, an untold number of unheralded individuals assisted slaves in gaining their liberty. Without fanfare or membership in antislavery organizations, they helped to destroy slavery whenever the opportunity arose. It was incumbent upon them to do so, since few free persons in the South could not claim a relative or friend who remained in bondage. During the 1850s, the most politically charged period in the antebellum United States, the subject of slavery moved to the center of national political debates. Free girls in the North and South must have been aware of the shift as the atmosphere became more tense beginning with the more stringent Fugitive Slave Act, an 1850 statute. The law authorized officers of the court to issue arrest warrants for suspected fugitives and certificates for their return to bondage. The fate of an accused runaway

Free Girls of African Descent depended upon whether or not she or he fit the claimant’s description rather than upon prima facie evidence. Under the 1850 law, authorities received $10 if they deemed an accused person guilty and only $5 if he or she was found innocent. They had a financial incentive to declare any accused person guilty of being a runaway. Since these cases were not subjected to jury trials and accused persons could not testify in their own behalf, the possibilities of kidnapping with the intent to enslave intensified. If free persons lost their free status it was nearly impossible to recover it, yet a limited number succeeded. Among that number was the freeborn Polly Crocket, who was kidnapped and enslaved as a child and came of age in bondage, which she considered a dismal abyss. Crocket’s daughter, Lucy Delaney, published the autobiographical piece, “From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom,” which illuminates the family’s quest to regain and maintain its freedom. Delaney remembered that her mother “never spared an opportunity” to tell her children to seek liberty “whenever the chance offered” (Delaney 1988, 15–16). Like many others in bondage, Delaney grew up knowing that slavery was the antithesis of the natural state of being, freedom. Among the earliest published writings of the African-born Phillis Wheatley was a poem that included the lines, “In every Breast God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom, it is impatient of oppression and pants for Deliverance.” Wheatley’s owner emancipated her when she was approximately twenty years old in 1773 (Bruns 1977, 306). Emancipation for nearly 4 million other enslaved males and females, 56 per-

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cent of whom were under twenty years of age, did not come to fruition until the nation endured a bloody civil war. Once the fighting began in 1861, many slaves took advantage of the chaos surrounding them and liberated themselves by running away. Still others flocked to Union lines in hopes of winning their freedom. The fourteen-year-old slave-born Georgian, Susie King Taylor, witnessed the war from within a Union camp where she worked as a cook and laundress. She also helped bandage and nurse wounded soldiers. Moving beyond traditional jobs for women, Taylor said that she “learned to handle a musket” well, take guns apart, and reassemble them. The pressing needs of the war made it possible for her to perform such jobs (Taylor 1968, 26, 32–35). Susie King Taylor remembered hearing the Emancipation Proclamation read and described January 1, 1863, as a “glorious day.” The Emancipation Proclamation proclaimed that slaves within the rebellious areas of the Confederacy were free as of January 1, 1863. In actuality the proclamation did not free any slaves because the Confederacy did not enforce it, but it raised the hopes of blacks who came to believe that it was simply a matter of time before slavery would disappear completely. By the end of December 1865, emancipation became a reality when the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified by enough states to become law. Former slave girls could now enjoy the rights similar to those open to free girls before the general emancipation in 1865. Not only were these liberties and guarantees applicable to the former slave girls, but they were extended to their offspring as well. As nearly 4 million blacks made the transition from slavery to freedom, Margarett Nillin, who had

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worked as a personal servant in Texas before emancipation, reflected upon the changes in her life. “In slavery I owns nothin’,” the ninety-year-old Nillin said, who emphasized the futile possibilities of claiming possessions of her own when she added, “[I] never owns nothin’.” By contrast, Nillin, who was twenty-one years of age at the time of her emancipation, explained the changes over time when she said, “In freedom I’s own de home and raise de family.” The responsibilities attendant to running a household and guiding children through their formative years into productive adulthood were not without their woes. “All dat cause[d] me worryment,” Nillin remembered, who did not have similar frustrations in bondage. But when given a choice between remaining enslaved and being emancipated, Nillin said without hesitation, “I takes freedom.” Similarly, Victoria Adams, one of Nillin’s contemporaries, after reflecting upon the early years of her life, said: “I like being free more better” (Rawick 1972b, vol. 5, pt. 3, 152–153; Rawick 1972a, vol. 2, pt. 2, 12). Wilma King See also African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; Enslaved Girls of African Descent References and Further Reading Bruns, Roger, ed. 1977. Am I Not a Man and a Brother? The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688–1788. New York: Chelsea House. Delaney, Lucy A. 1988. “From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom.” In Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press. Horton, James Oliver. 1976. “Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston.” New England Quarterly 49 (June): 51–76.

Ingersoll, Thomas N. 1991. “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718–1812.” William and Mary Quarterly 48 (April): 173–200. Lerner, Gerda. 1993. “Sarah Mapps Douglass.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn TerborgPenn. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing. Lerner, Gerda, ed. 1973. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books. Murray, Pauli. 1987. Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family. New York: Harper and Row. Potter, Eliza. 1991. A Hairdresser’s Experience in the High Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Prince, Nancy. 1990. A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica. New York: Markus Wiener Publishing. Rawick, George P., ed. 1972a. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Vol. 2, South Carolina Narratives, pt. 2. Westport: Greenwood Press. ———. 1972b. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. 19 vols. Vol. 5, Texas Narratives, pt. 3. Westport: Greenwood Press. Richardson, Marilyn, ed. 1987. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sterling, Dorothy. 1984. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton. Stevenson, Brenda, ed. 1988. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press. Still, William. 1872. The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hairbreadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves and Others, or the Largest Stockholders, and Most Liberal Aiders and Advisers, of the Road. Philadelphia: Porter and Coats. Taylor, Susie King. 1968. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp. New York: Arno Press and New York Times. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1864. Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from Original Returns

Frontier Girls of the Eighth Census by Joseph C. G. Kennedy. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Wilson, Harriet E. 1859. “Our Nig”: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. 1983. Reprint, New York: Random House. Woodson, Carter G., ed. 1969. The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis, 1800–1860. New York: Russell and Russell.

Frontier Girls Girls played a vital part in the life and labor of the American frontier. They contributed to their families’ survival, helped shape society in new settlements, found their own distinctive pleasures and coped in their own ways with the difficulties of pioneering. The frontier was the edge of EuropeanAmerican settlement pushing into North America. The Anglo-American frontier moved from the region just west of the Appalachian Mountains in the 1770s to the Mississippi Valley in the 1820s, the Pacific coast in the 1840s and 1850s, and the Great Plains in the 1870s and 1880s. East of the Mississippi River, most frontier families were farmers who labored to clear land of trees and plant it with corn, cotton, tobacco, and other crops. In the far West were mining towns, ranches, lumber camps, and market centers, as well as farms. Many frontier families lived isolated from others and relied heavily on their own resources. Because the continent was filled with well-settled Native American peoples, many frontier girls came into close contact—and sometimes conflict— with people of the tribes who were being dispossessed by the expanding frontier. In some ways frontier girlhood was out of step with developments elsewhere in the United States. Especially among the

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urban middle class in more settled parts of the country, girls were contributing less and less to the economies of their families and were increasingly sheltered from the world outside the home. Most frontier families, however, depended heavily on the work of children. They could not afford to hold their daughters apart from the demands of labor inside and outside the home. Girls grew up closely involved with their communities, whether in mining towns, ranching regions, or newly settled farming country. Girls, in fact, were often essential to a family’s survival. They helped their mothers with the extraordinary range of work in the household—from cooking, cleaning, and washing to making and mending clothes, whitewashing walls, and much more. On farms and ranches and often in towns, girls lent their hands to cultivating the gardens that for many families produced much of the food on the dinner table. During the first year or so of settling in a new area, farmers would have no income from their work until their fields were broken, planted, and harvested. Mothers and daughters often would provide most or all of the cash income from the household by selling not only surpluses from the garden but also eggs, milk, and butter from the chickens and cattle families brought with them. In mining and market towns, bachelors or married men living on their own frequently boarded with families. The women and girls who cooked for these men and sometimes did their laundry provided income needed for their households’ survival. Girls in towns worked at many other jobs—running errands (sometimes for prostitutes and others in the demimonde), peddling pies, and gathering and selling edible wild plants. Everywhere,

Sharpshooter Annie Oakley won a shooting contest at the age of fifteen, competed against champion male shooters, and toured America and Europe with Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show.” (Library of Congress)

Frontier Girls girls were vital contributors to the cash incomes all families required to buy what they could not produce for themselves. Girls did not work directly in some of the heaviest frontier labor, for instance, in underground mining and logging and building fences, but on frontier farms and ranches they shared many tasks with adults. At six or seven years of age, they were in the saddle and herding cattle. They spent hundreds of hours during the summer chopping weeds from the growing crops and keeping birds, cattle, and wild game out of the fields. In the arid West they sometimes hauled water in wagons from miles away for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. They brought in wood and, on the plains, gathered “chips” (the dried dung of cattle and bison) that was sometimes the only available fuel. Many daughters became accomplished hunters, bagging rabbits, deer, and other game for the dinner table. They gathered many kinds of edible wild plants—grapes and plums that grew along the creeks, greens, some nuts, and even some roots. Frontier daughters (and sons) often engaged in a wider diversity of work than their parents. In this they were continuing the roles children had played throughout American history—and in most societies of the past—even as young Americans in other parts of the changing nation were withdrawing from the working world and living by patterns that would become more common in the twentieth century. The frontier child’s world of play, like that of work, was also somewhat out of step with that of youngsters elsewhere. Middle-class parents in the cities increasingly tried to shape their daughters’ and sons’ characters by choosing their toys and amusements. For the first time industry was providing significant num-

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bers of playthings. Among the thousands of families moving to the frontier, however, girls mostly were expected to find their own amusements. Play, in fact, was the part of girls’ lives most under their own control, and it showed them at their most creative. They sometimes turned part of their work into play. They raced horses while herding cattle, waged mock battles by throwing cow chips and clods of cornfield dirt, and played hide-andseek during expeditions to gather wild berries. Other play was a kind of rehearsal for future roles girls saw among adults. With their brothers they practiced branding, using sticks on dogs and cats. They constructed miniature farms and households and the people who inhabited them— matchbox wagons pulled by beetles, houses and fences made of twigs, and tiny corrals, schoolhouses, and chicken coops. Girls created a variety of toys from the natural world. They skated on wooden floors with melon rinds strapped to their feet and played with balloons made from pigs’ bladders. Branches became stick horses and a variety of imagined weapons. The popularity of such items among girls emphasized the frontier’s tendency to blur or erase the line between the work and play of female and male. But girls also had more traditional toys. Dolls, the female playthings most common to all cultures, were fashioned from cornhusks and corncobs, pinecones, and other materials found in fields and woodlands, usually graced with bits of cloth and perhaps buttons for eyes. Dolls were placed in cradles and beds imagined from logs and piles of leaves and fed from stumps pictured as stoves. When parents gave dolls to girls, they were trying to encourage their daughters to imagine maternal roles they would be

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expected to fill in a few years. As other presents they gave sets of toy dishes and tea sets. A few of the earliest board games that found their way to the frontier promoted dominant values of Victorian America. Such gifts illustrate another theme in frontier life—the determined effort of adults to implant traditional values and patterns of life into the country they were settling. This impulse, expressed in many areas of pioneer life, was especially acute in relations between adults and children. Girls and boys, after all, would be responsible for shaping communities during the first full generation of settlement. Playthings of cultural instruction were one more means of planting a way of life on the frontier. Children, in their own way, were doing the same. Wherever girls and boys gathered, they played games they themselves imported from elsewhere. Some could be traced back centuries into European history and many had roots in colonial America. Girls preferred some over others—many said fox and geese and red rover were special favorites—but as in work and other kinds of play, the sexes mixed more often than not. These games served another purpose. Girls arrived on the frontier from across the nation and the world, but because they all carried the baggage of organized games with their simple and familiar rules, strangers could come together and form an instant bond. Ring-around-arosy, ante-I-over, and other favorites were another part of cultural tradition brought westward. Through them, children did their part in creating frontier communities. Education was an even more obvious method of transmitting values and culture to frontier girls. Parents were torn between two impulses. Upon settling in

a new area, parents typically tried to establish some means of providing educational basics. Yet parents also needed both daughters and sons to help in the prodigious work of making a new life on the frontier. This conflict expressed more broadly the frontier’s tension between the patterns of an older America and the tendencies of the new. As they did the work expected of them for generations, girls also were urged toward the educational advantages so strongly promoted by middle-class parents in more settled parts of the nation. Girls were often educated in the home. Parents took care to bring to the frontier what were considered their society’s basic texts—the Bible and a few literary and historical classics—and often added contemporary novels and other writing. Mothers, especially, took time to teach daughters to read with the help of these books, and as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other fundamental cultural texts were read, a cultural inheritance was passed on. Soon after their arrival in a new settlement, parents usually tried to establish public schooling, but doing so could be difficult. Few children lived in mining camps during their first months, and although farms were full of them, early settlement was so widely scattered that a district of 100 or more square miles might have only a handful of students. The frontier consequently often had more schools per 100 children than elsewhere in the country—testimony to the standing of education among adults. Typically, these were one-room schools, some in abandoned sod houses, ramshackle buildings, or even old railcars. Girls attended from the age of five or six through early adulthood.

Frontier Girls Education was one area in which the experiences of girls and boys diverged somewhat. Especially as they grew older and were drawn more into the roles of adult women, daughters had relatively more time for schooling, although at peak times of work on farms, at planting and harvest, they were still expected to be in the fields and not in the classroom. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, teaching was one of the few occupations outside the home considered socially acceptable for girls approaching womanhood. This trend, especially true on the frontier with its high demand for adult male labor, led large numbers of girls into teaching. As young as fifteen, they took charge of classrooms. Many would follow this profession throughout their adult lives. In schooling, girls’ domestic and public lives often merged. The same happened elsewhere in frontier society. The frontier’s isolation, plus its tendency to throw together strangers from varied backgrounds, left families hungering for such social activities as dances, lectures, school entertainments, and church revivals and dinners. Girls attended them all and often played prominent roles in the entertainment. Flirtation and courtship were a natural part of these social gatherings. Particularly on the earlier frontiers in the East, girls married at a somewhat earlier age than in more settled regions, but the popular image of pioneer daughters barely into puberty finding husbands is exaggerated. By their late teens, girls were being courted, and most were married in their early twenties.

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In those late teen years of courtship, girls were also being drawn increasingly into the traditional working and social world of Victorian women. This could be a jarring change. The demands and opportunities of the frontier required girls to spend much of their time outside the home, learning their own abilities and satisfying their curiosities while playing independently and working with their brothers and fathers in settings usually reserved for men. Then, as they entered puberty—and coincidentally as the frontier was passing and an area was taking on the traits and social patterns of more settled country— girls were expected to assume roles more traditional for women. Some embraced this life as creative and rewarding, but some resented and resisted the change and kept to lives outside the female norms of the day. The resulting inheritance, as these girls matured and reared daughters of their own, was as mixed as the experience of the frontier itself. Elliott West See also Captivity; Education of Girls; Native American Girls; Play; Work References and Further Reading Hampsten, Elizabeth. 1991. Settlers’ Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Peavy, Linda, and Ursula Smith. 1999. Frontier Children. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Werner, Emmy. 1995. Pioneer Children on the Journey West. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. West, Elliott. 1989. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

G Gifted Girls

to the achievement of gifted girls, causing the decline in the numbers of identifiable gifted girls as they grow up. First, gifted girls may not be identified early enough. The identification of gifted children often begins in third grade. This practice, however, penalizes young gifted girls who are often outstanding in early childhood. They talk, read, and count earlier than boys, and in the preschool years they score higher than boys on intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. But by middle school the balance is reversed. Even as early as third grade, many gifted girls have gotten the message, effectively delivered at home and in school, that it is safer not to stand out for academic prowess, that it is more acceptable for girls to be like their peers. Educators, therefore, need to take seriously the signs of developmental advancement in girls during the preschool years. Second, for gifted girls a gradual loss of self-esteem starts early. Between grades three and eight, most gifted girls’ self-concept declines significantly, and by adolescence many gifted girls suffer a marked lack of confidence. Eighth-grade gifted girls report more negative self-regard and lack of self-confidence in behavior, intellectual and school status, and popularity than nongifted girls in the same grade (Kline and Short 1991; Klein and Zehms 1996). Conversely, characteristics such as

The history of education in the United States has been based on the principle of providing education in an egalitarian framework. The concept of providing special education for children identified as gifted and talented has been seen by many educators as creating an elite class. Over the past twenty years, however, there has been a gradual recognition of the need to identify and develop programs for gifts and talents that range from mathematical to musical. Many states have enacted legislation encouraging local school districts to provide special opportunities for highachieving and talented students. The actual research on the effectiveness of these programs has not been completed. The school and life experiences of gifted boys and girls differ in a number of respects. In early childhood and through the elementary school years, gifted boys and girls are equal in number. In adolescence, however, a marked turnaround occurs. At around age twelve, gifted boys outnumber gifted girls, and by adulthood there are far more gifted men than gifted women. What happens to those young gifted girls? Many do not capitalize on their giftedness. Their academic achievement and other talents falter, and their gifts may become obscured on the way to womanhood. Research suggests that several factors converge to produce barriers

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A young girl playing the violin. (Francoise Gervais/Corbis)

perfectionism, hopelessness, and discouragement rise with age. Bruce Kline and Elizabeth Short hypothesize that these changes result from conflicts between the psychological needs of gifted girls and society’s gender-role expectations, as girls learn from their families, school, and the media which behaviors are approved (Kline and Short 1991). Third, as they move into adolescence, many gifted girls discover that it is smart not to look too smart. They deny, camouflage, or abandon their talents and see disadvantages in being gifted. Adolescent girls are faced with choosing between the competing goals of popularity and academic achievement, and social relations

often take precedence over intellectual interests. Since gifted girls are more socially adept than gifted boys, they pick up social cues and know how to fit in. In order to please others, gifted girls tend to play down their talents. In a study of more than 600 children, Linda Silverman found that girls typically adapt to the ability level of their age-mates (1993). Gifted girls in grades three through nine chose not to leave their friends to join advanced classes. The middle school years are the most critical period for loss of talent. At this time, gifted girls discover that high achievement may cost them acceptance by their peer group. Girls’ groups reward conformity and may ostracize the girl who is a high achiever. In a study of almost 500 students that examined how gifted students are viewed by their peers, gifted boys were found to be the most popular and gifted girls the least. The girls were perceived as generally moody or sad, whereas the boys were described as funny and having a good sense of humor (Luftig and Nichols 1991). Giftedness and leadership qualities often go hand in hand. Leadership qualities are encouraged in boys, and gifted boys are described as leaders. In gifted girls, however, the same qualities are often described as “bossiness” and are discouraged. The message conveyed to girls is that it is okay for girls not to be assertive and not to assume leadership roles; having friends is far more important. Adolescent girls make choices that affect their academic careers. They stop enrolling in gifted programs in grades ten, eleven, and twelve (Read 1991) and are at particular risk for academic underachievement in the areas of math and science. The myth in society that task pro-

Gifted Girls ficiency is gender-related shows up in gifted boys’ and girls’ attitudes about their abilities and also affects the types of courses they select. Gifted girls do not estimate their abilities as highly as gifted boys; girls’ perception of their math abilities is low, whereas boys’ perception of their language abilities is low. Thus the message is perpetuated that it is acceptable for girls not to do well in math and science; they can be excellent readers and writers and leave science and math to the boys. Studies that have examined gender differences in math abilities show mixed results. Although boys appear more active and able in advanced math and science classes, research in basic math and spatial abilities shows no difference. Good math test performance depends on the number of math classes taken, and avoidance of math classes by girls results in lower standardized test scores. However, the gap in math achievement scores between males and females seems to be decreasing, and the number of girls in advanced math and science classes has increased. In 1990 boys made up a higher percentage of precalculus, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus classes, but in 1994 there was an equal or higher percentage of girls in all those classes except calculus (AAUW 1992). Girls and boys show different test-taking styles. Despite the lessening of the gap between boys and girls on tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the results of which determine eligibility for National Merit Scholarships, girls still do less well, according to research by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. College Board officials point to research showing that boys and girls are treated differently in classrooms as a

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possible reason for girls’ lower scores. Standardized tests that entail short fill-in or multiple-choice responses reward bold, quick answers and a willingness to take risks, characteristics more typical of boys than girls. Researchers such as Carol Gilligan have shown that females process and express knowledge differently and more subtly; they look for nuances and shades of gray. College and career choices are affected by high school course selection, creating a downward spiral effect (Siegle and Reis 1998). Test results and course selection have important implications for performance on college entrance exams, programs for the gifted, and career choices. It follows that if gifted girls abandon their math and science pursuits for more “socially acceptable” activities, they run the risk of limiting their options for career development as well as their personal satisfaction in the workplace. Despite the catch-up occurring in math and science, there is still a gender gap in technology. For example, in 1996 girls made up only a small percentage of the high school students who took advanced placement computer science exams. Furthermore, the girls who do take computer classes tend to be in data entry, whereas boys are more likely to take advanced computer applications that can lead them to careers in technology. Programs are being instituted that aim to change attitudes as well as educational practices. Schools and families are tackling the problem in different ways. Some parents choose single-sex schools for their daughters, hoping to encourage independence and the full use of talent. Other parents and schools choose to effect change by encouraging teacher training within coeducational environments and

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by creating special programs to foster gender equality. Some schools establish single-sex classes in math and science. As changes are implemented, benefits will accrue to society as well as to individual women; their aspirations will be unlimited, and they will benefit in terms of selfesteem, occupational satisfaction, and access to financial resources. Anita Gurian See also Education of Girls; Mathematics and Science References and Further Reading American Association of University Women (AAUW). 1992. The AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls. Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation. Callahan, Carolyn M., and Sally M. Reis. 1996. “Gifted Girls, Remarkable Women.” In Remarkable Women: Perspectives on Female Talent Development. Edited by Karen D. Arnold, Kathleen Diane Noble, and Rena Faye Subotnik. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Klein, Ann G., and Debra Zehms. 1996. “Self-concept and Gifted Girls: A Cross- sectional Study of Intellectually Gifted Females in Grades 3, 5, 8.” Roeper Review 19, no. 1: 30–34. Kline, Bruce B., and Elizabeth B. Short. 1991. “Changes in Emotional Resilience: Gifted Adolescent Females.” Roeper Review 13, no. 3: 118–121. Luftig, Richard L., and Marci L. Nichols. 1991. “An Assessment of the Social Status and Perceived Personality and School Traits of Gifted Students by Non-gifted.” Roeper Review 13, no. 3: 138–153. Read, Carolyn R. 1991. “Gender Distribution in Programs for the Gifted.” Roeper Review 13, no. 3: 188–193. Siegle, Del, and Sally M. Reis. 1998. “Gender Differences in Teacher and Student Perceptions of Gifted Students’

Ability and Effort.” Gifted Child Quarterly 42, no. 1: 101–110. Silverman, Linda Kreger. 1993. Counseling the Gifted and Talented. Denver, CO: Love.

Girl Gangs For a small segment of girls in the United States, joining and participating in a gang has become a defining aspect of their adolescence. Historically, the issue of female delinquency and girls’ subsequent involvement in gangs has been subsumed by the attention given to boys. When female delinquency was studied, theories were built on sexist assumptions and evolved in starkly different ways than theories of male delinquency. Despite the paucity of theoretical development and research, recent media attention has been given to the idea that a “new,” more violent, “masculine” girl has emerged. This type of coverage has popularized the public’s notion that society is now confronted with predatory girls in gangs who have assumed the social traits of males. It is difficult to get a clear picture of the prevalence with which girls participate in gangs and the degree to which they may be increasingly violent since studies to answer these questions are lacking. The small amount of research that does exist shows many differences between girls’ and boys’ gang involvement and delinquency. To understand why girls join and participate in gangs requires an examination of the unique realities of their lives, which are shaped by gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Ultimately, this type of analysis highlights many issues, such as sexual victimization, that lead to a more accurate assessment of girls and gangs. Historically, gangs emerged as a response to needs for protection and self-

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An eighteen-year-old member of the Circle City Piru Bloods gang in Los Angeles, California. (Jim Tynan/Impact Visuals/PictureQuest)

identity. Girls have been a part of gangs since the initial accounts of gangs in the early 1800s, when “criminal” gangs first formed. Girls’ gangs were initially described as auxiliary groups to male gangs, and female gangs were only briefly mentioned in reference to their association with existing male gangs (see Thrasher 1927). In the late 1950s girl gangs’ strong ties to boy gangs began to form. Unfortunately, early gang activity by girls is not well documented or researched. Current research reveals tremendous variety in girl gangs, from autonomous all-female gangs to mixed-

gender gangs. Further, there may be more useful ways to conceptualize and categorize girl gangs by examining differences between gangs regarding their reliance on fighting, drug-selling and use, age, and race (Hagedorn and Devitt 1999). As criminological theories evolved to explain subcultural delinquent groups, they were almost exclusively applied to boys, ignoring girls. In fact, peer groups have come to be seen as a crucial determinant of male delinquency. Several assumptions have prevented the application of peer group theory to explanations of girls’ delinquency. In many

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ways, theories of girls’ delinquency have remained fixed in dated but “classic” studies that noted that their behavior was dictated by biological, hormonal, or genetic attributes unique to females, for example, sexual promiscuity or maladjustment to the “normal” feminine role. Increased attention is now being given to girls in gangs for several reasons. One of the more negative reasons for this attention is the inaccurate and sensationalized image of girls in gangs created by the media. Rather than providing a holistic picture of girls in gangs, the media tends to spotlight particularly heinous and rare crimes committed by minority girls from the lower class. A comparison with “typical” female delinquency is often made to demonstrate the masculine nature of the gang-related offense and is cited as support for the influence of female liberation and increasing independence on girls (Chesney-Lind 1993). This perspective represents a continuation of theoretical ideas that emerged in the 1970s, which suggested that the women’s liberation movement, by promoting female independence and equality, was responsible for increases in female crime and delinquency (see Adler 1975). Although there has never been empirical evidence to support these assertions, the media frequently relies on this explanation when it comes to girls in gangs. Unfortunately, this type of attention results in the portrayal of girl gang members as evil and ultimately leads to ineffective policies to address their problems. Evaluating studies of girls’ involvement in gangs and delinquency challenges public perceptions created in part by the media and reveals many differences that exist between girls and boys. In a recent study by the Office of Juve-

nile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (1999), law enforcement officials reported that females accounted for 11 percent of all gang members. This estimate is consistent with the average estimate of 10 percent from existing studies (Pollock 1999). Studies of delinquency relying on self-reported data indicate that for nonserious offenses, girls and boys engage in similar rates of delinquency, but for serious offenses there is a wide gender gap that has remained constant over time. Small increases in arrest rates for girls are often falsely cited as evidence that girls’ violence has skyrocketed. It is important to examine these increases closely before such generalizations are accepted. For example, although the proportion of girls arrested for violent crimes rose 5 percent between 1980 and 1995, the entirety of that increase was attributable to an increase in aggravated assaults. Feminist scholars have suggested that this increase may be due to a reclassification of status offenses rather than reflecting an actual change in the behavior of girls (ChesneyLind and Shelden 1992). Meanwhile, rates of other offenses included in the violent crime index and committed by girls, such as murder, rape, and robbery, have decreased or stayed the same. Regardless of gender, gang members are more likely to participate in delinquency and to participate with greater frequency than nongang members. However, studies specific to gangs and gang delinquency have found that girls in gangs commit fewer and less serious offenses than boys (Bjerregaard and Smith 1993; Chesney-Lind and Brown 1998; Joe and Chesney-Lind 1995). Girls’ violence was found to be less likely to result in death and more likely to be directed at relatives and friends as a

Girl Gangs result of disagreements when compared to boys’ violence. Girls have been more likely than boys to report getting into trouble due to running away or other status offenses in response to a difficult family environment that often included abuse. With the exception of marijuana, boys in gangs also reported more substance abuse than girls in gangs and more involvement in selling drugs than girls. Fortunately, increased attention is now being given to girls in gangs because of qualitative, feminist research exploring, for example, why girls join gangs. The reasons for gang involvement are currently being sought by highlighting the realities that constitute everyday life for many girls. Initial research in this area pointed to the desire for popularity and the excitement provided by gang involvement. Although this may be part of the answer, girls’ involvement in gangs today is theorized to be a natural response to adverse socioeconomic conditions and further powerlessness caused by inequalities regarding gender and race. Studies of girl gangs suggest that gang involvement is seen either as a vehicle to escape the anticipated and often demeaning role of wife and mother or as an alternative to the seemingly unattainable dream of having a successful marriage and family. In addition, a desire for respect and status as well as access to moneymaking opportunities were motivating factors for girls’ gang participation. Another reason girls join gangs may be isolation from and failure in traditional institutions, such as family and schools. Girls join gangs to fulfill needs not met by their families—needs such as acceptance, belonging, and loyalty. Girl gang members are more likely than boys in gangs to have come from abusive homes

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and from families with serious parental drug use (Hagedorn and Moore 1996). Because of these problematic issues in families, gangs provide an alternative as girls describe their gangs in language mirroring idyllic family life (Quicker 1983). Educational difficulties provide another motive for girls to join gangs. One study found that having low expectations of completing school increased the chances of gang membership 20 percent for girls but only 1 percent for boys (Bjerregaard and Smith 1993). Another study found that although more than one-half of male gang members had dropped out of school, about 80 percent of female gang members were dropouts (Felkenes and Becker 1995). These difficulties experienced by girls support the idea that exclusion from traditional institutions leads some girls to pursue alternative opportunities that can be provided through gang membership. Female gang members face unique problems and may suffer more from their gang involvement for longer periods of their lives. Male gang members acknowledge that girls are treated like possessions or sexual objects, with a strong double standard in place determining acceptable behavior for girls and boys. Reports of domestic violence and brutal sexual victimization on the part of girls in gangs reinforce the existence of attitudes and behaviors that devalue females. In-depth qualitative studies with girl gang members emphasize their exposure to violence and the resulting acceptance of pain and brutality as a daily and unavoidable part of life. Additionally, girls in gangs face issues of teen pregnancy, teen motherhood, and the challenges of raising children under difficult socioeconomic circumstances. Unfortunately, rather than

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attempts to understand and address the problems of girls who choose gangs, the response has been to condemn them, which ultimately leads to ineffective policies. Kristi Holsinger See also Graffiti; Juvenile Delinquents; Substance Abuse References and Further Reading Adler, Freda. 1975. Sisters in Crime. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Bjerregaard, Beth, and Carolyn Smith. 1993. “Gender Differences in Gang Participation, Delinquency, and Substance Use.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 9, no. 4: 329–355. Brotherton, David C. 1996. “‘Smartness,’ ‘Toughness,’ and ‘Autonomy’: Drug Use in the Context of Gang Female Delinquency.” Journal of Drug Issues 26, no. 1: 261–277. Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1993. “Girls, Gangs and Violence: Anatomy of a Backlash.” Humanity and Society 17, no. 3: 321–344. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Marilyn Brown. 1998. “Girls and Violence: An Overview.” Pp. 171–200 in Youth Violence: Prevention, Intervention, and Social Policy. Edited by Daniel J. Flannery and C. Ronald Huff. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Randall G. Shelden. 1992. Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Felkenes, George T., and Harold K. Becker. 1995. “Female Gang Members: A Growing Issue for Policy Makers.” Journal of Gang Research 2, no. 4: 1–10. Hagedorn, John, and Mary L. Devitt. 1999. “Fighting Female: The Social Construction of Female Gangs.” Pp. 256–276 in Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender. Edited by Meda Chesney-Lind and John M. Hagedorn. Chicago: Lake View Press. Hagedorn, John, and Joan Moore. 1996. “What Happens to Girls in the Gang?” Pp. 204–218 in Gangs in America.

Edited by C. Ronald Huff. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Harris, Mary G. 1988. Cholas: Latina Girls and Gangs. New York: AMS Press. ———. 1994. “Cholas, Chicano Girls and Gangs.” Sex Roles 30: 289–431. Joe, Karen A., and Meda Chesney-Lind. 1995. “‘Just Every Mother’s Angel’: An Analysis of Gender and Ethnic Variations in Youth Gang Membership.” Gender and Society 9, no. 4: 408–432. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 1999. 1996 National Youth Gang Survey. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Pollock, Joycelyn M. 1999. Criminal Women. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing. Quicker, John C. 1983. Homegirls: Characterizing Chicana Gangs. San Pedro, CA: International University Press. Thrasher, Frederic M. 1927. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Girl Power Girl power, a term coined in the mid1990s by Great Britain’s ubiquitous pop stars The Spice Girls, represents a primarily commercial form of popular feminism where girls, for the first time in history, take center stage in the media as political subjects. Through television heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who fights demons in a miniskirt, girl power promotes the idea that in this new and enlightened era, girls can do anything to which they set their minds. Traditional feminism has little relevance in this discourse because problems of gender inequality are considered largely solved, and girls are no longer hindered in the same ways that their mothers were. As one of The Spice Girls states their mission: “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties. . . . Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a nineties

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The British band The Spice Girls. (Reuters New Media Inc./Corbis, 1998)

way of saying it” (Douglas 1997, 21). In other words, girl power is firmly aligned with “postfeminism”—the idea born in the 1990s that feminism has outlived its immediate usefulness and, as a result, is incapable of offering anything substantive to young women and girls. Girl power is the manifestation of a decade-long fascination with teenage girls and girlish things—one that started with the feisty resurrection of the term girl in the early 1990s by members of the musical and zine-based movement riot grrrls. Arguably a more radical and overtly political movement than girl power (if girl power can be called a “movement” at all), riot grrrl represents the flipside of girl power in that it is largely outside the commercial and media-saturated realm. Riot grrrl possesses the political muscle

often lacking in girl power; it also has the cohesion of a bona-fide youth culture. As one early manifesto states: “Riot grrrl is . . . BECAUSE we need to accept and support each other as girls; acknowledging our different approaches to life and accepting every one of them as valid. BECAUSE we seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the status quo” (Carlip 1995, 32). Those who identify as riot grrrls, therefore, are aware of the forces against them—of their doubly marginalized position as youth and as women. Girl power, on the other hand, is less a movement than a broad and somewhat nebulous cultural phenomenon. In a sense, girl power represents the tamer, more palatable version of riot grrrl—a version largely created

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The Guerrilla Girls are an example of a third-wave feminist group involved in the “girl power” movement. (Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls)

by the media. The focus for girl power is on “feeling good”—on tapping into individual power as opposed to focusing on the forces curtailing it. As one twelveyear-old girl puts it: “It means equality . . . that girls are strong, each one in her own way” (Lemish 1998, 164). As with most media-hyped phrases, however, girl power is multivalent. It has absorbed everything from girls’ friendships to their fashion sense. In fact, its commercial capital has so defined it that the intersection between philosophy and consumerism is very blurred indeed. In terms of its relationship to actual teenage girls, girl power carries a commercial message, in that it signals the emergence of teenage girls as a powerful economic force. With the immense popularity among teenage girls of films like Scream (which grossed $103 million in the box office upon its initial release), bands like The Spice Girls (whose single “Wannabe” sold 1.8 million copies in the United

States alone), and television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the economic clout of adolescent girls is not so difficult to figure. The number of teenagers in the United States was on the rise in the 1990s for the first time in fifteen years, and their ranks were growing at a faster rate than the overall U.S. population. Moreover, according to one market research firm, teenagers spent an estimated $84 billion of their own money in 1997 alone. Clearly, teenage girls ages thirteen to seventeen—88 percent of whom “love to shop,” according to one consumer survey—represent a viable market. And marketers have been quick to capitalize on that. Empowerment through style—in terms of both fashion and attitude— becomes something girls can buy in a Delia’s clothing catalogue. Yet, despite its almighty consumerist ethos, girl power nevertheless resonates on an emotional level with today’s adolescent girls. In part, girl power appeals because of its relevance to a teenager’s life. As the following quotation indicates, girls are well aware that their concerns are frequently overlooked by older women and in contemporary feminist discourse. As one sixteen-year-old girl reflects on her early adolescence: I was stuck in the middle. I was changing. I wasn’t a woman, but I wasn’t a little girl. I wanted to play with dolls, but then I wanted to go out and meet guys. I wanted all these clothes, but then I wanted toys, too. . . . It was a lot of changes. I was really stuck in the middle, that’s how I felt. I don’t know if my mother understood that or if she remembers how that feels. (Cassidy 1999, 40)

Girl Power Not only do some girls today feel that older women typically ignore them as conscious subjects, but also they are quite clear about the ways in which they are different from “older” feminists. The new girl power feminism—as defined by postfeminist websites, in anthologies like Listen Up! Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Findlen 1995), and by The Spice Girls’ liner notes—fits more comfortably with the current self-conceptualizations of teenage girls, particularly in terms of pleasure (the old feminists did not approve of makeup), sexuality (the old feminists were puritanical and antisex), and empowerment (the old feminists claimed victim status). Although these representations of earlier feminist positions are myopic or even blatantly inaccurate, it is nevertheless the case that today’s girl power feminism looks quite different from the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, girl power relies on the machinery of the media and less on grassroots organizing or academic production to convey its meaning. And much like the message suggested by Nike’s “just do it” advertising, girl power’s message is about individual power and achievement. And yet, girl power also puts a high premium on girl bonding. As The Spice Girls propose in their song “Wannabe”: “If you wanna be my lover, you’ve got to get with my friends. Make it last forever, friendship never ends.” These lines are perhaps the most famous in The Spice Girls’ canon and were probably largely responsible for their meteoric rise as girl power heroines. The notion that adolescent girls might privilege female friendship over romance created a minirevolution—one that can certainly be felt in various mainstream films like Herbert Ross’s Boys on

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the Side (1995) and Annette HaywoodCarter’s Foxfire (1996). Although clearly a discourse of empowerment for girls, the question remains as to just how revolutionary girl power actually is. Girl power’s ethos can be found everywhere in the popular media—in teen magazines that emphasize issues like “The Power of Positive Thinking” and in films like Andy Tennant’s Ever After (1998), billed as “the girl power Cinderella story.” Girl power suggests an orientation in which, if a girl works hard enough, she can achieve anything she desires. It is a brand of feminism that projects a tough and powerful teen image, but one that is unrealistic and unattainable for all but the most privileged girls. According to the girl power line of reasoning, girls need not worry about structural inequalities based on race or class because they are meaningless in a world dominated by individual achievement. Unfortunately, in most cases, this individual can only be one who possesses the privilege of whiteness and an upwardly mobile class position. In the final analysis, then, girl power cannot guarantee power for all girls—rather, it is primarily for those who have the financial and educational resources to obtain it. Kimberley Roberts See also Fan Clubs; Teenybopper; Zines References and Further Reading Budgeon, Shelley. 1998. “‘I’ll Tell You What I Really, Really Want’: Girl Power and Self-Identity in Britain.” Pp. 115–144 in Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls around the World. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Carlip, Hillary. 1995. Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out. New York: Warner Books.

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Cassidy, Carol. 1999. Girls in America: Their Stories, Their Words. New York: TV Books. Douglas, Susan. 1997. “Girls ’n’ Spice: All Things Nice?” The Nation (August 25): 21–24. Findlen, Barbara, ed. 1995. Listen Up! Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. Seattle: Seal Press. Lemish, Dafna. 1998. “Spice Girls’ Talk: A Case Study in the Development of Gendered Identity.” Pp. 145–168 in Millennium Girls: Today’s Girls Around the World. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Munk, Nina. 1997. “Girl Power!” Fortune (December 8): 132–140. Press, Joy. 1997. “Notes on Girl Power: The Selling of Softcore Feminism.” Village Voice (September 23): 59–61.

Girl Scouts The Girl Scouts is one of the largest international organizations of girls ages 5 to 17. Currently, there are more than 3.6 million Girl Scouts in the United States, and since its founding in 1912, more than 40 million girls and women have been in the organization. Girl Scouting and Girl Guiding encompass the world and exist in 136 countries. From its inception, Girl Scouting promoted both traditional gender norms of domesticity and new feminist ideals that were illustrated most clearly in outdoor activities, career preparation, and citizenship education (8 years before women had the vote nationally). Girl Scouts are expected to uphold the ideals expressed in “The Promise” and “The Law.” The trefoil pin signifies the three parts of the promise, “On my honor, I will try: / To serve God and my country / To help people at all times / And to live by the Girl Scout Law.” The organization was founded by Juliette Gordon Low (nicknamed “Daisy”) of Savannah, Georgia. Low was born into an aristocratic, southern family on October

31, 1860. Low became partially deaf because of childhood mastoid infections, and during her wedding in 1886 to William Mackay Low of Great Britain, a piece of rice lodged in her good ear. A doctor punctured her eardrum trying to remove it, leaving her almost completely deaf. For the rest of her life, Low used her deafness to ignore points of view contrary to her own. The marriage was an unhappy one, but before they could divorce, Willy Low died in 1905. While still living in England in 1911, Low became acquainted with Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. As an ally of Baden-Powell’s sister, Agnes, Low became involved in the Girl Guides and founded a troop in Scotland. She returned to Savannah in 1912 to start Girl Guides in the United States. At the behest of the girls in her troop, Low began using the term Girl Scouts in 1913, because it seemed more “American” and adventurous. In 1915 the Girl Scouts of the United States of America was organized with Low as president, and a national headquarters was established in New York City. Low worked tirelessly to promote Girl Scouting “for all the girls in America.” She envisioned the organization as including a mixture of play, fun, work, and healthy values that would guide girls to womanhood. Initially, Girl Scouts grew because of Low’s network of friends and her intuitive sense of identifying what girls would want to do and what they might find fun. From the beginning, an integral part of Girl Scouts was its focus on outdoor activities for girls. The first ten years of scouting included developing an American program that was distinct from the British program, incorporating diverse types of girls, staffing and training leaders, and laying the founda-

Girl Scouts tion for an international organization, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGS). The organization also began what would become an ambitious publishing venture, producing handbooks, pamphlets, songbooks, and magazines, including what would become The Leader, a monthly guide for troop leaders, and The Rally, which would shortly be renamed The American Girl, at one time the largest magazine for teenage girls in the United States. During World War I, Girl Scouts experienced enormous growth, partially because of the war and the patriotism it inspired. Girl Scouts worked in hospitals, grew victory gardens, and sold war bonds to contribute to the war effort. The now universal connection between Girl Scouts and cookies also began during World War I. The first “cookie sale” was held on Wall Street at a rally, with Mary Pickford challenging stockbrokers to buy homemade cookies from Girl Scouts to help the war effort. This event spawned the move to cookie sales for many troops, though all the early cookies were homemade in the women’s bake sale tradition. In 1934 the Philadelphia Girl Scout Council became the first to sell distinctive commercial cookies, and a national tradition began connecting uniformed girls and entrepreneurial commerce. After Low’s resignation as president in 1920, Girl Scouting began its transformation from a highly personalized form into a stable, bureaucratic, national organization independent of Low under the direction of Jane Deeter Rippin. By 1926, the organization had a training center for leaders in upstate New York, Camp Edith Macy. Still coping with extraordinary growth, Girl Scouting began to develop a program that institutionalized domestic feminism. Girl Scouting saw itself as a

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conscious promoter of “up-to-date womanhood” but also as a bulwark against flappers and American moral decline. Both the Depression and World War II caused Girl Scouts to modify their programs and work to include new groups of girls. They began expanding their outreach to girls beyond the middle class. Although Girl Scouting had included minority girls in northern troops as early as 1913 and had set up troops of “handicapped” girls as early as 1917, the movement became much more conscious of including racially diverse groups, sometimes in integrated settings. During the Depression, the Girl Scouts joined with other women’s and youth organizations to respond to the needs of girls and the “hard times” of the country, including a project to work with Dust Bowl migrant girls. Like World War I, World War II had a profound effect on the organization. Girls flocked to Scouting to promote the war effort and to reach the goal of “a million or more in ’44.” Additionally, the longtime internationalism of Girl Scouting helped members support U.S. entry into the war and aid underground resistance scouting groups in Europe, since scouts and guides were outlawed as European countries fell one by one to the Nazis, who installed new organizations of Hitler Youth. In the post–World War II period, the Girl Scouts shifted their focus from the “war-ready” scouts to a more traditionally feminine version. Nevertheless, the Girl Scouts remained a place of choice and varied experience for women and girls trying to escape the pervasive feminization of women’s roles in the postwar world. The world of Girl Scouting often became an avenue into paid professional work for women, as well as a haven for girls. Between 1945 and 1959, the organization continued to grow, reaching more

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A group of Girl Scouts watches a parade in Alexandria, Virginia. (Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis)

than 3 million paid members and becoming both the largest female voluntary organization and the largest single employer of women in management positions in the United States. Girl Scouting continued training girls in patriotism and civil defense while maintaining its strong internationalist stance. Ironically, because of its unwavering support for the United Nations and internationalism, Girl Scouts were accused of subverting young girls into “one-world” proto-communism by the Veterans of Foreign Wars during the McCarthy era. In 1956, Girl Scouts bought the birthplace of Juliette Low in Savannah to be a national center and also a “safe place” for racial dialogue in the South. Although it did not figure prominently in the change that swept the South, it is one of the few

historic houses dedicated to a historic woman, and it remains a destination for scouts and guides of all races from all regions. In the late 1950s, Girl Scouting became a force for racial change for white and African American girls and women in the South by beginning integrated activities in some southern communities. Yet racial issues remained highly charged, and change was not easy. Noted educator Gloria D. Scott became the Girl Scouts’ first African American president in 1975, but the organization still faced challenges of multicultural inclusion. Further, by the end of the 1960s, Girl Scouts had to respond to the “youth rebellion,” which was increasingly affecting women’s roles and visions of girlhood. Girl Scouting found itself embattled, hav-

Girl Scouts ing to make decisions about whether or not to make substantial programmatic changes to retain its place as the premier girls’ organization in the United States. Girl Scouting was forced to respond to the growing feminist movement and the changing demographics of women’s lives in the 1970s. Claiming to have always been a “feminist organization,” in a series of votes Girl Scouts opted to remain an all-girl organization, whereas Camp Fire Girls moved to a completely coeducational program and changed their name to Camp Fire, admitting boys at all levels, and Boy Scouts began admitting girls to senior Explorer troops. Attempting to stop membership losses, the Girl Scouts made sweeping program changes, and the National Board made its first political endorsement in sixty years when it put Girl Scouts on record as supporting constitutional ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. There was some fierce resistance within the organization to this identification with feminism, however, which crystallized around the controversy over the “Woman’s Badge” in Philadelphia. Because of the information about birth control and abortion included in earning the badge, the Roman Catholic Church in Philadelphia withdrew all its support and affiliation with Girl Scouting. To a lesser degree, these issues generated controversy in other areas. Included in the 1970s program revisions, the Girl Scouts also instituted Eco-Action, an environmental program popular with girls and less controversial with adults and sponsors. Today the Girl Scouts have renewed their commitment to physical education by instituting a health and fitness national service project in 1994 and a sports initiative in 1996. They have also supported

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programs that have encouraged girls to study math and science. The pledge “to be a sister to every scout” that concludes the Girl Scout Law underscores the organization’s lifelong commitment to diversity. The new Girl Scout slogan, “Girl Scouting: where girls go strong,” continues to reflect the Girl Scouting emphasis on physical fitness, outdoor skills, and “practical” feminism. Mary Rothschild and Georganne Scheiner See also Arts and Crafts; Camp Fire Girls; 4-H; Saturday Evening Girls; Summer Camps for Girls References and Further Reading Brown, Fern G. 1996. Daisy and the Girl Scouts: The Story of Juliette Low. Morton Grove, IL: Whitman. Choate, Ann Hyde, and Helen Ferris, eds. 1928. Juliette Low and the Girl Scouts: The Story of an American Woman. Garden City: Doubleday for the Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. 1986. SeventyFive Years of Girl Scouting. New York: Girl Scouts of the USA. ———. 1997. Highlights in Girl Scouting, 1912–1996. New York: Girl Scouts of the USA. Inness, Sherrie A. 1993. “Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls and Woodcraft Girls: The Ideology of Girls’ Scouting Novels 1910–1935.” Pg. 229–240 in Continuities in Popular Culture: The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present and Future. Edited by Ray B. Browne and Ronald Ambrosetti. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Jeal, Tim. 1990.The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. New York: Morrow. Rosenthal, Michael. 1984. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. New York: Pantheon. Shultz, Gladys Denny, and Daisy Gordon Lawrence. 1958. Lady from Savannah: The Life of Juliette Low. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

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Tedesco, Lauren. 1998. “Making a Girl into a Scout: Americanizing Scouting for Girls.” Pp. 19–39 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press.

Girls and Sweets Before the Mother Goose rhyme that described their constituent ingredients as “sugar and spice and everything nice,” girls were in some part synonymous with not only sugar but also all manner of other sweet things made from sugar. This association of girls with sweets and the more abstract corollaries of sweetness— piety, purity, refinement, and femininity—became ever more intensified and naturalized as sugar itself became more democratized in American culture. At the same time, paradoxically, the act of a girl consuming sweets suggested her budding sexuality as well. It was this dual set of cultural connotations that made the connections between girls and candy highly politicized in American culture. The feminization of sugar in general and confections in particular was part of a larger trend in the United States beginning in the nineteenth century that imbued marketplace commodities with personal characteristics, forging human links with the material world that defined both people and the goods around them. Sugar’s shift in monetary value during the nineteenth century caused a concomitant shift in social value: at the beginning of the century, when refined sugar was still an expensive rarity, it was a symbol of male economic prowess. By the end of the century, refined sugar was so prevalent and so affordable—people were eating nearly 80 pounds of it per

person per year—that it became socially devalued as well. What had once been a material symbol of wealth and power had transformed, in less than 100 years, into a marker of social weakness connected with women, children, and the sickly. And as sugar became feminized, women and girls became sweeter in the American psyche. Eventually, the consumed and the consumer became conflated, making sweetness and femininity synonymous. At this time, when refined sugar and the confections made from it became more familiar to Americans as affordable marketplace goods, the popular culture— including medical treatises, domestic manuals, recipe books, and advertising— created links between abstract ideas and physical characteristics. Refined sugar— white, granular, ephemeral, and sweet— was the physical repository for conceptual qualities such as refinement, gentility, purity, and femininity. At the same time, these same sources introduced the idea that confections could embody the more dangerous aspects of girls as nascent sexual beings. Candies were both innocent treats and luxurious and potentially addictive morsels that represented adult female pleasures in girlhood form. Sweets were pleasing indulgences that held no nutritional value and were therefore worthless from a practical dietary standpoint. Medical advisers recognized this and warned against the sin of, for example, bonbon eating by girls and women, defining it as a self-indulgent act that they linked to masturbation. Prolific health advocate John Kellogg, for one, wrote in 1884 that “self abuse” and sexual precocity in girls was caused by, among other things, eating “exciting and irritating food,” which in his mind included candy (Kellogg 1884, 330). At

Death Serves Soda. Even in the early twentieth century, as this picture shows, people were concerned about the dietary dangers of sugar. (The Soda Fountain, June 1909, p. 27)

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the same time, however, other domestic advisers continued to emphasize the purer aspects of sugar and candy by using the same language to describe them that they used for females, linking the nature of the commodity directly to the nature of the consumers themselves. (Eventually these were analogized to such a degree that a recognizable icon like the wedding cake served as a sweet and edible surrogate of the bride, the role that most little girls dreamed about during their entire childhood.) Indeed, popular advisers were instrumental in forging such cultural definitions. Women like Sarah Tyson Rorer warned against the harmful effects of eating too much candy—especially adulterated penny candies—at the same time that her articles in Ladies’ Home Journal and her cookbooks featured numerous saccharine recipes aimed at the mouths of children. Other material connections reinforced the links between girls and sweets. Like all children, girls had a strong appetite for sweets; children comprised the main consumers of hard candies and accounted for the success of most candy manufacturers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, many girls and young women at the turn of the century made candies in their own kitchens and sold them at local stores in order to earn an income. Still others worked in candy factories as chocolate dippers, candy wrappers, and box packers. Although working conditions there were typical of most turn-of-the-century factories (dark, crowded, and poorly ventilated), the owners of these factories used their young female workforce as a collective symbol of their products’ unadulterated properties: virginal girls made pure candies.

The business world presented the most clear-cut cultural meanings through advertising, especially for products such as bonbons and prepackaged desserts. In these texts, the images of particular girls functioned as popular and recognizable icons that stood for the supposedly pure and upstanding reputations of the companies and their products. These images were also meant to reassure the grownup women using novel products that they could do so with ease and success; after all, even a little girl could master such a process. One of the most recognizable of these corporate images, the Jell-O girl, was originally modeled on the company’s advertising illustrator’s own four-yearold daughter, named Elizabeth King. She faithfully reappeared throughout the first decades of Jell-O’s advertising, from 1904 on, and was later redesigned by Rose O’Neil, artist of the kewpie dolls. With blonde locks and ruffled dress, the Jell-O girl, a future housewife who could easily prepare impressive desserts, symbolized the purity of the granulated gelatin product itself and also represented the company image as a whole. Other dessert companies used the same kind of visual rhetoric to sell their goods, including the Junket “dainty Junket girl” and the Knox gelatin cherubs. These companies’ recipe booklets, printed by the thousands and given away free with the products, helped to sell both the idea of sugar as a worthwhile consumable and the idea of girls as sweet. Private individuals at the turn of the century also capitalized on the cheapness and abundance of refined sugar by publishing their own books on home candy making. These, too, sparked culinary fads: fudge-making and taffy-pulling parties were all the rage with girls of the

Girls and Sweets time. Girls not only ate sweets but also incorporated them into their lives through domestic activities like making them. Mother Goose was right: by eating so much candy, girls were made out of sugar and spice, and in turn they made other things out of sugar and spice. By the twentieth century people saw sweets as trivial, sensual indulgences eaten with little forethought and for little worthwhile purpose. They were the consummate products consumed by females, young and old, who could not control their own desires and were easily satisfied by life’s trifling things. To many minds, confections were dangerous in the hands (and mouths) of girls and women. Boys ate candy, certainly, but this was often seen as a purposeful endeavor: they often bought licorice sticks or chocolate cigars and spit pretend tobacco juice or smoked pretend cigarettes in imitation of their fathers. For girls, imitating their mothers was seen as a less than worthy occupation. Developing an early taste for sweets meant that they were doomed as adults to the luxurious dissipation provided by the sensational novel and box of bonbons. But candy was one of the few things on which girls spent their own money, and unlike needlework supplies and clothes, candy did not last—it was ephemeral, and it disappeared, deliciously, at the moment of consumption. Eating sweets was a way for girls, at least in small part, to sate their own appetites. This idea manifested itself not just with candies but with other confections as well. Ever since the 1870s, the soda fountain was a highly feminized social space. Middle- and upper-class women often took their daughters there to sample the frozen treats and to partake in a social

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atmosphere whose focal point was the consumption of sweet things, much like the tea party of a century before. Women who were taking breaks from their urban shopping excursions often met up with friends at a nearby fountain; in this way, they also trained their daughters in the art of socialization and habituated them to the important role of sweets in such ceremonies. These daughters, then, grew up to be young women who met up with their own friends and beaus at the local fountain. A verse written in a 1909 trade journal, entitled “Phoebe at the Fount,” encapsulated the connection between sweets and romantic affection but made the soda a surrogate for romantic interest: “I don’t care much for boys, / For only twelve am I, / In my fresh youth, a sweeter tooth, / Would other pleasures try; / So Mister Druggist-man / Fill up a cup for me / Of icy cream, a perfect dream, / And chocolate spread free” (Dennis 1909, 32). The popularity of the soda fountain for young women continued through the 1950s, by which time it had become a familiar institution for courtship rituals: meeting a boy at the soda fountain and sharing a soda with him was both a safe and socially acceptable form of consorting with the opposite sex. By the mid-twentieth century the candy industry also used other, more directed ways to deliver sugar to the mouths of girls. Penny candies, popular from the 1840s on, appealed to children’s sensibilities on all levels. They were affordable, enabling children to spend their money on their own choices. What is more, these treats often mimicked familiar objects like locomotives, flowers, and horses or were static depictions of allegorical scenes and, seen behind the merchant’s windows or in glass jars, were

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A young girl eyes candy in a store. (Shirley Zeiberg)

very enticing to the young mind and appetite. During the next 100 years the candy industry became much more sophisticated at marketing their products to their young consumer base by manufacturing sweets that were gender-specific. For girls in particular, candy jewelry was popular and appealing. Candy necklaces—“beads” of pastel-colored confections strung on elastic cords—were worn and eaten at the same time. These were accompanied by candy rings—pieces of plastic set with candy imitating gemstones—and later by candy lipstick—sugary cylinders that could be applied, like makeup, to one’s lips and then licked off. As with items like the lipstick, candy marketed toward girls was highly suggestive, melding innocent childhood pleasures with the more adult sexual pleasures of their mothers. The ambiguous rela-

tionship of girls to sweets was highlighted (and used as savvy marketing in some cases) once again. Sweets were also signifiers of seduction itself and of illicit sex. Historically, children and especially girls were warned about strangers who enticed with sweets but were interested in their own kind of gratification. This connection was also capitalized on by late-twentieth-century marketing far removed from the candy industry in which, for example, the music group the Archies sang the lyrics, “Sugar, ah honey honey / You are my candy girl / and you’ve got me wanting you,” in their hit song “Sugar Sugar.” In another instance, the movie poster for the re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita showed the eponymous figure wearing red heart-shaped sunglasses and sucking suggestively on a red heart-shaped lollipop, which served as a surrogate penis. The image juxtaposed a young girl’s supposed innocence with her awakening sexuality: an appetite for candy signified an appetite for sex as well. And shoes with extremely high stiletto heels, called Candies, were popular with the junior high and high school girls of the 1970s, many themselves called Candy outright or as a shortened form of Candice. The complete success of these disparate connections between sweets, purity, sexuality, and femininity—suggested since the late eighteenth century—was revealed in the vernacular language of the late twentieth century. Common appellations such as “sweetie pie,” “sugar,” and “honeybunch” were endearments that also tended to infantilize. But “popping her cherry,” a commonly used phrase in the late twentieth century, perhaps best expressed the conflation of young women and sweets because it meant the action of

Girls’ Culture breaking a girl’s hymen and her subsequent loss of virginity. Wendy A. Woloson See also Body Image; Consumer Culture; Eating Disorders; Girls’ Culture References and Further Reading Belden, Louise. 1983. The Festive Tradition: Table Decoration and Desserts in America, 1650–1900. New York: W. W. Norton. Campbell, Helen. 1888. The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Chapman, Robert L., ed. 1997. Dictionary of American Slang. New York: HarperCollins. Charsley, Simon. 1992. Wedding Cakes and Cultural History. London: Routledge. Dennis, Charles. 1909. “Phoebe at the Fount.” The Soda Fountain (May): 32. Kellogg, John. 1884. Plain Facts for Old and Young. Burlington, IA: I. F. Segner. Levenstein, Harvey. 1988. Revolution at the Table. New York: Oxford University Press. Macleod, David I. 1998. The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890–1920. New York: Twayne Publishers. Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Nasaw, David. 1985. Children of the City at Work and at Play. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Shapiro, Laura. 1986. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Woloson, Wendy. Forthcoming. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confections, and the Cultural Use of an American Commodity in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girls’ Culture Girls’ culture encompasses the commercial market of mass-produced commodities—books, dolls, clothing—created by

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adults for young female consumers, as well as girls’ varied responses to those products. Although these cultural forms attempt to instill in girls socially acceptable notions of gender and desirable feminine behavior, girls do not always respond accordingly. Thus girls’ culture also refers to the rebellious culture that girls make themselves through innovation and imagination, as well as by transforming the commodities and contexts of commercialized girls’ culture. The recognition of the role that girls’ culture has played in the shaping of girls’ gendered identity (and women’s lives later on) is a product of recent scholarship. Until recently, girls’ activities, associations, and actions were widely regarded as trivial aspects of their upbringing unworthy of scholarly inquiry, especially when compared to the magnitude of the issues adult women faced. Aside from the pioneering work in the 1970s by Angela McRobbie, who focused on British girls’ cultures, American girls and their cultures remained relatively unexamined until the early 1990s. In part because of the political origins of women’s studies scholarship in secondwave feminism, scholars tended to focus on adults to explain gender relations. A second factor that inhibited serious inquiry on girlhood was the dominant scholarly perspective that popular culture was uniformly repressive. When a more innovative scholarship on youth and children’s culture did emerge, it unfortunately privileged the experiences of boys over girls through the use of such gender-neutral terms as “childhood” and “youth.” But some anthologies, such as Small Worlds, began to include essays that focused on previously unexamined aspects of girls’ lives (West and Petrik 1992). Within a few years, pathbreaking

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This book illustration shows the construction of girls’ culture as one of domesticity. (Library of Congress)

book-length studies were published that examined the gendered meanings encoded in dolls, movies, fiction, magazines, advertisements, and other cultural products that aim to shape girls into women. Informed by the literature on women, youth, and childhood and influenced by cultural studies and gender history, scholars since the 1990s have engaged in a lively debate about girls’ culture. Are its origins in the early twentieth century, the antebellum period (i.e., before the Civil War), or earlier? Another debate concerns the very nature of girls’ culture. Is it repressive or transformative? Lynne Vallone (1995) argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and nonliterary sources aimed to “conquer” the Anglo-American girl; contain her “desire, hunger, anger, ignorance,

and aggression”; and inculcate Christian morality. But other scholars, such as Mary Celeste Kearney (1998), have shown how girls also subvert the conservative aims of adults to socialize them into idealized women. Whether reading books or playing with dolls, girls have expressed their independence from adult expectations by defiantly transforming cultural products into sources of liberation. For example, the girls’ culture that slaves made through “ring games” served as an expression of feelings and a source of comfort. These girls were able to express their resistance to adults who sought to instill traditional roles based on race and sex. Miriam Forman-Brunell and Kimberley Roberts

Girls’ Fiction See also Collecting; Consumer Culture; Domesticity; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’ Magazines; Reading; Zines References and Further Reading Formanek-Brunell, Miriam. 1998. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Inness, Sherrie A. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. New York: New York University Press, intro., chap. 13. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 1998. “‘Don’t Need You’: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Riot Grrrl Perspective.” Pp. 148–188 in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Edited by Jonathan Epstein. Oxford: Blackwell. Leadbetter, Bonnie J. Ross, and Niobe Way, eds. 1996. Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities. New York: New York University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2000. Feminism and Youth Culture. 2d ed. New York: Routledge. Mitchell, Sally. 1995. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. New York: Columbia University Press. Nelson, Claudia, and Lynne Vallone, eds. 1994. The Girls’ Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Vallone, Lynne. 1995. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. West, Elliott, and Paula Petrik, eds. 1992. Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.

Girls’ Fiction Historically, American fiction for girls has reflected adult efforts both to shape and to please its readers. Consequently the fiction of any given period reveals less about what girls were really like than it does about what adults believed or wanted them to be like—itself an enormously im-

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portant clue for the understanding of girls’ lives in the United States. Because most fiction aimed at girls addresses a girl protagonist’s role within her family or peer community, girls’ novels typically share a fascination with the nature of feminine strength, a focus on girls’ conflicting desires for independence and for dependence, and an emphasis on the home as a source of both turmoil and power. Domesticity, indeed, is an overarching theme for the genre, which explores and models— sometimes conservatively, sometimes subversively—girls’ aspirations within or away from the private sphere. American girls’ fiction is considerably more recent than America itself. Colonial children of both sexes read imported books, often religious works such as the Bible; John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678); or James Janeway’s A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671–1672). Homegrown texts were few, and those there were, notably the long-lived New England Primer (ca. 1680), likewise tended to prefer a puritanical, antifiction approach. After the American Revolution, British publications remained popular, although by the 1820s nationalist sentiment increasingly dictated that American children should read American books. But the most successful of the new self-consciously American writers for the young, among them Jacob Abbott and “Peter Parley” (Samuel Goodrich), usually preached to children in general rather than to girls in particular, so that researchers seeking American fiction that specifically targets young females will find the post-1850 period richer than its predecessor. A landmark work in this context is Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World

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(1850), which outsold every earlier American novel and succeeded brilliantly in Britain also. Warner’s saga, variously preoccupied with rural housekeeping, adults’ emotional cruelty toward children, the satisfactions of hymn singing and Bible reading, and the nature and difficulties of good behavior, exemplifies what is often disparagingly termed “sentimental” writing—that is, writing that seeks to elicit tears. In thus manipulating her readers, Warner’s primary goal is clearly to bring her audience of adolescents and adults to an understanding of the Christian life as one of soul searching, self-abnegation, and devotion to duty. But simultaneously, Warner’s wellnigh exclusive focus on the emotions and gradual perfecting of young Ellen Montgomery may allow the reader to confuse soul searching with self-absorption, and the narrative’s contention that housework builds character coexists with an awareness that for bright girls, domestic labor is as stultifying as it is arduous. If Warner holds that duty requires girls to stay where others put them, she nonetheless recognizes that they may long to run away; the remarkably mobile Ellen travels from city to country and from the United States to Scotland, belonging to no fewer than four families over the course of the story. Similarly, Warner harps on the commandment to honor father and mother but exposes at length the sins of Ellen’s insensitive father and two subsequent guardians: her rigid, grasping aunt and her worldly, domineering uncle. If the narrative affects to trace Ellen’s progress in controlling her own nature, stigmatized as faulty and passionate, the reader is nonetheless permitted to conclude that Ellen is innately superior to almost everyone. Thus even

as nineteenth-century adults seeking improving fiction for their offspring could consider The Wide, Wide World uplifting and Christian, many girls ignored its didacticism and focused instead on the gratifying Cinderella story at its heart, in which Ellen gains wealth, status, and the love of the novel’s worthies. The Wide, Wide World set the pattern for much that followed. The passionate heroine struggling to coexist with society’s strictures, the possibility—so dear to the Victorian mind—of wielding a peculiarly feminine power by influencing others for good, and even the conflation of romance and the father-daughter tie (an unpublished conclusion clarifies that Ellen marries the clergyman who has dominated her training) recur in the works of authors from Louisa May Alcott to Martha Finley to Jean Webster. Alcott’s semiautobiographical Little Women (1868–1869), the quintessential American girls’ novel, follows sisters Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March but focuses particularly upon strong-willed Jo, who over the course of four books develops—some would say “deteriorates”—from hobbledehoy into wife, mother, headmistress, and successful author. Less insistently Christian than Warner’s tale, Little Women nonetheless invokes the same religious models (Bunyan and the Bible) and draws on many of the same character types, including the saintly mother wrapped up in her daughters’ well-being, the spirited protagonist who has trouble curbing her temper and tongue, and the domestic paragon who achieves an exemplary death. The ambiguities surrounding the role of women that are latent in The Wide, Wide World are more overt in Little Women, a quality that has fascinated feminist critics in recent decades.

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A scene from the MGM 1949 movie version of Little Women, based on Louisa May Alcott’s’ famous book series. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Most readers consider the teenage Jo Alcott’s most fully realized character, although this prolific writer produced many other popular girls’ novels. As much as Ellen Montgomery, Jo has been an ongoing influence upon American domestic fiction for girls. Although today’s Alcott fans often resonate to Jo’s impatience at constraint, however, latenineteenth-century writers appreciated the moral didacticism that Alcott inherited from her own models. Alcott imitators such as Susan Coolidge (pseudonym for Sarah Chauncey Woolsey) emphasized not only their heroines’ tomboy vitality,

playfulness, and talent with words but also the girls’ taming as they are forced into femininity. In What Katy Did (1872) and its two sequels, for instance, Coolidge’s Katy Carr reaps the moral benefits of a serious injury caused by her own disobedience. Although Katy arises from her invalid’s sofa before the end of the first book, she never loses the hard-won maturity, virtue, and importance to others that invalidism has conferred upon her; she unites Jo’s energy with Beth’s halo. But by the nineteenth century’s end, the “taming” imposed upon Jo’s heirs sometimes meant only that they would

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outgrow their initial immaturity. The increasing romanticization of late Victorian childhood infected even such strongly religious works as Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore (1868), close kin to The Wide, Wide World. As Anne Scott MacLeod observes, the key difference between the two novels is that whereas Ellen Montgomery must struggle to accept Christ as a living presence, eight-year-old Elsie is always presented as the narrative’s spiritual authority. This view of the child as savior was to become increasingly important from the 1880s through the 1910s, culminating in Eleanor Porter’s best-seller Pollyanna (1913), the tale of an orphan whose determination to find something to rejoice at in the darkest situation reforms the adult community. The argument that adults suffer from a spiritual malaise that only childish innocence can cure is common in girls’ fiction but rare in stories aimed at or written by American males, a discrepancy reflecting the gendered dichotomy between action and affect in Victorian America. The heroes of boys’ books do; the protagonists of domestic novels for girls are. Readers of Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905), and many other narratives learn that certain girls wield a formidable power manifested not through adventure and accomplishment but through their ability to attract love. For such heroines, femininity itself is the ultimate career. The 1920s and 1930s, however, witnessed important changes in female gender roles as women increasingly began working outside the home. Girls’ fiction responded in multiple ways. Most obvious, perhaps, is the rise of narratives in which girls aspire to glamorous jobs. (One might argue that such novels are the

heirs of the many turn-of-the-century fictions depicting life at women’s colleges; the earlier stories do not usually reveal whether the newly minted graduates embark upon professions, but they put a premium upon the activity and energy needed for financial independence.) Typical is Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy family series, beginning with The Saturdays (1941), in which sisters Mona and Randy dream of becoming, respectively, an actress and a ballerina-cum-painter. That such ambitions are both legitimate and realistic is made clear in The Four-Story Mistake (1942), when fourteen-year-old Mona stars in a radio soap opera. Much mass-market series fiction also relies upon the romance of the public sphere. Girl detectives such as Nancy Drew (who debuted in 1930), Hollywood phenomena such as screenwriter/director/actress/producer Ruth Fielding (1913–1934), and nurses such as Sue Barton (1936–1952) all helped to construct an image of the young American woman as energetic, competent, independent, and successful, dominating her environment and often her menfolk. But the years after World War I also saw a boom in historical fiction for girls and especially in novels emphasizing the strength demanded of American women through the centuries. Caroline Dale Snedeker, known for her tales of ancient Greece and Rome, produced Downright Dencey (1927), set in Nantucket in the 1810s. Snedeker dwells on the demands and rewards of Quaker austerity for women; imaginative and undisciplined Dencey civilizes a waif into a desirable fiancé and matures into a young woman worthy of respect by heeding her New England conscience. Rachel Field’s Calico Bush (1931) traces the travails of a French “bound-out girl”

Girls’ Fiction whose life in sparsely settled Maine in the eighteenth century consists of much more privation than pleasure. Another frontier child is the eleven-year-old protagonist of Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn (1935), daughter of an English aristocrat who has moved his family to Civil War–era Wisconsin. As the family tomboy, Caddie responds warmly to farm life and to interactions with Indians, but the narrative explains that more conventionally feminine women, Caddie’s mother included, find such an existence agonizingly hard. Still, many of these tales emphasize the ongoing theme that rigor has its own attractions. Take Ruth Sawyer’s novels about Lucinda Wyman, Roller Skates (1936) and The Year of Jubilo (1940), both set in the 1890s. Born into a wealthy Manhattan family, Lucinda has spent her early childhood hedged about by rules. When her mother’s health requires her parents to make an extended stay in Italy, she is overjoyed to be separated from her family and thus enabled to lead a less structured existence. This break in routine is vacation rather than privation, but the sequel starts on a darker note by killing off Lucinda’s father and impoverishing the family, who must leave their New York mansion for their erstwhile summer cottage in Maine. Facing the harshness of winter, her older brothers’ contempt for her as girl and child, and the depression and anxieties of all the Wymans at their changed circumstances, Lucinda finds herself happy to meet the challenges of her new life. In part, of course, the attractiveness of this life is that she may shed some of the constraints of aristocratic femininity and lead a more “natural” existence, an ideal popular in girls’ fiction since the days of Alcott and Warner.

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The volumes that today’s readers most readily associate with frontier values and reverence for the hardscrabble American past are surely Laura Ingalls Wilder’s nine Little House books (1932–1971), which describe her own early life and that of her husband-to-be in the 1870s and 1880s. As the Ingalls family moves from Wisconsin to Oklahoma to Minnesota to the Dakotas, they must cope with wild animals, plagues of locusts, illness, solitude, and blizzards. There are social challenges, too; as a teenager, Laura has to leave home to work as a teacher in order to assist with her blind sister’s college tuition. Always restless and ungovernable, Laura refuses to include the word obey in her wedding vows, a moment that underscores her kinship to countless other girl protagonists in a body of literature that has historically placed a high value on feistiness. Critics have complained that girls’ fiction of the era immediately following World War II lacks the emphasis on grit present in many earlier tales and that the 1950s renaissance of domesticity (as many women left the workplace) fed adolescent novels that preached that fulfillment lay only in romance. But if the “junior novel”—precursor of today’s “young adult novel”—typically features heroines who lack Jo March’s independence of mind, it may nonetheless suggest that standing out from the herd is no bad thing. Thus, for example, in Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny (1959), Jean learns to reject handsome, popular, and selfish Johnny for a less conventionally attractive rival. Although the novel posits that teenage girls should find their happy endings in relationships with boys, it teaches also that girls have the right or the responsibility to question the crowd’s definition of satisfying romance and to seek a more egalitarian partnership. Sim-

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ilarly, Madeleine L’Engle’s early heroines Philippa Hunter (And Both Were Young, 1949), Camilla Dickinson (Camilla, 1951), and Vicky Austin (introduced in Meet the Austins, 1960) consider themselves losers until they find validation in boys’ eyes, but L’Engle makes clear that the boys in question are no Prince Charmings—they have serious problems of their own. Girls and boys must help each other mature, as neither can expect to be in control. If the didactic urges in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction often concern religion, those of the later twentieth century often concern sexuality. The anxieties about dating addressed in “junior novels” by Cleary, Betty Cavanna, Mary Stolz, and other popular authors gave way to a sometimes ostentatious frankness by the mid-1960s, as such authors as Judy Blume (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, 1970) and Louise Fitzhugh (The Long Secret, 1965) broached hitherto taboo subjects such as menstruation. Teen pregnancy became a staple of the young adult “problem novel,” as in Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (1967). And increasingly, girls’ fiction began to focus on sexuality outside the mainstream. L’Engle’s Polly O’Keefe (A House Like a Lotus, 1984), an avowed but untried heterosexual, develops a mentor-disciple bond with a middle-aged lesbian; Nancy Garden’s Liza Winthrop (Annie on My Mind, 1982), a high school senior, discovers her own lesbianism and has a passionate and loving sexual relationship with a girl her own age; and the characters in Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat (1989) and its sequels inhabit a world of polymorphous perversity in which sexuality is to be accepted in any of its manifestations. At least superficially, the trend has been to cele-

brate sexual freedom, tolerance, and the “progressive,” although some texts (A House Like a Lotus is one) seem conflicted on this issue. Race and ethnicity are another locus for late-twentieth-century didacticism, as the American “melting pot” ideal increasingly gave way to one of heterogeneous multiculturalism. Minority protagonists, once rare to the point of nonexistence, became commonplace after the 1960s civil rights movement, whose spirit continued to inform multicultural texts of the 1990s. The dominant message is that of taking pride in one’s heritage, but readers are also asked to be aware of prejudice and injustice, past and present. Historical novels on these themes are common, and some settings are especially prevalent: the slaveholding era and the racially tense 1920s, the latenineteenth-century Jewish diaspora and the Holocaust. Fantasies and domestic tales address ethnicity as well, and sometimes realism and fantasy combine in time-travel books in which contemporary American girls inclined to reject their heritage are forced to experience what they have despised, as happens in Belinda Hurmence’s A Girl Called Boy (1982) and Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988). With the interesting exception of the novel on Native American themes, which not infrequently subordinates family to larger cultural concerns and suggests that family weakness is offset by individual and/or ethnic power, multicultural fiction is prone to validate the family as the great source of strength and hope, although other agendas are also discernible—consider the American Girls Collection (1986– ), in which books coexist with elaborate merchandise, so that multiculturalism and

Girls’ Fiction an interest in American history are inextricable from consumerism. Late-twentieth-century pro-domestic novels diverged from the overall direction of American girls’ fiction, which even in its infancy never unilaterally assumed the family’s benevolence. The Wide, Wide World, among many other nineteenthcentury examples, directly criticizes fathers in multiple ways. And if Victorian mothers were usually beyond reproach, mid-twentieth-century texts such as Caddie Woodlawn sometimes exalted the father at the mother’s expense. Girl readers have long been encouraged to observe fictional parents’ flaws: fathers, mothers, or both are skewered for being domineering, detached, irresponsible, weak, selfish, insensitive, or simply unpleasant. Novels thus often exalt the peer group or urge the discovery of more satisfactory surrogate parents, although some narrators observe that the protagonists’ culpable turbulence prevents them from bonding with biological families that may be entirely acceptable. This phenomenon is apparent in many “social problem” novels of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, John Neufeld’s Lisa, Bright and Dark (1968), in which the schizophrenic title character turns to her friends for amateur group therapy because her parents, worshipping normalcy and respectability, ignore her cries for help; or Lee Kingman’s The Peter Pan Bag (1970), in which Wendy flees her pleasant family in order to “find herself” in Boston hippiedom under the watchful eye of a friend’s older brother. Similar attitudes toward family crop up in domestic novels—for example, Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), in which wealth has barred Harriet’s parents from participating in her life—and in historical fiction by authors such as Elizabeth George Speare and Sally

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Watson, whose strong-minded heroines usually escape home early in the narrative to combat domestic stability by joining pirate crews or helping to start the American Revolution. More recently, Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust (1997), set in Oklahoma in 1934–1935, continues the tradition of dissecting parental flaws, even as it also focuses on the need to forgive the serious errors of one’s parents and oneself. That Hesse’s sequence of free-verse poems won the Newbery Medal and the Scott O’Dell Award suggests the willingness of the children’s literature establishment to reward girls’ books that question domesticity. As this overview has suggested, such willingness is by no means new. Claudia Nelson See also Advice Books; American Girls Collection; Chicana Girls; Comic Books; Domesticity; Fairy Tales; Girls’ Magazines; Literacy; Nancy Drew Mysteries; Reading; Zines References and Further Reading Avery, Gillian. 1994. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books 1621–1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. 1995. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. 1999. Little Women: A Family Romance. New York: Twayne Publishers. MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1994. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Nelson, Claudia, and Lynne Vallone, eds. 1994. The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Tompkins, Jane. 1987. “Afterword.” Pp. 584–608 in The Wide, Wide World. By Susan Warner. New York: Feminist Press.

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Girls’ Magazines In the late 1990s, girls could choose from a multitude of girls’ magazines that covered the latest teen fashions, beauty, music, movie stars, new ways to meet boys or friends in the never-ending quest for “popularity,” and advice on parents, school trouble, or dating dilemmas. By the turn of the twenty-first century, girls were a well-established magazine audience, but this was not always the case. In the early twentieth century, most girls read family, women’s, and romance magazines and, later, movie magazines. By the late 1920s, however, some women’s magazines began to recognize their younger readers and offer monthly columns like “Sub-Deb” and “Teens of Our Times.” These columns addressed teenage girls directly and spread information about teen social life but remained only a section in adult magazines. By the early 1940s, magazines had been developed specifically for girls and addressed young fashions, dating, friends, school, movies, and music. Their success paved the way for an abundance of girls’ magazines and led to the newest forms of teen-centered publications, grrrl zines, and Internet sites. The first publications to speak to girls directly were American Girl and Everygirls’ Magazine, the official magazines of the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls, respectively. These magazines catered specifically to organization members, though, and few outsiders subscribed. In the late 1920s, editors at the Ladies’ Home Journal discovered that girls were sharing their mothers’ copies or even buying their own. They established a column entitled “The Sub-Deb, a Page for Girls,” and led the way for mass-circulation magazines to address their younger readers. The first “Sub-Deb”

editor wrote as though her readers were wealthy debutantes-to-be with an endless supply of friends and funds. The column advised girls on how to plan and host elaborate parties, grow out their bobbed hair, dress elegantly, and develop homemaking skills such as decorating, cooking, and knitting. When Elizabeth Woodward took over the column in 1931, the tone shifted to that of a big sister. Woodward added an emphasis on boys and relationships. She strongly advised girls to attract dates, rather than pursue them, by cultivating looks, listening skills, and a fun personality. The cardinal rule was to play games well, but not too well. These traits were also recommended for making friends and gaining approval from teachers. Throughout the 1930s, advice on relationships expanded to include debates on going steady, petting, responsibility, and avoiding the dangers of peer pressure— issues that appealed to an audience beyond the glamorous subdebutantes. As the column grew in popularity, articles and advertisements for girls appeared more frequently in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Short stories praised virtuous teenage heroines who did not neck, drink, or smoke yet always won the boy. Other characters had aspirations beyond marriage until they met the right man, that is. The advice, party ideas, and fashions were still designed to cultivate responsible, glamorous young adults. One article advised girls to pause and revel in the swish of their party dresses before rushing off to dates or dances. But by February 1938, the subdebutante column “Shaggin’ on Down” marked a new attempt to follow as well as lead by imitating teen slang to teach the latest dance steps. In October 1942, Ladies’ Home

Girls’ Magazines Journal published The Scoop, a newspaper with features, fiction, fashions, and club news produced just for girls. The word about teens was starting to spread. Parents’ Magazine launched a “Teen-Age Problems” column in the mid-1930s, but it served primarily as a forum for parents. In February 1941, however, Parents’ Magazine introduced “Tricks for Teens,” which featured high school fashion ideas. The column, which originated in a department store contest on teen fashions, invited teenage girls and their mothers to send descriptions and pictures of high school fads. The initial column was written to mothers and sympathized with their struggles to understand high school “fad-shions.” Due to the enthusiastic response from teenage girls, however, the column soon spoke to girls directly: “TEEN-AGE highschoolers, this is your feature. Urge mother to read it, too” (Parents’ Magazine, April 1941, 108). And Parents’ Magazine, a magazine intended for adults, began to carry articles and advertising targeted specifically at teenage girls. Parents sponsored fashion design contests for teenage girls, created a “Hi-School Board Fashion” label to promote teen fashions, and devoted several pages in each issue to teen fashion spreads. This interest led the Parents’ Institute to create Calling All Girls in July 1941, the first general magazine designed exclusively for “girls and subdebs.” Primarily filled with comics, Calling All Girls also contained short stories and advice on fashion, manners, and beauty. Advertisements for the new magazine assured mothers that its content would be entertaining and wholesome. In March 1944, “Tricks for Teens” was moved to Calling All Girls, and Parents’

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again focused on its original adult audience. Calling All Girls, almost titled Susan, a Magazine for Girls, started as a quarterly magazine but quickly became a monthly due to high circulation and reader response. Calling All Girls was not destined for long-term success, however, because the publishers never quite understood the audience or advertising base. Circulation initially reached 250,000 and by 1945 had grown to a respectable 500,000. The emphasis on comics kept the average age of the reader around 13, and the magazine never gained readership among the more fashion-conscious high school girls. In addition, the format of the magazine did not attract the highly profitable fashion advertisers, and the publishers did not actively seek more appropriate advertising. Seventeen magazine debuted in September 1944 and had much greater teen appeal. The first issue sold out quickly— 400,000 copies in six days. Circulation exceeded 1 million copies by February 1947 and 2.5 million by July 1949. Seventeen declared that it reached more than half of the 6 million teenage girls in the United States through copies shared with friends and family. Readers were mostly from white middle-class and upper-middle-class families, but Seventeen reached across broader age and class boundaries than Calling All Girls and previous girls’ columns. Seventeen was created from the similar recipe of young fashions, beauty, movies, music, dating, boys, friendships, parents, careers, and education. But girls liked it because it tried to make them better teenagers rather than good little girls or elegant adults. Helen Valentine, Seventeen’s first editor in chief, envisioned a

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magazine that would treat teenage girls seriously and respect their emotional and intellectual needs in addition to helping them choose their first lipstick. To achieve this goal, the magazine included occasional articles on World War II, international issues, and postwar inflation. Seventeen also acquired substantial advertising revenue and worked to translate its editorial message and the buying power of this age group to businesses and the advertising industry. Boys were also active magazine readers. The “Sub-Deb” column in the Ladies’ Home Journal, Seventeen, and other girls’ magazines claimed that boys were reading and writing in for advice on girls. By 1935, the “Sub-Deb” column was occasionally titled “For Men Only,” and Parents’ Magazine received so many unsolicited responses from teenage boys for “Tricks for Teens” that they began including boys’ fads. Most boys, however, were primarily reading picture magazines such as Life; general-interest magazines such as Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post; or science, mechanical, and sports magazines. By the early 1950s, automobile magazines such as Hot Rod had a strong hold on the magazine market for boys. No magazine for boys, however, enjoyed Seventeen’s enormous success with both readers and advertisers. Although Seventeen drew from the experience of its predecessors, it quickly surpassed them. Calling All Girls attempted to mimic Seventeen’s success by dropping its comics and investing additional money in art, writers, and production. Parents’ Institute also tried to redirect its efforts to attract preteens, ages nine to twelve, to a new publication, Polly Pigtails. Despite these efforts and competitors such as the glamour magazine Junior

Bazaar, which covered fashion almost exclusively, Seventeen remained the leader for decades and firmly established the market for girls’ magazines. In the 1950s, an explosion of gossip magazines for teenagers, such as Modern Teen, Teen Time, Teen Parade, and Hep Cats, sought a working-class market with advice columns and fan clubs. Seventeen, while retaining its hold on the middleclass market, changed in the 1950s as well. The original staff was replaced, and the magazine entered a period of transition by forging closer ties with advertisers. The attention to responsible citizenship was almost entirely overshadowed by an emphasis on fashion, dating, and marriage. In the 1960s and 1970s, Seventeen and other girls’ magazines responded to the feminist movement with a shift toward personal growth and independence. Seventeen’s thirtieth anniversary edition in September 1974 heralded the new opportunities available to teenage girls since the 1940s and claimed that workplace discrimination based on sex no longer existed. Girls could be anything they wanted to be and could successfully combine careers with family life. The conservative 1980s, however, marked a return to more domestic and traditionally feminine content and a decline in articles encouraging self-development. Sassy entered the market in the 1980s and created the first serious competition for Seventeen. Sassy was more outrageous and tried harder to imitate teen slang. Magazines like Young Miss also began to place more emphasis on boys and sex. Although Seventeen responded in kind, it tried to retain a balance of fashion, beauty, relationships, school, and entertainment, as well as boys.

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A teenager sitting on the couch reading magazines. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos, ca. 1955)

Girls’ magazines emerged as teenagers began to rely more heavily on their peers and on the commercial popular culture for guidance and entertainment. This balance shifted again in the late 1990s, as teenagers’ patience with adult-driven information, guidance, and taste waned. The proliferation of noncommercial girls’ magazines and Internet sites has ensured that a multitude of voices speak to and for teenage girls. These zines and virtual magazines have created a new and very different kind of competition. Girls’ zines started in the mid-1980s as noncommercial, low-budget magazines produced by teenage girls themselves to

challenge mainstream society and media. Riot Grrrl, for example, brings together young women in the punk music scene, provides an alternative to mass media and consumer culture images of girls, and offers readers a forum for self-expression. By the late 1990s, teenage girls were one of the fastest-growing populations of Internet users. Building on the explosion of grrrl music and styles, websites such as “echick,” “chickclick,” “teenmag,” and “teengrrrl” offer articles, fashion advice, and a forum for discussions on topics relevant to girls today. These sites are created and run by girls themselves and devote much of their space to readers’ input.

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They provide a safe community where girls can share their experiences and discuss tough issues. Kelly Schrum See also Advice Books; Clothing; Comic Books; Girls’ Fiction; Latina Girls; Literacy; Reading; Zines References and Further Reading Budgeon, Shelley, and Dawn H. Currie. 1995. “From Feminism to Postfeminism: Women’s Liberation in Fashion Magazines.” Women’s Studies International Forum 18, no. 2: 173–186. Duncombe, Stephen. 1998. “Let’s All Be Alienated Together: Zines and the Making of Underground Community.” Pp. 427–451 in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. Edited by Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard. New York: New York University Press. Lyness, Paul I. 1951. “Patterns in the Mass Communications Tastes of the Young Audience.” The Journal of Educational Psychology 42, no. 8 (December): 449–467. Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Schrum, Kelly. 1998. “‘Teena Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944–1950.” Pp. 134–163 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press. “Tricks for Teens: Fashion Fads That Hit High School Fancies.” 1941. Parents’ Magazine (April): 108.

Girls’ Rooms Since the creation of separate sleeping quarters, girls’ rooms (also referred to as bedrooms or sleeping rooms) have been decorated with an eye toward reinforcing prevailing gender ideals by adults (chiefly mothers) and redecorated by girls to express their individuality, often in adolescence.

In seventeenth-century America, girls did not have rooms of their own; no one did. Colonial families were large (with eight to ten children), and houses were not. As a demonstration of rank among family members, parents slept on the first floor in the most valued social zones of colonial houses. Infants slept in cradles in a central room that accommodated many productive activities, but as they got older, children shared trundle beds or straw pallets. Along with siblings and servants, children slept in upstairs attics and outbuildings of houses with undifferentiated space that afforded little privacy or comfort. Nor were these sleeping arrangements ever permanent; children were frequently moved from one bed to another depending on changing circumstances. In her 1992 study of colonial children, historian Karin Calvert found only one reference to a children’s room in early America. A prosperous colonel was at the forefront of cultural change in eighteenthcentury Maryland when he designated the closet between the hall and the parlor as the “children’s room.” Increased affluence, the influence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment notions about childrearing on Victorian family life, the increasing size of houses, and room specialization were factors that led to the emergence of upstairs “chambers” designated for sleeping in more prosperous middle-class households. Cradles were now placed in parents’ rooms or in a nursery (a room mother and infant shared following childbirth). The choice of a nursery, located farthest from the locus of family activity, was determined by its location (often at the back of the house or third floor) and for its utility. Because the sparsely furnished nursery was not as yet a site on display for admiring guests, parents invested little in its

Girls’ Rooms decoration. But believing that children were better off if supervised by an adult meant that most siblings also slept with servants, as they had in the seventeenth century. The four daughters of a wealthy Virginian, for example, shared a sleeping chamber with female domestic servants. In Philadelphia, Harriet Manigault slept in her mother’s room for the first eighteen years of her life, whereas her two younger sisters shared a room on the third floor with a maid (Calvert 1992). Infant daughters and sons—along with older children—often slept in the beds or bedrooms of their parents or grandparents well into the middle of the nineteenth century. But antebellum doctors’ and health reformers’ concerns about the safety of small children smothered or smashed by slumbering parents contributed to the overall trend toward single bedsteads and separate rooms. The healthy development of girls could only occur without such injurious agents as grandmothers, siblings, dogs, and cats living in their bedrooms. Health concerns, increased prosperity, a domestic ideology, and decreasing family size (fewer siblings) were all factors that contributed to the diversification of household interiors over the course of the nineteenth century. New notions about the importance of education and cultivation also contributed to providing children with a room separate from adults. Though by the 1830s children’s rooms separated children from adults, sisters and brothers shared “nurseries” that were gender-neutral. It was not until preadolescence that sisters were likely to have a room of their own, but only in families where circumstances permitted. Middle-class parents expected daughters to write and often rewrite their diary entries because of the importance placed on self-cultivation and

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self-control. But behind the closed doors of their bedrooms—and beyond the watch of others—girls could indulge their imaginations. In the protected space of the bedroom, girls could chart “a middle way between the fiery rebel and the good daughter of advice books and fiction” (Hunter 1992, 59). In fact, in order to preserve girls’ privacy, domestic advisers devised a code of etiquette, advising: “If you make a point of never going, uninvited, into the sleeping-rooms of your young companions, you can keep your own sacred from intruders” (Farrar 1937, 276). In later years, experts would recommend including a cozy seat for socializing, inviting confidences, or for just sitting and reading a book. But such advice was largely irrelevant to working-class and immigrant daughters who lived in cramped tenement apartments. For them, privacy could only be found on crowded, busy city streets. Although girls in the nineteenth-century United States slept in their own rooms, it was not until shortly after the turn of the twentieth century that articles about girls’ rooms began to appear regularly in popular magazines. It is no coincidence that Peter Pan takes place during Wendy’s last night in the nursery she shares with her younger siblings. Although it was considered acceptable for younger sisters to share a room, with the “discovery” of adolescence and its turbulence at the end of the nineteenth century, adults began to take more seriously the needs of adolescent girls. They would “need” their own room when they “reached that longed-for period in life when her needs are worthy of consideration, when a quiet, retired spot is deemed a necessity for [her] study and work . . . Her sense of individual possession is coupled with a delightful sense of importance and newfound dignity,

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which renders her association with ‘the children’ unworthy to her seriousness” (quoted in Cromley 1992, 126). To Progressive-era parents (and most since), girls’ rooms were designed to reflect and reinforce their daughters’ feminine identity. For example, the room with that “girlish charm” included a dressing table, “that important feature of feminine existence,” which was best when draped with a flounce of muslin (Shrimpton 1912). Other items included a tea table, sewing screen, sewing table, and writing desk. In keeping with prevailing notions of femininity, experts recommended pink or blue chambray wallpaper with cutout borders. Girls’ rooms were to reflect such feminine virtues as beauty, good taste, and sincerity. The rose, considered the “favorite” flower of girls, could be embroidered, painted, or appliquéd onto curtains, bedspreads, and walls. Fresh air and sunlight were important considerations to Progressive-era adults worried about the dangers of cities. Bare floors and no upholstery were essential in the germ-free rooms of young, delicate girls. At the turn of the twentieth century, contemporaries asserted that girls’ socialization as future homemakers made them experts at decorating their rooms: “Since earliest childhood she has manifested the homemaking spirit, expressing her ideas in her doll houses, and fitting up corners of the nursery to realize her ideas of interior decoration. Indeed, she is by right of heritage the prospective home-maker” (Tachau 1915, 10). The value placed on homemaking coincided with other turn-of-the-century developments. The influence of Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories and the “discovery” of adolescence by the first

American child psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, both contributed to the wider acceptance of a separate domain for developing daughters: “The most exacting household tasks are invested with new dignity when they become part of the daily routine of keeping her own apartment neat; and perhaps nothing can have so fine a psychological effect as this feeling of responsibility for her own possessions” (Tachau 1915, 10). Feminism also contributed to the reallocation of household space. Virginia Woolf would soon explain the importance of having “a room of one’s own.” But in the twentieth century, having one’s own room was often determined by larger economic forces that affected both family size and household space. The prosperity of the 1920s was followed by two decades of austerity. Having separate rooms for all family members was a lesser priority among families forced to tighten their belts during the Great Depression. Unemployment compelled numerous families to move to living quarters that were both less expensive and less expansive. For some families, there were only one-room shanties in makeshift Hoovervilles. Thousands of teenage girls who slept on park benches in New York City abandoned pretenses of family life altogether. Despite increased opportunities for employment during the World War II, the scarcity of housing forced several generations of families to crowd into small apartments. A room of one’s own was a luxury few could afford. A shortage of space, especially in urban apartments or in big families, often meant that children, usually of the same sex, shared bedrooms. Twin beds and matching furniture divided rooms and, occasionally, roommates.

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A teenager gets dressed in her bedroom. (Shirley Zeiberg, 1970s)

Girls in the postwar United States were far more likely to have their own room or share one with a sister. Child-centered suburban houses were designed to accommodate the baby boom generation. Since the 1950s, mothers have decorated their daughters’ bedrooms following the suggestions of interior decorators, furniture makers, and toy companies. With bold primary colors designated for sons, pink or lavender rooms have come to be associated with femininity, passivity, innocence, fantasy, daintiness, and love. Inevitably, girls come to feel that they have “outgrown” their rooms: the decor

no longer matches who they think they have become. Girls also feel the need to separate themselves from their parents, whose hopes and expectations are encoded in their daughters’ bedrooms. Bedrooms can become a contested terrain as girls assert their individuality and autonomy and even punctuate their anger with a slammed door! “Keep Out” signs designate claims to privacy and autonomy. In the highly personal arena of the bedroom, developmental issues are expressed in visual ways and material terms. Expressing personality and identity—by giving a soul to things in their rooms—

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provides girls with opportunities to experiment and adjust without public scrutiny. Walls become screens upon which girls project their fantasies with pictures of pets and posters of people. But the bedroom is not only a representation of the mind; it can also be an extension of the body. Girls decorate their rooms as they adorn their bodies. Contemporary advice books even encourage girls to think this way. Using the language of fashion design, they recommend that girls give their rooms “makeovers” and use “accessories” (e.g., pillows, lamps, curtains) in order to “choose a look that fits you” (Roehm 1997, 41). Perhaps girls invest more time in decorating their rooms because they spend more of their waking time in them than in centuries past. Once designed for sleeping only, bedrooms containing computers, telephones, televisions, and other technology provide girls with a wide range of new opportunities to transport themselves beyond their bedrooms. Although in Sound Effects Simon Frith argued that “girl culture . . . starts and finishes in the bedroom,” he neglected to consider the other possibilities that also take place there (cited in Kearney 1998, 285).

Cutler, Martha. 1906. “Girls’ Rooms.” Harper’s Bazarre 40 (October): 935–940. Farrar, Eliza Ware. 1837. The Young Lady’s Friend. Boston: American Stationers’ Co. Hunter, Jane. 1992. “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late Victorian America.” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March): 51–81. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 1998. “Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture.” Pp. 285–310 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Kellogg, Alice M. 1910. “Decorations and Furnishings for the Home, IX— Furnishing a Young Girl’s Room.” American Homes and Gardens 7 (November): 420–423. McMurry, Sally. 1987. Farmhouses and Families. New York: Oxford University Press, 178–185. Perrett, Antoinette R. 1910. “Girls’ Rooms.” St. Nicholas 37 (May): 595–596. Roehm, Michelle, comp. 1997. Girls Know Best: Advice for Girls from Girls on Just about Everything. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing. Shrimpton, Louise. 1912. “Furnishing the Girl’s Own Room.” Woman’s Home Companion (May). Tachau, Nina. 1915. “The Girl’s Room.” House Beautiful 38 (June): 10–12.

Miriam Forman-Brunell

Graffiti See also Consumer Culture; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture References and Further Reading Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Cromley, Elizabeth Collins. 1992. “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms, 1890–1930.” Pp. 120–144 in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services. Edited by Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

The word graffiti is derived from the Italian word graffiare, meaning “to scratch,” and was probably first used to refer to the writings and drawings (“little scratches”) found on ruins. In the contemporary United States, graffiti refers to unauthorized or illegal writings, drawings, and art in public spaces and on highly visible private property. Often done in aerosol paint, graffiti is not to be confused with art in that medium that is painted legally and with permission.

Graffiti Humans have written and drawn on walls since at least the Paleolithic period of human history, but these markings are usually thought to have been sacred or in some way unique and collectively sanctioned. Among the oldest graffiti are those found in Turkey dating from about 1000 B.C.E., but graffiti have also been found on ancient architecture around the globe, including the ruins of the Mayans, Greeks, and Romans and the Great Wall of China. Since the eighteenth century, all expressive and creative works, including graffiti, have been understood as at least partly reflecting the culture and society in which they were created. Graffiti in its contemporary meaning is commonplace and requires reasonably widespread literacy, a readily available means to make a recognizable mark without too much effort, and public or accessible private spaces that are unobserved at least part of the time. In the early nineteenth century, larger and increasingly diverse populations moved into tightly packed cities. Mass production made the means of writing more accessible, and mass education spread a shared literacy to more people, particularly young people. Amassed into schools and organized around its schedules, young people developed a shared age-based culture of their own, which included graffiti as one means of public expression. By the mid-nineteenth century, graffiti was a well-established object of scholarly study as well as a popular source for ribald and humorous writings. Young people’s graffiti continued to be collected and photographed throughout the twentieth century, and examples ranged from carvings in tree bark and school desks; to chalk writings on freight trains, walls, and sidewalks; to writings in public toilets; to radical slogans on public walls; to

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the contemporary mural-like works of graffiti artists, many of whom continue to create art as adults. A new kind of graffiti emerged in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s and blossomed in the New York City subways a few years later. This elaborate, artistic, and usually illegal public script has sometimes been called “graffiti art,” but its originators called it “writing.” Writing became the first of several new artistic forms, such as rapping and break dancing, created by urban youth in the 1970s and 1980s and now collectively known as hip-hop. Writing transforms language into a direct social challenge for public space, art, and social recognition and fame. At the same time, its illegal placement in urban space questions many of the established cultural values surrounding private property, organized aesthetics, social status, and identity. Today, most of the writing has been removed from the New York City subways, but this art-without-permission has not simply vanished; instead, the art has adapted itself to public and private walls while simultaneously moving outside its original locations in East Coast U.S. cities. The early 1970s writing culture of New York City was made up primarily of working-class African American, Puerto Rican, and immigrant youths between the ages of twelve and seventeen. But writing, like hip-hop in general, is now an international cultural movement, a controversial art form around the globe that exists between galleries and street corners, between authorized murals and illegal masterpieces. Setting aside issues of law, order, and ownership, writing is a well-organized artistic and literary urban movement with an established social structure and a set of cultural traditions. Writers rarely write their birth names. Instead, they choose a

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name and meticulously design a “tag,” or moniker, with striking visually rhythmic lettering in order to catch the eyes of passersby who see their work. Most writers are part of one or more “crews,” a group involved in writing that can be identified by their initials written near the work of its members. A new writer enters the culture as a “toy” and builds a reputation as her or his skills and quantity of work increase. At the top of this hierarchy are “kings” whose names are well known within the local and sometimes the national and international graffiti scene. Although there is fierce competition between writers for recognition and fame, rules of reciprocity, support, respect, and communication are the central cohesive forces within writing culture. Because of graffiti’s ephemeral nature and illegal status, documenting its history has proven to be very difficult for scholars. Ascertaining the role of girls and women in writing culture is even more elusive. Graffiti have been widely used by females involved in social movements since 1960, including the women’s rights and feminist movements. More recently, latrinalia—graffiti in public toilets—was used by college women to publicize the identities of date-rapists on some U.S. university campuses. However, contemporary studies indicate that females participate less frequently in writing than males, a difference usually explained by the ways in which the two genders are socialized to behave in public space. All available evidence points toward a small but important number of young women who helped to shape the practice of writing at its inception in New York City. David Schmidlapp and Phase 2 (1996) mention Barbara 62, Eva 62, Michelle 62, Barmaid 36, S.Pat 169, Big

Bird 107, Irene 159, Line 149, Tash 2, T. T. Smokin 182, Charmin 65, Stoney II, and Grape 1 as “pioneering female writers.” In the early 1970s the number of female writers appears to have diminished. After the mid-1970s, famous female writers were very rare. Jack Stewart (1989) documents only 122 names by female writers from 1970 to 1978 in New York City, when tens of thousands of individuals wrote on the subways. Since 1994 there have been only a handful of young women who considered themselves dedicated writers and even fewer who were considered to be so by their peers. Very few women have gained widespread reputation for their aerosol art (any work produced in aerosol paint, primarily on canvas for sale in art galleries or as commissioned murals), much less as writers producing illegal works. Only Lady Pink gained national and international recognition as an accomplished aerosol artist and writer during the “art boom” period of the early 1980s in New York. There was what, ten, fifteen thousand graffiti writers in New York City at the time [late 1970s and early 1980s] and I was the female. There had been girls before me in the 1970s and some girls that did things on their own, not because of a boyfriend, like Charmin and Z73 and Eva 62 and Barbara 62. They were girls that wrote for a few years and got their kicks but then life takes over. You have to find a job, you end up getting married, having kids, and you no longer have that time to go recklessly running off and getting arrested for the weekend. You end up growing up. When I started in 1979, 1980 I was the only girl, so I immediately became famous all over town

Graffiti because I was the only girl and my boys that were hanging with me became famous too. Right along side my name they said their names too. Yeah, she hangs out with Seen and Doze. (Lady Pink 1998) There is evidence to suggest why there is a disproportionately smaller number of female writers than male writers. A few of the recognized female writers, like Stoney, were more or less “uninvited” to join some of the early writing crews. Although some widely respected male writers stood up for young women in these groups, most males did not seem to have been willing to do so, which reflects a lack of importance placed on gender diversity. In fact, actions by male writers may have served as a deterrent to potential female writers. Males tend to write the names of their girlfriends as a public sign of the male’s devotion. Although there is certainly no restrictive intent in such gifting, it may indicate that young women are not expected to write themselves. Moreover, women’s art is often crossed out with words such as “girle,” “bitch,” “slut,” or “whore,” whereas male graffiti art is defaced by other writers who cross it out with their own tags. The demeaning “crossings” insinuate that it is the female artist’s gender and sexuality that are lacking the desirable qualities and not necessarily her artistic skills. Still, Stoney felt as if most male writers of her time treated her as an equal in all respects. In most respects, writing is a form of communication dominated by young men. Males tend to be dismissive of female action and young women’s active (rather than reactive) role in writing. As several female writers have stated, the greatest deterrent to their participation

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in this art form has been the damage to their reputation during their early years as a toy traveling in the company of male writers. I personally feel that, even though some of the male writers are my friends, I feel a little bit intimidated. Intimidated by their skill and by them being male. Because I’m female, I feel like I have to work three times as hard to prove myself. With another female to bomb [paint] with, you don’t feel that uneasiness and you can just let go and have fun. Yet, when you try to write, as a female, even though they might not be overtly sayin’ anything negative to you, the female feels this pressure. And that makes it all that much harder. I think that’s why a lot of females don’t write. Because they are intimidated as hell. Actually to tell you the truth, I think some guys are intimidated by female writers. They either totally think it’s cool or they just don’t like it. (Girle 1997) However, there are numerous stories of male and female writers working together successfully. In an interview with Siren magazine, Lady Pink explained that “Very early on, I gathered very strong friends. I was down with a lot of important painting crews. I had a lot of back [support], so guys wouldn’t mess with me.” Girle’s and Lady Pink’s experiences with writing hint that there are other reasons for low rates of female participation. Apprentice relationships are the primary means by which painting skills, the necessary knowledge of the local graffiti scene’s history, and writers’ ethical codes are handed down. When females are not

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welcomed as peers among male writers, the pool of potential teachers is narrowed. This is not to say that males have not acted as teachers for female writers, because they have. In the early age range when most writers are initiated, however, females are more likely to learn from males when they are involved romantically. Some then choose to take on writing as an extension of their relationship; in other cases, young women have ceased writing altogether when their relationship ended. As Lady Pink’s remarks above show, most young women who stuck to writing got started in graffiti with the help of writers not romantically involved with them. Moreover, female writers work within traditional and culturally determined limitations that are set outside the graffiti culture; thus gender standards in the wider society inevitably influence the decisions of young women to become writers. Women’s involvement in writing is affected by some key cultural meanings associated with property relations. Property is central to the Western cultural concept of self. One is defined by what one owns and controls. Within this framework, property is an icon of power. Writing on another’s property is a way in which those without power can symbolically appropriate it. At the same time, women and girls have historically been objectified, purchased, traded, and owned by males. Within this Western cultural framework, males tend to expect a space of their own within the massive urban landscape (even if they must acquire it illegally and symbolically), whereas females have not been raised with this same expectation. Another reason for low female participation involves the conditions under

which graffiti art is produced. Stewart argues that young women involved in this illegal art form were deterred from writing by their boyfriends, who were concerned about their being hurt or arrested. But male prejudice cannot solely account for young women’s apathy toward graffiti. In the 1970s and early 1980s, subway trains became the preferred site for writing. Since the train yards at night were the prime place and time for painting subway cars, some young women who would have otherwise joined in might have considered this “illegal” space too dangerous. However, fears of being in the subway yards at night cannot be explained solely by the possibility of being captured and beaten by authorities or by the more rugged terrain of the yards, since female writers had already demonstrated a fearlessness toward these conditions at par with males. Most likely, concerns about being targets of sexual violence in the yards created enough apprehension to keep novice females away from the practice. Many potential female writers could not count on the kind of support given to Lady Pink, whose peers prevented “guys” from “mess[ing]” with her. Apprehensions of painting in the yards aside, it is undoubtedly more difficult for most young women to escape from their parents’ homes at night. In many family households, daughters are much more likely to be assigned domestic chores, like housecleaning or child care, which obligate them to stay home at night when most writing is done. In contrast, young men are seldom expected to perform these tasks, thus allowing them the space and time to engage in writing. Because of the division of labor among the genders, young women cannot partic-

Graffiti ipate in graffiti or, if they do, transcend the toy stage as easily as males. The struggle for recognition and fame is also harder for young women once established as writers. Their work tends to be compared with other women’s graffiti art rather than writers in general. It’s funny when guys say to you, “you are way better than that person” or “you and this girl are the best,” as if I would only be compared to other girls. But I mean it’s so many things, like boys expect so little of you being a girl writer. Cuz’ if I do two fill-ins [a relatively simple form of writing] somewhere I’ll get like six times more props [fame] than a boy would just because I’m a girl. Because of that I get stuck in these little ruts where I won’t want to do more than that. So that’s kinda hard. Like if you walk in to a room with a bunch of boy writers who don’t know you write they won’t even look at you. But that’s true of everything, not just writing. They won’t acknowledge that you have anything to offer other than a good time. (Eskimo 1999) Statements like this suggest that young women writers are considered as either oddities or novelties in the graffiti culture. This view, along with overtly sexual references of disrespect made by young men in graffiti art, serves to place young women in an inferior class of writers. Inevitably, these actions create greater competition among female writers, encouraging them to battle for the minor status allotted to women. Despite all the hazards and although their numbers are small, women play an integral role in graffiti art. In each city,

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there tends to be at least one girl writing next to hundreds of boys. But it is the scarcity of female writers that creates the conditions for them to become key figures in the development of graffiti as an art form and a social movement. The relatively small number of works by female writers have a greater impact than those by males. They have been essential to the migration and evolution of regional graffiti styles. Since the early 1970s, female writers have acted as bridges between the art styles created in different cities. Because of the lack of local or regional female role models, female writers in smaller U.S. cities look outside their locality for influence, style, technique, and compatible mentors. Of necessity, they made allies with and role models of female writers across the United States and beyond. In doing so, their work has rapidly influenced regional styles, more so than male writers’ work. Male toys look up to and attempt to emulate the style of local male artists, whereas female toys turn to both local writers and female writers in other cities and countries. Thus young women tend to make a greater impact in the evolution of a city’s graffiti art style, specifically because fewer of them are writing. Writing and aerosol art have changed mainstream art, advertisements, urban images, youth culture, and public art. The historical role of young women is integral to the future role of writing as this art form takes off in many different and sporadic directions across the globe. From the art galleries to the streets, writing continues to expand and include girls as both significant aerosol artists and important graffiti writers. Yet the central role of young women in the development of graffiti as an art form has received

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Graffiti in hip-hop spray-painted letters, Seattle, Washington. (Joel W. Rogers/Corbis)

minimal attention and recognition by scholars and fellow writers. In the available records, which include popular culture productions, female participation in any aspect of hip-hop culture, including writing, has remained relatively subordinate and hidden behind secondary or stereotypical images of women as girlfriends of more important male artists. Since the 1970s, the development and subsequent commercialization of hip-hop culture have encouraged a fantasy image of male artists scratching records, rapping, break dancing, and writing in an aggressive display of youthful exuberance and an explicit resistance to the mainstream values of white, middleclass society. In this environment, young women (as girlfriends) serve as a familiar and reassuring social “bridge” between hip-hop subculture and its potential mainstream audiences, but their status

as important artists and writers in their own right is overlooked. Dramatic action and a commanding presence (like illegally writing a large and striking name) within the public arena tend to be culturally associated with males, whereas the feminine self has been more often culturally associated with passivity, quietude, and privacy, particularly at a young age. The exclusion of females in most historical documentation of graffiti art and the persistent representation of women in secondary roles such as bystanders, art objects, or recipients of dedications (girlfriends/mothers) reinforce the perception that the female role in graffiti is secondary and subordinate to that of male writers. All this has made it very difficult to understand a feminine role within writing, other than in relation to men. A handful of women ethnographers are trying to deconstruct the perception that

Graffiti young women’s participation in graffiti is limited to subordinate and secondary roles. Nancy Guevara (1985a) and Rivière have found that young women have developed styles unique to them. Female writers are more likely to include images in their work or to be identified solely by images instead of names and letters, as is the most common style. Women are more likely to use bright mixes of colors, including pastels, and tend to place greater attention on the accepted conformity of letter shapes in the names they write. Although no color scheme is ever exclusively gender-bound, the images, use of colors, and aesthetic patterns most often produced by female writers constitute a feminine voice breaking with the male standard of language, just as that (writing) language has already broken from dominant proscriptions. Young women also have particular ways of identifying themselves in graffiti. Names, assumed to precisely disclose gender identities in most other areas of everyday life, are likewise assumed to reveal the gender of female writers in most instances, as the tag-names of Girle, Lady Pink, and Ms. Maggs illustrate. Names can be further manipulated to construct a gendered tag-name with phonetic and symbolic interpretations such as Ms. Red or Ms. Taken, which read as “misread” or “mistaken.” But names can also function as a way to mask gender identity, since the illegal nature of writing demands that the name be exhibited without the body, the art without the artist. Some young women have chosen to remain androgynous in graffiti writing or have intentionally manipulated graffiti names to make their gender more elusive. Androgynous monikers such as Rukus, Snear, Phant, Ropas, Kaos, and

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Since have allowed young women to hide their gender. This tendency would seem to provide writing with the opportunity for a nongendered art. Since 1990, there has been a resurgence of female participation in writing culture, surpassing the levels of participation that Stewart (1989), Schmidlapp and Phase 2 (1996), and Craig Castleman (1982) documented in the early 1970s. No doubt, more women will be recognized nationally and internationally as accomplished aerosol and graffiti artists, capturing the title of “queens” and thereby challenging the patriarchal language and structure of this writing culture. Melisa Rivière and Joe Austin See also Communication; Girl Gangs; Juvenile Delinquents; Substance Abuse References and Further Reading Austin, Joe. 2001. Taking the Train: Youth, Urban Crisis, and Graffiti. New York: Columbia University Press. Castleman, Craig. 1982. Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. Boston: MIT Press. Chalfant, Henry, and Martha Cooper. 1984. Subway Art. New York: Henry Holt. Eskimo. 1999. Interview with Melisa Rivière, July 13. Girle. 1997. Interview with Melisa Rivière, March 1. Guevara, Nancy. 1985a. “Graffiti Talk: Words, Walls, Women.” Tabloid, no. 9: 20–31. ———. 1985b. “Women Writin’, Rappin’, Breakin’.” Year Left (London) 2, no. 2: 160–175. Lady Pink. 1998. Interview with Melisa Rivière, August 11. Mediati, Ellen. 1997. “Hot Pink: An Interview with Lady Pink.” Siren 2: 21. Miller, Ivor Lynn. 1993. “Aerosol Kingdom: The Indigenous Culture of the New York Subway.” UMI 1349354 Master’s thesis, Yale University.

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Ortner, Sherry. 1996. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Anthropological Theory. Edited by R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing. Reisner, Robert. 1971. Graffiti: Two Thousand Years of Wall Writing. New York: Cowles Book Company. Schmidlapp, David, and Phase 2. 1996. Style: Writing from the Underground,

(R)evolution of Aerosol Linguistics. Viterbo, Italy: Stampa Alternativa/Nuovi Equilibri. Stewart, Jack. 1989. Subway Graffiti: An Aesthetic Study of Graffiti on the Subway System of New York City 1970–1978. Ph.D. diss., New York University, UMI 9004328. Stoney. 1999. Interview with Joe Austin, August 11.

H Hair

Hairstyling has a long and complicated past, from the fancy perfumed wigs of ancient Egypt to the elaborate headpieces of eighteenth-century France to Sinead O’Connor’s bald minimalism. But the story of styling is more than an examination of simple fashion whimsy; it has to do with technological advances, notions of privacy, theories of childhood development, and concepts of personal hygiene. These components not only interact with each other but also define what is feasible. For example, in eighteenth-century France when bathing and shampooing were not common occurrences in women’s daily hygiene routines, hair was fashioned elaborately. As long as women kept their hairdos dry and slept upright in bed or in chairs, their labyrinthine styles could last for weeks. Large doses of perfume and powder were used to disguise the rancid smell of lard-based mousses. However, when daily or even weekly baths and shampooing became the norm in the twentieth century, this process was too time-consuming to be tackled as an everyday occurrence; hair had to become easier to maintain in order to accommodate a daily bathing regimen. Technology is also an important aspect of hairstyling. Invented in 1897, the Marcel waving iron permitted a number of straight-haired young women to sport fashionable ringlets. But the waving iron

Going blonde changed my life. It was the summer of 1966. I was fifteen. I was at the cottage and I felt overweight and really unattractive. To make matters worse, my sister was older than me and extremely popular. So one night I got a bottle of peroxide and bleached my hair. I thought I looked glamorous. The boys did too. —Anonymous interviewee (quoted in McCracken 1995, 116)

Like the millions of American women and girls who frequent beauty salons in search of the perfect cut and color, countless teens understand the potent symbolism of hair. Fashion experts ponder the meaning of clothing styles, underwear, and millinery items but overlook hairstyling despite its obvious importance as a fashion statement. Shape, color, texture, and style all lend themselves to the visual analysis of hair, much as they create a language of design in the world of fashion or fine arts. Hair is transformative, a type of self-invention through which a woman can change her appearance to coincide with varying visions of herself. It is a public statement of how she wishes to be viewed. In this way, analysis of hairstyle and color offers rich insights into the lives of women and girls and the culture in which they live.

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was expensive and took six to twelve hours to work, effectively excluding most girls who could not afford the fee or time to undergo the procedure. It was not until Charles Nestle invented the permanent wave in 1915 that a sizable number of girls and young women could have trendsetting curls. Throughout the twentieth century, advances in technology continued to influence and democratize the hairstyling industry. When the first handheld hair dryers were invented in the 1920s, hairstyling became quicker and easier for a vast number of American women. By the 1950s, Clairol introduced a one-step home hair-coloring kit that revolutionized hair care. For the first time, almost any teen could afford a bottle of “tint” and, in the privacy of her own home, transform herself into a blonde beauty before first-period study hall. Besides personal hygiene and technology, society’s view of public and private functions played another important role in fashioning women’s hair. This phenomenon is exemplified by three American paintings. Anne Pollard (1721) was 100 years old at the time of her portrait. Despite her age, she is portrayed with her hair appropriately covered. In colonial times, it was said that the sight of women’s hair would make the angels sin. Social mores dictated that even as a century-old matron and liberated tavern owner, Anne Pollard’s hair had to be wrapped. Accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Freake, little baby Mary suffered the same fate in 1671. Viewed not as a child but as a little adult, Mary’s hair is tastefully covered just as that of her mother and centenarian successor. Although these hair coverings were discarded well before the nineteenth century, hair in the

Victorian era continued to be fashioned and patterned in the privacy of the home. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg notes, with the “growing focus on appearance . . . girls spent more time in front of mirrors arranging their hair. In many families, mothers, daughters, and sisters spent considerable time brushing each other’s hair” (1997, fig. 10). But because of the traditional notion of the erotic nature of tresses, only the immediate family saw mother or sister with her hair down. Hairstyling emerged from the private sphere when the first public salons were established in the late nineteenth century. John Sloan’s painting Hairdresser’s Window (1905) portrays a youthful woman having her hair fashioned in one of these public salons before the eyes of a lively metropolitan crowd. By the turn of the century, as single women left the home to work in offices and factories, hair became a more public spectacle in the high-pressured and impersonal atmosphere of urban life. Theories of childhood psychology also added to the complexity of hairstyling. As Karin Calvert notes in Children in the House (1992), by the mid-nineteenth century, childhood and adolescence came to be viewed as distinct developmental stages. By the twentieth century, childhood was seen as a distinct phase of life, one fundamentally different from adulthood and requiring special nurturing and protection. As if to visually reflect these various stages of life, little girls, adolescents, and women sport different hairdos. Little girls’ hair is styled in a more unregulated, ungendered, and practical fashion, often hanging freely down the back or tied in pigtails. When girls’ figures begin to change, they are encouraged to don more mature hairstyles. With the

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Girls’ and young women’s hair was often covered when they went out in public in the nineteenth century, as this 1846 portrait by James Baillie shows. (Library of Congress)

onset of adolescence and the transition to adult responsibility and privilege, girls’ hair is arranged in styles that mediate between the simplicity and practicality of children’s styles and the more sophisticated ones of adults. The ponytail—a popular style of the late 1940s and 1950s—is a good example of this phe-

nomenon. Although grown women sometimes wore it in an attempt to look young, the ponytail was popular mostly with teens. The ponytail’s name harkened back to horses, animals considered to be erotic fixations among young girls. In this style, the hair is pulled back to reveal a maturing face. At the same

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time, the hair is playfully coltlike in the back, wiggling and bouncing as a girl walked. Revealing yet sprightly, innocent yet erotic, this look reflected the cultural position of the teenage girl in the postwar United States. Social mores and technological advances played a significant part in hairstyling in the twentieth century but so, too, did the cultural role of women. When girls begin to assume the position of an adult, their hairstyles often reflect the role that mature women will play in society. Predominant trends in styles often parallel significant events in gender relations; they mirror a fluctuation in the social order. For a more nuanced glimpse into the position of young women in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hairstyles offer significant clues. For example, as mistress of her home, an ideal Victorian woman oversaw her children’s upbringing and provided a sanctuary for her weary husband from the cruel demands of the working world. The public sphere was dominated, however, by men. A proper woman remained in the home: her lack of autonomy in civic life were reflected in the heavy corsets, bustles, and long skirts that limited her physical freedom. Most little girls grew their hair long in anticipation of the time when they could pin it up as their mothers and older sisters did. Little girls could look forward to the time when they too would rule the domestic realm as wives and mothers. When they became adults, their hair would be kept long but primly pinned up on their heads. Privacy was of the utmost importance. A Victorian lady would never let her hair down in public. In that respect, her wellcontained hair matched her cloistered life in the home.

This straitlaced style continued well into the twentieth century. The big change in women’s hair occurred in the 1910s and early 1920s, with the introduction of the bob. At the time, this short, over-the-ear cut was seen as a major act of liberation because it seemed to defy the social order of Victorian propriety. Short and breezy, it was worn by teens and flappers and reflected a busier and more liberated lifestyle. The bob was considered outrageous by many and was believed by critics to have been worn by French prostitutes during the early part of the century. Despite its naughty reputation, many young women—including the popular dancer Irene Castle—embraced this trend. It was easy and free, much like the reputation of the flappers themselves. Whether riding in a new convertible with the top down, dancing the black bottom in public dance halls, earning a living as a working “girl” in the city, or voting in national elections after the successful passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women seemed to have more freedom in the 1920s. The short bob cut and the accompanying slimmer silhouette mirrored these liberated times. During the 1930s and early 1940s, hairstyles were notably lacking in innovation, although variations on the bob and curl abounded. Examples included feathercuts, pageboy bobs, and the “over the eye look” popularized by such movie stars as Greta Garbo and Veronica Lake. During the Depression and World War II, attention to hairstyles waned. In these troubled times, people focused more on financial security and winning the war. Fashion houses from France—the inspiration for many of these chic new haircuts—closed during the occupation. In the United States, female defense plant workers were encouraged to keep their

Hair hair short or pulled back in a bandanna to prevent accidents. With a Depression to conquer and a war to win, fancy hairstyles were relegated to the back burner. Although young girls dreamed of looking like their favorite movie star, the times dictated a more discreet look. With the return of prosperity in the 1950s, however, hair reentered the fashion arena. The next dramatic change in hairstyles began with the advent of home hair coloring and the introduction of the bouffant hairdo, an elaborate style in which large quantities of hair were backcombed or teased and frozen into place with aerosol spray. Unlike their counterparts from earlier centuries, 1950s teens bathed and washed their hair regularly. As a result, much sacrifice was required in order to maintain the bouffant. Not only did girls wear curlers to bed, but frequent trips to the hair salon were crucial. The complexity of the bouffant dictated that young women depend on their stylists to sculpt their hair and keep it in place. Much like the earlier hairstylists in eighteenth-century France, a 1950s hairdresser was all-important to customers, for it was his or her vision of a particular style that was imposed on their faces. A girl conformed to the bouffant; the style did not conform to her features. Because the bouffant was frozen in place with hairspray, the aesthetic of this style was one of control. In that respect, it mirrored the inflexible and rule-driven atmosphere of the United States during the Cold War. A strong nuclear family and adherence to stringent gender roles were considered imperative for the United States to beat the godless red menace. As anthropologist Grant McCracken notes, the bouffant was “controlled, it was everything women were supposed to become: meek, unthreatening, compli-

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Annette Funicello in “Beach Party” demonstrates the ideal hairstyle of the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Photofest, 1963)

ant, and disciplined” (McCracken 1995, 36). The bouffant and spray kept older women’s curls in place much like the nylon brassiere and girdle restrained their bodies. Armed with their AAA training bras, white lipstick, and cans of hairspray, young girls were inculcated early into 1950s gender ideology. Mouseketeer Annette Funicello epitomized this look. On an album cover for the soundtrack for her movie Beach Party (1963), Annette stands next to her personalized surfboard, apparently ready to hit the waves when the surf comes up.

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This photograph did not reflect a scene from the film because Annette rarely surfed or even entered the water in her beach movies. Her hair, eye makeup, and figure had to keep their shape under all circumstances, never shifting, smearing, or wiggling despite water, wind, and sand. At the same time that her body was controlled, it was also highly sexualized—cinched at the waist with her breasts artificially uplifted. She was erotically enticing in her snug suits and nylon supports, and she embodied the romantic and passionate promise of a perfect 1950s wife. On the occasion of the release of her movie Back to the Beach (1987), Annette Funicello recalled her original role as Dee Dee in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965). She noted: “Oh my God. When I look at those movies now and see my hair. . . . It never moved. The wind would blow and every hair stayed in place. Even when I’d go into the water, my hair never got wet. We’re not talking real life here” (Sherman 1987, 50). If in her movies she ventured into the water, she emerged looking as if she had not left the shore. As Funicello’s quote testifies, a girl’s place was not in the water but on the beach, looking pretty and preparing lunch. Her fixed appearance signaled to the public that her role on the domestic front was secure. She had found the perfect balance; her controlled hairstyle and artificially uplifted figure suggested that she was enticing and seductive and at the same time morally chaste and untouchable until the day of commitment. She embodied postwar domestic ideology from head to toe. Besides the bouffant hairdo, the 1950s also marked the popularization of home coloring aids. In a May 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, a picture appeared of a

young brunette bending over a bassinet, looking down at her baby and smiling proudly. The text read: “She’s happy, confident—just as a new mother should be— and she looks as wonderful as she feels”; no tired eyes from those 2 A.M. feedings, no weight gain, no postpartum depression. Clairol provided the reader with an intimate closeup of a mother and child. The advertisement asked the viewer, “Does she or doesn’t she?”—then offered a coy hint: “Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.” The “Does she or doesn’t she?” pitch— an advertising slogan associated with the Bristol-Meyers Miss Clairol product line—was one of many hair-coloring campaigns originating in the 1950s. Before the 1950s, using peroxide, dying, or tinting hair not only was tedious and expensive but was considered trashy and inappropriate for well-bred girls. Platinum blondes had an especially bad reputation since they conjured up images of the bleached-blonde sexpot of 1930s films. Described as the “bad girl with the heart of gold,” movie star Jean Harlow, for example, was the “smart slut who cracked gum and one liners” (Time 1935, 26; Haskell 1973, 11). Mae West had a similarly tainted reputation, often portraying prostitutes in motion pictures and reciting off-color jokes. Although Harlow and West were frequently described as plucky, good-humored, and good-natured, they were still wanton women, lovable but tarnished. Photographs of Clairol’s happy mothers and contented children counteracted this badgirl image of the woman who dyed her hair. In the age of domesticity, when the family unit was so important, what could be more sacred than the intimate bond between mother and child? If a mother could change her hair color, why not any

Hair decent young girl? Clairol made coloring “as much a part of a woman’s beauty routine as lipstick and powder” (“No Question” 1963, 8). But more importantly, the company made it a respectable and private affair. A teenage girl could do the deed in the privacy of her own bathroom, and technological developments allowed her to do it in one simple twenty-minute procedure. During the 1960s, a new trend in styling emerged. This milestone in hair care occurred when Vidal Sassoon entered the hairdressing scene. Unlike 1950s stylists such as Ernest Adler and Mr. Antoine who sculpted elaborate bouffants on the platformed heads of their clients, Sassoon believed that hair should follow the natural dictates of the shape of the head. Dispensing with chemicals, rollers, and hairspray, Sassoon was, according to McCracken, a modernist who believed in the adage that “form followed function.” No more would the customer have to endure the rigid rules of the bouffant. With a swish of the head, a Sassoon cut fell neatly in place on the head of his client. In the 1960s, hair could be a unique form of self-expression in which the design followed the dictates of each individual. Young women’s hair symbolized the new social freedoms of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement. It was during this period that unisex salons entered the scene and wigs allowed a girl the freedom to change her hairstyle like a hat. No more was one hairstyle the defining trend of the period. With improved portable hair dryers, home permanents, and styling gels, hair was easier to manipulate. As the rock musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical intimated, anything seemed permissible in the age of Aquarius.

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A young woman with dyed hair in the 1990s. (Skjold Photographs)

From the 1970s to the 1990s, hairstyles continued this liberatory trend. In the postmodern era, no particular cut dominated for any length of time. Various fads came and went. In the 1970s, Farrah Fawcett’s big hair was all the rage. For feminist critics, this fad reflected a step backward in the fight for women’s rights. They claimed that Fawcett’s cut was a return to the 1950s with its emphasis on height, sculpted shapes, and hairspray. But for many teenage girls, Farrah’s big hair symbolized a sense of authority without a loss of sexiness. Fawcett popularized the style while playing in the successful television series Charlie’s Angels, which featured female detectives who

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packed pistols, beat up bad guys, and solved dangerous crimes. It was one of the first programs to feature women engaging in physical feats of daring. For girls growing up in the 1970s, Charlie’s Angels and Farrah Fawcett were their first active female role models; copying Fawcett’s hair or purchasing a Farrah Fawcett doll was a way of pledging allegiance to their favorite star. In the 1980s, as more women entered the ranks of the corporate world, a plethora of “blunt cut” styles reflected women’s new professional positions. As McCracken notes, the blunt cut “was symbolically everything the ‘dress for success’ look was. It had the same standardized severe, disciplined character to it” (McCracken 1995, 169). With its emphasis on a sleek and sharp aesthetic, this efficient style signaled women’s ability to “bring home the bacon.” Although conservative blunt cuts were popular among women, the 1980s also produced the antistyles of bald stars like Sinead O’Connor and Sigourney Weaver and the magenta mohawks of the punk rockers. With Madonna and her postmodern performances that emphasized constructed personae, Americans girls became intrigued and aware of the rhetoric of personal style. Much of this awareness began in the 1960s, but by the 1980s, it seemed even more obvious that choices of clothing and haircuts revealed the ideological bent of the person who wore them. Mohawks and baldness were recognized by many as rebellious statements criticizing the conventional view of women’s beauty. As contradictory styles proliferated in the 1980s, people developed more of an understanding of the position that hair played in personal and public lives. Although there is still no agreement as to

what constitutes the perfect cut, more people appreciate hair as a vehicle for selfexpression and transformation in an increasingly impersonal world. Barbara J. Coleman See also Body Image; Clothing; Consumer Culture; Girls’ Culture; Surfer Girls References and Further Reading Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. “Fine Feathers Make Fine Fans.” 1935. Time (August 19): 26. Frasko, Mary. 1994. Daring Do: A History of Extraordinary Hair. New York: Flammarion. Haskell, Molly. 1973. From Reverence to Rape. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. McCracken, Grant. 1995. Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self. New York: Overlook Press. “No Question Now That Many Do—But with Whose Color?” 1963. Printers’ Ink (August 16): 8. Sherman, Eric. 1987. “Frankie and Annette: Back to the Beach.” Ladies Home Journal (July): 50.

Handbags Bags have a long and rich history in the life of American girls and women. More than purely utilitarian objects, bags have been decorative accessories to clothing as well as expressions of artistic talents. They have also served as markers of the status and occupation of those who carry them. Although men and boys have also carried certain types of bags, in the United States purses and handbags are associated with females and their gender socialization. In games of dress-up and in

Handbags children’s books, purses and handbags are symbols of womanhood. The use of backpacks, the most popular type of bag among students, has recently raised concerns about health and safety. They have been banned at some schools due to concerns over students carrying weapons or drugs to school. At other schools, students are carrying such heavily loaded backpacks that parents and pediatricians worry about shoulder and back strain. Among the solutions to these problems are clear vinyl or mesh see-through backpacks and bags on wheels. The latest styles of bags conform to the shape of the body and distribute weight more comfortably. Some are worn around the waist, hips, arms, or torso and enable the wearer to exercise greater freedom of movement. In the eighteenth century girls and women carried personal essentials in pockets suspended from a waistband under their long, full skirts. The often flat, pear-shaped pocket bags with vertical slit openings were worn singly or in pairs. Slit openings in skirts and underskirts allowed access to the pockets. It is this type of pocket that “Lucy Locket” lost in the famous nursery rhyme. Although not visible to others, pocket bags were often decoratively embroidered by girls and women. The influence of the Enlightenment on clothing styles near the end of the eighteenth century led to softer, more slender silhouettes based on classical styles. As a result, bulky pockets were replaced by drawstring bags called “reticules” that young women suspended from hand or wrist. Needlework skills were considered important accomplishments and condoned activities for girls and women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Portrait of Miss Harriet Leavens by folk artist Amy Phillips. (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, gift of the estate of Harriet Anna Niel, ca. 1815)

Embroidery, knitting, crocheting, tatting, and sewing were regular activities, and the materials and equipment for those endeavors were organized and contained

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in workbaskets and workbags. Girls and women used these baskets and bags in their homes and sometimes carried them along on visits to friends. Bags and purses were among the many items made or embellished by girls and women using their needlework skills. Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular women’s magazine published in the nineteenth century, included a “Juvenile Department” that occasionally featured patterns for purses that children could make for fairs or for gifts. The intricacy of these patterns attests to the high level of skill attributed to the children who would make them. Patterns for making bags and purses appeared also in other magazines and in commercial pattern books, although commercially manufactured bags were available as well. As garment styles and silhouettes changed throughout the nineteenth century, attached pockets were incorporated in or on women’s and girls’ clothing, but bags and purses continued to be carried as well. These bags held scarcely more than a handkerchief, calling cards, and money. The personal items women carried with them in the nineteenth century were fewer than most women would feel comfortable with today. Popular bag styles included narrow knitted tubes called “long purses,” chatelaine bags that hung from belts, and a variety of crocheted and beaded bags that were carried by hand or on the wrist. Advertisements in mailorder catalogs show diminutive versions of some of these bags for children. Throughout the twentieth century, women’s roles in society broadened, and the items that women carried in public proliferated. The variety of sizes, shapes, and materials used in women’s purses and handbags increased. At various times bags have been hung from belts or around

the neck or have been carried in hand, dangled from wrist straps or finger rings, clutched under the arm, hung from the crook of the arm, or slung over one shoulder or both. They have been made of leather, suede, silk, velvet, wool, metal, beading, mesh, plastic, nylon, rubber, and more. They have been closed with drawstrings, flaps, folds, buttons, snaps, zippers, and a variety of frames and clasps. Bags and purses have increasingly been manufactured for and marketed to girls. Often they have been small versions of the bags sold to women. Sometimes they have included a variety of juvenile decorative motifs such as popular cartoon characters. Handbags and purses have become so closely associated with women in the United States that their use may be seen to have gender role associations. Purses and handbags can be used as tools of feminine socialization; one example can be found in the activity of dress-up that is so popular among young children. This type of imaginative play helps children try out different roles and practice social skills. Handbags or purses are often seen in such play as elements contributing to the image of an adult woman. This idea is reinforced by illustrations in some children’s books in which characters play dress-up and purses and handbags are among the objects associated with women. In some other board books and easy readers written for young children, purses and handbags are associated with girls striving to act grownup or like their mothers. Near the end of the twentieth century, girls of all ages could be seen carrying a wide variety of bags. Purses, backpacks, athletic bags, dance bags, book bags, tote bags, and others help girls organize the personal belongings that they find neces-

Handbags sary for daily life and the equipment for particular activities. Each type of bag can be found in an array of sizes, shapes, materials, and colors. They range from toys for young children to sophisticated, functional bags either resembling or identical to bags carried by adult women. Very young children may carry small toys, books, dolls, or other amusements. In their bags older girls store personal hygiene and grooming products, writing materials, books, snack foods, cellular phones, pagers, water bottles, keys, money, identification, and more. In specialty bags they may carry athletic equipment, dance supplies, and clothing for after-school activities. Some girls carry a purse as well as a backpack or book bag to school. Despite their usefulness, bags have become part of certain health and safety issues. Safety experts advise girls and women that the way they carry purses or handbags can make them more or less vulnerable to attack by purse-snatchers. For example, purses dangling from a shoulder, wrist, or hand can easily be grabbed away. Bags with straps slung across the chest are more securely anchored to the body, but if they are grabbed, personal injury to the wearer may result. Personal injury may result as well from attempting to hold on to any bag if it is being stolen. The backpack has become the most popular type of bag among students for carrying books and other school supplies. As such, it has become one of the complex problems facing school administrators, teachers, parents, and students in the effort to achieve and maintain a high level of safety and security in the educational environment. In response to the dangers presented by some students bringing weapons and drugs to school,

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some schools have banned the carrying of backpacks to classes. Some others have attempted to eliminate contraband by requiring students who carry backpacks to use a type of see-through pack made of mesh or transparent vinyl. Conversely, some schools have eliminated lockers for reasons of space and economy. As a result students carry heavy backpacks full of the day’s necessities, which has prompted concern among parents and pediatricians over back and shoulder strain among students of all ages. Some parents have provided wheeled backpacks for their children, and pediatricians advise children to distribute weight throughout the backpack and to carry it by both shoulder straps. The newest styles of bags being marketed to girls and women at the beginning of the twenty-first century are designed variously to be worn around the waist, hips, arms, or torso. Some resemble vests, others holsters. They conform to the shape of the body and empower the wearer with a freedom of movement that is not possible when clutching, dangling, or otherwise holding on to a bag or strap. Marsha Propst Carothers See also Arts and Crafts; Clothing; Consumer Culture References and Further Reading American Academy of Pediatrics. 1998. “Carrying Backpacks a Weighty Issue for Students.” AAP News 14, no. 9: 31. Chaiet, Donna. 1995. Staying Safe while Shopping. New York: Rose Publishing Group. Foster, Vanda. 1982. Bags and Purses. Costume Accessories Series. Edited by Aileen Ribeiro. London: B. T. Batsford. Haertig, Evelyn. 1983. Antique Combs and Purses. Carmel, CA: Gallery Graphics Press. ———. 1990. More Beautiful Purses. Carmel, CA: Gallery Graphics Press.

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Home Economics Education Home economics education, a curriculum historically aimed at girls, focuses on improving the health and strength of girls, their families, and their communities. The scope and emphasis of home economics education have evolved since 1850. Historically, girls and women gained access to education through the home economics movement under the guise of learning to be better homemakers, mothers, and wives. For most of its history, home economics education at the secondary school level has differed from the home economics education offered at the postsecondary level. At the junior high school and high school levels, home economics has focused on the household—cooking, sewing, financial home management, and parenting and relationship skills. At the college level, the curriculum has been more scientifically rigorous, offering classes such as food chemistry and child psychology and also providing female graduates entry into academia when appointments in traditional departments were closed to them. For most of its history, the paradox of home economics education has been its twofold existence: the general population perceived that home economics education taught girls to be better wives and mothers, whereas colleges (notably the land-grant institutions) taught female students to be home economics teachers—in effect providing them with a profession. Reacting to the popular but inaccurate stereotype that home economics “is just cooking and sewing,” home economics education programs at the secondary level more recently have tried to break out of the gendered mold by recruiting boys and expanding offerings to vocational training in subjects such as institutional or com-

mercial food preparation and child care. At the postsecondary level, home economics programs have changed their names to the College of Human Ecology or School of Family and Consumer Resources, for example. The professional organization of home economists, the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), voted to change its name to the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences to provide a more accurate picture of its purpose and rid itself of demeaning stereotypes. In this era of lamenting the increase in teen pregnancy, poor consumer skills, and increased violence, it is surprising that the subject matter taught in home economics classrooms is still devalued and derided. The home economics education movement provided a lasting and irrevocable contribution to our society by providing education for girls and women from 1850 onward and continues to highlight the positions of women and families in American society today. The home economics movement in the United States started in the mid-1800s. Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, is credited as the founder of the home economics movement. Her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy for Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, was considered to be the first home economics text suitable for use in public schools and by American women who needed to manage their homes. Between 1820 and 1865, Beecher wrote frequently on home, children, health, and the body and promoted the idea of teaching women to be better mothers and housekeepers, thus designating the management of a home as a scientific discipline. Beecher discussed qualitative motherhood rather than quantitative motherhood at a time when the United

Home Economics Education States was in the middle of the greatest drop in fertility in its history, from 7.04 children for the average white woman in 1800 to 5.92 in 1850 to 3.56 in 1900 (Woloch 1996). This decrease in family size meant that women could spend more time rearing and nurturing their children, rather than just spending time bearing them. The enduring quality of Beecher’s manuals was the promotion of domesticity—the belief in female power in the home. This ideology put women in charge of the home sphere. Women could assert themselves within the family as much as their husbands attempted to assert themselves outside the home. This ideology advocated the moral authority of women, whose scientific methods of management could help stop the decay of family life. Leaders of the Progressive movement promoted the professionalization of homemakers for the betterment of families and society. Ellen Swallow Richards, an instructor in sanitary chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believed that teaching women to think critically would not just help individual families but also give women the skills to help cure society’s ills. Her passion led to the Lake Placid Home Economics Conferences, held from 1899 to 1907, and ultimately the founding of the American Home Economics Association (AHEA). The conferences that started with eleven people in 1899 had hundreds of attendees by 1907. To promote the importance of the domestic sphere, home economics had become an appropriate and acceptable course of academic study for young women. Land-grant institutions created by the Morill Land-Grant Act of 1862 provided college-level vocational education (as opposed to liberal arts education) to rural Americans. As young men learned

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about farming at these colleges, rural young women took up home economics, learning to assume the roles of efficient farm wives or small-town housekeepers. The first home economics curriculum was offered at Iowa State in 1871. Kansas State began its domestic economy curriculum two years later, and in 1874 Illinois Industrial University followed suit. Teaching practical subjects also influenced curricula at the historically black colleges, although home economics usually began as skills development for newly freed blacks at the precollege level to help them obtain employment. In Louisiana, Southern University’s high school offered domestic science classes to girls starting in 1880. At the college level, Alabama A&M University began offering home economics classes in 1881, and its Department of Domestic Science was established in 1891. But for colleges aimed at both black and white American young women, the curriculum evolved over the years into teacher training, as well as more scientific subjects such as child psychology, household engineering, and chemistry. At the same time these college women were studying home economics as a way to better themselves and society as a whole, home economics curriculum entered secondary schools. Domestic science was introduced into the public schools in Boston in the late 1800s, and Emma Willard, another pioneer in home economics, included domestic instruction at Troy Seminary in New York State. “Home economic courses would train girls for both their roles in the community and at home. Through such education girls would become responsible consumers and citizens, establish and run healthy households, be productive and confident homemakers” (Apple 1997,

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Girls using sewing machines to make “dollar dresses” at Washington Irving High School, New York City, New York. (Library of Congress, 1911)

81). In 1910, the National Education Association (NEA) endorsed home economics as an effective way for girls to ameliorate the problems of an urban industrial society. At the time, many thought that instruction should start at age five or six. However, the majority of girls then, just as they do today, usually had their main experience with a home economics class in junior high school. In the early part of the twentieth century, many girls would drop out of school by the eighth grade, and the contingent of people who wanted to teach girls the proper way to run a house urged that the curriculum be offered in junior high school to make sure as many girls as possible got the training. In addition, historian Jane Bernard Powers provides evidence that

girls who shouldered the expense of time and money to go to high school wanted training for employment, not housekeeping: “For the majority of young women who went to high school, homemaking was something to be learned in junior high school, or learned at home; it was not relevant to high school goals” (Powers 1992, 96). The twofold nature of home economics education continued with the training of college women. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 provided funds for training home economics teachers who would then teach in the primary and secondary schools. They were given this professional training so as to teach their younger sisters not to aspire to be professionals but to be better wives and housekeepers. Thus their students had unusual role

Home Economics Education models: working women who instructed them to assume the role of homemakers. As the twentieth century progressed, the idea that home economics education provided girls with the knowledge necessary to run households became widespread, outweighing the Progressive-era notion that homemakers could be moral saviors and ignoring the fact that many women had no choice but to work. In the 1920s and 1930s classes at the secondary level focused more exclusively on skill development for the individual homemaker. Homemaking was women’s work, as is evidenced by the fact that “in 1938–1939 barely 1 percent of boys enrolled in home economics courses” (Apple 1997, 92). The main funding for home economics education continued to come from legislation interested in supporting rural life. In 1936, the George-Deen Act called for equal appropriations for home economics education and agricultural education, the outcome of which continued to give home economics legitimacy as a course of study. Although it was passed into law, the funds were not appropriated because of the Great Depression. Although the postwar era could be seen as the golden age of the homemaker (having the largest percentage of stay-at-home mothers the United States has ever seen), home economics education was actually threatened. In 1958, the National Defense Education Act, prompted by Sputnik, promoted funding for high school science, math, and foreign languages instead of home economics. Home economics programs at the postsecondary level were going through a crisis as well; just like the high school programs, the curriculum was not seen as academically rigorous enough. According to historian Margaret Rossiter (1997), many prominent programs, including those at Cornell University, Iowa State

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University, and Michigan State University, were downsized. Home economics departments at the University of Chicago, Teacher’s College at Columbia University, and University of California at Berkeley were eliminated outright. The pressure continued to increase in the 1960s as the women’s movement joined in criticizing home economics education. Second-wave feminists, possibly remembering their own experiences sewing aprons and preparing unappetizing food, argued that the coursework fostered restrictive roles for women and girls and saw home economics education at the junior high and high school levels as problematic. (They did not consider that home economics also provided employment for women.) In response to the changing awareness of women’s place in society in the 1960s, the role of home economics education in providing vocational training for employment purposes began to be critically examined. The 1963 Vocational Education Act required that a certain percentage of funds earmarked for home economics education be used for home economics–related occupational training. This is the first time that the public demanded more vocational education from home economics classes to aid students in getting a job in the paid labor force, not just to be better mothers and housewives. Of course, the irony is that training girls and women for a profession was what the college-level home economics departments had been doing since their inception, but they had failed to influence public perceptions that home economics went beyond cooking and sewing. The act did, however, strengthen the position of home economics education at the secondary level. The Vocational Education Act has been renewed and modified over the last three

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Students with teacher in a home economics cooking class, Prairie Farms, Alabama. (Library of Congress, 1939)

decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, in an attempt to “de-gender” home economics, boys became an appropriate audience for home economics education curriculum in the secondary schools; courses were renamed and reengineered to attract more males. The 1970s was also the first decade in which colleges changed their official names from home economics to human ecology or family resources and consumer sciences. The Carl D. Perkins Vocational Act of 1984 continued the tradition of providing money for home economics education. Home economics education has now come full circle. In the 1990s, home economics courses focused on decisionmak-

ing and problem solving, the cornerstone of the home economics discipline posited by Ellen Richards at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1994, the AHEA Delegate Assembly voted to change its name to the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences and, the same year, the American Vocational Association (AVA) Division of Home Economics Education voted to change its name to the Family and Consumer Sciences Education Division of AVA. The underlying cause of both name changes emerged from a 1993 conference titled “Positioning the Profession for the 21st Century,” which was attended by representatives of several home economics professional associa-

Hygiene tions. As one home economics education teacher put it: “If only cooking and sewing were the pressing issues at hand. Instead, we have teen pregnancy, theft, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, violence in the streets and pressure to join gangs” (Weate 1995, 25). But even as the profession works to break free of stereotypical images of home economics, it is nearly impossible to “de-gender” the nature of home economics. Even though many home economics classes today have been renamed “Life Skills” and few college programs named “home economics” remain, the fact that at the beginning of the 1990s an overwhelming 98.5 percent of secondary school home economics teachers were women indicates the continuing gendered nature of the field. But instead of trying to ignore its past, home economics education should celebrate its heritage and the strong force the home economics movement has been in educating and providing career opportunities for American girls. Deborah B. Smith

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with Esther Glover Fahm. Tallahassee: Florida A&M University Foundation. Powers, Jane Bernard. 1992. The “Girl Question” in Education: Vocational Education for Young Women in the Progressive Era. London: Falmer Press. Rossiter, Margaret W. 1997. “The Men Move In: Home Economics in Higher Education, 1950–1970.” Pp. 96–117 in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schultz, Jerelyn. 1990. “Middle Schoolers Dig into Voc Ed If It’s about Real Stuff: Home Economics Programs.” Vocational Education Journal 65 (November–December): 42. Stage, Sarah, and Vincenti, Virginia, eds. 1997. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vincenti, Virginia. 1997. “Chronology of Events and Movements Which Have Defined and Shaped Home Economics.” Pp. 321–330 in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weate, Gwen M. 1995. “Suffer the Children.” Vocational Education Journal 70 (April): 24–25, 45. Woloch, Nancy. 1996. Women and the American Experience: A Concise History. New York: McGraw-Hill.

See also Domesticity; Education of Girls; Mathematics and Science References and Further Reading Apple, Rima D. 1997. “Liberal Education or Vocational Training? Home Economics Education for Girls.” Pp. 79–95 in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Data File. 1992. Vocational Education Journal 67 (September): 37–39. Fahm, Esther Glover. 1990. “Home Economics: Our Roots, Our Present, Our Future.” Pp. 190–252 in Historically Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Development of Agriculture and Home Economics, 1890–1990. By Leedell W. Neyland,

Hygiene Although the meaning of the term has varied widely, hygiene has played an important role in girls’ self-image and social interactions throughout American history. Hygienic beliefs and practices among girls have never been entirely private. Over time, however, American girls have developed a particularly public, commercial connection with hygiene. For all its variation, girls’ hygiene now has the common feature of putting girls in the spotlight as consumers.

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In colonial days, girls had as casual an approach to hygiene as their brothers and parents. Few colonists saw any reason to bathe even once a week, other than the customary daily rinse of face, hands, and perhaps neck and feet. Clothes were laundered rarely and with difficulty. Parents expected girls to help with the constant chores, which included keeping self and home tidy, but adults did not focus special attention on female cleanliness. Once girls got their periods—an event that usually occurred at age fifteen or sixteen rather than today’s average of twelve—their mothers or older sisters showed them how to soak, boil, and discreetly store the reusable monthly cloths. The subject provoked little discussion yet also little shame: a girl’s entry into puberty was quietly publicized by her adoption of longer adult dresses and pinned-up hair. Hygiene took on new meaning with the onset of industrialization. Baths became easier to procure with the new woodburning stoves and galvanized tin tubs, and public bath facilities served the rapidly expanding cities. Repeated cholera epidemics gradually yielded to improved public sanitation. For individuals, too, medical thinking emphasized that clean skin could prevent or cure many illnesses. Beginning in the 1820s, cultural ideas about women’s special moral purity found a parallel in physical cleanliness. Female grooming thus took on an extra importance, part of the process of gender separation made famous in the Victorian era. As girls gained access to academic opportunity over the next several decades, forward-thinking educators used exercise to balance sustained study, and a debate raged over the merits and risks of tight corsets. A number of girls’ schools even taught anatomy, physiology, and

hygiene; by 1850 the latter term denoted knowledge of the body’s functions and informed self-care, including exercise, temperate diet, looser dress, and frequent bathing. Middle-class women in particular saw hygiene as a female domain, since mothers would care for the bodies of their families, and girls were expected not only to keep cleaner than boys but also to study hygienic living. Meanwhile, girls from very poor backgrounds, those who lived in less settled regions, or those stuck in slavery had little opportunity to take up or even know about the new higher hygiene expectations. Only with the germ theory of disease, developed and popularized in the late nineteenth century, did the notion of hygiene become equated with freedom from germs. In the same years, immigrants poured into the United States from more distant, different lands and humbler backgrounds than ever before. Urban areas increasingly invested in public health campaigns, including those based at schools and in settlement houses. Many foreign-born girls would have their first encounter with American-style hygiene at the immigration office or required nurse’s examination at school. Americanization included adopting the new antiseptic version of hygiene for home and body. Immigrant girls often led their families to this goal, stimulating intergenerational conflict. At the same time, national advertising campaigns in magazines began to picture female models in advertising for many personal care products such as soaps, strengthening the link between female attractiveness and cleanliness. In many families, a girl’s purity remained a key value; mothers frequently chose to tell their daughters nothing about physical maturation, believing that the information threatened female innocence.

Advertisement for Ivory Soap showing the Spirit of Cleanliness standing on a bar of soap which is floating on a body of water, 1913. (Library of Congress)

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By the 1920s, hygiene was fast becoming an American obsession, with girls and women leading the way. Economic prosperity, ever-increasing advertising budgets in magazines and radio, and more national brands stood behind the explosive success of such new products as disposable sanitary napkins, shaving supplies, and deodorants. As women shortened their skirts and sleeves, cut their hair, wore skimpy bathing suits, and tanned their skin, they also began shaving their legs and underarms, washing their hair more often, and using more makeup. Well-appointed homes now had electrically lit bathrooms with mirrors over the sink. Able to see themselves in brighter light, middle-class girls sought medical treatment for acne. Poor families, immigrants, and African Americans often had different hygienic values or lacked the new amenities, but the power of national advertising enticed young girls to strive for the middle-class white ideal. This era’s intergenerational clashes included the use of tampons starting in the 1930s, which many mothers considered a breach of virginity. Mothers could no longer hope for their daughters to remain in the dark about such matters because sanitary product companies sent representatives to schools armed with instructional films, pamphlets, and samples. Girls often knew more than their mothers had at the same age and talked more openly about hygiene. By the 1950s, Americans had an international reputation for clean personal habits, and girls led the charge. Teenage girls outspent their male peers almost threefold on grooming items and clothes. Deodorant sales soared as advertising in magazines, on the radio, and on television pitched a widening array of hygiene products. Training bras and girdles offered

girls “junior figure control” for the first time. School training films and health classes hammered away at the necessity of good grooming for everyone, but standards of female cleanliness continued to signify attractiveness, far more than for men and boys. Even poorer Americans often had private bathroom facilities, allowing most girls to spend time preening and cleaning as the media, advertising, and their peer group expected. In the 1960s and 1970s, girls’ relationship to hygiene changed again. With the backlash against 1950s culture and the greater availability of birth control and changing sexual behavior, some girls embraced the “natural” state of their bodies. Shaving, daily bathing, and the wearing of perfume, makeup, bras, and girdles declined among girls who, along with many adults, questioned whether control of the body really equaled attractiveness and success. In quest of greater control over bodily needs, tampons were redesigned in the 1980s for greater absorbency. But the superabsorbent tampons caused dozens of women to sicken and die from toxic shock syndrome. Tampons were reformulated as a result, but some girls and women still opted for pads, including a new breed of reusable pads made from organic cotton. One constant about girls’ hygiene has been its changing meaning over time and among different subsets of American girls. Though less widespread now than in the 1970s, the naturalistic alternative to the American hygienic ideal has persisted. Today about 10 percent of young women decline to shave their legs and underarms for cultural reasons. Douching is widespread among some ethnic and racial groups yet almost unknown in others. However, the commercial and public aspects of hygiene have steadily increased

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plies are marketed to satisfy the wide range of different hygienic practices. Most mothers now tell their daughters about menstruation; but if they do not, television, store displays, school hygiene classes, or peers surely will. Girls remain vulnerable to suggestions that their bodies are unclean and therefore unworthy, making them still lucrative targets for companies selling personal care products. The relationship between girls’ identities— both private and social—and hygienic care of their bodies remains a powerful aspect of girlhood today. Rebecca R. Noel See also Adolescent Health; Advice Books; Body Image; Child Guidance; Menstruation

Thirteen-year-old girl washes her face in the bathroom sink. (Skjold Photographs)

over time and across cultures. Cosmetics, hair and skin products, and sanitary sup-

References and Further Reading Banner, Lois W. 1983. American Beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Hoy, Suellen. 1995. Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness. New York: Oxford University Press. www.cybergrrl.com. www.mum.org.

I Immigration

Scotland to American farms did not have to contend with issues of extended compulsory education or the impact of public schooling in heterogeneous urban settings. If they received an education, it was brief and probably seasonal. It most likely took place with few nongroup members present, and their parents relied heavily upon these girls’ labors on farms, in workshops, and in family stores. The changes in their expectations and options probably proceeded more slowly and with less outside influence than that which confronted young girls migrating in the 1990s, for example, from Korea to Los Angeles or from Pakistan to New York. In these latter cases, education extending into the late teenage years and the powerful impact of popular culture have most likely complicated the process by which the cultural norms and social practices of the sending society and those of the receiving one interacted with each other. Therefore, differences in time, place, and the level to which state policies limited parental authority mattered a great deal in the shaping of the many histories of immigrant girlhood. Among the 45 million immigrants who came to the United States between 1820 and 1924, no one model can be employed to describe conditions on any matter, this one included. Just as the history of each immigrant group differs in

To date there have been no historical studies of immigration as it affected girls. Although historians of immigration have become increasingly sensitive to issues of age and gender in the immigration and adaptation process, no body of literature has specifically focused on the ways in which immigration shaped and was shaped by dependent children of either sex. To understand what it meant to be an immigrant girl must be cobbled together from studies on other aspects of immigration. This necessity is due in part to the fact that there is no singular history of immigration. How girls participated in the emigration process, how they went through the actual move from one place to another, and the ways in which they adjusted to a new home, new language, and new set of social and cultural options varied from group to group and time to time. Since the history of immigration is a thread that runs through all American history, beginning in earnest in the 1820s and continuing into the twenty-first century, the history of girls within it has been shaped by vastly changing circumstances. This reality complicates and defies the possibility of writing an integrated history of immigrant girlhood. For example, young girls migrating with families in the 1820s from Wales or

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An Italian mother with her three children arrives at Ellis Island in this photograph by Lewis Hine. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Immigration terms of causation, timing, structure of the migratory pool, and modes of adaptation, so too the ways in which girls participated in these vast human movements must be seen as many individual histories. No single narrative can trace this dynamic, and no single paradigm can be employed to illustrate the particular history of girlhood among “immigrants.” It is too large and amorphous a category of analysis. Despite both the absence of any previous historical inquiry into this matter and the many variations on the theme, a number of patterns can be discerned in the experiences of different groups. In order, however, for any case studies and the differences between them to make sense, certain overarching concerns must be presented. Most emigrations have been shaped by economic concerns. Men and women left homes because changed economic circumstances made it impossible for them to continue living as they had. Many also hoped that emigration to the United States would better the conditions of their lives. Therefore, most decisions about who within a family—men, women, adults, children—should move, and when, grew out of a complex economic calculus. Most immigration to the United States involved the movements of able-bodied workers who could labor, underconsume, and save money. Decisions about migration were made in part by assessments as to who could work best and underconsume the most while suffering the least harm. This consideration helps explain why children were not present in large numbers, at least in the earlier stages of most migrations. A great difference can be seen between those groups who emigrated to the United States directly into agriculture and

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those who migrated for jobs in industry. Immigrant families bound for farming had a history shaped by the fact that full families migrated together. Many immigrants from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, parts of Germany, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and various places in central Europe, as well as Japan, hoped to become independent farmers. Such migrations required the labor of full families, and wives and children, boys and girls, provided the labor necessary for the kind of intensive small-scale farming with which immigrants began. Girls within these families tended to replicate, in age-appropriate ways, their mothers’ chores and roles. Their lives were structured around the performance of tasks deemed natural for women, particularly the myriad details involved in cooking, cleaning, and tending smaller children. They also had specific farm chores, including gardening, churning butter, collecting eggs and taking them to market, and putting up preserves, some of which were sold and others of which were kept for family consumption. Farm daughters also helped their mothers tend to the needs of the hired hands and seasonal crews of workers brought in for harvesting. At peak moments of the agricultural year, gender and age barriers broke down, and girls labored briefly in the fields with their brothers. Additionally, immigrants in agriculture tended to settle in ethnic clusters, creating relatively isolated homogeneous communities. What schooling immigrant girls got in these farm settings therefore tended to take place within an ethnic framework, and little mixing with outsiders took place. Most immigrants came to the United States for work in industry, however, and they settled in cities. In most migrations,

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some family members arrived first. Those who spearheaded family migrations struggled to amass enough money to facilitate the subsequent emigration of other family members, those defined as most dependent and least able to earn money. As such, particularly during the period of the European immigration from the 1880s through the 1920s, men far outnumbered women as immigrants. In some cases, this tendency was extreme. Among Italians, men outnumbered women until the second decade of the twentieth century three to one, among Greeks about eight to one, and among the Chinese about twenty to one (Nee and de Bavy 1972). When married men migrated, they generally brought their sons and other young male relatives—nephews, brothers, and cousins— who could work and contribute to the family fund. They seemed to have known that women of all ages earned less than men and that children consumed more than they produced. The histories of girls in immigrant communities were shaped in large measure by this issue of the age and gender balance of the group. The more maleheavy the group, the fewer girls lived within the immigrant enclaves. The more equal or even female-heavy the group in terms of the representation of women among the immigrants, the more girls were present. This reality in turn shaped the options and expectations of immigrant girls in the United States in terms of education, work, leisure, position in the family, and ultimately decisions about marriage that took them out of the ranks of girlhood. Two cases studies, of Italians and eastern European Jews, can be used to demonstrate the impact of the structure of migration on girls. They may provide templates

from which historians interested in pursuing the subject further can proceed. The majority of the Italian migration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century, taking off as a transformative phenomenon in the 1890s and flowing heavily from Sicily and the south. Until the short period between the end of World War I and the passage of restrictive immigration legislation in 1924, most Italian immigrants were men. It was rare for full families, with parents, sons, and daughters, to immigrate together. Many of the men actually hoped that they could return to Italy and live well there on their savings from labor in the United States. When married men decided that they were going to stay in the United States, they brought over their families. Single men who decided to stay went about the process of finding a wife and starting families in their new country. Not surprisingly, as more men decided to remain in the United States after the war and throughout the 1920s, women and children began to make up the bulk of the migrants from Italy. In the Italian enclaves that developed in most large American cities in the late nineteenth century, women were decidedly outnumbered by men. As a result of men’s motivations and women’s minority status within the communities, Italian women who were the daughters of immigrants tended to marry relatively young. Only a short period of time came between the end of compulsory education, as mandated by the state, and marriage. From the scattered secondary studies as well as the memoir and social reform literature of the immigration era, it becomes clear that among Italian immigrants, girlhood was relatively brief. Few sources chart an elaborate leisure culture of Italian girls in the immigrant genera-

Immigration tion or the development of any sense of entitlement on their part for consideration within the family as individuals. Parents tended to worry a great deal about the honor and supervision of their daughters, and girls had relatively little freedom to partake of recreational activities. They had as little formal schooling as possible, since parents in the immigrant generation saw no need for girls to extend their education beyond literacy and formal state requirements. Girls had thrust upon them a substantial amount of domestic responsibility, including cooking, cleaning, and taking care of smaller siblings. Daughters accompanied mothers gleaning empty lots and parks for mushrooms, dandelions, and other wild edibles, which were used to supplement the family diet. The work lives of Italian immigrant girls also took place within the relatively protected environment of family supervision. Italian mothers contributed to the family economy by taking piecework into their homes. They shelled nuts, made artificial flowers, put the finishing stitches on garments, and performed a myriad of other manufacturing tasks at homes. Daughters and young sons worked along with their mothers. In warm weather, Italian mothers and daughters hired themselves out as families in cranberry bogs, canning plants, and many other regional enterprises that blurred the line between industry and agriculture. Even when Italian immigrant girls in their mid- to late teens worked outside the home, they were likely to labor for townspeople and relatives. They worked primarily with other young Italian girls rather than with women and men of mixed backgrounds. The girls of the immigrant Italian communities tended to replicate their moth-

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ers’ lives. Although the physical setting in which they found themselves was different, girls’ lives were lived in order to support a collective family effort. They did so in the context of roles and responsibilities defined as female-appropriate, and girls had little chance to experience the immigrant enclave and the large city as individuals. Like Italians, eastern European Jews began to move to the United States in massive numbers in the 1880s, and that migration continued apace into the 1920s. But unlike that of their co-immigrants, Jewish migration to the United States was defined as permanent and involved full families. Certainly, unmarried young people did make the move by themselves or accompanied by peers. This was true of single young women, many still girls, and men. But primarily this was a family migration. Of those Jews who migrated, 25 percent were either under age fourteen or over age forty-five, indicating that children were well represented as well as older, less productive adults (Kuznets 1975, ix). The presence of children meant that girls and boys made up a substantial part of the immigrant communities. The typical pattern of eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States involved husbands coming first with their older children. The sex of the children was irrelevant, and fathers took daughters as well as sons with them to earn money to pay for the fare for the rest of the family. This meant that some teenage Jewish girls came to the United States in the vanguard of their families and without their mothers. The absence of mothers may have given them a somewhat free hand in exploring the city and learning about American culture and its gender expectations. It also meant that

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the labor of these girls was highly valued and that they took their work seriously. Jewish girls worked in the same kinds of sweatshops and factories as Jewish boys and men. Married Jewish women were less likely than any other group of immigrant women to be employed outside the home, but unmarried Jewish women not only had high rates of employment but exercised a high level of control over where they worked. They “shopped around” for better-paying factories. The high rates of unionization of Jewish women, particularly after the “uprising of the 20,000” female shirtwaist workers in New York in 1909, ushered in an era in which young Jewish women helped influence communal politics. That strike was actually declared by a sixteen-year-old girl, Clara Lemlich, who spontaneously got up at a meeting at Cooper Union and called upon the shirtwaist operatives to go out on strike. Jewish immigrant girls took advantage of the educational opportunities in the United States in numbers similar to their brothers. In the immigrant generation in most American cities, Jewish girls stayed in school just as long as Jewish boys, although schools pushed girls into vocational tracks. The key factor in immigrant families as to which child received the most extensive education, including high school and even college, was age, not sex. Younger children, those either born in the United States or who came there as very small children, were the ones who got to stay in school. This held true for girls as much as for boys and may help to explain why, in New York in particular, the daughters of immigrants made such a dramatic leap by the 1920s into the ranks of public school teaching. Memoir literature points to an immigrant Jewish culture in the United States

in which young girls did not function with high levels of parental supervision, despite the fact that they maintained a high level of responsibility toward their families. Older girls were expected to clean and mind younger children. If their families owned a small shop, which up to half of them did, they were expected to work in the store. But despite these chores, Jewish immigrant girls participated in a street culture of games and friendships and eagerly went to the libraries, parks, and other kinds of public amusements. Those girls who worked were less likely to be able to hold on to as much of their earnings as their brothers for pocket money, although what they kept from the family’s coffers they used to buy clothes, snacks, and leisure-time activities. This consumption took place in an emerging American Jewish culture that gave girls a relatively well-developed sense of their own individual tastes and predilections. This sense of individuation may not have been as solid as their brothers’, but then, the gap between their lives and that of boys in the United States was probably greater. These two case studies—out of potentially hundreds—indicate that there was no single history of immigrant girlhood. Rather, each group dealt with the dichotomy between “old world” expectations for girls and American realities differently. Each one of those historical narratives deserves to be explored. Hasia R. Diner See also Asian American Girls; Chicana Girls; Domestic Service; Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Free Girls of African Descent; Indentured Servants; Latina Girls; Little Mothers; Mill Girls; Saturday Evening Girls; Work

Indentured Servants References and Further Reading Cohen, Miriam. 1993. Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ewen, Elizabeth. 1985. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press. Kuznets, Simon. 1975. “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure.” Perspectives in American History 9: 35–124. Lamphere, Louise. 1987. From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nee, Victor G., and Brett de Bavy. 1972. Longtime, California: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. New York: Random House. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Weinberg, Sydney Stahl. 1988. World of Our Mothers: Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Weiner, Lynn. 1985. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. 1977. Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Indentured Servants In the seventeenth century, girls and young women were among the first settlers of the Chesapeake, a region that encompasses Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, where they worked as contract laborers to planters. Their enthusiasm for taking a job across the ocean was shaped by the lack of opportunities at home as well as dishonest advertising circulars. The harsh conditions of life

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and their servitude precluded marriage; out-of-wedlock pregnancy was punishable by the addition of a year or two to their tenure. The Chesapeake region was the first area settled by the English. In 1606 a group of London merchants received permission from King James I to establish a joint-stock company for the purpose of digging for silver, gold, and copper in the new world. Their interest in quick profits led to an expedition to establish a trading post, not a colonial settlement. In 1607, 104 ill-equipped men with rarefied skills and inexperienced young boys landed in Jamestown (named after the king). Within six months, most had died of salt poisoning or infectious diseases (e.g., dysentery and malaria) caused by inadequate food rations and brutal living conditions. In 1619, the Virginia Company of London abandoned its original goal and encouraged settlement instead. Three times as many young (between ages fifteen and twenty-four), single men as women immigrated to the Chesapeake. Many were displaced farmers and unemployed laborers who were attracted by false promises of upward mobility. In order to promote family life and settlement stability, the Virginia Company recruited young, single women such as nineteen-year-old Alice Pindon to migrate to the New World by distributing pamphlets advertising for “maids.” Because the vast majority could not afford the journey across the Atlantic, however, they promised to work for five to seven years as an indentured servant to a Chesapeake planter. Although in the long run the future looked bright, in the short run it was bleak. Conditions of servitude on tobacco farms were harsh. Colonists lived in less than comfortable circumstances in

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Indentured Servants

crude, cramped one-room shacks with few material possessions. Serving girls were likely to share a loft where all bedded down together. Girls in their late teens and those in their early twenties worked ten to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. They grew food, which they also prepared and preserved. If indentured to a poor planter, a servant would have spent much of his time in the fields, planting crops, enriching seedbeds, transplanting seedlings, stripping cured tobacco leaves, and packing them into barrels. Hoeing, weeding, stripping, curing, harvesting, and packing tobacco were repetitious and time-consuming. The quality of life for nearly everyone was poor, but especially so for indentured servants. Because everyone lived on isolated farms along river banks, sociability was limited. There was little organized religious worship and no small towns (as in rural England) because Chesapeake subsistence farmers did not rely on trade. As a result, the diet was monotonous and not nutritious. Meals were limited to pork and corn, and vegetables were scarce. Many felt hungry much of the time. The generally poor diet increased susceptibility to diseases (e.g., typhoid, smallpox, pellagra) from which they had no immunities. Many newcomers did not make it through a year, unable to survive their “seasoning” as they succumbed to “agues and fevers.” Mortality rates were much higher in the Chesapeake than in New England. Indentured servants were legally entitled to shelter, food, and clothing but little else. Instead, they faced numerous onerous restrictions. They could be sold or disciplined (though the courts protected them from excessive beatings from abusive masters). They faced penalties for

running away or for sexual transgressions. Adolescent girls raised in this land unsupervised by protective patriarchal fathers experienced greater sexual freedom, but as a result, the risks of bearing a child out of wedlock were high. At least 20 percent of all young women in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake gave birth outside marriage. (One-third of those who did marry were already pregnant before the ceremony.) But pregnant servants were not permitted to marry unless the father was willing to pay her master for the rest of her contracted term. Because pregnancies deprived masters of able-bodied workers, pregnant servants could be fined and whipped and made to serve an additional twelve to twenty-four months to repay their masters for their trouble and expense. The burden also befell their daughters or sons, who were inevitably bound out for service. Young women who survived their indenture became planters’ wives. But because they did not begin their childbearing until their mid-twenties, most young women had only two to three children before they died in childbirth or from disease. Still, mothers were more than twice as likely to survive their husbands, who collectively left behind thousands of orphaned girls and boys. As a result of high mortality rates, seventeenth-century Chesapeake families were typically made up of stepparents and step-siblings. Widows were likely to remarry because men still outnumbered women. Moreover, no one person, male or female, could run a plantation alone. Some fathers made provisions in their wills supporting their children or authorizing overseers to remove children from households with abusive or wasteful stepfathers (of which there were many),

Indentured Servants but most did not. Mary Empson was four years old when her father died. Because her mother was too poor to provide for her, Mary was traded for four cows. Girls who had no fathers to provide for them were often bound out. Until their mother remarried, they could learn useful housekeeping skills. Even girls over the age of three were expected to work. But the experiences of girls and boys differed. Fathers expected sons to learn how to read and write, but daughters were taught to sew. Some girls were taught to read the Bible. In his will, one planter, John Lawson, requested that his two daughters “receive learning and sewing instruction” so as to be “brought up to huswifery [sic]” (Walsh 1979). In general, girls assumed their place in the gendered world of the Chesapeake house-

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hold with fewer problems than their brothers. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Domestic Service; Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Free Girls of African Descent; Immigration; Work References and Further Reading Berkin, Carol. 1997. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, chap. 1. Walsh, Lorena. 1979. “Till Death Do Us Part: Marriage and Family in Seventeenth Century Maryland.” In The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays in Anglo-American Society. Edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Walsh, Lorena, and Lois G. Carr. 1977. “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in 17th Century Maryland.” William and Mary Quarterly 34, 3d series.

GIRLHOOD IN AMERICA An Encyclopedia

The American Family The six titles that make up The American Family offer a revitalizing new take on U.S. history, surveying current culture from the perspective of the family and incorporating insights from psychology, sociology, and medicine. Each two-volume, A-to-Z encyclopedia features its own advisory board, editorial slant, and apparatus, including illustrations, bibliography, and index.

Adolescence in America edited by Jacqueline V. Lerner, Boston College, and Richard M. Lerner, Tufts University; Jordan W. Finkelstein, Pennsylvania State University, Advisory Editor

Boyhood in America edited by Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County, and Jacqueline S. Reinier, California State University, Sacramento

The Family in America edited by Joseph M. Hawes, University of Memphis, and Elizabeth F. Shores, Little Rock, Arkansas

Girlhood in America edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, University of Missouri, Kansas City

Infancy in America edited by Alice Sterling Honig, Emerita, Syracuse University; Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Michigan State University; and Holly Brophy-Herb, Michigan State University

Parenthood in America edited by Lawrence Balter, New York University

GIRLHOOD IN AMERICA An Encyclopedia

Volume 2 J–Z

Miriam Forman-Brunell, editor Associate Professor of History University of Missouri Kansas City, Missouri foreword by

Susan Douglas

Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England

Copyright © 2001 by Miriam Forman-Brunell All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Girlhood in America : an encyclopedia / Miriam Forman-Brunell, editor; foreword by Susan Douglas. p. cm. — (The American family) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57607-206-1 (set : alk. paper) — 1-57607-550-8 (e-book) 1. Girls—United States—Encyclopedias. I. Forman-Brunell, Miriam. II. American family (Santa Barbara, Calif.) HQ777.G5745 2001 305.23'0973'03—dc21 2001001346 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (cloth)

ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-book. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

A-to-Z List of Entries

vii

Volume 1: Entries A to I Volume 2: Entries J to Z Bibliography 703 Index 761 About the Editor 773

v

1 383

A-to-Z List of Entries

VOLUME 1, A–I

Clothing Collecting College Girls Comic Books Communication Consumer Culture Cosmetics

A Acquaintance Rape Adolescent Health Adoption Advice Books African American Girls in the Twentieth Century Allowances and Spending Money American Girls Collection Arts and Crafts Asian American Girls

D Dance Classes Dances and Dancing Dating and Courtship Daughters and Fathers Daughters and Mothers Depression and Girls Diaries Disabilities Dollhouses Dolls Domestic Service Domesticity

B Babysitting Barbie Bat Mitzvah Birth Control Body Image

E C

Eating Disorders Education of Girls Emotions Enslaved Girls of African Descent

Camp Fire Girls Captivity Cars Catholic Girls Cheerleaders Chicana Girls Child Abuse Child Guidance

F Fairy Tales Fan Clubs

vii

viii

A-to-Z List of Entries

Female Sexuality 4-H Free Girls of African Descent Frontier Girls

G Gifted Girls Girl Gangs Girl Power Girl Scouts Girls and Sweets Girls’ Culture Girls’ Fiction Girls’ Magazines Girls’ Rooms Graffiti

L Latina Girls Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls Lesbians Literacy Little Mothers

M Mathematics and Science Mennonite Girls Menstruation Mill Girls Movies, Adolescent Girls in

H

N

Hair Handbags Home Economics Education Hygiene

Nancy Drew Mysteries Native American Girls

I

Orphans and Orphanages

Immigration Indentured Servants

P

O

Jewish Education of Girls Juvenile Delinquents

Pets Pickford, Mary Play Pocahontas Prom Psychotherapy Punk Rock Puritan Girls

K

Q

Kinaaldá

La Quinceañera

VOLUME 2, J–Z J

A-to-Z List of Entries

R

Surfer Girls

Radical Feminism Reading Red Diaper Girls Relational Theory Riot Grrrls Rural Girls

T

S Samplers Saturday Evening Girls Sexual Harassment Slumber Parties Sororities Southern Belles Sports Substance Abuse Suicidal Behavior in Girls Summer Camps for Girls

Tea Parties Technology Teen Pregnancy Teenybopper Television Temple, Shirley Tomboys

W Witchcraft Work

Z Zines

ix

J Jewish Education of Girls

leaders in towns having established synagogues such as New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Girls, unless a parent elected to provide tutoring, received virtually no formal instruction in Jewish subjects. A girl’s Jewish knowledge was to be acquired by listening, observing, and modeling her own religious beliefs and practices on those of her mother. With an American Jewish population estimated to be scarcely 4,000 in 1830, these ad hoc arrangements appeared to suffice for both girls and boys. When large-scale Jewish immigration from German lands got under way in the 1830s, girls in the northeastern United States were already well represented in coeducational common schools. By the middle of the nineteenth century, almost as many girls as boys attended elementary (common) schools, generally taught by women teachers, and by the 1870s the achieved educational level of girls had surpassed that of boys. As did their Protestant counterparts, American Jewish women responded to the feminization of teaching that accompanied the development and growth of common schools. Unlike Catholics, who largely rejected the Protestant-controlled common schools as anathema to their religious beliefs, most Jews accepted the common school ideal. Jewish girls benefited from the expansion in educational

The secular and religious education of Jewish girls, including their limited formal schooling, initially overlapped. But over the course of nearly three and a half centuries, Jewish girls’ secular and religious instruction took separate paths. The secular education of Jewish girls has been tied closely to the emerging American educational system and has consistently expanded. The nature and scope of their Jewish education, however, have been inconsistent. It has been intimately related to the larger project of transplanting and sustaining Judaism in America and to the evolving roles of women within the various branches of American Judaism as these denominations have emerged since 1800. Upon their arrival in the seventeenth century, the first Jewish settlers in North America provided rudimentary instruction to their own children, usually by employing tutors in the home. In the late eighteenth century, education began to move out of the home and the children of then-established Jews, boys and girls, went to dame schools (a combination child care and primary school run by women, often in their own homes) and private schools (a few linked to synagogues) where they received a general education. Boys were tutored in Jewish subjects in preparation for bar mitzvah by religious

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Jewish Education of Girls

Rebecca Gratz (Library of Congress)

opportunities for all girls in the American common school, but the Protestant character of common schooling remained a problem. Stimulated by the early-nineteenthcentury Second Great Awakening, missionaries, many of whom were women staunchly committed to the evangelical religious movements of the age, directed their attention to the urban immigrant poor. Jews were particular objects of missionary zeal. Emblematic of the mission to convert, in 1820 the American Society for Meliorating the Conditions of the Jews was incorporated in Philadelphia. Especially following the panic of 1837, when economic conditions were unusually bleak and coinciding with the recent influx of Jewish immigrants from German-speaking lands, female missionaries in Philadelphia offered free food and clothing to immigrant mothers, infusing

the Gospel along with their charity and encouraging mothers to send their children to Sunday school. The ecumenical Christianity, moral instruction, and literacy training of the common school classroom could be brought by missionaries directly to the children of Jewish neighborhoods, boys and girls believed to be dwelling in ignorance and darkness. Philadelphia, home of the American Sunday School Union (1824), was a city well prepared to give these children a limited basic education linked to Protestant religious and moral instruction. Led by Rebecca Gratz, a group of Philadelphia women rose to the dual challenge: the need to counter missionary efforts among Jews and the need for a Jewish education to supplement the general (and Christian-influenced) education received by most Jewish children. These women were themselves poorly schooled in Jewish subjects but were imbued with the American vision of women as pious, spiritual, and gifted at teaching the young. With years of public charitable activity behind them as members of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, they were prepared to publicly defend Jewish interests by founding a Sunday school in 1838 based upon the model of the Protestant Sunday school. This may have been the first opportunity for American Jewish women to teach Jewish subjects. Lacking teaching materials, they adopted the Protestant Sunday School Union catechism as the basis of their religious and moral instruction, blotting out overtly Christian passages. Within two years, however, two sisters who helped found the Hebrew Sunday school produced the first instructional materials specifically intended for use in Jewish primary religious instruction: Simha Cohen Peixotto’s Elementary In-

Jewish Education of Girls troduction to the Scriptures, for the Use of Hebrew Children and Mrs. Eliezar Pyke’s Scriptural Questions for the Use of Sunday School for the Instruction of Israelites. The latter, known as “Pyke’s catechism,” became the basis of instruction in Philadelphia as well as in schools that were established shortly thereafter by Jewish women in Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and Baltimore. The Philadelphia Hebrew Sunday school model rapidly spread by means of women’s networks: Gratz and other Philadelphia women writing to relatives and friends in the still small, close-knit, interrelated American Jewish community. In Philadelphia and elsewhere, Jewish women took up the challenge to sustain the children of Israel in the United States by educating them in the religion of their forbears. They usurped a traditional prerogative of males and in so doing redefined and expanded the woman’s role in Judaism to include the Jewish education of children. The Hebrew Sunday school enrolled boys and girls, American-born and immigrant. By providing formal Jewish teaching to girls, its instructors implicitly acknowledged that the mimetic process was insufficient for educating girls in Jewish traditions. The Hebrew Sunday school embraced the American practice of coeducation and placed women teachers at the head of the class. Since many of the Sunday school’s pupils went to other schools during the week, the school’s part-time curriculum reinforced the supplementary nature of Jewish education and legitimized the separate study of secular and religious subjects and “teacher” as a female role. It framed Judaism as an American religion that was compatible with and complementary to the American day school.

385

Americanized Jewish women also responded to the Protestant challenge by embracing some of its cultural features. The Sunday school curriculum presented Judaism as a religion with a catechism to master, Bible stories to mine for moral lessons, and religious practices compatible with American life. This Jewish education taught in English was worlds apart from European concepts of Jewish studies tied to Talmud and Torah, taught by men, and generally reserved for males. In New York City in the 1840s and 1850s the course of Jewish education, for boys as well as girls, was tied to the relationship between the city’s Jews and its public schools. German Jewish immigration in this period gave New York the largest Jewish community in the United States. The new arrivals found the city’s schools divided by class and religious denominations. Parents with even modest means sent their children to private, usually church-related schools. Free public education, common throughout the rest of New York State and most of the northeastern United States, was not provided in New York City until 1842. Free education was available only at Protestant-imbued charity schools. In the 1840s the city’s small public school system had a decidedly Protestant cast that offended both Catholics and Jews. Many Jewish parents, especially among new immigrants, did not want to expose their children to Christianizing influences in either private or public school. The need of these parents to educate their children, coupled with the lack of viable alternatives, gave rise to pressures to found Jewish day schools. By 1854 there were seven day schools enrolling more than 850 boys and girls. Girls accounted for about one-third of enrollments, a proportion of Jewish

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school enrollments (day and supplementary) that, within a few percentage points of variation, has been relatively constant until the present. These schools offered both secular and religious studies at the elementary school level. Although it would appear that boys and girls followed a common curriculum, there was gender differentiation: girls received instruction in sewing and needlework and boys in cantillation of Torah and Haftarah. The presumed adult roles of men and women within the Jewish community seemed to permit, if not yet require, Jewish as well as general education for girls. But the presumed nature of adult participation, at least in the public religious realm, was still divided along gender lines, hence the differentiated studies. At midcentury Max Lilienthal, then rabbi of New York’s Congregation Ansche Chesed, introduced a new practice to the American Jewish community, a confirmation for both boys and girls. Lilienthal’s Shavuot-linked confirmation ceremony, first held in 1846, was preceded by five months of twice-weekly classes for the participating twelve-year-old girls and boys. Criticized by more orthodox congregants and suspended because of unrelated congregational politics, the confirmation was adopted by Temple Emanu-El in 1852 and resumed by Ansche Chesed in 1860. It continues in many congregations to this day, especially in Reform Judaism, and was an early acknowledgment of the importance of educating Jewish women in their religious traditions. Changes in New York State’s education laws in 1851 and 1855 and changes in the nature of public education in the city addressed many of the concerns of Jewish parents. Local school boards were granted the powers to choose instructional materials, and reading from the Bible was

made discretionary. Overt Christian religious influences were considerably diluted, especially in neighborhoods with concentrations of Jewish families. The vibrant congregational day school sector evaporated overnight. The seven congregational day schools that flourished in 1855 collapsed by 1856. Jewish parents in New York apparently were ready to accept the division of secular and religious instruction for their sons and daughters as had an earlier generation of Jewish parents in Philadelphia. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Jewish children in New York City, like those throughout the United States, received their secular schooling in public schools. Jewish education, if received at all, was offered in supplementary schools or by private teachers who scheduled instruction after school hours. Since boys received more regular religious instruction outside public schools, the collapse of Jewish day schools affected the Jewish education of girls more than boys. Girls continued to receive a general education in the public schools, but the majority received little or no Jewish instruction. For those American Jews who embraced then-emerging Reform Judaism, the Reform Sunday school provided girls with a limited Jewish education. For more orthodox Jews, especially newly arriving immigrants from eastern Europe, efforts were made to adapt European educational models of Jewish education. The first Talmud Torah school was opened in New York City in 1857, and by 1890 hundreds of chederim (a primary supplementary school usually run by a single teacher) had been established. A typical cheder enrolled forty to fifty boys, often in wretched physical quarters, after public school hours to learn mechanical reading of Hebrew-language religious texts.

Jewish Education of Girls As inadequate as the Jewish education was for boys, the state of Jewish education for girls was worse. With no eastern European models of Jewish girls’ schools for adults to transplant, girls were largely neglected. In eastern Europe the mimetic tradition, coupled in many cases with home tutoring, provided girls with the knowledge, skills, and affective attachments they needed to live as Jewish women. Jewishness was as much cultural as intellectual. Hence the natural and informal process of cultural transmission for eastern European Jews carried along with it religious identity and beliefs, group attachment, lifeways, and genderdefined roles. Since Jewish women had few religious responsibilities outside the home and no obligation to study religious texts in Hebrew (although there was a considerable religious and later popular literature in Yiddish intended for a substantial female audience), little or no formal provision was made to educate girls. Immigrants seemed to assume that home and community in the United States would nurture the head and heart of Jewish girls as it had in the old world. The opening of a Christian mission school in 1864 on New York’s Lower East Side, home of many of New York’s poorest immigrant Jews, spurred the Jewish community to action, as an earlier mission school had done in Philadelphia. Eleven congregations organized the Hebrew Free School Association, which opened its first school in 1865, a day school teaching general and Jewish subjects. Many in the established Jewish community opposed a day school, arguing that it segregated Jewish immigrant children and made it more difficult for them to assimilate into American society. Additional free schools were opened, all supplementary, and the day school closed in 1872. Public school atten-

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dance became a precondition for enrollment at a Hebrew free school. The free schools were more popular with girls than boys. Poor immigrant parents, many religiously orthodox, preferred the traditional instruction of the cheder for their sons to the free schools’ lessons on morality, manners, vocational training, and Americanization. However, lacking a European precedent for daughters, these same parents seemed more disposed to experiment with a new curriculum when it came to their daughters’ educations. As the great wave of Jewish immigrants to the United States gathered force in the last decades of the nineteenth century, settled Jews became increasingly concerned with the poor Jews of the tenement districts. Out of a complex mix of self-interest and selflessness, established Jews greatly expanded their missionary and social work efforts. Charity work among the Jewish poor became a major expression of one’s religiosity and identity as a Jew, especially among Reform Jewish women of the upper classes. In New York City, Minnie Louis, president of the Sisterhood of Temple EmanuEl, led her colleagues downtown to make home visits to immigrant families. Out of these visits emerged the visiting trained nurses program (which, under Lillian Wald, became the Henry Street Settlement) and, in the early 1880s, the Down-Town Sabbath School, later called the Louis Down-Town Sabbath School. Initially, the school provided Jewish religious instruction one day per week to girls of the Lower East Side, but later it expanded to offer daily technical-vocational instruction for girls in 1887 and, after weathering several additional changes, became the Hebrew Technical School for Girls in 1899. What started as

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a school to bring religious education to Jewish girls who otherwise had few such opportunities was transformed into a vocational program to serve what came to be considered the more pressing need to help female Jewish immigrants adapt to a modern, enlightened, but economically demanding country. Although there was considerable ambivalence about and much neglect of Jewish education for girls at the turn of the twentieth century on the part of parents as well as the Jewish charitable community, both Reform and Orthodox, there was a strong commitment to secular education for Jewish girls. Established Jews, often in close collaboration with American public schools, directed the children of immigrants into the public schools. By the time of World War I, more than 275,000 Jewish children attended New York City public schools, and fewer than 1,000 attended the city’s three all-male yeshivas. Established Jews saw the public schools as their allies in efforts to transform immigrant children into model Americans. The public schools would have primary responsibility for making over the children of immigrants into true Americans, and a new, modern Jewish education would transform old world religious beliefs and practices into a modern Jewish religion better suited to the American milieu, one in which all citizens shared in a common secular-civic culture and individuals embraced compatible but separate religious denominations. Jewish girls in American public schools, especially at the elementary level, were exposed to the potent model of the American woman teacher. The mimetic process, which traditionally had been relied upon to maintain Jewish religious and cultural lifeways, now was in the service of cultural transformation.

American life, observed and imitated in public schools, was reinforced in the streets; by public entertainment, magazines, and libraries; and by the casual processes of going window shopping on uptown outings, watching movies, and listening to the radio. Young Jewish women also acquired a new set of American aspirations that could be satisfied only by mastering American culture. American public schools could prepare them for modern women’s roles. Many such women in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Boston followed a path from Ellis Island to public school, to a teacher’s college, and back to the public school classroom. Yet few Jewish children, especially girls, received any religious education in the period prior to World War I. As Alexander Dushkin reported in his study of Jewish education in New York City, published in 1918, fewer than one in four children in 1917 and only one in six girls received any Jewish education. More children would have received some Jewish education during their childhood than were enrolled in any given year, but it is clear that Jewish education was largely neglected. The need to provide a modern Jewish education to American Jewish children was recognized early in the twentieth century by many Jewish leaders, especially those connected with the Kehillah of New York (an organization that represented New York City Jews from 1908 to 1922). Samson Benderly, the father of modern American Jewish education, was invited to New York to form the Bureau of Jewish Education in 1910. The dual task of Jewish educators, as he saw it, was to Americanize their students while simultaneously building a viable Jewish culture in the United States. Jewish edu-

Jewish Education of Girls cation, he argued, should be “complementary to and harmonious with the public system” and should prepare Jewish youth for active participation in a bicultural world (quoted in Gorin 1970, 98). The bureau recognized that modernizing the role of women in the American Jewish community was critical and set out to enlarge the Jewish educational opportunities of girls. Experimental programs for girls at the elementary level were developed, followed by Hebrew preparatory schools for girls (ages 11–14) and Hebrew high schools (the Marshaliah schools). By the 1920s the bureau had created what may have been the first Jewish school “system” for girls from elementary school to the Teachers Institute, a program that attracted more women than men. Based on American institutional models, the bureau actively embraced the American practice of training and employing young women as teachers. This new adult role for Jewish women who had been born into eastern European immigrant communities motivated many to pursue a Jewish education in the United States. And the growing presence of women educated in Jewish religious traditions helped to redefine roles for Jewish women. In 1922 the first bat mitzvah was celebrated by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s eldest daughter Judith, a ceremony that went beyond confirmation and opened possibilities for girls that became reality for many as the twentieth century progressed. Upon the demise of the New York Kehillah after World War I, its young leaders scattered across the United States, helping to establish and run city bureaus of Jewish education. Between 1915 and 1938, bureaus were started in fifteen cities, and in four of these, Hebrew teachers’ colleges were founded

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to train modern Jewish educators, both men and women. Most Jewish children in the twentieth century, if they received a Jewish education, did so in congregational after-school programs or Sunday schools. But Orthodox Jews in New York and elsewhere grew increasingly concerned with the limited Jewish education available to their sons and daughters. Many felt that supplementary education was inadequate. In the 1880s Orthodox educators founded a boys’ yeshiva that emphasized Torah and Talmud study but also offered secular studies to meet state education laws. New York’s Orthodox Jews were first able to send their daughters to day school when the coeducational Yeshiva of Flatbush opened in 1928, followed shortly by the all-girls Shulamith School in 1929. These schools, along with the coeducational Ramaz School in Manhattan (1937), offered both secular and religious instruction, seeking to integrate the modern with the classical and Jewish with American. Although religiously orthodox, they supported cultural Zionism and the Hebrew language. In an important sense, within one Jewish institution they attempted to prepare students for the bicultural world envisioned by the new Jewish educators rather than splitting responsibility between public and Jewish schools. In the 1990s Jewish day schools, which numbered about 600 in towns and cities throughout the United States, was a growing American Jewish phenomenon. Although about 70 percent are under Orthodox auspices, the Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism also sponsor day schools (Isaacs 1992, 66). In an American environment in which public education has been questioned by some and religious education

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Torah reading at the Solomon Schecter Day School, White Plains, New York. (Shirley Zeiberg)

has become increasing relevant to many, the private religiously sponsored day school—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—is a common sight on the American educational landscape. Jews who at one time strenuously opposed Jewish day schools as a form of self-segregation and looked to the public schools as the best means of integrating Jews into American life are now confronted by a much more variegated educational-religious landscape. Modern-day schools are clearly distinguished from European yeshivas by their rejection of instruction in Yiddish and its replacement by English and Hebrew, the coeducational practice of many of these schools, the high level of Jewish instruction provided to girls, the employment of women teachers, and the

high regard for secular studies. Although most Jewish children still attend public schools, more than 11 percent attended Jewish day schools. And unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century, girls are now almost as likely as boys to attend day schools. In the 1990s an estimated 440,000 children were enrolled in Jewish schools, representing between 35 and 40 percent of all Jewish children: approximately 60 percent attended afterschool programs and 40 percent day schools. In addition to the modern Jewish day school, there is a second, potent, Jewish day school sector sponsored by the Ultraorthodox Jews who arrived in the United States in small numbers before World War II and in larger numbers following

Jewish Education of Girls the Holocaust. They brought with them models of settlement and education that conformed to their desire to separate themselves as best they could from the secular world. They rejected the models of American Jewish day schools developed by modern Orthodox Jews, schools that sought to synthesize the Jewish and the modern; established their own yeshivas that focused on Jewish texts and Jewish learning; and incorporated secular studies only to satisfy state laws. For Ultraorthodox Jews, schools were integral to their efforts to protect their children from the perceived evils of secular America. Jewish education would do battle with the antireligious, assimilating, and secularizing forces of modern education, represented especially by public schools. And girls as well as boys had to be saved from public education. Ultraorthodox Jews who immigrated in the 1930s carried with them the Bas Ya’akov school model of girls’ education created by Sara Schenirer in 1918 in Kraków, Poland. They established the first such school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1937. Ultraorthodox girls, traditionally excluded from all study, were allowed to study the written law (Torah) and secular subjects, but not the oral law (Talmud). Secular study, lacking precedent in the Orthodox world for either men or women and considered to be of decidedly lesser value than the study of Jewish texts, was readily incorporated into the schooling of girls. Whereas Jewish religious reformers saw schools as positive modernizing forces and modern Orthodox Jews saw schools as the arena within which modernity and tradition could be synthesized, the Ultraorthodox saw education as the means to conserve their beliefs and lifeways, a defense against the modern

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world, a way of ensuring separation rather than integration, and a way to reinforce stringent adherence to halakic prescriptions. For the first time in the history of Jewish settlement in the United States, a community of Jews sought to use schools as a defense against their new country and not as a means to incorporate Jews into American society. The education of Jewish girls in the United States today is as heterogeneous as the Jewish community of which they are a part. By far the largest number attend public schools and secular colleges and universities. Many receive no Jewish education at all. But American Jewish girls now have Jewish educational opportunities broader than ever before and a full range of adult Jewish roles in which to actively employ their Jewish studies, including rabbi, cantor, Judaica scholar, and Jewish educator. The only limits to what women can study or the adult roles they can perform are set by the status of women in the branch of Judaism into which they are born or in which they choose to participate. Stephan F. Brumberg See also Bat Mitzvah; Domesticity; Education of Girls; Home Economics Education; Immigration; Little Mothers; Mathematics and Science References and Further Reading Ashton, Dianne. 1997. Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Brumberg, Stephan F. 1986. Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. New York: Praeger. Dushkin, Alexander M. 1918. Jewish Education in New York City. New York: Bureau of Jewish Education. Gorin, Arthur A. 1970. New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The

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Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922. New York and Philadelphia: Columbia University Press/The Jewish Publication Society of America. Grinstein, Hyman B. 1945. The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Hyman, Paula E. 1995. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Isaacs, Leora W. 1992. “What We Know about Enrollment.” Pp. 61–70 in What We Know about Jewish Education: A Handbook of Today’s Research for Tomorrow’s Jewish Education. Edited by Stuart L. Kelman. Los Angeles: Torah Aura Publications. Kaestle, Carl F. 1983. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang. Pilch, Judah, ed. 1969. A History of Jewish Education in America. New York: Curriculum Research Institute of the American Association for Jewish Education. Soloveitchik, Haym. 1994. “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy.” Tradition 28, no. 4: 64–130. Tyack, David B., and Elizabeth Hansot. 1990. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wertheimer, Jack. 1999. “Jewish Education in the United States: Recent Trends and Issues.” Pp. 3–115 in American Jewish Year Book, 1999. Edited by David Singer and Ruth R. Seldin. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Juvenile Delinquents The history of girls deemed delinquent by society is marked by a good deal of change, although themes from the past still affect current practices. Although ideas about “proper” gender roles for females have evolved, so too have societal images of girls in trouble. Despite some

change, it is apparent that early theories and notions about girls continue to impact current treatment of delinquent girls. From the beginning, the etiology, processing, and treatment of female offending has been given low priority by delinquency theorists and researchers, particularly when compared to corresponding efforts to understand boys’ delinquency. However, girls have received considerable attention regarding their morality, and historically there have been special attempts by the juvenile justice system to control their sexuality. The formation of the juvenile justice system began with a concern to control the social and moral behavior of all juveniles. Within the context of a patriarchal society, this control has had unique application to the lives of girls. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, white, middle-class women reformers sought to address the social problems of the day. One of their concerns was the growing lower class, who in their estimation often failed to provide children with adequate moral virtues and a proper Christian upbringing. This perceived failing led to the belief that these young girls, largely from the lower class, were in danger of a life of vagrancy and sexual exploitation. Therefore, the problem of young, poor girls was given intense scrutiny, with the ultimate goal of establishing policies that would serve to maintain the existing social order. The response of the reformers, the early courts, and correctional facilities clearly illustrated nineteenth-century attitudes about women. During this time period, “success” was defined as turning wayward girls into “respectable” women—a woman who would marry, have children, and live a domestic life. Ironically, however, it was frequently the family who

Juvenile Delinquents would turn an incorrigible daughter over to the state in the hopes of providing a better life for her or the necessary training needed to transform her into a respectable young woman. An additional concern of the reformers was protecting and controlling girls’ sexual behavior because sexual chastity remained a crucial requirement of ideal femininity. Although sexual abuse in the home was ignored, the reformers focused their efforts on protecting women from more external threats like prostitution. There was concern that girls could use their sexuality as a way to survive if they had no one else to care for them. Correctional efforts did little to change the social class of the girls, but they did strive to provide a family-style reformatory experience emphasizing Christian family life. It was the job of these correctional surrogate parents to help the girls realize their “natural” role as caretakers and homemakers. Although some of the intentions of the early developers of correctional institutions for girls were admirable, they often fell short of the high rehabilitative ideals they aimed for and all too frequently resulted in rigid training and punitive, custodial care. Along with the early institutional efforts, it is also important to examine the theories of delinquency for girls that shaped how the juvenile justice system responded to them. Like the reformers, theorists were influenced by the social beliefs of the day, and their ideas reflected this. Early studies of female criminality, though varied, found common ground in the assumption that girls’ behavior was dictated by biological, hormonal, or genetic attributes (often conceptualized as weaknesses) that were believed to be unique to females. The most influential themes of early theories were the biolog-

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ical and psychological inferiority of females, girls’ sexuality as a main motivating factor toward delinquency, and the importance of females’ adopting the culturally acceptable feminine role. Stepping out of that role was in and of itself defined as delinquent behavior. It is important to note that the offenses for which girls came under correctional intervention were generally nonserious in nature; the overriding concern was guiding them toward appropriate moral and sexual behavior. This is one of the features of early responses to female juvenile delinquents that has had a long-lasting legacy on their treatment today. Using selfreported data from the youth themselves, delinquency researchers have highlighted and provided a critique of the juvenile justice system for operating under a double standard regarding the behavior of girls versus boys. Self-reported findings have suggested that girls and boys commit an equal number of status offenses (defined as violations only applicable to minors, such as running away, truancy, or violations of parental authority). However, girls are dramatically overrepresented for these offenses within the justice system, as seen in official statistics. As noted, these practices have been shaped by early responses to female delinquency that relied on sexist and stereotypical ideas about girls. Arguably, minor offenses like status offenses have since been considered part of the normal maturational process for many adolescents. However, it is girls who run a higher risk of being identified and punished for what is more often considered normal behavior in boys, a practice that clearly discriminates against girls. Moreover, feminist reviews of processing studies have found that girls have been treated as or more harshly for status offenses

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than boys. In some cases, girls were found to be treated more harshly for status offenses than boys were for criminal offenses (Belknap 1996). Several reasons have been offered to explain these current discrepancies in the treatment of girls and boys by the juvenile justice system. Consistent with the past, parents have been more likely to conform to gender-specific socialization patterns that require stricter standards of behavior for their daughters than their sons. Further, girls’ sexuality has been key in determining how they are dealt with by law enforcement and the courts. For example, when girls were charged, particularly with minor offenses, their sexual reputation and how well they conformed to gender stereotypes influenced their sentences (Lees 1989). Even in cases in which the offense was not sexual, females were more likely to be given gynecological exams to assess their sexual behavior, and this evidence was sometimes used to charge girls with additional offenses (Chesney-Lind 1973). Another way status offenses have had particular relevance for girls is through the criminalization of girls’ survival strategies. For example, abuse may cause girls to run away from home to escape an abusive environment, which may in turn lead them to incorporate survival strategies on the streets that include theft and prostitution. In fact, the juvenile justice system has often treated girls similarly whether they were the victims of sexual abuse or engaging in sexual behavior. The focus on these status, or noncriminal, offenses has served to entrench girls in the system by mandating harsh punishments for behaviors that are in reality minor in nature. Stereotypical thinking about girls is so deeply embedded in U.S. culture that even legislation designed to

counteract unequal treatment has failed to correct the problems outlined above. The “typical” female juvenile offender is a fourteen- to sixteen-year-old girl from an ethnic minority group, who is most likely a status offender living in poverty and instability with a family history of incarceration. In general, most juvenile offenses are minor. Girls make up approximately 26 percent of all juveniles arrested. Although the media portrays huge increases in violent offending by girls, it appears that any increases in girls’ arrests have been mirrored by increases in boys’ arrests—a fact that suggests more about changes in the behavior of all youths, or the processing of youths, rather than changes in the behavior of girls specifically. An examination of arrest trends in the United States for juveniles between 1958 and 1994 showed that although girls’ arrest rates have increased more than boys’, the arrest rates of girls for violent and serious crimes have not changed significantly (Chesney-Lind and Brown 1998). In fact, the proportion of girls arrested for the most serious crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter has been declining since 1985. These offenses made up approximately 6 percent of all arrests for girls in 1995. One of the most distinct differences between girls and boys in official arrest statistics was found in the status offense category of “running away,” which made up 20 percent of girls’ overall arrests and only 5 percent of boys’ (Belknap and Holsinger 1998). Although official statistics have led to the conclusion that females were more likely to be engaging in traditionally female crimes (e.g., status offenses and minor theft), self-reported studies have illuminated differential responses by the juvenile justice system based on gender.

Juvenile Delinquents First, self-reported studies have found no evidence supporting the contention that females are more involved in status offenses than males. In fact, their patterns of status offending, drug-related crimes, and less serious offenses were similar (Chesney-Lind and Shelden 1992). Self-reported studies have supported what is found in official statistics related to violent and serious offending. This area of offending represented the greatest difference between male and female delinquency patterns. The 1980s and 1990s have brought a marked turnaround in the amount of research on female juvenile delinquents. Not only has this research been more plentiful, but it has identified gender differences in pathways to offending that continue to be explored. These new research initiatives promise to provide a more accurate portrayal and investigation of girls’ delinquency etiology and experiences in the justice system. For instance, cycle of violence theories acknowledge the long-term consequences of childhood victimization (Widom 1989). It has been established that children who are physically harmed early in their lives are more likely than their nonabused counterparts to engage in juvenile delinquency, particularly delinquency that involves violence (Dodge, Bates, and Pettit 1990). Estimates of the rate of young women in the juvenile justice system who have been abused range from 40 to 73 percent (ChesneyLind and Shelden 1992). Although neglect and abuse are also important issues in the delinquency of boys, studies have shown that these problems within families are more common, start at an earlier age, and last longer for girls. Feminist perspectives offer a more sophisticated analysis of gender that includes a critique of how the structures

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of society and patriarchy have shaped the experiences of girls. Recently, feminist theorists have made significant advances in how female deviance is conceptualized and how pathways to crime often differ based on gender. Some of the issues explored include the differential socialization of girls and boys, different motivations for crime, differences in contexts of offending, and differences in opportunities for crime and delinquency based on gender. A feminist perspective also requires paying close attention to the interaction of gender and sex with race and social class. This perspective emphasizes theorizing that is rooted in the realities of girls’ lives, as opposed to stereotypical thinking. For example, feminists know that girls experience a double standard regarding sexual behavior, sexual objectification, and an expectation that they conform to the socially acceptable role for women. As mentioned, one new area of exploration regarding gender differences in offending is differences in the “context of offending.” This research suggests that, for example, a “typical” assault committed by a girl may look quite different than a “typical” assault committed by a boy. Initial research suggests there may be important gender differences in the level of seriousness, the role the offender played in the offense, the relationship between the victim and offender, the setting in which the offense took place, and the motivation or intent of the offense (Steffensmeier and Allan 1998). Research thus far has demonstrated that compared to males, females are less likely to inflict injury on their victims, more likely to hurt someone they know well, less likely to use weapons, and less likely to be on drugs when the offense was committed (Campbell 1986; Triplett and Myers

This fifteen-year-old juvenile delinquent was convicted of second-degree murder in New York for killing her grandmother in 1994. (Associated Press/Pool Times Herald Record)

Juvenile Delinquents 1995). Girls’ violence was also more likely to occur as a result of an interpersonal conflict with a relative or friend, whereas boys’ violence was more instrumental and lethal (Chesney-Lind and Brown 1998). One of the most common reasons females are incarcerated is their involvement with significant others who are committing a crime. So far, the research has shown the greater effects of relationships for girls that may result in pulling females into crime. Other gender differences are beginning to emerge as well. A review of literature on adolescent female development suggested that girls experience greater depression, more suicide attempts, and a decrease in self-concept during and after puberty, whereas young males experience improved self-concept and self-esteem. Self-injurious behavior is more common for girls than boys. Other findings suggest that girls, particularly in adolescence, perceive their relationships with their parents or guardians as more negative than boys. Indeed, this perception is strong enough to warrant more girls acting on the situation and running away. In addition, girls frequently have relationships with older boys and men and consequently have a unique vulnerability to involvement in the justice system as a result of these relationships. In the area of substance use, many more girls than boys reported being addicted and experiencing withdrawal symptoms. Girls reported greater use of over-the-counter and prescription drugs, as well as younger initial use of crack and cocaine. Girls were more likely to report starting to use because of a boyfriend or because of depression, which is consistent with findings that girls use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate (Holsinger 1999).

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With these newer, more gender-specific explanations of delinquency comes a prescription for change in which research informs policy and is used to improve the treatment of incarcerated girls. The correctional system has generally been developed for boys and is therefore less responsive to the unique needs of girls. Facilities serving girls are less likely to provide treatment for physical health problems, disruptive or violent behavior, mental health problems, and programs for sexual victimization than those serving boys. Facilities for girls also provided less aftercare, shorter programs, and fewer certified teachers on staff (KempfLeonard, Peterson, and Sample 1997). Similarly, another study found that girls received half as many treatment services as boys, had to wait longer for treatment services, and were offered services that were less intensive and of shorter duration than the programs provided for males and were “unisex” instead of “gender-specific” (Wells 1994). Some of the important needs of girls that have typically been ignored by the correctional system include issues of adequate medical care, substance abuse treatment, pregnancy and dependent children, mental health care, and a history of sexual and physical abuse. Clare Feinman (1984) has argued that attempts to provide effective and helpful responses to girls will continue to fail as long as they are based on stereotypical gender roles rather than on the unique needs of the female population. Although girls and boys have some of the same problems, there are many that have unique application to girls “in a gendered society” (Chesney-Lind and Shelden 1992). Fortunately, there is a growing movement that seeks to provide more equitable treatment for girls in the juve-

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nile justice system, although much more work needs to be done. Kristi Holsinger See also Female Sexuality; Girl Gangs; Graffiti; Movies, Adolescent Girls in; Substance Abuse References and Further Reading Belknap, Joanne. 1996. The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice. Cincinnati: Wadsworth Publishing. Belknap, Joanne, and Kristi Holsinger. 1998. “An Overview of Delinquent Girls: How Theory and Practice Have Failed and the Need for Innovative Changes.” Pp. 31–64 in Female Crime and Delinquency: Critical Perspectives and Effective Interventions. Edited by Ruth T. Zaplin. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers. Campbell, Anne. 1986. “Self-Report of Fighting by Females.” British Journal of Criminology 26, no. 1: 28–46. Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1973. “Judicial Enforcement of the Female Sex Role: The Family Court and the Female Delinquent.” Issues in Criminology 8, no. 2: 51–69. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Marilyn Brown. 1998. “Girls and Violence: An Overview.” Pp. 171–200 in Youth Violence: Prevention, Intervention, and Social Policy. Edited by Daniel J. Flannery and C. Ronald Huff. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Randall G. Shelden. 1992. Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Dodge, Kenneth A., John E. Bates, and Gregory S. Pettit. 1990. “Mechanisms

in the Cycle of Violence.” Science 250: 1678–1683. Feinman, Claire. 1984. “An Historical Overview of the Treatment of Incarcerated Women: Myths and Realities of Rehabilitation.” The Prison Journal 63: 12–26. Holsinger, Kristi. 1999. “Addressing the Distinct Experience of the Adolescent Female: Explaining Delinquency and Examining the Juvenile Justice System.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan Dissertation Service. Kempf-Leonard, Kimberly, Elicka S. L. Peterson, and Lisa L. Sample. 1997. Gender and Juvenile Justice in Missouri. Jefferson City: Missouri Department of Public Safety. Lees, Sue. 1989. “Learning to Love: Sexual Reputation, Morality and the Social Control of Girls.” In Growing Up Good: Policing the Behavior of Girls in Europe. Edited by Maureen Cain. London: Sage. Steffensmeier, Darrell, and Emlie Allan. 1998. “The Nature of Female Offending: Patterns and Explanation.” Pp. 5–29 in Female Crime and Delinquency: Critical Perspectives and Effective Interventions. Edited by Ruth T. Zaplin. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers. Triplett, Ruth, and Laura B. Myers. 1995. “Evaluating Contextual Patterns of Delinquency: Gender-Based Differences.” Justice Quarterly 12, no. 1: 59–84. Wells, Ruth Herman. 1994. “America’s Delinquent Daughters Have Nowhere to Turn for Help.” Corrections Compendium 19, no. 11: 4–6. Widom, Cathy Spatz. 1989. “The Cycle of Violence.” Science 244: 160–166.

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rites, the ritual varied from an individual vision quest to a ceremony attended by dozens of friends and family and held in the family’s home. The kinaaldá belongs to this second category of ceremony. Many anthropologists argue that the kinaaldá and other puberty rites for girls arose to serve three important functions: announce that a girl was eligible for marriage, protect the community from the dangers of a menstruating girl by secluding her, and initiate a girl into the responsibilities of being an adult. In addition, it should be noted that the two major Indian tribes today that have public ceremonies are the Apache and the Navajo. Both of these tribes traditionally had matrilocal residence rules and matrilineal kinship patterns. Thus there seems to be some connection between a history of maternal dominance of kinship and residence patterns and the presence of public ceremonies for girls. Perhaps a ritual is needed to mark a transition in status, since in respect to her residence, a girl essentially remains at home, living near her female kin. Anthropologist Judith Brown (1963) adds that the greater a woman’s contribution to economic subsistence, the more likely her society will mark her passage from girlhood to adulthood. A girl in a matrilineal society, it is argued, needed to be prepared to assume her responsibilities in a female work group and was valued

A puberty rite for an individual girl, rather than a group ceremony, the kinaaldá occurs soon after the Navajo girl’s first menstruation and traditionally lasts for five days and four nights. Except for some Hispanic girls who have a quinceañera on their fifteenth birthday or Jewish girls who are eligible for a bat mitzvah at twelve, very few adolescent girls in the contemporary United States undergo a puberty rite. Thus the Navajo are unusual in the attention they devote to a girl’s first menstruation. Many cultural critics insist that adolescents might benefit greatly from the special recognition such rites afford. Because puberty rites are so uncommon in the modern-day United States, anthropologists have gone to considerable length to explain why they do appear. It should not be assumed that all Indian tribes had puberty rites. First of all, there is the difficulty of defining exactly what one is—or was. Many Indian tribes practiced seclusion of menstruating women at the time of puberty, which appears to have arisen from fears of the polluting effect of women’s menstrual blood. Menstrual blood was associated with spiritual power and had to be treated with care in order that a community survive and not fall victim to famine or devastating losses from war. Among those tribes that had puberty

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Silver Horizons by Nelson Tsosie. (AINACO/Corbis, 1996)

more highly in a culture in which adult and older women had considerable power. Advocates of puberty rites for girls insist that they provide a highly positive recognition of a girl’s body and potential to be a mother. Indeed, to the Navajo, a girl’s first menstruation was sacred and a cause for rejoicing, since it showed that she was ready to bear children. Closer examination of Navajo attitudes reveals, however, that the Navajo once segregated menstruating girls in separate huts, had powerful taboos limiting the activities a menstruating girl could undertake, and also frowned on telling boys that a girl was menstruating for the first time. To be sure, there is much evidence of respect for womanhood and motherhood in Navajo culture, as one might expect

among a people who worshipped several female spiritual powers. Even so, the ritual, although respectful of women’s ability to bear children, was intended to train a girl in her traditional female responsibilities and prepare her for marriage and motherhood. It is best to think of the kinaaldá not as a girl’s ritual but as a religious ritual in a religion that regarded women highly. The Navajo made no distinction between secular and religious—all life-sustaining activities demanded religious ceremony. Moreover, Navajo religion can be defined less as a unified system of doctrine and more as a series of ceremonial practices intended to uphold central beliefs. The audience looking for affirmation of its beliefs included not only kin but also

Kinaaldá spiritual beings who were dwelling in the midst of the living. Among Navajo spiritual beliefs the most important was the love of beauty, more liberally translated as the love of peace, harmony, and all that is good. A long list of rituals (called “Blessingway” ceremonies) were thought to express and realize this ideal of beauty. Of the many Blessingway ceremonies, from a wedding to the blessing of a house to the blessing of seeds, the kinaaldá was considered the most important. The Navajo girl does not undergo any special advance preparation for the kinaaldá. Despite the importance of the mother-child bond and the common pattern of married women residing near the mother’s kin group, the mother has no special role in the kinaaldá, either. Instead, there are two major roles for adults in the ceremony, one for an adult woman who acts as an instructor of the girl and the other for a lead singer at the all-night ritual of song and prayer on the last evening of the kinaaldá. An older woman, chosen to be the girl’s lifetime companion and instructor, is selected to “mold” the girl’s body because she has the physical strength and beauty to do it. The older woman sings sacred songs, washes and combs the girl’s hair, and massages the girl’s body. The girl’s body is seen as pliable, similar to an infant’s at birth. For that reason, her body can be reshaped so that it will be perfect and womanly, like that of Changing Woman. The other significant adult participant is the lead singer, the closest thing to a priest among the Navajo, who conducts religious rituals. The lead singer can be male or female, although males generally predominate. On the last night a lead singer directs the kinaaldá as well as the assembled group in the singing of special a cappella songs sung only at Blessingway ceremonies.

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All puberty rites involve transformation of the youth into an adult, but in kinaaldá the girl is thought of as transformed not just into a woman but into Changing Woman, a central Navajo spiritual power of goodness who created the Navajo people. According to traditional teachings, Changing Woman had no parents but was raised in the hogan of the First Man and First Woman. As she grew up, she brought to the earth the single most valuable crop, corn, and gave fertility to women. Changing Woman had the first kinaaldá—presided over by Talking God. In repeating the same ritual Changing Woman underwent, it is thought that the female initiate takes on the qualities of goodness possessed by Changing Woman. Moreover, just as Changing Woman was fruitful (she mated with the Sun), so, too, a Navajo girl is seen as becoming able to have children not from her ability to menstruate but from having undergone the ritual of kinaaldá. After the ritual is completed, the girl acquires protection from misfortune and a guarantee of health and prosperity. Despite a lack of standardization of the ritual or a written script, the kinaaldá has many standard elements, repetitive actions, and a standard costume. For a kinaaldá the girl wears an overblouse and skirt, a special sash and concho belt, and silver jewelry and turquoise beads. As part of the ritual the girl is secluded in her clan’s hogan (originally a conical structure built out of mud and large sticks and later a multisided and sturdier log and mud house), where she takes instruction from an older woman in grinding corn. Since corn was the basic food of the Navajo, the girl was being taught through repetition so she would know how to make a meal effortlessly. The girl must leave the hogan and run

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clockwise three times a day for four days as a symbolic effort to chase the rising sun. After trying to catch the sun, she turns and runs back to the hogan. In an outdoor pit, she bakes an offering to the sun, a ceremonial cornmeal cake. The cake is served to the assembled community on the last morning of the kinaaldá. The origin of the kinaaldá probably dates from 1650 to 1775, when the Navajo first became agriculturalists (Johnson Frisbie 1967, 9). Most crops were planted and tilled by female work groups, although the women might be assisted by men. Moreover, in the Southwest the Navajo came into contact with and were influenced by the Hopi and other southwestern Indian tribes. From the Hopi they borrowed the idea of making baked cornmeal into a ceremonial element. The costume of the kinaaldá, including the silver jewelry, reflects the impact of Navajo contact with the Spanish in the 1600s. The Spanish taught the Navajo blacksmithing, which the Navajo adapted in making silver jewelry. Beginning in the nineteenth century, missionaries and teachers at boarding schools for Indians were largely successful in their efforts to stamp out coming-of-age ceremonies that had a decidedly sexual nature. Rites to initiate boys into secret societies were lost, as were vision quests of boys and sometimes girls sent to the wilderness to find a guardian’s spirit. Moreover, missionaries and white teachers often sought to replace Indian rites with Christian ceremonies and encouraged speaking English at the expense of learning the native language. Many children were sent to schools far away from the reservations. Among some Navajo the kinaaldá must occur at the time of first menstruation; it cannot be postponed.

Because so many girls were away at boarding school, it was impossible for them to have a kinaaldá. The general assimilationist thrust in U.S. government policy also contributed to the decline of interest in Indian ritual. As a result, kinaaldá became rare by the 1940s and 1950s. Many girls openly refused to have one because they perceived it as hard work and resented having to wear “hot clothes and heavy jewelries” (Johnson Frisbie 1967, 28). In addition, quite a few elders had forgotten how to perform them. The kinaaldá was rediscovered in the 1960s as younger Indians became more militant, grew more interested in their history and culture, and sought to revive cultural rituals that had fallen into disuse. As the largest Indian tribe, the Navajo had more elders who still had some memory of kinaaldá. Moreover, some teachers at community-controlled schools and community colleges established in the 1960s on or near the reservation sought to devise a school curriculum that included the teaching of long-lost ritual. Schools on the reservation began to teach the Navajo language and culture and used federal funding to publish guides on how to stage a kinaaldá. As the ritual was revived in the 1960s, it was shortened (from five days to two) so as to be compatible with the girls’ school schedule. The number of times a girl had to run was reduced to twice a day. There used to be two kinaaldá, the second one a virtual repetition of the first, held when the girl menstruated for the second time. The second kinaaldá has disappeared in part because many modern teenage girls refuse to admit when they menstruate the second time so that they do not have to undergo the second ceremony. Thus, the ritual has been streamlined to accord with the

Kinaaldá unwillingness of modern teenage girls to undergo too strenuous an ordeal. Although it is possible for a girl to have a kinaaldá in a city or town, most occur on the Navajo reservation, located in the region surrounding the Four Corners where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. For urban Navajos, having a kinaaldá means returning to the reservation where relatives, perhaps elderly grandparents, still live. Many girls postpone their kinaaldá until school summer vacation. Most hogans on the reservation are now used for ceremonial purposes rather than as dwelling units. The kinaaldá no longer announces availability for marriage, as it did as late as the 1940s, but instead serves as a symbol of a girl’s interest in her Indian identity. There is more information about the history and evolution of the kinaaldá than any other Indian female puberty rite

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because it has been described by so many anthropologists. Elizabeth Pleck See also Bat Mitzvah; Menstruation; Native American Girls; La Quinceañera References and Further Reading Begay, Shirley M. 1983. Kinaalda: A Navajo Puberty Ceremony. Rough Rock, AZ: Navajo Curriculum Center, Rough Rock Demonstration School. Brown, Judith K. 1963. “A Cross-Cultural Study of Female Initiation Rites.” American Anthropologist 65: 837–853. Johnson Frisbie, Charlotte. 1967. Kinaaldá: A Study of the Navaho Girl’s Puberty Ceremony. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Keith, Anne. 1964. “The Navaho Girl’s Puberty Ceremony.” E1 Palacio 71: 27–36. Lincoln, Bruce. 1981. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 17–33.

L Latina Girls

Demographic Overview of U.S. Latinos The U.S. Census Bureau counted 22 million Latinos in 1990 and predicted that the Latino population will double in size by the year 2020 to number approximately 43 million people. Latinos are the youngest ethnic group in the United States. With a median age of 26.2, they are nearly ten years younger than their nonLatino counterparts. At the current rate of growth, Latinos are expected to comprise 24.5 percent of the U.S. population in 2020, making them the largest ethnic minority population and almost half the size of the non-Latino white population (Kanellos 1997, 187). Immigration and high birth rates together contribute to the rapid growth of the Latino population. In 1996 alone, over 300,000 people from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean immigrated to the United States. Yet even without immigration, Latinos would remain the fastest-growing ethnic population because they are younger and have higher fertility rates than other groups. On average, Latina women bear children at a younger age than their non-Latina counterparts. Latina mothers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four have 43 percent more children than non-Latinas of the same age. They continue to have

Latino is an umbrella term used to describe racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse ethnic groups from Latin American countries. Politically, Latino can serve as a useful term to unite such diverse groups for a common political agenda. Although the term Latina girls is not used in the political sense, it stresses the common experiences that Latina girls may have with one another as girls who live in a bilingual, bicultural world. Latino parents may have particular gendered expectations of their Latina daughters that are rooted in their cultures. For firstgeneration daughters, Latina girls may assume more responsibility within their families during the resettlement process in the United States. Advertisers have also begun to see Latina girls as an important segment of the consumer market. More commonly, however, if the media turns their attention to Latina girls, it is to portray them as teenage mothers. Beginning with civil rights movements in the 1960s, Latinas have become more successful in turning to sites of countercultural productions such as art, film, and literature to produce empowering images of Latinas. Studying Latina girlhood helps us understand how race is a central concept in the experience of girlhood, along with class and sexuality.

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A Latina girl in Harlem, New York. (David Turnley/Corbis)

more children throughout their childbearing years (Kanellos 1997, 187). Invisible Family Workers Although researchers have long understood that the presence of children in migrant households greatly influences parents’ immigration and settlement strategies, only recently have they begun to recognize first- and second-generation children as active participants in the family settlement processes. Latino immigrant children and especially girls perform the mundane but essential labor that makes permanent settlement possible. As “invisible family workers”— babysitters, surrogate parents, part-time employees, housecleaners, errand runners, caretakers, translators, and family protectors and advocates—Latina daugh-

ters work to maintain the material and emotional well-being of their families. Although often overlooked in contemporary debates on poverty and immigration, Latina girls work to ensure the survival of Latino families in the United States. In order to understand how Latina girls fit into their families and their multiple cultures, we must look at the history of immigration and why their diverse families chose to migrate to the United States. Mexican Americans’ roots in the United States date back to before 1848, when the Southwest still belonged to Mexico. Single Mexican men emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to obtain seasonal employment. By the 1920s, more Mexican families began to migrate to the United States. Studies of early-twentieth-

Latina Girls century Mexican immigrants often tackle the issue of assimilation. Within these studies, examinations of Mexican girls deal with the theme of how issues of assimilation caused conflict between themselves and their parents. Parents lamented that as their daughters assimilated into American culture, they lost important values from their own culture (Monroy 1999). Many of these conflicts arose over issues of proper gender roles and parents’ efforts to guard their daughters’ sexuality. Parents viewed American popular culture as negatively affecting their daughters. Bobbed hair, red lipstick, and short skirts were often seen as the result of Americanization (Ruiz 1999). Yet Mexican film stars such as Dolores Del Rio and Lupe Velez were prominent figures, along with Clara Bow. Mexican daughters’ position within the family also changed as they engaged in wage labor. As wage earners, many Mexican daughters contributed to the family income. Some young women were able to keep some of their paycheck and exert some economic independence. When young women exerted too much independence, as in the case of leaving home and moving in with a boyfriend, parents sometimes called in the police to bring their minor daughters back home (Odem 1995). Politics and economics have been central to understanding the reasons behind Puerto Rican migration to the United States. Beginning in the early twentieth century, many Puerto Ricans moved to the mainland in search of employment. Puerto Ricans more easily migrated to the United States after 1917 when the United States extended citizenship to Puerto Ricans by making the island a U.S. commonwealth (Sánchez-Korrol 1994). Many of the second-generation

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Puerto Ricans who live in New York refer to themselves as “Nuyoricans.” From 1948 to 1965, under “Operation Bootstrap,” Puerto Rico underwent rapid industrialization and offered tax incentives and cheap labor to U.S. companies in an effort to attract them to the island. At the same time, many Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States in search of employment, a trend that continues today (Rodriguez 1989). Women are important actors in shaping family and community for Puerto Ricans, especially on the mainland. A large percentage of Puerto Rican women are employed, and many families are headed by single women. Although Cubans can claim a longer history in the United States, large-scale Cuban immigration only occurred after 1959. Unlike Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, Cubans migrated as political refugees after the Cuban revolution in 1959, largely settling in Florida. A second large wave of Cuban immigration occurred in the 1980s. In a migration sanctioned by Fidel Castro, an estimated 10,000 Cubans left Cuba through the Mariel Harbor, and hence the refugees were known as Marielitos. Although the first wave of Cuban immigrants were mainly upper- and middle-class educated Cubans, the Marielitos were workingclass and comprised more blacks and mulattoes. Many Cuban families remain very traditional, upholding ideals such as male authority in the family. However, women also play a strong role in the workforce. Cuban women have a higher rate of workforce participation than any other Latino group or Anglo women. The passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 radically transformed immigration flows from Latin America and the Caribbean. This

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landmark legislation eradicated national origins quotas, which had favored applicants from western Europe. Congress instead established family reunification, refugee status, and human capital and labor skills as preferred categories for admission into the United States. After 1965, increased opportunities to migrate combined with economic and political turmoil led to a sharply increased immigration from the Dominican Republic, Central America, and Mexico. Women and children today comprise more than half of international migrants overall (Pedraza-Bailey 1991). Gender and family formation is key to understanding contemporary Latino immigration and settlement processes. Not only do gender and familial ties influence decisions to immigrate, but also they differentially shape immigrants’ settlement strategies and outcomes (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). In particular, the presence of children is an important factor influencing parental decisions to migrate and later decisions to remain in the United States. Research on undocumented Mexican immigration, for example, has shown that family formation is the first step in a lengthy process that leads to permanent settlement (Chavez 1991). Families composed of undocumented parents and U.S. citizen children often become binational, moving between the United States and their home country in coordination with employment cycles, school calendars, and holidays. Regardless of citizenship status, cyclical migration and binationalism are definitive characteristics of the family lives of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and most recently Central American and Dominican immigrants. Here again, the presence of children greatly influences decisions to migrate back and forth, as parents express

geographically conflicted desires for their children to receive formal schooling in the United States and to maintain close ties to the culture and language of their homeland. Within this context, binationalism also serves as a popular parental strategy to discipline “rebellious” Americanized daughters by entrusting them temporarily to the watchful eye and “traditional” influence of grandparents and other relatives back home. Recent research on children in Latino immigrant households shows that girls contribute to family settlement and survival in several significant ways. First, they contribute monetarily by taking on full- or part-time employment; by assisting their parents in their work for little or no pay; and by performing unpaid labor at home such as child care, cleaning and cooking, and attending to sick relatives. Contrary to the prevailing view that children have become economically “useless” in postindustrial American society, demographic data suggest that working youth are essential to the economic survival of Latino households. Since the 1970s, declining real wages and the growth of part-time employment have increased the percentage of working poor in the United States, especially among Latinos, necessitating the growth of multiple-worker households. Income and economic class is perhaps the starkest marker of diversity among Latinos. Relatively high levels of education, occupational status, and income reflect the middle-class status of the Cubans who migrated to the United States in the early 1960s. In contrast, both Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans are overwhelmingly workingclass populations with the lowest high school graduation rates of any U.S.-born ethnic group. Of these three groups,

Latina Girls Cubans have the highest average family income at $33,144 and Puerto Ricans have the lowest at $25,066 (Kanellos 1997, 388). Even more striking is a comparison of poverty rates. In 1998, approximately 26.7 percent of all Puerto Ricans and 24.4 percent of all Mexican Americans lived in poverty, compared to only 11 percent of Cuban American families (Ramirez 2000). In that same year, 34.4 percent of Latino children under the age of eighteen were living in poverty, compared to 10.6 percent of non-Latino white children. Although Latino children represent only 15.7 percent of all children in the United States, they make up over one-fourth of all children in poverty (Ramirez 2000). In 1990, Latino youth were more likely to be employed year-round than white and black youths. Largely concentrated in low-wage service and manufacturing jobs, Latino youth also earn the lowest wages of all racial groups. In 1990, the median weekly earnings for full-time male workers ages sixteen to twenty-four were $238 for white males, $255 for blacks, and $238 for Latinos. Among female youths, the earnings were $250 for whites and $225 for blacks and Latinas (Kanellos 1997, 386). Although U.S. census data show that, as with all groups, Latino male youths are more likely to be employed than females, research on firstand second-generation Mexican immigrant households in Los Angeles suggests an opposite trend in which adolescent girls have higher employment rates than boys (Valenzuela 1998). In addition to paid work outside the home, Mexican American girls are significantly more likely than boys to perform unpaid domestic labor in their households. They are also more likely to assist their parents in complex financial transactions such as

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purchasing a home or automobile and filing tax returns. Similar findings are borne out in research on Puerto Rican and Dominican low-income families, which shows that, as with their white and black counterparts, Latina daughters perform the “girl’s work” that is essential to the family economy among poor people in the United States (Dodson 1998). The girls in this Boston-based study reported responsibility for up to thirty hours per week of unpaid domestic labor, including caring for younger siblings and elderly or sick relatives, cooking and doing laundry, and shopping and running errands while their parents were at work. In households where parents worked two jobs to make ends meet, Latina girls as young as six or seven years old frequently became “surrogate parents,” assuming primary responsibility for newborn babies and for caring for and raising younger siblings and cousins. Research on low-income Latino households similarly points to the significant role that girls play as mediators and emotional caretakers in daily family life. In first-generation immigrant households, Latina daughters serve as the bridge between their Spanish-speaking homes and state institutions like public schools, medical clinics, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and welfare offices. This involves not merely translating but learning to operate within complicated and often hostile institutional structures and to advocate for their parents and household in gaining access to public services and to their basic rights as workers and residents (Valenzuela 1998). In both immigrant and nonimmigrant households, Latina daughters also perform the very difficult emotional labor of “holding off the chaos” that often accompanies family life under the

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dual pressures of poverty and racism. Whether intervening in parental substance abuse, defending their mothers against domestic violence, or acting as a protector or confidante to a single parent, Latina girls learn at an early age to navigate through the world of adult problems and to assume responsibility for keeping their families safe and intact. Latina Sexualities As Latina girls in the United States, many girls live in bicultural, bilingual worlds. They may read Judy Blume books and listen to hip-hop but also watch novelas (soap operas) at night with their families. Because of the effects of globalization, transnationalism, and immigrant networks, Latina girls often experience American culture even before their families migrate to the United States (Rouse 1992). The shared experience of living in a bicultural world connects many Latina girls to Latina actors and singers, such as Tejana singer Selena (who herself did not learn Spanish until she began to perform for Mexican audiences). Latina girls often express their empowerment through their identification with other Latinas who are portrayed positively in the media. During the 1980s, advertisers started targeting Latinos as a rapidly growing consumer market. Advertisers soon recognized the purchasing power of Latina girls. Latina teenagers, for example, purchase twice as many beauty products as other girls in their age group (Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1999). Consumer goods directed at Latina girls often emphasize their position as hyphenated Americans. Although magazines directed at teenagers are not a new trend, a growing niche within this category now caters to Latina girls. Such magazines as Latin Girl cover wide-ranging topics, from sug-

gesting makeup products flattering to Latinas to topics Latina girls would presumably find interesting. Even Latina Magazine’s slogan, “When you miss Latina, you miss you” suggests that within the pages of this magazine Latinas can find images that reflect themselves and their needs. Yet since Latinas are physically and culturally heterogeneous, this often proves a formidable task. Many of the stories in these magazines focus on relationships between parents and daughters and especially issues of sexuality. Sexuality has historically been a central issue in constructions of what it means to be Latina. Within various Latin American cultures, girls often grow up with their understanding of sexuality framed by the dichotomous symbols of virgin and whore. Many Latina girls themselves internalize these culturally rooted stigmas and therefore consider girls who use birth control promiscuous. Latinas have stereotypically been labeled as irresponsible “breeders.” These types of generalizations encouraged U.S. medical doctors to disburse experimental birth control pills to Puerto Rican women. During the 1960s, fueled by fears of a population explosion, the United States targeted Puerto Rican women in a massive sterilization campaign in which one in every three women on the island was sterilized, oftentimes without their knowledge. The sterilization procedure became so commonplace that Puerto Ricans simply referred to it as la operación. Similarly, in the 1970s, a group of Chicanas and Mexicanas sued Los Angeles County General Hospital for performing sterilizations without their consent or against their will (Velez-Ibanez 1980). Today similar controversy surrounds the disproportionate distribution of new birth control methods such as Norplant

Latina Girls to Latina and African American teenagers through community clinics. The dominant U.S. culture often stereotypes Latinas as hypersexual. Most news stories about Latinas focus on their lives as teenage mothers. Latinas and girls across ethnic lines who come into contact with the juvenile justice system often receive harsher punishments than boys for what juvenile officials consider excessive sexuality (Chesney-Lind 1997). Some argue that girls who come into contact with the court system are penalized for what some construct as their illicit sexuality. Even more taboo than heterosexuality is homosexuality. Authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Amelia Mesa-Baines, and Carla Trujillo have helped bring discussions of sexuality and lesbian experiences in Latino communities into the open, although they are still charged subjects for many. These authors discuss how as Latina lesbians, they challenge every aspect of prescribed gender roles for Latinas. Coming-of-Age Narratives Beginning with the 1885 publication of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, the coming-of-age narrative (or bildungsroman) has been a benchmark of Latina fiction and autobiography. Ruiz de Burton’s novel masterfully deploys the genre of the historical romance, as told through the tragic coming-of-age story of a young female protagonist, to pose a biting critique of Anglo racism, hypocrisy, and corruption in the years following the U.S. conquest of the Southwest. Nearly a century later, similar themes are powerfully articulated in the writing of New Mexican folklorist Cleofas Martinez Jamarillo. Most notable among Jamarillo’s extensive list of publications is her 1955 autobiography,

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Romance of a Little Village Girl (1955), which describes the brutal rape and murder of her seventeen-year-old daughter. Along with other Mexican American women writing during the period immediately after World War II—including A Miracle for Mexico and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert in We Fed Them Cactus (1954)—Jamarillo’s work reappropriates the pastoral style of the family memoir to dramatize the link between U.S. expansionism and sexual violence directed against Mexican American girls and women. These early works set the stage for the explosion of and new directions in Chicana literature during the 1980s and 1990s. Authors like Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo shift the geographic and cultural discourse of Mexican American fiction through their stories and poems about young Mexican American girls growing up in the urban barrios of the Midwest. In her semiautobiographical The House on Mango Street (1985), Cisneros interweaves the life story of her preadolescent narrator, Esperanza, with the broader sociopolitical reality of Chicago’s Mexican American community. Mary Helen Ponce’s autobiography, Hoyt Street (1993), recounts similar memories of growing up as a Mexican American girl in the Pacoima barrio of northeastern Los Angeles. Immigration is another theme developed in the writings of contemporary Chicana authors. Most notably Helena Maria Viramontes’s work, including The Moths and Other Stories (1995) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1996), dramatizes the experiences of undocumented Mexican families who migrate in search of seasonal agricultural employment. Immigration also figures prominently in coming-of-age narratives written by Puerto Rican women. Most prolific

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among these authors is Nicholasa Mohr, a second-generation Puerto Rican, or Nuyorican, who was born in New York City’s El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) to Puerto Rican immigrant parents. Among the first mainland Puerto Rican authors to publish in English, Mohr has documented the history of Nuyorican community formation in Spanish Harlem since World War II. Her first novel, Nilda (1973), is a series of vignettes about Puerto Rican girlhood in El Barrio. Mohr has also published many semiautobiographical works, including El Bronx Remembered (1975) and three books for juvenile readers, In Nueva York (1977), Felita (1979), and Going Home (1986). Mohr’s writings testify to the presence of strong women in Puerto Rican community life and to the marginalization of Puerto Rican families in New York City schools, welfare offices, and public hospitals. Another prolific Nuyorican writer is poet Sandra Maria Esteves. Her first publication, Yerba Buena (1980), explores the themes of self, community, and culture in a collection of poems about growing up Puerto Rican in the Bronx. As in her later publications, Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour (1984) and Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1992), Esteves’s poetry constructs a bilingual, bicultural notion of Puerto Rican identity. A similar portrait of Puerto Rican identity is developed in the writing of Judith Ortiz Cofer. Following three acclaimed books of poetry, Ortiz Cofer’s first novel, The Line of the Sun (1989), portrays the migration from a Puerto Rican village to a multiethnic, working-class neighborhood in New Jersey. The success of this novel led Ortiz Cofer to publish her personal memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), a collection of vignettes and poems about her

childhood experiences shuttling back and forth between Puerto Rico and New Jersey. Other Puerto Rican women writers have also recently published coming-ofage memoirs. First published in Spanish in 1986, Magali Garcia Ramos’s Happy Days, Uncle Sergio (English translation, 1995), recounts a middle-class girlhood in 1950s Puerto Rico, set against the panorama of suburbanization and everincreasing U.S. influence on island politics and culture. Esmeralda Santiago’s autobiography, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), tells of her family’s struggles to overcome poverty in Puerto Rico and later to adjust to the adversity of immigrant life in Brooklyn. The coming-of-age experiences of Latina girls in the United States figure prominently in the work of Cuban American playwright and screenwriter Dolores Prida. Beginning with her first play, Beautiful Senoritas (1977), Prida’s work has been produced in the United States, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. In Coser y cantar (Sewing and Singing, 1981) Prida created a bilingual text that reflects on the difficulties of growing up Latina in the United States. Botanica, which debuted in the Spanish Repertory Theater in 1990, develops these themes through its portrayal of intergenerational conflict within a family of Puerto Rican women in New York City. Prida has had more than twenty plays produced and has published several poetry collections, including Treinta y un poemas (Thirty-one Poems, 1967) and Women of the Hour (1971). Achy Obejas is part of a younger generation of Cuban American women writers who reflect on their childhood within the exile Cuban community in the United States. In her collection of short stories,

Latina Girls We Came All the Way from Cuba So That You Could Dress Like This? (1994), Obejas relates her experiences of growing up in two cultures and two languages and of her sexual awakening as a lesbian. The conflict that young Cuban American girls experience between their own emerging sense of self and their parents’ cultural norms and expectations is similarly explored in Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (1993). The novel’s youngest protagonist is a teenage daughter of Cuban exile parents who, in a struggle to find an identity as a young artist in New York City, must imaginatively travel back to Cuba and bridge the emotional and political divide that has split her family in two. Another notable contributor to Latina coming-of-age narratives is Dominicanborn author Julia Alvarez. In her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Alvarez tells the story of the Garcia family, uprooted by the Trujillo dictatorship from their middle-class family life in the Dominican Republic to seek exile in suburban New York in the 1960s. As the four teenage Garcia sisters struggle for acceptance into American suburban culture, by straightening their hair, forgetting their Spanish, and dating boys unchaperoned, they come to realize that their new “American” identities are irrevocably tied to the island they left behind. Alvarez’s semiautobiographical novel Yo (1997) presents a similarly complicated portrait of migration, acculturation, and Dominican-American girl- and womanhood. Natalia Molina and Alejandra Marchevsky See also Chicana Girls; Female Sexuality; Immigration; La Quinceañera; Work

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References and Further Reading Aparicio, Frances R., and Susana ChavezSilverman. 1997. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Chavez, Leo. 1991. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1997. The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dodson, Lisa. 1998. Don’t Call Us out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America. Boston: Beacon Press. Hagan, Jacqueline Maria. 1994. Deciding to Be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horno-Delgado, Asuncion, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, eds. 1989. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. 1997. The Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States. Detroit: Gale Press. Mahler, Sara J. 1995. American Dreaming: Life on the Margins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Monroy, Douglas. 1999. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oboler, Suzanne. 1995. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Odem, Mary E. 1995. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pedraza-Bailey, Sylvia. 1991. “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender.” Annual Review of Sociology 17: 303–325. Perez Firmat, Gustavo. 1994. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Ramirez, Roberto R. 2000. “The Hispanic Population in the United States.” In Current Population Reports March 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. 1995. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Rodriguez, Clara. 1989. Puerto Ricans: Born in the U.S.A. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Romero, Mary, Pierette HondagneuSotelo, and Vilma Ortiz, eds. 1997. Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S. New York: Routledge. Rouse, Roger. 1992. “Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle, and Transnationalism among Mexican Migrants in the United States.” In Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Edited by Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. New York: Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 645. Ruiz, Vicki L. 1999. From out of the Shadows: Mexican American Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Sánchez, George. 1990. “‘Go after the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929.” In A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History. Edited by Ellen DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz. New York: Routledge. Sánchez-Korrol, Virginia. 1994. From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suarez-Orozco, Carola, and Marcelo Suarez-Orzoco. 1995. Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation among Latino Adolescents. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Valenzuela, Abel. 1998. “Gender Roles and Settlement Activities among Children and Their Immigrant Families.” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 4: 720–742.

Velez-Ibanez, Carlos. 1980. “Se me acabo la canción: An Ethnography of NonConsenting Sterilizations among Mexican Women in Los Angeles.” In Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present. Edited by Magdelena Mora and Adelaida Del Castillo. Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center UCLA.

Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls Learning disabilities is one of the least understood diagnostic terms used in educational circles today. Because 10–15 percent of the U.S. population have been labeled “learning-disabled” and 80 percent of the learning disabled population have a reading disorder, most of the research has centered on reading problems rather than on general learning disabilities. The study of learning disabilities began around 1900 and focused on brain research until about 1930, when clinical study of the child became more important. From 1960 to 1980, legislative support for funding remedial programs increased, and rapid expansion of school programs occurred. During most of the twentieth century, educators and psychologists have assumed that reading disorders strike mostly boys and that females are consistently superior to males in all reading skills. Research has only recently begun to question these assumptions and to examine gender differences in reading disorders. Some researchers have questioned whether there really are more boys than girls with reading disorders, citing the possibility that more boys are identified. Most of the previous research has been done with children who have been identified by their schools as having reading

Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls problems. Boys are more likely to receive special education and account for 80 percent of those being treated at reading clinics. These disproportionate statistics were investigated by Sally Shaywitz, codirector of the Center for the Study of Learning and Attention Disorders, and her colleagues at Yale University. They followed almost 500 Connecticut children from kindergarten through third grade and found that the schools identified more than four times as many boys as girls for diagnosis and treatment. However, when the research team independently tested the children, they found that equal numbers of boys and girls in both grades had reading difficulties. Other studies have corroborated that the disorder occurs at equal rates in males and females when careful diagnostic criteria rather than traditional school-based referral procedures are used. A bias in sample selection rather than biological gender differences most likely accounts for the impression that more boys than girls have reading problems. Most school systems rely on the recommendations of teachers before testing students for underachievement rather than testing all the students. Teachers are far more likely to diagnose the condition in boys because boys are apt to act out and become troublesome to adults, whereas girls are more apt to withdraw and struggle quietly, drawing little attention to themselves. Girls are identified later than boys, and since it is well known that early identification makes a difference, they are deprived of appropriate help during critical years. This imbalance affects both boys and girls: too many boys are in special education and too many girls are struggling in silence.

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One consequence of this pattern is that in the early grades, schools employ teachers for remedial reading classes, which are generally filled with boys. In contrast, by high school, girls usually fall behind in math, but fewer remedial math teachers are hired, since girls are supposed to be less proficient in math than boys. Parental attitudes also contribute to the imbalance in identification and treatment. Because parents are attuned to the conventional wisdom and the information disseminated by the schools and the general press, they are more likely to expect reading problems in their sons than in their daughters. In addition, some parents believe that educational failure will have a greater impact on the future lives and careers of their sons than on their daughters. Boys are expected to be self-supporting, and although girls are expected to work for part of their lives, eventually they may be supported by husbands. Other explanations for the gender imbalance of children identified as having reading disorders have been advanced. The causes of learning problems may vary because of physiological differences between boys and girls that begin at conception. Males are more vulnerable than females to a variety of developmental problems associated with abnormalities in neurological or psychological function that result in dyslexia, language disorders, stuttering, and autism. It has been suggested that males have more clusters of learning disabilities, manifested in both academic and behavioral difficulties, whereas females tend to have a single disability. Another avenue of research has addressed the possibility of gender differences in the ways in which males and females use their brains in reading. With

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the development of high-tech imaging equipment, research into questions of brain anatomy and function has recently begun. Scientists have been able to identify specific brain malfunctions in reading disorders. It has been shown that the splenium of the corpus callosum is larger in dyslexic than in normal readers and larger in female than male dyslexics. Shaywitz and her colleagues at Yale University have found different areas of the brain become active during phonological processing. Individuals with reading disorders show very little activity in rearbrain areas (the angular gyrus and Wernicke’s area), which are known to be important in linking written words with phonic components. Instead, individuals with reading disorders compensate by overusing a front-brain section called “Broca’s area,” traditionally associated with other aspects of language processing and speech. In addition, it was found that different parts of the brain were used by women and men in arriving at the same solution. All the men in the study and some women used the left-side portion of Broca’s area, but other women used both sides. The study strengthens the argument that the male brain is more asymmetrical than the female brain. These findings represent only a beginning; other researchers believe that there may be additional processes at work. The social and emotional consequences for girls with learning disabilities are significant. All children with learning disabilities are likely to make negative attributions about their own ability and to show less effort following academic failure. Girls, however, have been found to be particularly vulnerable to the debilitating effects of perceived academic and social failure. Several stud-

ies have shown that girls with learning disabilities are at risk for developing and maintaining a sense of helplessness regarding academic tasks. They are likely to blame their own lack of ability for their failures and are less likely to persist in performing tasks they find difficult. Girls with learning disabilities also show adverse reactions to social failure. They tend to feel less well-liked, and this belief, together with a more passive social style, may result in more rejection and subsequent isolation and depression. Learning disabilities have far-reaching effects in terms of employment. Followup studies of individuals with learning disabilities show that women tend to be steered into jobs consistent with sex-role stereotypes and that males are more likely to be employed full-time and to remain employed for several years after the initial study. Clearly, reading disorders are disabling and interfere with academic progress. However, they also influence children’s psychological and social development. Although the causes of reading disorders have yet to be definitively identified, the fact remains that girls with reading problems are not being identified as often and as early as boys. Girls who are not identified may not receive the appropriate remedial services they need to develop fully, which places them at risk for longterm academic, social, and emotional difficulties. Anita Gurian

See also Disabilities; Education of Girls; Literacy; Reading References and Further Reading Lerner, Janet. 1985. Learning Disabilities: Theories, Diagnosis and Teaching Strategies. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lesbians Lubs, Herbert A., et al. 1999. “Familial Dyslexia: Genetic, Behavioral and Imaging Studies.” Annals of Dyslexia. Nass, Ruth. 1993. “Sex Differences in Learning Abilities and Disabilities.” Annals of Dyslexia 43. Settle, Shirley, and Richard Milich. 1999. “Social Persistence Following Failure in Boys and Girls with LD.” Journal of Learning Disabilities 32, no. 3: 201–212. Shaywitz, Sally E., Bennet A. Shaywitz, Jack Fletcher, and Michael D. Escobar. 1990. “Prevalence of Reading Disability in Boys and Girls: Results of the Connecticut Longitudinal Study.” Journal of the American Medical Association 264: 998–1002.

Lesbians Lesbians may be defined as those girls and women who find primary sexual and emotional satisfaction from other girls and women. It may appear odd to link the terms lesbians and girls: at the same time that contemporary heteronormative U.S. culture imagines childhood as “innocent,” free from the encumbrances of sexuality, it assumes that children are always already heterosexual and that they possess an originary heterosexual identity. Thus it becomes almost impossible to imagine a “lesbian girl.” Yet throughout the twentieth century, some girls (defined here as young women under the age of eighteen) in the United States have identified themselves as lesbians and have been identified by others as such. The identity categories homosexual and heterosexual are relatively recent inventions that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1978). Throughout history, people have experienced same-sex erotic attachments, but only recently was sexuality regarded as a central facet of identity and identification. Until the mid- to late

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nineteenth century, sexuality in the West was divided between natural and unnatural acts: sex for reproductive purposes inside marriage was thought to be natural, whereas all other sexual acts were considered “unnatural,” regardless of who performed them. Gradually, in large part through the efforts of sexologists, who began to connect particular acts to deviant identities such as the onanist and later the homosexual, sexuality began to be regarded not as something someone did but as something someone had and was. Every person was thus expected to claim a sexual identity, and that identity was thought to transmit a particular set of truths about the self. Although this shift from acts to identities was widespread, it would be wrong to say that it was universal: not only did people persist in defining their sexualities through the acts they performed rather than through an appeal to an identity, but prior to the emergence of homosexual and heterosexual as dominant binaries of identity, other proto-identities existed, for example, the “sodomite” (Halperin 1998). Prior to the late-nineteenth-century emergence of the identity category “lesbian,” ways of defining female sexuality in the United States differed across race and class. White, middle-class girls and women could sustain lifelong “romantic friendships,” passionate, intimate relationships, without suffering any social sanction (and even earning social approval) (Smith-Rosenberg 1975). In part because of the increased gender separation found in white, middle-class, Victorian culture, a spatial arrangement that was continued outside the home as girls began to enter the new semipublic spheres of the boarding school and the women’s college, girls were able to form new intimacies with other girls and women outside

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the sphere of the family (Vicinus 1982). It would be wrong to claim, however, that these relationships were lesbian in the contemporary sense of the term. Not only was this label not available to these young women as a form of identification, but it is unclear from the evidence available whether whatever kinds of contact these girls and women shared would qualify as “sexual” according to contemporary understandings of the term. Yet it seems clear that in some, if not many, cases, “romantic friendships” included what we would now define as forms of female homoerotic sexual expression. In the nineteenth century, white, middle-class girls might form relationships with other girls that lasted their lifetimes, often while also entering into heterosexual marriages, without attracting social censure as long as they did not transgress norms of gender, class, and race (for example, by acting “mannish” or by forming cross-class or interracial relationships) (Duggan 1993). “Masculine” women were often rejected by their families. In order to find employment, they were forced to conceal their biological sex because many occupations were closed to women or would not accept females who so obviously transgressed gendered norms. Such “passing women” were able also to court and sometimes even to marry other women (D’Emilio and Freedman 1988). It is harder to know how “feminine” working-class women who were attracted to other women fared because their stories have not been documented as well as those of women revealed to be passing as men. As homosexuality and heterosexuality began to emerge as distinct identities inside the discourses of medicine and psychology, lesbian identities, as well as gay male ones, began to take on a distinctly

deviant resonance. Homosexuality in general became the “unnatural” other to heterosexuality, the measure by which heterosexual norms of sex and gender could be maintained (Sedgwick 1990). Relationships between girls and between women that previously had existed without comment now began to be viewed with suspicion, not only by experts and educators but by the women within them. What had been previously viewed as harmless “crushes” or “smashes” between girls, for example, now were increasingly regarded as dangerous intimacies (Sahli 1979). It is important to emphasize, however, that these were uneven developments: within various subcultures and regions, an older model of romantic friendship could exist unchallenged alongside newer models of lesbianism. Within same-sex organizations such as the Girl Scouts, for example, sometimes girls could still have intense crushes and express their love physically without fear of censure (Kent 1996). And in general, the space provided by “girlhood” remained for many a space of female-female erotic possibility, in part because theories of female sexual development argued that girls were asexual or innocent until the age of puberty and in part because the leeway afforded girls and women for same-sex physical expression and emotional intimacy in the twentieth century has been much greater than that afforded boys and men. Whereas normative masculinity often requires that boys and men repudiate same-sex emotional and physical intimacy, except in select, socially sanctioned contexts (on the battlefield, in sports), girls and women are often, although not always, allowed a much wider range of same-sex intimacies. One should not romanticize this space, however: Freudian theories of female sexual development labeled homosexuality

Lesbians a “phase” that girls would and should grow out of, a step on the way to “mature heterosexuality.” In the twentieth century, girls who continued into young adulthood to value female friendships over heterosexual romance suffered social stigma and worse. Furthermore, as in the nineteenth century, expressions of samesex sexual desire, overt gender transgressions, and interclass and interracial same-sex relationships have often been cause for social approbation, as has been the increasingly common practice of “coming out,” which by midcentury connoted not only entering the larger gay and lesbian community but also affirming publicly (to the community at large) one’s homosexuality (Chauncey 1994). Girls who identified as lesbian or were identified as such by others (through rumor, because they were too “masculine,” and so on) were and often still are at the mercy of their parents and guardians. Lacking legal and often financial independence, they could not prevent their families from sending them to psychiatrists to be “cured” or from committing them to mental hospitals. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and young women are still institutionalized for what is termed “gender-identity disorder,” as Daphne Scholinski’s recent narrative, The Last Time I Wore a Dress (1997), describes. Scholinski was committed to mental hospitals for three years solely because of her failure to conform to cultural ideals of femininity. Other young women were emotionally and physically abused or thrown out of their homes to make their way as teenagers on the streets, which made them more vulnerable to physical abuse. Currently, it is

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estimated that young gays and lesbians make up one-quarter of homeless teens in the United States (Singer 1993). At the same time, the emergence of a movement for gay and lesbian civil rights has provided some young women with emotional, legal, and financial support, as have aspects of the feminist movement. However, stereotypes about the “recruitment” of youth into homosexuality have made connections between adult gays and lesbians and queer youth particularly fraught and dangerous, and the movement for gay and lesbian (and later bisexual, transgender, and queer) civil rights has also focused mainly on the rights of adults. Nonetheless, Sharon Thompson, researching the sexual lives of teenage girls in the United States, has found that what makes the most difference in the lives of young lesbians at the end of the twentieth century is not their sexuality per se but whether they have familial and social support networks to which they may turn. Unfortunately, it is still the case that gay and lesbian youth are at much greater risk of committing suicide (gay and lesbian children make up roughly 30 percent of all teen suicides). Yet in many major American cities, as well as in suburbs and even some rural areas, queer support groups have emerged not only through larger gay and lesbian organizations but within public and private schools in the United States. But with increased visibility has come increased vulnerability to attack because violence against gays and lesbians is also on the rise. Cultural representations of lesbian girls have also increased dramatically. Within representations of lesbianism, girlhood often occupies an important position. Under intense pressure to combat various normative accounts of the

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formation of lesbian identity, many representations of lesbian girlhoods portray childhood as an originary space where the “clues” to one’s sexual truth are already evident. Often writing against claims that homosexuality can be “cured” or that it is the result of abuse or seduction, lesbian authors portray childhood as revealing the hidden truth of the self, a truth that is often only realized later in life, a truth that has always existed and is immutable, natural, and innate. What may be disparate, unrelated childhood experiences find coherency only in retrospect, when the author or narrator discovers her lesbianism (Martin 1993). Perhaps the first and most influential representation of what might be termed a lesbian girlhood is British writer Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 account of the early life of Stephen Gordon in her novel The Well of Loneliness. In many ways, this text establishes the narrative tropes of lesbian girlhood, among them the main character’s feelings of isolation and difference from the rest of society; her cross-gender identification; and her early childhood “crushes” on other girls and women. For Stephen, these differences become a curse rather than a source of pride or pleasure. More recently, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) introduced an exuberant, brave young heroine, Molly Bolt, who experiences her difference from normative society not as a burden but as something eventually to be embraced and celebrated, something that gives her a more accurate view of the world. Although not the first novel since The Well to offer a happy ending, Brown’s book has been hailed as a breakthrough in its celebration of lesbian identity and pleasure. Despite their differences, both of these works describe their young heroines’

conflicts with normative heterosexual society and their search for queer community. Since the 1970s, lesbians of color have described in both fiction and autobiography the ways in which queers of color are often caught between the homophobia of their “home” cultures and communities and the racism of the larger gay and lesbian community. In the short story “Johnnieruth” (1987), for example, Becky Birtha describes the specificities of a lesbian girlhood within a working-class African American community, as does Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1992). Lorde narrates the conflicts with her family and, in particular, her mother that alienate her from her AfroCaribbean community, but after coming out to the larger lesbian community, Lorde encounters racism and classism among her white lesbian peers. Ultimately, Lorde defines her own, racially specific homoerotics, linking her adult love for women to her early childhood passion for her own mother and the rituals of AfroCaribbean culture she represents. Specific cultural norms also provide different possibilities for female-female homoerotics as well as exerting different kinds of limitations upon them: as Catrióna Rueda Esquibel has argued (1998), the accepted practice of comadrazgo within Chicana/o culture allows young Chicanas to form intense female-female relationships without social sanctions. Esquibel points to such texts as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984, 1991) and Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1987), which, while not offering representations of “out” young women, do eroticize young female friendships and describe what happens to these relationships as girls are forced into the heterosexual system.

A nineteen-year-old lesbian participates in the gay pride parade in Chicago. (Skjold)

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Recent representations of lesbian girlhood have also begun to appropriate the norms of popular romance for lesbians: Maria Maggenti’s film, The Incredible True Story of Two Girls in Love (1994), coopts many of the conventions of teen romance for a young lesbian, interracial, cross-class couple. Sadie Benning’s semiautobiographical videos, however, draw attention to the assumptions that lie behind the use of childhood in much of lesbian culture as a site for evidence of a “true” identity. Instead, as Mia Carter asserts, Benning stages her own identity as performance, as discontinuous and ambiguous. Similarly, other writers reject the nostalgia that often accompanies adult representations of childhood for representations of the sadomasochistic yet erotic cruelty of girls to other girls (Gaitskill 1992) and the brutal realities of queer teen desire (Lewis 1994). Regardless of how cultural producers use childhood— whether they see it as “proof” of an inherent sexuality or as a space of possibility, regulation, something to be nostalgically remembered or forever repressed—what is clear from all of these examples is that childhood itself is a site of struggle. As Elspeth Probyn has noted (1996), gays and lesbians have no choice but to enter into debates over its meaning when many other so-called experts claim to know what is best for children. Thus, childhood remains a crucial space for queer articulations of selfhood in the face of homophobic efforts to deny queer children access to sex education; safety from discrimination and abuse at home, at school, and in the workplace; social services; and basic emotional and material support. In the face of such opposition, queer youth themselves have begun to organize and speak out about their experiences.

For example, in the collection In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (Gray 1999), lesbian-identified girls discuss topics such as knowing when they were lesbian, coming out to parents, being out at school, and falling in love. They also describe the communities of queer teens they have found online, as the Internet provides new possibilities for support and self-discovery. Increasingly, as the twenty-first century begins, in print, online, in music, and through grassroots community organizing, girls themselves are claiming the right to define the terms by which they identify themselves as lesbian. Kathryn R. Kent See also Adoption; Body Image; Dating and Courtship; Female Sexuality; Girls’ Fiction; Psychotherapy; Suicidal Behavior in Girls References and Further Reading Benning, Sadie. 1989a. Living Inside. Black and white, 4 min. ———. 1989b. Me and Rubyfruit. Black and white, 4 min. ———. 1989c. A New Year. Black and white, 4 min. ———. 1990a. If Every Girl Had a Diary. Black and white, 6 min. ———. 1990b. Jollies. Black and white, 11 min. ———. 1990c. A Place Called Lovely. Black and white, 14 min. Birtha, Becky. 1987. Lover’s Choice. Seattle: Seal Press. Brown, Rita Mae. 1988. Rubyfruit Jungle. New York: Daughters, Inc., 1973. Reprint, New York: Bantam. Carter, Mia. 1998. “The Politics of Pleasure: Cross-Cultural Autobiographic Performance in the Video Works of Sadie Benning.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 3: 745–770. Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.

Literacy Chávez, Denise. 1987. The Last of the Menu Girls. Houston: Arte Público. Cisneros, Sandra. 1991. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Público, 1984. Reprint, New York: Vintage. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. 1988. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row. Duggan, Lisa. 1993. “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-theCentury America.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 4: 791–814. Esquibel, Catrióna Rueda. 1998. “Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 3: 645–682. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Gaitskill, Mary. 1992. Two Girls Fat and Thin. New York: Bantam. Gray, Mary L. 1999. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth. New York: Huntington Park Press. Hall, Radclyffe. 1928. The Well of Loneliness. Reprint, New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Halperin, David. 1998. “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality.” Representations 63: 93–120. Kent, Kathryn R. 1996. “‘No Trespassing’: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2: 185–203. Lewis, Heather. 1994. House Rules. New York: High Risk. Lorde, Audre. 1992. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Maggenti, Maria, director. 1995. The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. Smash Pictures. Martin, Biddy. 1993. “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s].” Pp. 274–293 in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge. Probyn, Elspeth. 1996. Outside Belongings. New York: Routledge.

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Rupp, Leila J. 1999. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahli, Nancy. 1979. “Smashing: Women’s Relationships before the Fall.” Chrysalis 8: 17–27. Scholinski, Daphne, with Jane Meredith Adams. 1997. The Last Time I Wore a Dress. New York: Riverhead Books. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Singer, Bennett L. 1993. Growing Up Gay: A Literary Anthology. New York: New Press. Smith-Rosenberg, Carol. 1975. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1: 1–29. Thompson, Sharon. 1995. Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy. New York: Hill and Wang. Vicinus, Martha. 1982. “‘One Life to Stand Beside Me’: Emotional Conflicts in First-Generation College Women in England.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3: 603–628.

Literacy In the colonial period, girls had limited access to education, with the literacy rate for adult women in New England at less than 50 percent (Lockridge 1974, 15). The establishment of public schools helped increase girls’ access to instruction in reading and writing, and in the years after the Revolutionary War, an ideology of republican motherhood justified the education of young women so that they could appropriately instruct their sons in the virtues of citizenship. Educational opportunities for girls at all levels increased throughout the nineteenth century, and by 1870, European American girls ages ten to fourteen had surpassed

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The Illustrated Primer, published by George F. Cooledge and Brother, New York, intended to make learning to read fun for children. (Library of Congress)

boys in literacy and academic achievement (Tyack and Hansot 1990, 46). African American children had far fewer opportunities for instruction in reading and writing, but in the years after the Civil War, African American literacy rates rose dramatically. By 1910, 85 percent of African American girls between the ages of ten and nineteen were literate (Tyack and Hansot 1990, 53). Although formal literacy instruction was largely

denied African Americans until the final decades of the nineteenth century, it was often imposed on Native American children as a “civilizing” influence. Missionary and government schools were founded with the express purpose of teaching Native American children to reject the oral traditions and native languages of their families and tribes in exchange for education. Despite the educational limitations imposed upon them, girls of various ethnic and racial backgrounds have throughout U.S. history used their reading and writing skills in interesting, sometimes subversive ways. Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to gauge, and scholars can draw only limited inferences based on the percentages of people who could sign their full names rather than merely make a mark (X) on public documents such as wills, deeds, and marriage licenses. For much of the population in the American colonies prior to 1700, it does seem that illiteracy was the norm. For girls in particular, literacy was not deemed necessary: they were schooled in cooking, spinning, sewing, and other domestic duties through faceto-face interactions with female kin and through direct experience. By the end of the colonial period, nearly universal male literacy had been achieved in New England, but perhaps only half as many women as men were literate (Tyack and Hansot 1990, 46). This growth in literacy rates was due in part to the passage of laws that required parents to educate their children and townships to provide public education. In 1642, the Massachusetts General Court ordered selectmen in all towns in the colony to “take account from time to time of all parents and masters, and of their children, concerning their calling and imployment of their children, espe-

Literacy cially of their ability to read and understand the principle and capitall laws of this country” (quoted in Tyack and Hansot 1990, 15). This law that required that children be taught to read was soon replicated in other colonies: Connecticut in 1650, New York in 1665, and Pennsylvania in 1683. As the first legislation to mandate the use of public funds to support schools, the Massachusetts Bay Law of 1647 required townships of fifty families or more to “appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and reade, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general” (quoted in Tyack and Hansot 1990, 16). In response to such legislation, the private dame schools where many children learned the basic rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic slowly changed into more public institutions as towns began to pay “goodwives” to teach poor children. Originally, the typical dame school consisted of a few girls and boys under six or seven years of age who were instructed by a woman in her home. Parents paid a small fee for the supervision and instruction of their children. Over time, the dame school transformed into official public summer schools in which women taught boys and girls of various ages. The curriculum included learning the alphabet and basic spelling and mastering a few simple religious texts. Girls also learned to knit and sew, and boys sometimes received preliminary instruction in writing and oral arithmetic. Hornbooks served as students’ introduction to reading in dame schools. Presenting the alphabet, the first few lines of a syllabary, and the Lord’s prayer, the hornbook was a single page tacked on to a durable wooden paddle and covered with a pro-

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tective layer of transparent horn. After mastering the hornbook, students would take up a primer, which usually contained several pages of instructional material, a more extensive syllabary, and words of increasing length. The final three stages of the reading curriculum consisted of mastering a Psalter, the New Testament, and the Bible. Early in the eighteenth century, spelling books also became important texts for literacy education, and the “pronouncingform method” of instruction was dominant. The instructor would call out a word, and the students, individually or in unison, would enunciate the letters of each syllable, pause to pronounce the syllable, then proceed to the next syllable until the word was completed (Gilmore 1989, 37). This method of repetition and rote memorization was considered appropriate since students would mainly devote their reading lives to religious texts. Schools and teachers were engaged in a shared intellectual project with religious leaders and parents to teach children the belief system of the dominant culture. Because the task of the reading teacher was so narrowly defined, instruction was often a female province. Throughout the colonial period, then, both girls and boys of European American ancestry learned to read through a patchwork system of dame schools, summer schools, charity schools, and town/district schools. Writing, though, was largely a male domain. Defined in the colonial period as penmanship, good writing was viewed entirely in terms of formation of letters. For technical reasons, texts for writing instruction that featured various “hands” or scripts were not produced on colonial presses until after the American Revolution. Copybooks were thus the prized possessions of writing masters. More-

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over, writing was considered a job-related skill necessary only for young men who would serve as clerks, lawyers, physicians, and ministers. Because girls were trained to be successful homemakers, penmanship was irrelevant to them. According to E. Jennifer Monaghan, the corresponding skill for girls was sewing (1989, 60, 64). For elite girls who were more likely to acquire advanced literacy skills in their homes or through private education, literate activities such as letter writing and diary keeping could help nourish their developing sense of identity and emotional well-being. Letter writing allowed young women to craft their lived experiences into written artifacts to be shared with readers. Sending and receiving letters also created a sense of sociability with geographically distant friends and relatives and expanded the horizons of the world in which they lived. Keeping a diary similarly allowed a girl to assume editorial control of her life story as she encoded it in print. Although some girls viewed their diaries as a private space in which they could record intimate, personal information, other diary keepers viewed their writing as a record of personal, often spiritual development that could be shared with and evaluated by parents. At the end of the eighteenth century, girls’ opportunities for literacy education increased as a discourse emerged that positioned female education as necessary for women’s newly politicized role as wife and mother. A new nation placed new demands on its citizenry, including women. In order to raise virtuous, wellinformed sons who would be productive citizens of the new democracy, women would have to draw upon their capacities for rational, moral thought and give over

their supposed tendencies toward the frivolous and sentimental. Terming this new conception of women’s roles “republican motherhood,” Linda Kerber has noted that advocates of education for women could now make a case that girls had a right to full educational experience. Both the demand for schooling for girls and the number of schools mushroomed after the American Revolution. As the romanticism of the early nineteenth century took hold, the concept of childhood was redefined, and the literacy instruction received by girls in the burgeoning number of schools for young women began to change. Spurred in part by European educational reformers and thinkers like Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the view that children were born into depravity and needed rigorous discipline gave way to a conception of childhood that foregrounded the essential goodness and innocence of young children. This revisionist thinking about childhood necessitated changes in the ways in which girls (and boys) were taught to read and write. As Lucille M. Schultz has noted, popular textbooks for literacy instruction that emphasized the parts of speech, types of sentences, and characteristics of style, and that provided students with an abstract list of topics for their own compositions (e.g., Richard Green Parker’s Progressive Exercises [1832] and George P. Quackenbos’s First Lessons in Composition [1851]) began to compete with texts that asked students to compose their own texts and write about their own lives. Using illustrations extensively, textbooks like Charles Morley’s Practical Guide to Composition (1838) and John Frost’s Easy Exercises for Composition (1839) helped students sharpen their observational and descriptive skills.

Literacy Even more importantly, as Schultz has argued, these new writing textbooks shifted the locus of authority. Previously, students had learned that authority resided in an unassailable repository of knowledge based largely on common religious principles and texts. Children were taught to use their literacy skills to demonstrate their comprehension of these shared cultural beliefs. During the nineteenth century, the locus of authority shifted, and the voice of the individual subject rose to prominence. By the end of the century, literacy instruction involved the composition of original, experiencebased texts. For example, prize-winning essays at the Buffalo Female Academy in 1854 included “Our Home Wreath,” “Visit to the Graveyard,” “Pets,” and “Trees” (quoted in Schultz 1999, 121). Although the opportunities available to European American girls to acquire facility with written language prior to 1900 were often limited and tinged with assumptions about woman’s proper sphere, girls of color faced additional educational challenges. In the hands of government-sponsored missionaries in the 1800s and in later federally funded schools for Native Americans, education was viewed as a way to “civilize” Indians and indoctrinate them in the norms of white society. Although many tribal leaders gradually came to accept the necessity of educating Native American boys so that they could better understand treaties and other documents written in English, accounts by Native American women and white missionaries indicate that there was less interest in educating girls well into the twentieth century (Coleman 1993, 67). Girls who did attend day schools, reservation boarding schools, or off-reservation boarding schools often experi-

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enced a profound sense of dislocation. They were supplied with new clothing, forced to endure mandatory hair cuttings, and introduced to new foods and eating implements. Most significantly, they were given new, Christian names and were forbidden to use their native languages. The curriculum at schools like Richard Henry Pratt’s multitribal school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Hampton Institute, and the Phoenix Indian School were dominated by vocational training. Typically, students studied basic academic subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic, history) in the morning, and afternoons were devoted to learning job or domestic skills (e.g., sewing, laundry, and cooking for girls). Such a curriculum actually delayed the academic progress of many students. Helen Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi Indian who attended the Phoenix School, explained that the half-and-half curriculum (academic and vocational) prevented her from graduating (Coleman 1993, 114). Despite the emphasis on vocational training, oratorical competitions and school newspapers often flourished in schools for Native American students, suggesting that some students did become comfortable with the English language in both its printed and oral forms as a way to present themselves to the wider world. In the nineteenth century, African American girls, particularly those dwelling in the South, were restricted by laws that prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. As the number of enslaved African Americans increased in the southern states during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the white population became more fearful of and resistant to the notion of literate African Americans. Between 1829 and 1835, various states passed laws making it illegal

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to teach slaves to read and write. There is little evidence that those who violated the laws were actually prosecuted, however. Such laws ran counter to the Protestant imperative that all persons have access to the Bible. Janet Duitsman Cornelius (1991) has powerfully documented the ingenious ways that slaves and free blacks learned to read, write, and share their literacy skills with other African Americans, often supported by religious societies and Protestant benevolent organizations. In northeastern, midwestern, and western states, free African American children were typically excluded from public schools. To counter such discrimination, African Americans established educational societies and opened schools in connection with their churches. Thousands of free African Americans learned to read and write in Sunday schools throughout the North prior to the Civil War. As the United States moved into the twentieth century as an increasingly urban and industrial nation, progressive educators began drawing upon new scientific research in psychology and the social sciences as they sought to more directly address the vocational, health, family, and civic needs of diverse students and to prepare them to participate fully as citizens in a democratic society. At schools like John Dewey’s University of Chicago Laboratory School and the Lincoln School of Teachers College in New York, the study of reading, spelling, penmanship, and grammar were all viewed as elements in the process of communication and textual production, and students were provided with opportunities to practice these skills in conversation, through letter writing, by keeping journals based on their personal observations, and in the production of student magazines and newspapers. Educa-

tors also looked for ways to link literacy studies with students’ work in other areas of the curriculum. For example, if a class of sixth graders were studying farming in their science class, they might write letters to the Department of Agriculture requesting government bulletins on seed testing and then keep a lab journal as a means of recording the results of their own experiments with corn and soybean seeds. The basic tenets of progressive education also had a positive impact on Native American girls through the Meriam Report (Institute for Government Research 1928). The eighty-three-page section of the report dealing with Indian schooling was authored by professional educator W. Carson Ryan, Jr. Ryan offered a well-reasoned and cogent critique of programs that removed Native American children from their homes, families, and tribes and instead insisted that Indian schools should draw upon tribal traditions as the basis for helping children creatively construct meaningful lives for themselves as citizens who brought a unique cultural heritage to modern society (Coleman 1993, 50–51). In the world outside the classroom, American girls growing up in the early decades of the twentieth century were encountering a print culture in which forces of homogenization and diversification were operating simultaneously (Kaestle et al. 1991, 272). Regionalism, immigration, racism, sexism, and class stratification all contributed to diversity in print. The immigrant, religious, and radical presses thrived as printing and distributing periodical literature became less expensive, and such publications could play a role in the struggles of parents in immigrant and religious subcultures who often encouraged their chil-

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A mentor and her five-year-old students read a book at a youth center in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Skjold Photographs)

dren to preserve their traditional values. Although on one level the broad literate public seemed to be splintering into smaller factions, forces of homogenization were also in play. The arrival of national wire services and syndicated features helped standardize newspaper content. Beginning in the 1890s, girls across the United States could read comics like “The Katzenjammer Kids.” The radio and movie industry created popular heroes, and they spawned fan magazines and sponsored write-in contests that reached a nationwide audience. Literary “masterpieces” returned to prominence in American schools as the influence of progressive educators waned in midcentury, and more teenage girls were introduced to the same books at the same time (Kaestle et

al. 1991, 272–293). Assessing the relationship between American society and the available reading and writing materials at midcentury, Carl F. Kaestle concluded, “society was not really homogeneous, but print culture was, to an unprecedented degree” (286). Partly in response to the feminist, Black Power, and other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s as well as an explosion in computer and media technologies, American girls at the beginning of the twenty-first century have access to an ever-increasing range of reading and writing materials. With the works of diverse authors available in paperback editions and textbooks that emphasize multicultural issues, teachers can introduce students to the works of

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writers like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Tan. Moreover, the pedagogical emphasis on using reading and writing as a means to understand one’s own life and to record personal experiences that first came into vogue in the nineteenth century and that was a central thread in the work of progressive educators largely remains in force for girls enrolled in American schools today. In her study of adolescent girls living in rural Iowa, Margaret J. Finders discovered that her subjects felt that expressive and narrative writing about personal experiences was what teachers valued as “good writing.” As one girl explained to Finders, “It’s what you have to write. It’s the only thing they [teachers] count” (1997, 121). For many young women, literacy events taking place outside the classroom—keeping diaries, signing yearbooks, passing notes, forging hall passes, reading teen zines, penning graffiti on bathroom walls, participating in home party retail ventures (e.g., Avon, Home Interiors), and entering extracurricular poetry contests—are a more vital means by which they use print to measure and control their growth into adulthood. Finders concluded that carrying and reading teen zines served as an act of selfpresentation for early adolescent girls as they documented their interest in what they perceived to be adult material, and perhaps more importantly, they were demonstrating their willingness to challenge the authority of parents and teachers who did not deem teen zines to be appropriate texts for girls (1997, 57). Similarly, penning and reading bathroom graffiti about sexual orientation, physical desires, and bodily functions allow girls to explore and expose complex, adult issues. In her study of African American

and Hispanic adolescent girls attending an urban junior high school, Amy Shuman found that young women often imitated the voices of adult authorities to serve their own playful ends. One young woman composed a “Constitution of Love” whose preamble began: “We the People young in heart [in] order to form more perfect kisses . . . ,” and amendments attached to this amorous manifesto reminded adolescent readers that “Thou shalt not squeeze hard” and “Thou shalt kiss at every opportunity” (quoted in Shuman 1986, 87). Although literacy can allow girls to begin negotiating more adult roles for themselves, they also use print to create strong bonds of solidarity and to define social boundaries. Finders found that by passing notes during class, girls established their membership within a network of friends, and the annual ritual of signing yearbooks served to mark hierarchies among groups of girls. According to Finders, students who could not compose a message deemed appropriate by others were marked as social outsiders, and permitting a girl of lesser status to sign one’s book seemed to lower the status of the yearbook owner (1997, 43–44). Notes of apology and threatening letters left in student lockers are also forms of literate activity that circulate through girls’ lives outside the classroom, binding them together and highlighting fault lines among them. For girls who feel alienated from social networks within their schools or communities because of socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, personal appearance, or other reasons, literacy may involve deeply personal and private acts of reading and writing. By keeping a diary, writing poetry, or composing other types of texts that they protect from public view, some disenfran-

Little Mothers chised young women can safely use print to explore their frustrations and anxieties, vent anger, express sadness, and celebrate personal triumphs. Jane Greer See also Communication; Diaries; Education of Girls; Girls’ Magazines; Graffiti; Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls; Reading References and Further Reading Coleman, Michael C. 1993. American Indian Children at School, 1850–1930. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. 1991. “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Finders, Margaret J. 1997. Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. New York: Teachers College Press. Gilmore, William J. 1989. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Institute for Government Research. 1928. The Problem of Indian Administration (The Meriam Report). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Kaestle, Carl F., Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr. 1991. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kerber, Linda K. 1988. “‘Why Should Girls Be Learn’d and Wise?’ Two Centuries of Higher Education for Women as Seen through the Unfinished Work of Alice Mary Baldwin.” Pp. 18–42 in Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia. Edited by John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe. New York: Norton. Lockridge, Kenneth A. 1974. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: Norton.

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Monaghan, E. Jennifer. 1989. “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England.” Pp. 53–80 in Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Edited by Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schultz, Lucille M. 1999. The Young Composers: Composition’s Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Shuman, Amy. 1986. Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tyack, David, and Elisabeth Hansot. 1990. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Little Mothers Little mothers was the term used at the turn of the twentieth century to describe girls who spent their time taking care of their younger siblings. Being a little mother was a common experience for many girls from immigrant and workingclass families, an experience that taught girls from an early age to identify with their mothers and to share in their responsibilities. Taking care of babies was only one of the ways in which girls helped out their mothers and contributed to the family. They also assisted with the cleaning, cooking, and daily marketing, bargaining with peddlers and shopkeepers to save a few pennies; worked alongside their mothers making artificial flowers, lace, or other kinds of “homework”; and helped out in family shops and peddled flowers or baskets to earn a little extra money. But taking on the care of babies and toddlers was probably the most important way a girl could contribute to her family and lighten her mother’s heavy load of responsibilities. Too young

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A girl sits on a doorstep in New York City with a baby on her lap in this photograph by Jacob Riis. (Bettmann/Corbis)

to do the heavy household work, girls were given the job of watching the little ones. Some started to be responsible for rocking babies and taking them out for air when they were as young as five years old and continued caring for them in the afternoons after school. Girls would sit together on the stoop with their babies or park their carriages next to each other in the street while they talked and played together. In some city neighborhoods, babies and small children were essentially raised by their older sisters, who fed, clothed, diapered, and bathed them and took personal pride in their appearance. Many girls reportedly came to see their charges as their own babies. When these babies got older, however, they some-

times resisted their older sisters’ authority and could be difficult to control. Girls’ feelings about their child care tasks were often mixed, combining pride in “their” babies with regret and even resentment that their child care duties kept them from being able to play. Unlike the boys who ventured far from their homes to sell newspapers or peddle goods on other city streets, these girls stayed close to home with their babies. And of course, their work—like their mothers’—was unpaid, so they did not gain either the possibility of spending money or the increased status that their brothers’ work might bring. Some may have resented their responsibilities as compared to their brothers’ relative free-

Little Mothers dom to play in the streets, but most probably did not question their duty to help out their mothers. In fact, when mothers became ill or died, daughters often felt responsible for taking over their duties and keeping the family together. One such girl in Philadelphia, whose mother was being treated for tuberculosis, tried to work and care for her three younger siblings. When a settlement house worker decided the children should be placed in foster homes instead, the girl broke down, becoming “melancholy on account of the illness of her mother and the breaking up of her home.” Having taken on a mother’s responsibilities, it became her personal failure when the family was split up (Rose 1999, 53). Girls who acted as little mothers might grow up to take on the role of “kin keeper,” the woman who kept the family together, provided help in times of crisis, and remained at the center of family communication throughout her life. Girls’ experiences as little mothers clearly taught them to think of themselves as mothers, to share in their mothers’ responsibilities and worries, and to remain closely tied to the family rather than venturing far into the outside world. Girls also learned—sometimes painfully, sometimes without much remorse—that their role in the family and their status as “good daughters” were much more important than their attendance at school. Some of these girls would grow into mothers who were determined that their daughters would not be kept out of school or lose their childhood independence to care for younger siblings. Settlement house workers and other reformers often worried about these little mothers, who seemed to be carrying bur-

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dens they were not old enough to bear. Reformers were particularly troubled by the fact that children were staying out of school because they were needed to take care of their younger siblings. This concern partly motivated the establishment of charitable day nurseries that provided care for the children of poor working mothers. Settlement house workers referred to a “little mother problem,” and newspaper reporters described these girls in detail. Many settlement houses and city public health departments sought to teach the little mothers modern baby care and hygiene, realizing that these girls were the ones in charge of most of the neighborhood’s babies. Special classes or little mothers’ leagues were organized, and settlement house workers often hoped that the lessons learned by the little mothers would also be communicated to the real mothers. Little mothers also acted as their mothers’ link to expert child care advice when they took home economics at school or when they wrote letters to the U.S. Children’s Bureau, asking for copies of child care manuals to translate for their immigrant mothers. Although the phrase little mothers was used to describe immigrant girls in northeastern cities, the phenomenon was widespread in rural areas as well. Black girls growing up on farms in the South, for instance, started taking care of babies at a very young age and, as they grew older, learned to take on other household tasks, helping to sustain the household while their mothers worked as domestics in the homes of whites. Another farm daughter remembered her reluctance to be confined by her little mother responsibilities; she would give the baby’s cradle a push and run out of the house before she could hear him cry (MacLeod 1998,

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103). Not all little mothers were girls: if no older sister was available to care for the babies, boys were often pressed into service. This was true not only for working-class and immigrant families but also in middle-class households with many children. For instance, Benjamin Spock, the oldest of six children, remembered caring for his younger siblings, changing diapers, giving bottles, and jumping up from the dinner table to see why his baby brother was crying (Spock and Morgan 1985, 5). But child care and the role of the little mother were usually duties that parents and observers thought naturally belonged to girls, in which girls both helped their mothers and prepared for their own similar futures. Elizabeth Rose

See also Babysitting; Daughters and Mothers; Domesticity; Immigration; Latina Girls References and Further Reading Hareven, Tamara. 1982. Family Time and Industrial Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macleod, David I. 1998. The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890–1920. New York: Twayne Publishers. Nasaw, David. 1985. Children of the City at Work and at Play. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Rose, Elizabeth. 1999. A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Spock, Benjamin, and Mary Morgan. Spock on Spock: A Memoir of Growing Up with the Century. New York: Pantheon Books. Youcha, Geraldine. 1995. Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Scribner.

M Mathematics and Science

1990s have increased the number of girls enrolled in mathematics and science, but barriers to participation still exist.

Girls have historically been denied an education in mathematics and science. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, education was limited to private instruction in drawing, painting, and needlework. Mathematics and science were not part of the curriculum because it was generally believed that these subjects were a threat to girls’ health and virtue. By midcentury, girls were attending elementary and high schools, but the debate about whether they should study mathematics and science continued. Despite the debate, more girls than boys were studying mathematics and science in high school as the nineteenth century came to a close. A reversal of this trend occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, when home economics and business education were introduced. These vocational tracks led to less rigorous mathematics and science courses for girls, and more rigorous courses were not reintroduced until after World War II, when mathematics and science finally became important school subjects. The status of these subjects led to the development of new curricula during the 1960s and 1970s, but these curricula did not address the perception that mathematics and science were male pursuits or promote girl-friendly teaching or testing strategies. The most recent standards-based reforms of the

The Nineteenth Century and Elementary Education In the first half of the nineteenth century, only the small segment of American society that was male, white, and upper-class received an elementary education. The curriculum was equally restricted and focused on reading, writing, and religion. Most people thought that this was sufficient and that teaching mathematics and science in elementary schools was inappropriate and unnecessary. Since elementary education was not free and a debate was raging over whether it was even appropriate to educate girls, it is not surprising that most girls in the early nineteenth century were not sent to school. The few girls who were sent to school did not stay more than a year. From 1850 on, the efforts of reformers led to equal numbers of white girls and boys enrolling in elementary school. These students usually received poor instruction, and the curriculum continued to contain very little mathematics and science. In response to these conditions, reform-minded educators influenced by European thinkers such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Johann Friedrich Herbart began to argue for

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Girls measure a piece of ground in an arithmetic class at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. (Library of Congress, 1899)

teaching mathematics and science in elementary schools. These educators further argued that young children should be manipulating physical objects rather than engaging in the mental manipulation of abstract symbols. Teachers who embraced this new philosophy taught science using nature. Teaching arithmetic emphasized activities such as measuring distances and counting real objects. These age-appropriate reforms, like those that would follow, had a limited impact. Most elementary schools continued to ignore mathematics and science or continued to emphasize memorization of facts, choral recitation, assignments from textbooks, and practice of arithmetic computations.

By the late nineteenth century, arithmetic had finally become part of the elementary school curriculum because of the downward movement of university mathematics into high schools, which in turn transferred the responsibility of teaching arithmetic to elementary schools. Science, however, was still not part of the elementary curriculum and would remain unimportant well into the twentieth century. The Nineteenth Century and Secondary Education Both private and public secondary schools existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Established for wealthy white males who were going to the university to

Mathematics and Science become clergymen or to pursue literary careers, private academies and Latin grammar schools stressed a classical education in Latin and Greek. The curriculum did not include science or mathematics, although it was later modified to include some arithmetic. Private academies for girls did not have a strong academic curriculum or include the study of the classics. Like the boys’ academies, they eventually introduced a limited amount of arithmetic but not science. Most girls’ academies emphasized needlework, drawing, and music. Some academies were even created to teach girls how to run a household well. This curriculum was called “domestic economy.” A notable exception to the typical academy for girls was the Troy Female Seminary, established by Emma Willard in Troy, New York, in 1821. The seminary required girls to study trigonometry, physiology, chemistry, and natural philosophy (an early term for science). Another exception was Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts, which was founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon and modeled after the Troy Seminary. These academically oriented schools provided girls with the preparation they needed to go on to the few universities that accepted women. However, the founders of these more rigorous institutions had to conceal their true intentions of providing girls with an education equal to that for boys. They publicly justified their curriculum as a way to create enlightened women who would become better wives and mothers. As the nineteenth century progressed, more private schools for girls were established, but educational opportunities were still limited. There were fewer seminaries and academies for girls than for boys, and most were located in the eastern part of

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the United States. In addition, these institutions were costly to attend, and most did not have an academically rigorous mathematics and science curriculum. Publicly funded secondary schools also began as single-sex institutions. Boston Girls High School, established in 1828, was the first high school for girls. Thereafter, the number of high schools for girls increased rapidly. Paying for two singlesex schools rather than one coeducational school made little sense to taxpayers, and coeducational schools soon became the norm. The argument that coeducation would compromise a girl’s virtue fell on deaf ears in the face of economic realities. The number of girls enrolled in high schools steadily increased throughout the century, and by 1870 they outnumbered boys. Enrollment continued to grow so much that by 1900 there were three times as many girls as boys in high schools. However, access to a high school education continued to be primarily limited to those who were white, urban, and living in the northeastern part of the country (Rury 1991). Working-class girls attended high school at slightly lower rates than upperand middle-class girls, but religion and immigration had a bigger impact on high school attendance than social class. Protestant girls were more likely to attend than Catholic girls, and immigrant families from Germanic and Scandinavian countries were more likely to send their daughters to school than families from eastern and southern Europe (Rury 1991). The academies, seminaries, and high schools for girls were established by women reformers and liberal male educators who based their rationale for educating girls in the religious awakening of the early 1800s. They saw education as a way

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Chemistry lab at St. Teresa’s Academy, Kansas City, Missouri. (Library of Congress, ca. 1895)

to enlighten the minds of girls and women and to help them become more spiritual. However, the counterforce acting against the education of girls was a nineteenth-century fear that having girls study masculine subjects such as mathematics and science would be detrimental to society and lead to the destruction of the family. Many people believed that females were physically and intellectually weaker than males and that education would make them incapable of bearing children, ruin their health, lead to depression, and make them unmarriageable. Opponents of publicly funded education were particularly vocal in their opposition to edu-

cating girls because they believed that girls should be educated at home to preserve their purity and delicacy. Nevertheless, by the mid-nineteenth century the debate about educating girls had moved from whether they should be educated to what subjects were appropriate for girls to learn. This debate was temporarily resolved at the close of the nineteenth century. The coeducational public high school was dominated by what was called a male curriculum, which included mathematics and science. Public school educators argued for a male curriculum based on their belief that both sexes needed the same education and were equally capa-

Mathematics and Science ble. Government statistics for course enrollment patterns in 1889 indicate that girls also believed that they were capable of mastering a male curriculum (Rury 1991). More females than males were enrolled in high school algebra, geometry, physics, and chemistry. Furthermore, girls earned grades that were equal to or better than those earned by boys in all high school subjects, including mathematics and science. Girls were even winning mathematics prizes upon graduation based on their superior grades. The situation was quite different in private single-sex secondary schools at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there were equal numbers of males and females enrolled, there was less equality in the curriculum. In particular, more boys than girls were taking algebra, geometry, and various sciences. Even though by the late 1800s white girls had greater access to an education that included mathematics and science, many other girls remained uneducated. Black girls, girls from Asian immigrant families, Native American girls, and Chicana/Latina girls had fewer opportunities to obtain an education. Poverty, slavery, language, and culture all formed barriers to education for minority girls, but the greatest barrier of all was prejudice. The white majority believed that minority girls were intellectually inferior because of their sex and race or ethnicity. The Twentieth Century There were three waves of reform in teaching mathematics and science in the twentieth century. The first wave, built upon the ideas of Pestalozzi and Herbart, was led by John Dewey around 1920. Asserting that school should be enjoyable for children, Dewey and other Progressives

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emphasized a child-centered approach to teaching in the elementary school, mathematics and science topics that were socially relevant for young children, scientific and mathematical cognitive tools to solve everyday problems, developmentally appropriate tasks, and the social importance of knowledge. The elementary school mathematics curriculum was also driven by the idea of readiness to learn concepts and think mathematically. Consequently, formal mathematical instruction was postponed to later grades in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth century. Elementary science was hardly taught at all and continued to be limited to nature studies. The Progressive movement was ahead of its time and foreshadowed many of the present-day recommendations for making mathematics and science more girlfriendly. Unfortunately for girls, most of Dewey’s ideas were resisted by the public, and few were enacted in elementary schools. The history of girls taking mathematics and science in the twentieth century might have been very different if Dewey’s ideas had been more popular. Another innovation in the 1920s, which was the philosophical opposite of the Progressive movement, was the introduction of junior high schools. These schools served as an educational space maker for the mathematics and science curriculum. General science was moved from high schools to junior high schools to make room in the high school curriculum for the more rigorous sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics. In addition, general science was taught in junior high schools to compensate for the poor or nonexistent science curriculum in the elementary schools. The formal study of mathematics, delayed in ele-

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mentary school, also began in junior high school. Educators felt that junior high school was both their last chance to provide mathematics and science to students who would drop out of school in a year or two and their first chance to prepare students for studying mathematics and science in high school. Girls and boys participated equally in the mathematics and science taught in the junior high school. The high school mathematics and science curriculum took a step backward for girls in the early decades of the twentieth century. This period saw the introduction of vocational education. Girls were directed to a business (typing and stenography) or a home economics track, whereas boys were directed to a mechanical or university track. Then educators began to change the mathematics and science courses offered to reflect the vocational tracks of boys and girls. This led to a differentiated curriculum and a decline in the number of girls taking mathematics and science. Between 1900 and 1928 female enrollment in physics dropped 80 percent, and enrollment in algebra fell 33 percent (Rury 1991). Boys outnumbered girls in physics three to one and held a slight majority over girls in mathematics, even though the number of girls enrolled in high school was greater than the number of boys. Girls’ chemistry classes were related to the home, cooking, and food adulteration. Boys’ physics was more technical and scientific. Some educators even argued for limiting the mathematics taken by girls to arithmetic because that was all they would need for the home or office work. Educating girls also became an economic issue in the 1930s. Science courses were more costly than other courses because they included a lab in which

materials were consumed and had to be replaced. Consequently, principals and teachers actively discouraged girls from enrolling in science courses to reduce the number of students who would be consuming materials. Boys were not discouraged. The decline in girls’ participation in mathematics and science in the first half of the twentieth century caused little concern. Most young women still expected that they would be wives and mothers. Work was limited to the period before a young woman married, if she was middle-class or upper-class. Even women who wanted to work and had strong backgrounds in mathematics and science had difficulty securing university, government, or industry jobs that made use of their education. At midcentury a dramatic change took place. President Truman was impressed by the inventions brought about by mathematics and science during World War II, such as the atomic bomb, radar, computers, and jets. He believed that Americans had to reform their educational system, especially in mathematics and science, in order to improve health, prosperity, and national security. The president’s science advisers argued for a foundation that would fund research and improve science teaching in schools, and as a result the National Science Foundation was established. The foundation then funded for curriculum projects to improve mathematics and science instruction in kindergarten through twelfth grade. These curricula took various approaches. The science curricula emphasized teaching through discovery, the learning cycle, and hands-on activities. They focused on understanding scientific processes and the structure of science and on making students scientists. The mathe-

Mathematics and Science matics curricula emphasized teaching with manipulatives such as geometric shapes, counters, and blocks. They focused on concept formation, the structure of mathematics, and understanding of mathematical concepts. The content of the new mathematics curricula replaced algebraic, geometric, and trigonomic concepts with set theory, logic, Boolean algebra, and matrices. Aspects of these curricula were successful in helping students learn, but they came under sharp criticism from teachers and parents and were replaced by the traditional lecture and textbook. Teachers objected because the curricula were elitist and too difficult for most students. Parents objected because they were too nontraditional in both content and pedagogy, especially when the textbook was eliminated. Some scholars objected because the curricula ignored the needs of girls and did not address the high attrition rate of girls from mathematics and science courses. Educators were dismayed when these reforms failed girls, and researchers wanted to know why. They turned their attention to what happens to girls in schools and the nature of science instruction with regard to gender. Studies conducted from the 1970s through the 1990s painted a discouraging picture, but they also provided insights into what needed to be done. What follows is a brief review of this research and suggestions for ways to increase the participation of girls in mathematics and science. Attitude and Self-esteem. Positive attitudes toward mathematics and science decline from the elementary school through high school, and at all grade levels girls’ attitudes are less positive than boys. This decline is linked to the topics

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studied as well as the teaching strategies used. Girls also have lower self-esteem than boys, which is at the very lowest during the transition from elementary to high school (American Association of University Women 1999). Low selfesteem coupled with negative attitudes toward mathematics and science starts a chain reaction. Girls begin to lose selfconfidence and believe that they are not smart enough to take mathematics and science courses. Less self-confidence leads to lower career aspirations. The end result is that fewer girls take noncompulsory mathematics and science classes. The combined effect of low self-esteem and low self-confidence is so strong that girls feel that they are not good at mathematics and science even when they make good grades. Participation Rates. Most girls stop taking mathematics after algebra II. However, even when girls take the same number of mathematics courses as boys, they take lower-level courses such as basic and general mathematics. A similar pattern is found in enrollment in science courses. Girls enroll in biology and chemistry at comparable numbers to boys, but fewer girls than boys take physics. Enrollment for girls and boys in advanced placement classes for all areas of mathematics and chemistry is approximately the same. The number of girls exceeds boys in biology, but fewer girls than boys enroll in physics. Unfortunately, these high enrollment rates are not reflected in advanced placement testing. Fewer girls than boys choose to take the advanced placement tests, and when they do, they score lower than boys. School Effects. Schools play a big part in promoting girls’ participation in mathe-

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matics and science. For example, more girls than boys are identified and placed in gifted programs in the elementary school. Nevertheless, the selection and evaluation process appears to be biased because girls are not placed in gifted programs that focus on mathematics and science. The way American schools teach also has a large impact on girls. Textbookbased instruction, competitive learning strategies, and mathematics and science activities that are not placed in a human context or linked to girls’ concerns and interests (helping people, animals, and the world) do not promote interest in mathematics and science or high performance. These teaching strategies are more likely to match the learning styles and preferences of boys than girls. Classroom interactions also favor boys. Teachers call on boys more than girls, ask them more thought-provoking questions, and give them more feedback for answers. Teachers praise boys more overall, especially for the quality of their work. In contrast, girls are more often praised for the appearance of their work. Teachers also tell boys, but not girls, that their failures are due to lack of effort. These interactions send a clear message to girls. It says that girls are not important in the classroom, that they are not as smart as boys, and that they fail because they lack ability. Student-to-student interactions are dominated by boys and contribute to inequities in the classroom. This is especially true when students work in groups on hands-on mathematics and science activities. During group work boys hog materials and do the tasks. Girls watch or engage in stereotypical roles such as serving as secretary. Boys dominate the group discussions too. Boys ignore girls’

ideas, interrupt girls, or prevent them from speaking. In addition, the standardized tests used by schools strongly favor boys. Boys are comfortable with a multiple-choice format, but girls are not and want more information to answer the questions. The test questions themselves are an additional source of bias because they are more likely to reflect male experiences than female experiences or to appeal more to boys than girls (Bateson and Parsons-Chatman 1981; DeMars 1998; Murphy 1996). The Nature of Science and Mathematics. The general perception of the nature of mathematics and science also discourages girls. Boys, girls, parents, and society in general think of mathematics and science as more appropriate for males than females. A good example of the pervasiveness of this perception is the talking Barbie produced by Mattel. One version, which is no longer produced, had Barbie saying “Math is hard.” Since schools are reflections of society, it should not be surprising to see that schools reinforce the message that mathematics and science are more appropriate subjects for boys. Textbooks have also promoted the idea that mathematics and science are male professions. Until very recently, textbooks had few pictures of women scientists or mathematicians. There were fewer pictures of girls doing mathematics and science and almost no pictures of people of color. Some teachers reinforce the masculine image of mathematics because they believe that boys are better mathematics students than girls. Others reinforce the masculine image of science when they allow boys to dominate science classes.

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Even the makeup of the school mathematics and science faculty can contribute to a masculine image if there are few female teachers to serve as role models. The Latest Reform. The wave of reform that took place at the end of the twentieth century emphasized national standards and systemwide change. The standards helped to increase the number of girls in mathematics and science because statewide testing was linked to the standards. To do well on these tests, girls had to take more than the minimum mathematics and science classes. They also had to take more mathematics and science to meet high school graduation requirements, which increased in response to the standards. These two changes led to more honors and advanced placement classes being offered. The cumulative effect of these changes was higher test scores and little or no gender gap in performance. Research about how and what to teach to interest girls in mathematics and science also became part of the systemic reform effort in public schools and teacher preparation programs at universities. Although it is still very early to come to final conclusions, some positive effects have shown up in classrooms. Mathematics and science became more girl-friendly through the use of hands-on activities, carefully monitored group work, female role models, gender-sensitive textbooks, topics that interest girls, alternative assessments, long-term projects, and reduced competition. Some coeducational schools are experimenting with single-sex mathematics and science classes to improve test scores, attitude, self-esteem, and participation for girls. Unlike changes in pedagogy and the effects of standards, these

Students learn about math from a tutor in an after-school program. (Skjold Photographs)

single-sex arrangements have not made much difference for girls. Achievement has not increased. Furthermore, girls in single-sex classes do not plan to take more mathematics and science than girls in coeducational classrooms. Nor has there been an increase in the number of girls considering a science or mathematics career. The only solid evidence is the impact on attitude. Girls in single-sex classrooms have a better attitude toward mathematics and science than girls in coeducational classrooms. The Future As the twenty-first century began, it remained to be seen whether the latest

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reforms would translate into more girls liking mathematics and science, choosing to study these subjects, excelling on achievement tests, and embarking on mathematics and science careers. Parents must encourage their daughters to study mathematics and science and support their career goals. Everyone must be willing to invest in public education. Without paying for well-trained teachers, well-equipped laboratories, and access to computers, schools cannot provide girls or boys with a twenty-first-century mathematics and science education. Dale Baker See also Education of Girls; Gifted Girls; Jewish Education of Girls; Learning Disabilities, Reading Disorders, and Girls References and Further Reading American Association of University Women. 1991. Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America: Executive Summary. Washington, DC: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. ———. 1999. Gender Gaps. New York: Marlowe. Baker, Dale. 1998. “Equity Issues in Science Education.” Pp. 868–895 in International Handbook of Science Education. Edited by Barry Fraser and Kenneth Tobin. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Baker, Dale, and Michael Piburn. 1997. Constructing Science in Middle and Secondary School Classrooms. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Bateson, David, and Sharon ParsonsChatman. 1981. “Sex-related Difference in Science Achievement: A Possible Testing Artifact.” International Journal of Science Education 11: 371–385. Campbell, Patricia. 1995. “Redefining the Girl Problem in Mathematics.” Pp. 226–241 in New Directions for Equity in Mathematics. Edited by William Secada, Elizabeth Fenema, and Lisa

Adajian. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Deboer, George. 1991. A History of Ideas in Science Education. New York: Teachers College Press. DeMars, Christine. 1998. “Gender Differences in Mathematics and Science on a High School Proficiency Exam: The Role of Response Format.” Applied Measurement in Education 11: 279–299. Eschbach, Elizabeth. 1993. The Higher Education of Women in England and America. New York: Garland. Leder, Gerda. 1992. “Mathematics and Gender: Changing Perspectives.” Pp. 597–622 in Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Edited by Douglas Grouws. New York: Macmillan. Murphy, Patricia. 1996. “Assessment Practices and Gender in Science.” Pp. 105–117 in Gender Science and Mathematics. Edited by Lesley Parker, Leonie Rennie, and Barry Fraser. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 1970. A History of Mathematics Education. Thirty-second Yearbook. Washington, DC: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Oakes, Jennie. 1990. “Opportunities, Achievement, and Choice: Women and Minority Students in Science and Mathematics.” Pp. 153–237 in Review of Education Research, vol. 16. Edited by Courtney Cazden. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Rury, John. 1991. Education and Women’s Work. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Mennonite Girls The Mennonites, a religious sect with origins in the sixteenth-century Anabaptist groups of the radical Reformation, take their name from their founder, Menno Simons. The Mennonites follow the Schleitheim Confession of faith, which calls them to adult baptism, sepa-

Mennonite Girls ration from the world, and nonviolence. Today, a wide variety of Mennonites live in the United States and Canada. Each group embraces varying degrees of separation from the world, a fact that largely determines the lives of the girls in their communities. Although Mennonites in the United States and Canada have traditionally lived agricultural lives, rapid modernization and urbanization have taken place in the twentieth century. This, too, has affected the lives of girls in Mennonite communities. More conservative Mennonite communities, including the Old Order and Holdeman Mennonites, as well as the Amish, are more visibly recognizable as living a life separate from that of mainstream North American society, whereas the Mennonite Conference, General Conference, and Mennonite Brethren groups have more fully integrated into mainstream society. For girls in such communities, the focus of Mennonite identity has shifted from separation to service in the broader community and more active witness to peace and justice concerns. As a result, women and girls have been able to participate more fully in the promotion of these ideals through various means, especially churchaffiliated service organizations and educational institutions. Restrictions on attire have long been an outward symbol of the Mennonites’ rejection of worldliness that separates them from the broader American cultural landscape. Indeed, in some conservative Mennonite groups, especially those for which separation from mainstream society is still a central principle of group and individual identity, attire is a way to replace “the eroding function of social isolation and separate (German) language” long embraced by North American Mennon-

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Frontispiece from Tillie: A Mennonite Maid by Helen R. Martin (1904)

ites (Juhnke 1989, 131). Mennonite girls in Old Order and Holdeman communities are still required to wear “modest” clothing that covers the entire body, and girls’ heads must be covered by prayer caps (small bonnets worn on the back of the head). These restrictions on dress are designed to train girls in the biblical virtues of simplicity and social nonconformity and to teach obedience, specifically to Paul’s command for women to cover their heads (1 Corinthians 11). Clothing mandates differ from congregation to congregation. For example, prayer coverings vary “in size, material, strings, and color of string, and in whether

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A modern Mennonite girl (Arne Hodalic/Corbis, 1991)

the strings were tied or hung loose” (Juhnke 1989, 130–131). In these communities, girls’ attire is more restricted than that of boys. Indeed, girls’ and “women’s traditional clothing—cape dresses and head coverings—set them apart and forced them to bear the principal burden of separation from the world, a traditional Mennonite value” (Schmidt, Reschly, and Umble, forthcoming, 8). In more mainstream Mennonite communities, modesty is also encouraged, albeit in modern clothing. For example, makeup, jewelry, and revealing or economically ostentatious clothing are often implicitly, if not explicitly, discouraged for both girls and women. The lives of Mennonite girls have been affected by the role that adult women have assumed in both the communities and the church. In the General Confer-

ence and Mennonite Conference groups, women have assumed new roles of leadership in the twentieth century, which in turn has opened up new avenues for girls. Mennonite colleges, such as Goshen College, Bethel College, and Eastern Mennonite University, are open to young women, predominantly from mainstream congregations, who wish to pursue a college education in a Mennonite academic setting. In addition, roles for women as ministers, professors, professionals, and leaders have also developed within the more progressive Mennonite communities. However, Mennonite women’s and girls’ “community practices, participation, and influence are often exercised through their husband’s [or father’s] place in the community or through female-centered activities, such as the Breadmaking

Menstruation ritual and kinship networks” (Schmidt, Reschly, and Umble, forthcoming, 9). This can limit the activities of girls and the opportunities available to them, both inside their communities and in the broader American culture. Greta Grace Kroeker See also Catholic Girls; Jewish Education of Girls; Rural Girls References and Further Reading Dyck, Cornelius J., ed. 1981. An Introduction to Mennonite History: A Popular History of the Anabaptists and Mennonites. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Juhnke, James C. 1989. Vision, Doctrine, War: Mennonite Identity and Organization in America. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Kraybill, Donald B. 1987. “Mennonite Women’s Veiling: The Rise and Fall of a Sacred Symbol.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 61 (June): 298–320. Penner, Carol. 1991. “Mennonite Women’s History: A Survey.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 9: 122–135. Schmidt, Kimberly D., Steven D. Reschly, and Diane Zimmerman Umble. Forthcoming. Insider/Outsider: Women of Anabaptist Traditions in Historical Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Menstruation Menstruation in the modern United States has been shaped by a combination of biological and cultural changes over the past 200 years. On the biological side, the average age of menarche, or onset of menstruation, has dropped significantly since the eighteenth century. In the 1780s, the average age at which girls began menstruation was seventeen. Today, due to improvements in nutrition and health care, the average age of menarche is twelve, and it is not unusual for some girls to begin menstruating as

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young as eight or nine years of age (Tanner 1981). Cultural attitudes toward menstruation have also changed dramatically. In earlier historical periods, menstruation was viewed as a sign of a young girl’s transition to womanhood. In modern times, menstruation is viewed as a “hygienic crisis,” an attitude that emphasizes personal hygiene rather than rites of passage. Studies of adolescent girls in different historical, geographic, and socioeconomic settings have demonstrated that the age of menarche is not fixed but is heavily shaped by numerous influences such as fatness at adolescence, physique, health status, genetics, degree of physical activity, and socioeconomic status. Since the reproductive process requires energy, reproductive ability is curtailed in times of food scarcity or when calories burned through physical exertion or exercise exceed the amount of food ingested. Researchers have clearly established that poorly nourished girls, female athletes, and girls with anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders reach menarche at later ages, have higher rates of amenorrhea, and have a greater frequency of menstruation without ovulation than well-nourished girls (Brumberg 1988; Brumberg 1997; Frisch 1978). Physicians first began to notice a significant decline in the average age of menarche during the late 1800s but interpreted this phenomenon much differently than medical experts do today. Researchers now know that the declining age of menarche is due to improvements in nutrition and health care and the declining incidence of infectious disease. In the nineteenth century, however, most physicians endorsed racist ideas about human difference and looked for physical traits that would demonstrate that working-class Europeans and Africans, Asians,

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and Native Americans were inferior to white, middle-class Europeans. One of the physical signs that medical experts used to “prove” the inferiority of nonwhite and working-class individuals was early age of first menstruation, since this trait seemed to place these groups closer to animals. Doctors attributed the allegedly early age of puberty in nonwhite and lower-class individuals to two causes: precocious sexual activity and warm climate. Either or both of these factors, scientists argued, caused a buildup of heat in the body. Since many believed that heat was the engine of growth, anything that caused an accumulation of heat would lead to an early age of menarche. Anthropologists argued that peoples from tropical areas experienced earlier ages of physical maturity because of the hot climate and because these “primitive” cultures encouraged sexual experimentation and marriage at earlier ages than did Western countries (Russett 1989). Physicians noted that bodily maturation in American and European girls could be accelerated by indulging in conversations with men, kissing, or other sorts of sexual encounters. Some claimed that indulgence in sexual activity was why prostitutes and lower-class women had an earlier age of menarche than did gentlewomen (Tanner 1981). As a result of these views, middle-class parents in the United States viewed declining ages of menarche among middle-class white girls with a certain degree of alarm. Medical advice literature in the nineteenth century advised mothers to prevent their daughters from masturbating, reading romantic novels, and indulging in any activity that might excite the sexual passions. Many physicians also believed that too much consumption of meat contributed to preco-

cious sexual longings and development in young girls and could even cause insanity and nymphomania. Doctors therefore advised mothers to restrict their daughters’ intake of meat in order to prevent premature onset of menstruation. In retrospect, this advice may have contributed to the higher age of menarche in the late nineteenth century. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, doctors viewed menstruation as a pathological process that required close medical management. Most nineteenth-century physicians claimed that menstruation was a potentially dangerous, even life-threatening condition that required constant vigilance throughout a woman’s reproductive life. Because of the alleged perils of puberty, menstruation, and menopause, physicians advised women to avoid strenuous mental and physical activities during their periods. These beliefs were closely linked to fears about “race suicide,” the idea that the white, native-born, upper classes were dying out because of ill health, poor physical fitness, and lower birth rates compared to immigrants and African Americans. Many of these fears about race suicide focused on the health of college women, who married less often and, when married, had fewer children than women who did not attend college. These theories were used to restrict women’s access to higher education. According to the noted Harvard physician Edward Clarke, excessive mental activity drew energy away from the developing reproductive organs, leading to menstrual disorders and infertility. Clarke and other medical experts recommended that girls should not be allowed to attend high school or college, since they believed that intensive studying during adolescence would damage their reproductive health.

Menstruation Not everyone agreed with the medical theory, least of all women physicians who attempted to disprove the notion that education could damage women’s health. Women physicians such as Mary Putnam Jacobi and Clelia Duel Mosher conducted studies of female students and observed that not only was rest not necessary during menstruation, but that physical and mental activity could actually alleviate menstrual pain (Brumberg 1997; Russett 1989). Nevertheless, women’s colleges and coeducational institutions played it safe and protected female health by requiring women students to live on campus, hiring college physicians, and making physical education mandatory. During the twentieth century, changes in women’s roles and further medical studies gradually disproved the notion that menstruation was debilitating for women. Growing numbers of women entered higher education and the workforce without any apparent ill effects. Although some physicians undoubtedly clung to the notion of menstruation as pathology, this view gradually disappeared from mainstream medical opinion. The need to encourage women to enter the war production industries during World War II made the notion of menstrual debility increasingly untenable. Physicians combated the problem of “menstrual absenteeism” by emphasizing the normality of menstruation and stating that most women did not need to rest during their monthly courses (Lander 1988). Popular knowledge appears to have lagged behind medical views, however, for the medical advice literature from the 1940s and 1950s is full of complaints that women were continuing to view menstruation as a “sickness” and “scaring their daughters to death” with lurid tales

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of the trials and tribulations women endured because of “the curse.” Gynecologists may have been exaggerating the extent to which mothers failed to prepare their daughters in order to exalt their own medical expertise. However, historical studies indicate that as late as the 1960s, a significant number of girls felt ill-prepared for menstruation (Brumberg 1997). At the same time, racist and elitist views about early menarche gradually disappeared. Medical studies of girls who had experienced famine, illness, and other harsh conditions during World War II demonstrated a definite link between poor nutrition and delayed menarche. These discoveries, combined with growing intolerance for racism in scientific theory, completely undermined earlier notions about the effects of climate or sexual activity on puberty and established once and for all that nutritional status is the determining factor in age of sexual maturation (Tanner 1981). The growth of the sanitary products industry in the twentieth century also changed the ways in which girls experience menstruation. Until the late nineteenth century, most women and girls used scraps of spare cloth to absorb menstrual flow. By the 1890s, concerns about the spread of germs and the desire for disposable methods of menstrual hygiene among women workers and girls in schools and colleges led middle-class mothers and their daughters to make sanitary napkins out of gauze and surgical cotton. During the early 1900s, massproduced sanitary napkins began to appear and were advertised in women’s magazines starting in the 1920s. In 1933, Earle Cleveland Haas obtained the first patent for vaginal tampons, and the first manufactured tampons appeared on the market in 1936 under the brand name

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Tampax. The product was an immediate sensation: working women and athletes in particular liked the product because it was less cumbersome and conspicuous than sanitary napkins. The popularity of tampons received an added boost during World War II, as women and doctors alike recognized the advantages of internal protection for female war workers and military personnel. However, use of tampons by adolescent girls remained controversial well into the 1960s and revealed lingering anxieties about female adolescent sexuality. Many physicians and parents believed that using the product would corrupt girls by damaging or destroying the hymen, thereby paving the way for petting and intercourse. Others believed that tampons caused “erotic stimulation” in the genital area, thereby encouraging masturbation and other undesirable behaviors in young women. Despite these objections, adolescent girls continued to use tampons with or without parental knowledge or approval. Tampons gradually became part of adolescent girl culture in the years following World War II, as young women learned how to “put it in” from friends and older siblings. Using tampons allowed adolescent girls to become better acquainted with their bodies and their own sexuality in a context that was separate from either professional or parental control. The sanitary products industry responded to this growing teen market by offering “small” or “junior” size products designed especially for the adolescent vagina. Manufacturers of tampons also expanded their market by providing consumer education programs in public schools, guided by the philosophy that if “you sold them younger, you sold them longer” by devel-

oping product loyalty at a young age (Brumberg 1997). The transitions outlined above resulted in both gains and losses for adolescent girls. Menstruation has become a normal event, and girls are no longer advised to restrict their physical or mental activities when they have their periods. However, the growing prominence of the sanitary product industry and the emphasis on hygienic management have meant that adolescent girls equate menarche and menstruation with the use of a consumer product rather than seeing these events as part of a larger transition toward womanhood. Heather Munro Prescott See also Adolescent Health; Birth Control; Body Image; Female Sexuality; Hygiene; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1988. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House. Frisch, Rose E. 1978. “Population, Food Intake, and Fertility.” Science 199: 22–30. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1984. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lander, Louise. 1988. Images of Bleeding: Menstruation as Ideology. New York: Orlando Press. Prescott, Heather Munro. 1998. “A Doctor of Their Own”: The History of Adolescent Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1989. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mill Girls Tanner, James Mourilyan. 1981. A History of the Study of Human Growth. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mill Girls During the first half of the nineteenth century, the mill girls of New England became the first significant population of female factory workers in the United States. In response to the growing textile industry’s need for factory operatives to work as bobbin-doffers, spinners, weavers, and dresser-tenders, large numbers of young women left their rural homes to take advantage of employment opportunities in expanding mill towns such as Manchester, New Hampshire; Chicopee, Massachusetts; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and most famously, Lowell, Massachusetts. Working in the textile mills and participating in the communal life of the factories and the growing industrial towns afforded these girls a measure of economic and social freedom unavailable to women of previous generations. At the same time, the mill girls had to steer their way through profound social dislocations as they struggled to switch from the relative autonomy of work within a household economy to the regulated schedule of factory employment. In their attempts to reconcile their positions within a mechanized system of industrial labor with cultural ideals about feminine respectability and gentility, the mill girls used literacy and their literary productions in their attempts to forge sustainable identities for themselves as working girls. In preindustrial America, women’s work was an integral part of the household economy. More particularly, the spinning of yarn and weaving of cloth were primarily domestic activities that

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women and girls undertook within the home in order to meet the textile needs of their own families. In the early years of the Republic, Jeffersonian advocates of the household-based economy and agrarian lifestyle looked upon organized manufacturing with great distrust. As the Embargo Act of 1807 and eventual war with England interrupted foreign trade, the inconvenience of relying upon the domestic production of a rurally based population became all too obvious. For people who looked to promote the development of manufacturing interests in the United States, the making of cotton cloth seemed a promising venture: it was widely used; the raw material was grown on American shores; and though low in price, the sales volume was likely to be high. The earliest spinning mills in southern New England had begun production in 1790 under the direction of an English immigrant and machinist named Samuel Slater, but these early mills relied on a “putting out” system that actually increased the demand for household labor (Dublin 1979, 15). Only the carding of cotton and spinning of yarn were fully mechanized. Home-based workers were still needed to clean the raw cotton and to weave cloth. Sheltered from the competition of English imports by the hostilities between the United States and Great Britain, the Slater mills initially prospered. But in 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell began to develop a power loom that would make it possible to integrate all the steps in the production of cotton cloth at a single location, thus eliminating the coordination and quality-control difficulties associated with Slater’s system of putting out. In 1814, the Boston Manufacturing Company, comprising Lowell and

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a small circle of Boston merchants, began producing fabric at its Waltham, Massachusetts, mill and was poised to dominate the market for the inexpensive, coarse cloth used by the majority of Americans. By 1821, the Boston Manufacturing Company was paying average yearly dividends of 20 percent on its closely held stock and was looking to expand its operations beyond the limits imposed by the availability of water power along the Charles River in Waltham. Near the small village of East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, the Boston associates found sufficient water power where the Merrimack River dropped 32 feet in the space of 1 mile; in addition, the little-used Pawtucket canal could serve for power purposes, and the bigger Middlesex canal could offer freight and passenger access to Boston (Dublin 1979, 18–19). It was an ideal site to build a “city of spindles,” and by 1850, Lowell, which was incorporated in 1826, was the leading textile center in the nation, with a population of 33,000 (Dublin 1979, 21). Mill girls, most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, comprised a significant portion of the population of Lowell throughout its early decades. Needing a reliable pool of workers capable of handling the physical and mental demands of the power looms and other new machinery, the Boston textile magnates recruited the daughters of New England farmers to work in the mills. Typically, the families from which female mill workers came were the less propertied farmers in northern New England. These families did not face severe economic hardships, yet mill employment would have met a number of familial financial needs, for example, sending a brother to college, paying off a mortgage, making farm improvements, or

providing a dowry. On average, the operatives worked for twelve hours a day, six days a week. In 1836, mill girls’ daily earnings averaged 40 to 80 cents, with those workers employed in the dressing and weaving processes earning more based on their skills (Dublin 1979, 66). To overcome the stigma attached to factory work and to address parental anxieties about their daughters leaving home to work, the mill owners adopted an attitude of corporate paternalism, which included building company-owned boardinghouses where mill girls could lodge, staffing those boardinghouses with reputable matrons, enforcing a 10:00 P.M. curfew, requiring church attendance, and strictly prohibiting alcohol and “games of hazard” on company property. Functioning as surrogate parents, boardinghouse keepers were expected to enforce these regulations and to report any infractions to mill agents. Although the corporations’ efforts were regarded as responsible corporate stewardship, they also helped ensure a docile workforce. Providing their employees with accommodations afforded the mill owners an extra measure of control over the lives of the mill girls, and the company regulations were designed to ensure that workers were sufficiently well fed and well rested to meet the demands of factory work. In addition to the corporate paternalism, broader kinship networks helped facilitate the movement of these farmers’ daughters from their rural homes to the growing city of Lowell. As they sought employment in the mills, many girls were aided by sisters, cousins, inlaws, and hometown friends who were already working in the textile industry. Through these social networks, young women found places in the mills and

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were eased into their new duties as factory workers. The experience of entering the mills and taking up wage labor for the first time could be profoundly disorienting for many young women. One writer in the Lowell Offering described the experience of a girl when she entered the factory for the first time: At first, the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs, in constant motion, was very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure that she could never learn to weave, the harness puzzled, and the reed perplexed her; the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump upon her head, and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the threads. It seemed as though the girls all stared at her, and the overseers watched every motion, and the day appeared as long as a month had been at home. (Eisler 1977, 180) To help newcomers adjust to the demands of factory work, overseers used a system of “sparehands”: that is, new workers assisted experienced operatives as a form of on-the-job training. In addition to the sparehands system of training, mill girls often helped each other by tending an extra loom, allowing a fellow operative to earn wages while taking a brief leave from work for illness or personal emergency. A mill girl’s day was thus a social experience, not an individual servitude to industrial machines. Coupled with the kinship networks that facilitated their transition to factory towns and the fact that the mill girls were a homogeneous population in terms of age, ethnicity, and background, the

Cover of the Lowell Offering, a periodical written and published by mill girls. (Lowell Historical Society, Lowell, Massachusetts)

communal nature of work in the mills helped form a strong sense of solidarity among the factory operatives. Once the closing bell rang signaling the end of the workday, the mill girls returned to their boardinghouses. Typically, each boardinghouse sheltered twenty-five young women, with four to six girls sharing each bedroom, and meals were taken in a common dining room. The boardinghouses afforded individual mill girls little privacy. One factory operative lamented the “bustle and confu-

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sion” of the “overflowing boardinghouse,” noting: “If there chance to be an intelligent mind in that crowd which is striving to lay up treasures of knowledge, how unfavorably is it situated! Crowded into one small room which contains three beds and six females, all possessing the ‘without end’ tongue of woman, what chance is there for studying? and much less for sober thinking and reflecting?” (Factory Tract no. 1, 1845, 3). Outside the boardinghouses, the mill girls were able to take part in and help create a rich cultural life. Many young women availed themselves of local lending libraries. In her 1889 memoir of life as a mill girl, Lucy Larcom reported that she read the works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Washington Irving, John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Carlyle; Harriet Hanson Robinson (1976) similarly documented her reading of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sir Walter Scott. Periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s Magazine, Blackwood’s Magazine, and the Westminster and Edinburgh Reviews were also widely read among factory operatives. In addition to the popular lending libraries, Lowell was a frequent stop on the lyceum circuit, and lectures, concerts, and evening classes were well attended. Professor A. P. Peabody of Harvard recalled: I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum. . . . The Lowell Hall was always crowded and four-fifths of the audience were factory girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand and was intent upon it. When he rose, the book was laid aside and paper and

pencil taken instead. . . . I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note-taking. No, not even in a college class, as in that assembly of young women laboring for their subsistence. (quoted in Robinson 1976, 45) In addition to the opportunities for education offered by the lyceum and public lectures, many young women chose to affiliate with church-sponsored improvement circles or mutual selfimprovement clubs, where they could meet to discuss commonly read texts and share their own writing with each other. These improvement circles ultimately gave birth to the much celebrated periodical publication, the genteel Lowell Offering. The Reverend Abel C. Thomas, a Universalist minister, helped launch the Offering in 1840, but by 1842 two factory operatives—Harriet F. Farley and Harriott Curtis—had assumed all editorial duties. With its cover illustration featuring a young girl with book in hand while a factory building, church spire, and schoolhouse arise in the background, the Lowell Offering featured poems, essays, short stories, and sketches that positioned factory operatives as contented workers whose extracurricular, literary activities marked them as equals to the ladies of the leisure class. After a visit to Lowell afforded him the opportunity to peruse several issues of the Offering, Charles Dickens remarked: Of the merits of the Lowell Offering as a literary production, I will only observe, putting entirely out of sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls after the arduous labours of the day, that it will compare advantageously with great many English Annuals. It is pleasant

Mill Girls to find that many of its Tales are of the Mills and of those who work in them; that they inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence. A strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air; and though a circulating library is a favourable school for the study of such topics, it has very scant allusions to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life. (1842, 78) For Dickens and many others who praised the Offering, the link between the literary talents of the mill girls and their claims to a feminine respectability usually reserved for the leisured class provided reassurance that factory work need not be degrading and would not promote female depravity. Although the texts in the Lowell Offering were by no means as wholly concerned with depicting the benefits of factory life as Dickens’s reading suggests, the competing Voice of Industry staked out more radical ground. Frustrated by the unwillingness of the Offering’s editors to acknowledge that workers’ dissatisfaction with working conditions had been growing since the mid-1830s as the corporations increased the speed of work and chipped away at wages, Sarah Bagley and fourteen other mill girls formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) in December of 1844 and joined forces with the Voice of Industry, a widely read labor newspaper of the day. In 1846, the LFLRA bought the printing press used to publish the weekly paper, and Bagley joined the three-person publishing board. Through

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the Voice, the mill girls were able to articulate their demands for a ten-hour workday and improved working conditions. The Voice published operatives’ poetry, sketches, essays, and fiction, which addressed topics as diverse as the dignity of labor and the exploitation of workers as well as subjects more typically labeled as feminine: fashion, courtship, and marriage. More obviously than in the Lowell Offering, the mill girls who contributed to the Voice were seeking to forge a diverse discourse in which feminine respectability and labor militancy could coexist. In calling attention to their literacy skills by publishing various types of texts in the Voice, reform-minded mill girls not only asserted the traditionally genteel prerogative of participating in the print culture but also insisted upon working conditions that would not be so debilitating as to silence their voices (Lutes 1993, 7–8). Although the celebrated literary culture of the mill girls thrived in the first half of the 1840s, the textile industry and its workforce were already in a process of transformation, and by 1860 most of the farmers’ daughters who had journeyed to Lowell had departed, to be replaced by a more fully proletarian immigrant workforce. The mill girls had first “turned out” of the mills to express their outrage over proposed wage reductions and hikes in rates charged by company boardinghouses in February 1934 and in October 1836. The factory operatives viewed these proposed changes as an assault upon their self-worth and dignity. Employing a republican rhetoric and invoking their heritage as daughters of Yankee patriots, the mill girls sought to assert their equality with overseers, agents, and mill owners. Their efforts met with mixed success: in 1836 the mills operated at reduced

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This 1868 lithograph from Harper’s Weekly titled Bell Time depicts mill girls leaving the Lowell Mill. (Library of Congress)

capacity for a number of months, and the proposed increases in boarding costs were largely rescinded. By the mid-1840s, though, a new labor movement had taken root in the textile industry. The failure of sporadic and isolated opposition to mill owners’ attempts to speed up the rate of machines, to increase the number of machines each worker tended, and to establish a premium system that pitted overseers against operatives led workers to pursue legislative remedies against the mill owners. Lowell workers routinely sent petitions to the state legislature requesting a mandated ten-hour workday. The efforts of the reform-minded workers to improve working conditions were undermined by a number of eco-

nomic and demographic factors. By the 1840s, the mills along the Merrimack River had maximized their production capacities, and as the Waltham-Lowell patents expired, competition in the industry increased, driving down profit margins. Coupled with an influx of immigrants, mostly Irish, who were desperate for employment under any circumstances, work conditions in the mills deteriorated to the point that life as a mill girl was no longer an attractive option for the native-born daughters of New England farmers. Many of the mill girls left Lowell and other mill towns to become schoolteachers, missionaries, librarians, mothers, and wives. By 1860, nearly two-thirds of the mill workers

Movies, Adolescent Girls in were immigrants. No longer seeking to attract young women workers, owners stopped building and maintaining boardinghouses. The culture of the mill girls of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s had vanished from the scene by 1860. Jane Greer See also Immigration; Work References Dickens, Charles. 1842. American Notes for General Circulation. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz. Dublin, Thomas. 1979. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press. Eisler, Benita, ed. 1977. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840–1845). New York: Harper Colophon. Factory Tracts. 1845. 1982. Reprint, Lowell, MA: Lowell Publishing Co. Foner, Philip S., ed. 1977. The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings on Life and Struggles in the New England Factories of the 1840s by the Factory Girls Themselves, and the Story, in Their Own Words, of the First Trade Unions of Women Workers in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 1994. “‘What Factory Girls Had Power to Do’: The Technologic of Working-Class Feminine Publicity in The Lowell Offering.” Arizona Quarterly 50, no. 2: 109–128. Larcom, Lucy. 1889. A New England Girlhood Outlined from Memory. 1996. Reprint, Boston: Riverside Press. Lutes, Jean Marie. 1993. “Cultivating Domesticity: Labor Reform and the Literary Culture of the Lowell Mill Girls.” Works and Days 11, no. 2: 7–26. Robinson, Harriet H. 1898. Loom and Spindle or Life among the Early Mill Girls. 1976. Reprint, Kailua, HI: Press Pacifica. Ware, Caroline F. 1931. The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Zonderman, David A. 1992. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System 1815–1850. New York: Oxford University Press.

Movies, Adolescent Girls in Motion pictures have both shaped and reproduced adolescent femininity. Adolescent girls have been populating the screen from the inception of the medium, and moviegoing has been an important social activity of adolescence. The necessity of appealing to a wide audience clearly dictated both the themes and tropes of the early cinema. The earliest representations of adolescence on film took their subject matter from nineteenth-century forms of popular culture, such as stage melodrama, vaudeville, burlesque, and pulp novels. Among the earliest actors were adolescent girls, partly because the stigma associated with acting in films deterred stage actors from film work. Moreover, these young actors needed little training—early films were very short. There was also a technical reason for the use of young women: because of their lack of wrinkles, adolescent girls photographed well in the harsh lights needed to expose the film used in the earliest movies. The plots of one of cinema’s earliest directors, D. W. Griffith, often turned on the exploits of adolescent girls. Griffith idealized his adolescent heroines and remained fairly consistent in his portrayals of innocent, prepubescent girls well into the 1920s. He cultivated a repertory company that included a number of adolescent girls, including Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, Carol Dempster, and Dorothy and Lillian Gish. The most enduring idealized representation of girlhood and adolescence from

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1915 to 1930 was the one created by Mary Pickford. She began her film career in 1909 when she was sixteen, already older than most of the parts she would play, and would continue to play children until she was in her mid-thirties. Ultimately, she became a prisoner of her own image. Together, Pickford and Lillian Gish represented two extremes of the Victorian paradigm. Gish was either the victim or the redeemer, whereas Pickford was the plucky tomboy who triumphed over adversity in films like Rags (1915), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Pollyanna (1920), Little Annie Rooney (1925), and Sparrows (1926). Although the earliest representations of adolescent girls in film were idealized and took their content from nineteenth-century literary themes, by the early 1920s such films were of little interest to teenage girls. One theme that would emerge in the 1920s both on-screen and off was that girls’ culture was built on both conformity and rebellion. The process of identity formation was tenuous, as girls tried to embrace standards set by the parent culture and struggled to conform to peers’ expectations. Institutionalized secondary education, which would become widespread in the decade, encouraged peer conformity and adherence to group standards. By the 1920s, the peer group had become an important family substitute. Moreover, girls gained increased visibility as they began to carve out a cultural space that turned on their styles and fads. The cultural symbol of this new moral order was a teenage girl, the flapper. Although there were still idealized Victorian representations, increasingly the flapper began to replace the plucky orphan. The change also coincided with a shift from working-class to middleclass patronage of motion pictures. Flap-

per films like Prodigal Daughters (1923), House of Youth (1924), The Plastic Age (1925), Campus Flirt (1926), Our Dancing Daughters (1928), Our Modern Maidens (1929), and The Wild Party (1929) helped to perpetuate the popular image of wild adolescence and the revolt of youth. As films about girls made clear, generational differences were more than superficial. Screen teens were clearly rebelling against the parent culture and attempting to assert their own autonomy. The breakdown of traditional forms of authority in both society and film appeared to spur an epidemic of sexual delinquency. There was a fine line separating the film flapper from the delinquent and increasingly Hollywood crossed it. By the late 1920s, the behavior of flappers was labeled as sexually delinquent in a number of screen treatments, such as Road to Ruin (1928) and Port of Missing Girls (1928). Sensationalist exposés and pseudodocumentaries produced by independent studios pandered to public perceptions and fears about “wild youth.” Such depictions reinforced popular perceptions of delinquency while eroticizing female adolescent sexuality on the other. In both films and popular advice, the solution to a wayward daughter was a vigilant mother, so mothers were instructed to keep their daughters on a short rein. In response to what they saw as the corrupting effects of such films, moral reformers, particularly female reformers, targeted motion pictures in the 1920s. They marshaled evidence to show that the new medium was responsible for the moral decline of youth. Filmmakers shot back not only by increasingly representing female adolescents as a problematic group but often by blaming female reformers for the problems of girls. One compelling feature of films of the 1920s,

Movies, Adolescent Girls in extending into the 1950s, was the trope of middle-class reformers and club women as “bad mothers.” In fact, films have been fairly consistent in their condemnation of parental neglect as the cause of delinquency throughout the twentieth century. Whether they were sexual delinquents or simply girls challenging traditional forms of authority, adolescent girls in film seemed intent on testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Girls themselves were seemingly unaffected by the exposés and exploitation films that were meant to serve as dire warnings to both parents and teens. Although parents might be worried by the delinquents portrayed on film, girls themselves favored representations of autonomous, independent teens like those created by Joan Crawford and Clara Bow, who offered new paradigms of behavior. The Depression caused serious dislocation for American families, and adolescent girls on-screen were forced to solve their own problems without parental support or guidance. Increasingly, girls were represented as much more competent and resilient than their elders. Certainly, the tendency to mythologize teenage girls must be evaluated in the context of film censorship. Although films about teenage girls in the 1920s often challenged the censors, by the 1930s girls had become a safe topic again. For the first time, there were a large number of screen actresses able to portray distinct adolescent personas because they were themselves adolescents. Actresses such as Judy Garland, Bonita Granville, Anne Shirley, and Deanna Durbin offered clear characterizations that differed from those offered by child stars like Shirley Temple and Jane Withers. These representations coincided with the fact that female girls as fans also

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began to assert both their preferences and dislikes. The exigency of war increased the market power of teenage girls in the 1940s. The emergence of a strong subculture and a subcultural icon, the bobby-soxer, was instrumental in the continuation of a public identity for girls. Their increased market strength involved new avenues of consumption, as whole industries, like music and clothing manufacturers, began catering to teenage girls. Bobby-soxers in films like Janie (1944), Kiss and Tell (1945), Junior Miss (1945), The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), A Date with Judy (1948), and Father Was a Fullback (1949) were self-absorbed and blissfully unaware of the world crisis. Although the trope was sometimes a foolish one, there was a kind of subversiveness about this teen symbol. In film, the bobbysoxer operated as a destabilizing figure because she had the power to subvert her father’s authority (not to mention his sanity). Grown men seemed all but powerless in the face of the bobby-soxer’s cultural practices. The sexuality of teenage girls has consistently preoccupied filmmakers: it was problematized as delinquent in the 1920s, denied in the 1930s, and then made humorous in the 1940s. Particularly noteworthy were the ways in which girls were either the objects of adult male desire or the objects of continuous worry over their sexual behavior by adult men. Filmic tropes of teenage girls began to change in the 1950s as the carefree bobby-soxer evolved into the conflicted teen. Representations of happy, carefree teens were hardly a feature of the 1950s adolescent film, and humor was strangely lacking in Hollywood’s vision of screen teens. By this time, Americans were no longer laughing at the antics of

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Cindy Williams with Ron Howard in American Graffiti. (Photofest, 1972)

youth. Films about adolescent girls increasingly began to reflect very liberal attitudes about sex, attitudes that are in many ways more liberal than their early 1960s counterparts. Films like A Summer Place (1959), Blue Denim (1959), and Peyton Place (1957) subtly warned against the double standard and adult hypocrisy and suggested not only that teenage sex was inevitable but that teenage girls had sexual needs. As Hollywood’s dependence on the youth market increased, it began to cater to them through a cycle of delinquency films. Exploitation and sensationalism were used to attract a teen audience.

Although films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), The Wild One (1954), and The Blackboard Jungle (1955) won critical acclaim, the mainstay of the genre was the cheaply produced films of American International Pictures (AIP). AIP was responsible for almost all films made about teens in the 1950s. In 1954, three independent producers, Sam Arkoff, James Nicholson, and Roger Corman, formed the studio to make inexpensive films that would cater specifically to teens. AIP set up shop when other studios producing low-budget “B” films were shutting down. Nonetheless, the AIP producers reasoned that exhibitors

Movies, Adolescent Girls in still needed B-fare that was topical, sensational, geared to youth, and, most importantly, cheap to make. During the 1950s, AIP released more than twenty films dealing with delinquency alone. In the AIP product, there were only two kinds of girls—good and bad (or “thrill-crazy” as they were often called in these films). Female protagonists were either gang members, appendages to male gang members, or intent on reforming some boy (usually a gang member). The films featured large doses of sex, violence, hot rods, drag races, and rock and roll. They starred B-movie actresses such as Mamie Van Doren, Faye Spain, Anne Neyland, and Yvonne Lime in films like Fast and Furious (1956), Reform School Girl (1957), Dragstrip Girl (1957), Hot Rod Girl (1956), and High School Hellcats (1958). AIP films provided the perfect features for the new drive-in theaters that quickly became the province of teenagers. In the 1960s, films began to center on what television could not—sex. Filmmakers started to go as far as the censors would allow. At least 70 percent of box office revenue continued to come from people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, and studios continued to cater to the youth audience (Cohen 1969, 9). In the early 1960s, they did so by repackaging concepts and ideas about youth that had been successful in the 1950s. Juvenile delinquency was recycled in films like Because They’re Young (1960) and Kitten with a Whip (1964), but by the mid-1960s, films detailing juvenile delinquency lost their relevance. Even the press abandoned the subject, and delinquents stopped being a marketable commodity. Something was needed to take the place of delinquents, and Hollywood found it on the beach instead of the

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drag strip. Once again AIP was at the forefront of the new teen craze by capitalizing on the increasing public fascination with the culture of Southern California. The cycle began in 1963 with Beach Party and would continue through Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Bikini Beach (1964), and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965). Former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello became the premier beach bunny in these silly, slapstick farces. After the angst and teenage rebellion of the screen teens in the 1950s, Hollywood turned to more lighthearted, safer, and predictable themes about females in the 1960s. There was a return of the “harried father guarding his daughter’s virginity” films of the 1940s, and once again teenage girls seemed sexually irresistible. The 1960s daughters were, in fact, much sexier than their bobby-soxer counterparts and thus more deserving of their fathers’ concern in films like Take Her, She’s Mine (1963), I’ll Take Sweden (1965), and The Impossible Years (1968). Other films about teenage sexuality gave conflicting messages about the permissible boundaries of sexual behavior: Susan Slade (1961) warned of the hazards of teen sex, but Splendor in the Grass (1961) warned of the hazards of repressing sex. Although the biggest audience for films well into the 1990s continued to be teenagers, in the 1970s Arkoff was not the only producer finding it increasingly difficult to track the tastes of adolescents. Sex continued to be a staple of films about adolescent girls in films like The Last Picture Show (1971), Pretty Baby (1976), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), and Manhattan (1979). Moreover, the ways in which adolescent boys and girls were relating began to change in the 1970s as girls became sexual aggressors.

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Angelina Jolie and Winona Rider in Girl, Interrupted. (Kobal Collection/Suzanne Tenner/ Columbia Tristar)

In the 1980s, films about adolescents introduced a new theme: teenage girls intent on losing their virginity in films like Little Darlings (1980) and The Last American Virgin (1982). The trend reached its apogee in 1984 with the remake of the 1960 classic Where the Boys Are. The original film centered on the exploits of four college women during their Easter vacation in Fort Lauderdale. Although the lead character, Merritt, played by Dolores Hart, mouths sophisticated platitudes about the importance of finding out about sexual compatibility before marriage, she is at heart a prude, holding out for true love. Unfortunately, one of her friends, played by Yvette Mimieux, takes Merritt literally, and loses her virginity to a young man

posing as a “Yalie,” who then shares her with one of his friends. In the film’s climax, Mimieux tries to commit suicide because she is now “spoiled goods.” The 1984 remake Where the Boys Are ’84 stands in sharp contrast as it follows four coeds, once again on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, who have a contest to sleep with as many men as possible. In the remake men become the objects of conquest and female sexual pleasure. Another trend in teenage films, exemplified by American Graffiti (1972), Grease (1978), and Back to the Future (1985), was a nostalgia for simpler times. Nostalgia films allowed Hollywood to feature teenage virgins without seeming dated. For the most part, cinema teens were increasingly sophisticated as they

Movies, Adolescent Girls in came of age in films like Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Risky Business (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), but they could be crude in films such as Porky’s (1981) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The babysitter has been a destabilizing trope of female adolescence in films since the 1970s. In Adventures in Babysitting (1987), The Babysitter (1995), and The Sitter (1991), girls threatened the sanctity of marriage and family and the safety of children. Increasingly, girls also became victims of homicidal maniacs in a number of slasher films like Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), Friday the 13th (1980), and Scream (1996) (FormanBrunell, forthcoming). The success of films like the cult classic Heathers (1989) and Clueless (1995) sparked a revival of the teen genre in the late 1990s. The renaissance is due in part to demographics because there are roughly 37 million tento nineteen-year-olds. Moreover, teen films are relatively inexpensive to make and do not require big-name stars. They continue to be a staple of the market. Throughout the twentieth century, films about adolescent girls also commented on parents. Conflict with parents has been a consistent marker of films of female adolescence. Film parents, while sometimes well intentioned, more often have been preoccupied, absent, or simply inept. Teenage girls, however, have resented parental control and have struggled to assert their independence, particularly from their mothers. This theme pervaded two films released at the end of the century, Anywhere but Here (1999) and Tumbleweeds (1999). Except for a brief period in the 1930s during which girls were idealized, for the most part they have represented both generational change and societal instability in

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times of flux or crisis. Although the dominant tropes of girls in film can be grounded in the historical and material conditions of the culture that produced them, this discursive construction is often at odds with the lived experience of female adolescents. Perhaps this discrepancy reveals that girls have been a tangible symbol of both the hopes and fears of the parent culture, which is particularly ironic because teen girls are thought to be a particularly powerless group. Their culture operates in private sites and certainly does not appear to be politically motivated. Yet in films, teenage girls have often been constructed as powerful, subversive, problematic, or in opposition to the parent culture. Girls, in turn, have often used the same destabilizing tropes to create a social identity and to affirm a cultural authority. In their struggle between conformity and autonomy, both on-screen and off, girls have commanded the attention of adults. Films about adolescent girls are not only a formative part of the nation’s history in the early twentieth century but a formative part of becoming a girl. Georganne Scheiner See also Babysitters; Body Image; Fan Clubs; Female Sexuality; Girls’ Culture; Pickford, Mary; Teenybopper; Television; Temple, Shirley References and Further Reading Clover, Carol. 1993. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Larry. 1969. “The New Audience: From Andy Hardy to Arlo Guthrie.” Saturday Review 27 (December): 9. Considine, David. 1985. The Cinema of Adolescence. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Doherty, Thomas. 1988. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Film. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Forman-Brunell, Miriam. Forthcoming. Sitting Pretty: Fears and Fantasies

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about Adolescent Girls. New York: Routledge. Gateward, Frances, and Murray Pomerance, eds. 2000. Sugar and Spice: Cinemas of Adolescence. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Goldstein, Ruth M., and Edith Zorrow. 1980. The Screen Image of Youth: Movies about Children and Adolescents. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Jackson, Kathy Merlock. 1986. Images of Children in American Film. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Jowett, Garth, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller. 1996. Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund

Controversy. New York: Cambridge University Press. McGee, Mark. 1995. Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American International Pictures. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. McGee, Mark, and R. J. Robertson. 1982. The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Scheiner, Georganne. 2000. Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans 1920–1950. Westport, CT: Praeger. Stacey. Jackie. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge.

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lished the Stratemeyer Syndicate, where he hired freelance writers to complete manuscripts based on his outlines. These ghostwriters received a flat fee and had to agree not to reveal their identities publicly; the books were then published under a variety of pseudonyms owned by Stratemeyer. Using this production method (for which some have dubbed him the “Henry Ford of children’s literature”), Stratemeyer produced dozens of successful series, notably the Rover Boys (1899– 1926), the Bobbsey Twins (1904–1992), Tom Swift (1910–1935), and the Hardy Boys (1927– ). But books for girls presented a different challenge. The years between 1900 and the onset of World War I saw an outpouring of girls’ series fiction, much of which presented active, sporty heroines who spent more time with their peer groups than with their families. These girls at first seem a far cry from the docile, domestic girls of nineteenth-century books, yet they bore traces of residue from earlier conventions. The continued association between girls and a “softer” fictional aesthetic created hybrid heroines whose adventures were tamer than those of their male counterparts. Stratemeyer’s early attempts at girls’ series, like those of most other writers of the period, achieved only moderate success at best. The first truly successful girls’ series produced by the

The Nancy Drew Mysteries (1930– ) is the longest-running series of girls’ books in American history. The first and most successful teenage detective heroine, Nancy Drew profoundly influenced twentieth-century series fiction by quintessentially defining a type that later became commonplace through many imitators. Independent and powerful, Nancy is hailed as an early feminist icon by some enthusiastic fans and scholars. Others, however, describe her as a champion of conservative social values. This paradox stems from the character’s diversity; sculpted over several decades by an everchanging team of artists and businesspeople, Nancy appeared in books, films, television series, foreign translations, spin-off series, and even computer games. Each of these incarnations presents a slightly different Nancy, so that ultimately the teen sleuth’s most stable trait is the mercurial plasticity that allows multiple generations of readers to define her as they choose. Nancy Drew was the last complete creation of Edward Stratemeyer, an author who revolutionized children’s serial fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. A devotee of Horatio Alger’s work, Stratemeyer wrote numerous boys’ stories that he published widely as magazine serials and as hardcover books. In 1905 he estab-

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Stratemeyer Syndicate and Nancy Drew’s direct foremother was Ruth Fielding (1913–1934). Ruth began in the tradition of many nineteenth-century sentimental heroines but evolved into a career woman in the film industry, producing and starring in her own films as well as traveling the globe and solving mysteries. Girls of the 1910s and 1920s, who grew up witnessing rather different options for women than their mothers had enjoyed, embraced this independent and accomplished heroine. One of the ghostwriters whom Stratemeyer hired to write the Ruth Fielding books was a journalist from Iowa, Mildred Augustine (later Mildred Wirt). Her youth, vigorous style, and status as a career woman made her somewhat unusual among the syndicate’s predominantly male, middle-aged stable of hired pens. When Stratemeyer devised the idea for Nancy Drew, Wirt was the ghostwriter to whom he offered the new series. Upon receiving Stratemeyer’s outlines for the breeder set (the first three volumes, to be released simultaneously), Wirt set about creating a new kind of heroine; she would later say that she had wanted to depart from the “nambypamby” fare, as she termed it, written for girls in her own childhood. Although Wirt had much freedom in crafting this character, certain of Nancy’s characteristics were foregone conclusions. The son of immigrants and a firm believer in the powers of assimilation and hard work, Edward Stratemeyer made all his protagonists paragons of Anglo-American purity, vigor, and middle-class values. Nancy Drew, the blonde, blue-eyed only child of a prominent midwestern attorney, followed this formula, to which Wirt added her own ideals of the perfect heroine.

The series emerging from this collaboration found instant popularity because its central character satisfyingly embodied paradoxes not found in other heroines. Nancy was a self-directed and selfdisciplined adult, although she was only sixteen years old (later she aged to eighteen, where she stayed). She was also capable of activities traditionally done only by male heroes in boys’ books: she drove skillfully, fixed flat tires and outboard motors, and could single-handedly drag a fallen tree out of the road when it blocked her car. But she accomplished these feats without sacrificing her femininity, for Nancy was also an accomplished seamstress, cook, and pianist, demonstrating the traditional feminine graces. Indeed, one of the staples of the Nancy Drew Mysteries has always been her mastery of every skill imaginable, irrespective of traditional gender expectations. Gender codes were further blurred in the portrayals of Nancy’s clashes with criminals. Dressed in fashionable “frocks,” she remained impeccably elegant even while fighting off the burly thugs twice her age and size who tried to eliminate her. The levels of danger and violence Nancy faced were unusual for a girls’ series, and the ease with which she prevailed barely skirted absurdity. Commenting on Nancy’s superhuman resilience, one author wryly noted that “Nancy is bludgeoned into unconsciousness . . . enough to reduce her to a lifetime of hanging around Stillman’s Gym looking for odd jobs” (Prager 1971, 80). Her quick wits and physical strength are worthy of any male hero, and the structure of her stories has even been compared to that of the archetypal male quest myth (Caprio 1992). Perhaps the series’

Nancy Drew Mysteries use of some traditionally masculine tropes explains the atypical phenomenon of its mixed readership—for, unlike her female literary forebears, Nancy counted boys among her audience. Her appeal was so wide and so pronounced that, by 1932, Publishers’ Weekly reported that Nancy Drew was the single best-selling juvenile series in the United States. Nancy’s liminal gender status was matched by her liminal age status. Teenage girls are traditionally among society’s least respected members, yet Nancy commanded the respect and occasionally the fear of every adult around her. Early volumes highlighted Nancy’s duties in running the Drew household and supervising housekeeper Hannah Gruen, for Mrs. Drew had died when Nancy was a child. The absence of Nancy’s mother has been hailed by many readers as a favorite element of the series. Free from the restrictions usually imposed by mothers, Nancy plays second fiddle to no woman. She is the lady of the house, the mother of her own identity, and the apple of her father’s eye. Carson Drew, for his part, treats his talented daughter as an equal instead of a child. He gives her absolute respect and freedom, allowing her to embark on outrageous adventures with only a gentle warning to “be careful.” When villains disable Nancy’s roadster, either by sabotage or in harrowing car chases, Mr. Drew either pays for the repairs or simply buys his daughter a new car. The luxurious upper-middle-class accoutrements of Nancy’s life contribute to her freedom and provided an escapist appeal to Depression-era children. In addition to her famous father’s wealth, Nancy enjoys the benefits of his reputation; when officious adults block

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her investigations she has only to mention his name to obtain her ends. If Nancy’s physical prowess and freedom have led many to see her as a feminist role model, her reliance upon and identification with her father prompt others to disagree. Not only does Nancy share an unusually close relationship with Carson Drew, but she also upholds the values of the patriarchal society that he, as an officer of the court, represents. In volumes written throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nancy Drew defends the property, traditions, and family structures of the white, moneyed classes. The victims of crime whom she aids are upright citizens from “good” families who have fallen upon hard times or have been swindled by nefarious—and often nouveaux riches— criminals whose dishonesty is coupled with a boorishness that signals their social inferiority. These villains frequently compound their lowly status with ethnic diversity. Often described as “dark” or “swarthy,” they speak with foreign accents or, at the very least, terrible grammar. Asians, Egyptians, Jews, Hindis, and Gypsies are among Nancy’s foes; African Americans are slovenly servants who shuffle their feet, abuse alcohol, and speak in broad dialect. Some feminists understandably hesitate to embrace the class-conscious, patriarchal, and stunningly racist early Nancy Drew as a role model. Others, however, point out that one must take one’s heroines in their context. In her day, Nancy Drew was the first series heroine to provide an avenue of escape from the constrictions that circumscribed the lives of adolescent girls. Stratemeyer’s eye for popular trends led him to create some strong book heroines, but he was far from a feminist visionary. Believing that women should

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be wives and mothers, he forbade his daughters (he had no sons) to work outside the home. But his daughters had to assume control of the syndicate when Stratemeyer died suddenly from pneumonia less than two weeks after Nancy Drew’s debut in 1930. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and Edna Stratemeyer learned quickly to plot and edit manuscripts for their stable of series books. Almost immediately, the sisters added new characters to the Nancy Drew series: Nancy’s friends, Bess and George (a girl with a boy’s name), and her boyfriend, Ned. These characters somewhat dulled the quest-hero element of the stories, for Nancy no longer sleuthed alone. The new characters also heightened Nancy’s femininity; the addition of a boyfriend endowed her with a chaste sexuality, and the extremes posed by her best friends— overweight, frilly Bess and athletic, tomboyish George—positioned Nancy as a golden mean of feminine behavior. Under Harriet Adams’s supervision, subtle changes in Nancy Drew’s character became more pronounced over time. An East Coast, Wellesley-educated society matron, Adams had a far different worldview than that of Mildred Wirt, a middle-class midwesterner who worked in the rough-and-tumble world of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, the two women had different visions of Nancy Drew, and the chasm between these competing visions widened over time. After writing twenty-three of the first thirty volumes, Wirt stopped work on the series in 1953. Adams used other ghostwriters for a short time but soon began writing the manuscripts herself and continued to do so for the remainder of her life. Starting in the 1950s, then, Nancy became a very different character. The

decade’s emphasis on conformity, strict gender divisions, and obedience to authorities mirrored Adams’s conservative social values. Whereas the 1930s Nancy had been flippant with dimwitted policemen, the 1950s Nancy deferred to men in uniform. Whereas the 1930s Nancy had extricated herself from dangerous situations, the 1950s Nancy had to be rescued by her father and boyfriend. An even more radical change began in 1959, when Harriet Adams launched a massive project to update and revise all the earlier volumes. Spurred by complaints about the syndicate’s representation of minorities and by her concerns that older books were now too outdated to hold children’s interest, Adams and her staff cut every book by 20 percent of its length. The stories’ pace became quicker and the action more streamlined, and offensively drawn minority characters either disappeared or were minimized. The results were mixed. Much of the narrative charm that had leavened the series’ formulaic rigidity was now erased, as were entire stories. Most volumes were merely “cut down,” as Adams termed it, but several were completely rewritten, although the titles remained the same. Along with the outmoded technology and ethnic dialect, much of Nancy’s independence and spunk disappeared as well. After the revision process was finally completed in 1977, Wirt’s original texts could no longer be found in bookstores. This situation prevailed until 1992, when Applewood Books began publishing facsimile editions of the original Nancy Drew texts. These reprints are now widely available and very popular, particularly among adult collectors. In 1979 Harriet Adams changed publishers, a decision that had long-term repercussions for Nancy Drew. Since the

Nancy Drew Mysteries series’ inception, it had been published exclusively by Grosset and Dunlap, but after a well-publicized court battle, Adams transferred all her series to Simon & Schuster. Within three years she died, and the remaining partners in the Stratemeyer Syndicate sold the company to the publisher. In addition to continuing the core series, Simon & Schuster launched a string of spin-off series that created multiple versions of Nancy Drew for multiple readerships. When the series debuted in 1930, it had been intended for girls between ten and fifteen years of age. Childhood got shorter during the next fifty years; by the 1980s, Nancy’s primary readership was eight- to eleven-year-old girls. To recapture the teen market, Simon & Schuster released the Nancy Drew Files series (1986–1997), which emphasized romance and consumerism along with mysteries and depicted crimes more violent (including murder) than those used in the core series. The Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Super Mysteries (1988– 1998) joined the three detectives into one team, and Nancy Drew on Campus (1995–1998) sent Nancy to college, where she and her friends confronted issues like alcohol abuse, date rape, and fatal motorcycle crashes in addition to mysteries. (In one surprising plot development, George lost her virginity with a Native American boyfriend; Nancy herself remained chaste, however.) The Nancy Drew Notebooks (1994– ), a series for younger readers, features the central characters as grade school children. The core series, meanwhile, also began to modify Nancy’s personality slightly. Now written by a variety of ghostwriters from a younger generation than Harriet Adams’s, the character Nancy recovered some of her former independence from male authority.

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While children of the 1980s and 1990s were enjoying the plethora of new and diverse Nancy Drew personas, their elders were discovering a similar joy with the original Nancy Drew editions; during these decades, Nancy’s value as a “collectible” shot skyward. Adults’ nostalgic interest in Nancy Drew first began in the late 1960s, when upheavals among American youth led journalists across the nation to remark upon the continuation of a wholesome heroine like Nancy Drew. Considering that 1930s observers found Nancy revolutionary, it is significant that a mere thirty-five years later the same books were seen as embodiments of conservatism: the absence of any sex, drugs, or violence made mainstream journals interpret the series’ continuity as a comforting sign that modern children still enjoyed old-fashioned values. At the same time, however, another thread of media discussion about Nancy Drew focused on her radical impact as a strong and self-determining heroine. The term role model began to circulate in discussions of children’s culture, and the rise of second-wave feminism led to a celebration of Nancy Drew as an early feminist heroine. Articles and editorials expressing this perspective became staples of the popular press; literally hundreds of such pieces appeared locally and nationally during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As she had with children, Nancy Drew fired the imaginations of adults through her deployment of paradox: now simultaneously an icon of nostalgia for the “good old days” as well as an icon of feminists’ hopes for new and better days, Nancy enjoyed a massive surge of popularity among adult collectors. Original text editions became hot properties at flea markets and antique stores. Among estab-

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lished communities of series book collectors, Nancy Drew fans have grown to represent the largest contingent. In addition to the various editions of the books, collectors prize items reflecting Nancy’s several incarnations in popular culture: she has been made into board games, a doll, a Halloween costume, a lunchbox, jigsaw puzzles, and coloring books, to name a few. In 1998 she entered the computer age when Her Interactive developed a series of role-playing mystery games about Nancy Drew on CD-ROM. Several of these products were released in 1977 and 1978 in conjunction with Universal Studio’s Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, a primetime television show that alternated episodes of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew weekly on the American Broadcasting Companies (ABC) network. Striking a balance that would attract family viewership—parents as well as children—proved a difficult task, however, and the series faltered. Nearly twenty years later, Nelvana/ New Line television attempted to resurrect the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys franchises; the series ran in syndication for only one season (1995–1996) before being cancelled. These ill-fated television series were not Nancy Drew’s first appearance onscreen. During the late 1930s, Warner Brothers Studios developed a string of Bmovies based on the books. Although they received moderately good reviews, the films failed because they departed too sharply from the books’ portrayal of Nancy. Using the formula of the screwball mystery, a hybrid genre popular at the time, Warner Brothers created a distinctly flighty heroine (Beeson 1994). Moreover, the studio conducted nationwide surveys of teens and social scientists to determine the characteristics of “the

typical American girl of sixteen.” This agenda, coupled with the conventions of the screwball comedy, resulted in an emotional, slightly bratty, and mechanically inept Nancy Drew whom readers of the books could not recognize. Four films were released from late 1938 through 1939; a fifth was in production when the series was cancelled. Although the television incarnations of Nancy Drew did not violate the spirit of the books quite so drastically, there were sufficient differences to unsettle fans. Ultimately, all those who sought to bring Nancy to the screen faced similar obstacles: Nancy had a larger-than-life quality, even in the pallid revised texts; she was never simply a “girl next door.” Also, because the books never emphasized descriptions of appearance or personality, Nancy remained a somewhat sketchy figure. Readers could thus project their own fantasies onto Nancy, imagining her however they liked. On-screen, Nancy had to be embodied in a real actress. Not only did this force viewers to assimilate concrete details of physical appearance, but also it meant that Nancy became merely life-sized instead of superhuman. Much of the books’ potency lay in their offer of a semimagical alternative reality, retaining just enough “realism” to make Nancy’s world seem almost attainable. Anchoring Nancy into the corporeality of a real actress destroyed this delicate balance. It also required a single, cohesive interpretation of the character, which presented a problem for a heroine who contained so many contradictions and underwent so many changes. If Nancy’s inability to be neatly pinned down has made her a poor film or television character, it has made her a superb candidate for co-optation by adult interpreters. Creative artists and academics of

Nancy Drew Mysteries several different stamps have turned Nancy Drew into a growth industry. Critical attention began in the 1970s, contemporaneously with the encomiums in the mainstream press. While Ms. and Vogue published nostalgia pieces, the Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Popular Culture published analyses of the series’ Anglo ethnocentrism and its employment of dubious gender tropes. The 1980s and 1990s saw an increase in Nancy Drew studies by scholars in various academic departments. The watershed event came in 1993, when the University of Iowa—Mildred Wirt’s alma mater—hosted a Nancy Drew conference to honor its distinguished alumna. This event produced a spate of scholarly papers later published in two collections and inspired other scholars to examine the series. During the same period, artists began to acknowledge Nancy Drew’s pervasive cultural influence. The teen detective has been translated into successful dramas for children’s theater groups and into visual art by photographers and artists who play on the novels’ themes. She has also been lampooned in satirical plays and fiction, some of which illustrate lesbian interpretations of Nancy’s close relationships with George and Bess (seen as a butch/femme pair). Similar interpretations appear in several academic analyses by scholars of gender studies and queer studies. Nancy Drew’s durable influence on American girls also attracts the attention of scholars in education, library science, youth culture, popular culture, and communications. The qualities that made Nancy Drew such an unusual heroine in the 1930s have by now become common in children’s fiction, and the question of how long she can hold a place on bookstores’

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shelves is uncertain. But her flexibility bodes well for her future: for more than seventy years children and adults have found new ways to adapt this heroine to their recreational and professional needs. It is likely that Nancy Drew will continue to influence communities of readers, in some capacity, for years to come. Ilana Nash

See also American Girls Collection; Girls’ Fiction; Reading References and Further Reading Beeson, Diana. 1994. “Translating Nancy Drew from Fiction to Film.” The Lion and the Unicorn 18, no. 1: 37–47. Billman, Carol. 1986. The Secret of the Stratemeyer Syndicate: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory. New York: Ungar Publishing. Caprio, Betsy. 1992. The Mystery of Nancy Drew: Girl Sleuth on the Couch. Trabuco Canyon: Source Books. Chamberlain, Kathleen. 1994. “The Secrets of Nancy Drew: Having Their Cake and Eating It Too.” The Lion and the Unicorn 18, no. 1: 1–12. Dyer, Carolyn Stewart, and Nancy Tillman Romalov. 1995. Rediscovering Nancy Drew. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Gardner, Julia D. 1998. “‘No Place for a Girl Dick’: Mabel Maney and the Queering of Girls’ Detective Fiction.” Pp. 247–265 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Deidre. 1993. Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. New York: Twayne. Kismaric, Carole, and Marvin Heiferman. 1998. The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. New York: Simon and Schuster. Maney, Mabel. 1993. The Case of the NotSo-Nice Nurse: A Nancy Clue Mystery. Pittsburgh: Cleis Press. Mason, Bobbie Ann. 1995. The Girl Sleuth. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

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Plunkett-Powell, Karen. 1993. The Nancy Drew Scrapbook. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Prager, Arthur. 1971. Rascals at Large; or, the Clue in the Old Nostalgia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Siegel, Deborah L. 1997. “Nancy Drew as New Girl Wonder: Solving It All for the 1930s.” Pp. 159–182 in Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Native American Girls The concept of community undergirds the traditional socialization of Native American girls, but Euro-American conquest and colonization attenuated that particular role of the extended family and kin network. The arrival of new authorities along with more individualistic values engendered conflict in Native American families and indigenous nations. Reconciliation has often come only with the “re-ethnicization” of girls, a process yet to be unencumbered in modern times by the influences of mass culture and the politics of race and gender. Reshaped by the consequences of war, surrender, relocation, and assimilation, American Indian cultures nevertheless have continued to mold Indian girls’ worldview. In the preconquest period, roughly before the early sixteenth century, an Indian newborn in North America joined a relatively separate and insular world. Girls and boys grew up in a homogeneous environment surrounded by “expanding concentric circles of people who cared for them” (Szasz 1985, 314). Besides the immediate family, relatives, friends, clan or lineage groupings, and secret societies shaped the worldview of the young child.

In most traditional Indian cultures, elders expected girls and boys to learn by application and imitation rather than by rote memorization of principles. Such training was considered pivotal for one to be accepted as a mature member of the tribe. Though training for survival was critical, knowledge of cultural heritage and spiritual awareness were hardly neglected. The instruction, often taking the form of play, reinforced girls’ appreciation of Indian lifeways (Dejong 1993, 5, 10). Much of this traditional education came under attack in the wake of European colonization but did not necessarily disappear even in the twentieth century. The instruction young girls received mirrored the sexual division of labor in the indigenous group. In most societies tasks defined gender; among the Cherokees, the question—“is it a bow or a (meal) shifter?”—inquiring after the sex of an infant was telling (Perdue 1998, 25). Girls were inculcated to respect the complementary nature of women’s role that combined with the men’s in a symmetry essential for the nation’s survival. In Iroquois villages of present-day upstate New York, the “clearing,” or human-made structures, food supplies, surrounding fields, and family life, was the woman’s domain, but the “forest,” or trade, diplomacy, and warfare, belonged to men (Richter 1992, 22–23). Catawba women of the southeastern United States impressed upon their daughters the seasonal nature of female labor; dependent on the land, women tended fields in the summer and in winter gathered edible wild plants, while men hunted for meat and skins (Merrell 1991, 37). Among the sedentary Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, girls learned about farming, pottery production, household construction, and

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Two Crow girls on horseback, Crow Indian Reserve, Montana. (Library of Congress, ca. 1906)

basket making—skills they would require to function as wives and mothers in adulthood (Gutiérrez 1991, 8). Omaha girls of the Great Plains, in line with the mixed economy of their society, modeled their mothers’ expertise in dressing skins and drying bison meat but also became conversant with planting and harvesting corn (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911, 330). Even in the twentieth century, the centrality of work in girlhood remained paramount; Kaibah (Kay Bennett), a Navajo who grew up during the interwar years, was kept away from Euro-American schooling for a number of years so that she could help her single mother with sheep herding, the mainstay of the Navajo economy (Bennett 1964, 62, 204). Girls also had gender-cum-age-specific chores; for example, among Inuit people, preteen

girls carried toddlers, which freed adult women for work with seal and caribou skins (McElroy 1989, 298). Omaha girls unpacked horses returning from a hunt, and their male peers led them to water and food (Tong 1999, 26). Surviving the landscape would have been hopeless if the young woman was bereft of cultural knowledge that framed the individual’s life within a constellation of human relations. Most Native American societies imparted the culture to children via storytelling. Esther Burnett Horne, part Shoshone and part white and born in 1909, remembered her Indian mother telling her about the coyote, a trickster who represented the perversity, ambiguity, and contradiction of life. Trickster tales conveyed to Horne and her siblings tribal values without the

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tedium of direct instruction (Horne and McBeth 1998, 18; Szasz 1988, 12–13). Elders also told their young relatives creation accounts or stories that related the origins of their group. Through such instruction, the children came to understand the time-honored belief that their people belonged to the land on which they lived. To understand the meaning of life, girls and boys had to attain spiritual awareness. Young girls absorbed spiritual lessons through human relationships as well as through ritual and ceremony. When a girl reached puberty, she would have to undergo certain rituals to mark her entry into adulthood. Among the Yakima, Nez Perce, and Puget Sound Salish, both boys and girls went on guardian spirit quests, designed to secure a living creature who could aid and guide the youth for the remainder of his or her life (Szasz 1988, 17). Madonna Swan (Lakota), raised on the Cheyenne River reservation in the early twentieth century, like so many other Indian girls went through rituals commemorating the arrival of her first menstruation, a female life cycle associated with inordinate power. After a four-day period of isolation and many lessons imparted by her grandmother, she was declared a young woman, notwithstanding her biological age of thirteen (St. Pierre 1991, 43). The Iroquois puberty ritual involved retiring into the woods. The girl could return to the natal family after the end of the menstrual period, but thereafter whenever she menstruated, she would live apart from others (Wallace 1969, 38). Girls in Native American societies also enjoyed play. Like work, play was sex-segregated. Until the process of urbanization in the twentieth century gradually introduced mass culture to Indian lifeways,

female youngsters, in the absence of factory-produced toys, depended on nature to amuse themselves. Madonna Swan remembered that her carefree upbringing included playing with homemade beaded buckskin dolls. She and her friends fashioned tents out of full-sized blankets and played moving these “tipis” from one place to another, replicating the seasonal cycle of mobility when families used to hunt the buffalo for food and hide (St. Pierre 1991, 27). Omaha girls also imitated life by shaping dishes out of clay and building houses out of mud (Fletcher 1896, 892). Regardless of whether it was related to labor or leisure, each aspect of precontact native girlhood involved reciprocity, either in the form of exchange of gifts or bonds of obligations for services rendered or gifts received from elders. But European colonization disrupted the generational lines of authority and eventually destroyed the dyadic status relationship between givers and receivers. Through overt displays of authority, Spanish Franciscan padres in seventeenth-century New Mexico convinced Pueblo children that their fathers and gods were impotent before the friars. The padres reassigned gender roles for men and women, “emasculating” the men in the process. The padres then moved into the parental role by presenting themselves as benevolent fathers and nurturing mothers who deserved the gift of Indian baptisms and obedience of God’s laws (Gutiérrez 1991, 77). In the eighteenth century, unequal power relations also played out in Spanish California. Given the Spaniards’ belief in a code of honor that rewarded sexual conquests, Indian women and girls were targeted for seduction, a phenomenon that persisted long after the end of the chaotic

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Native American children in front of an adobe church. (Corbis)

Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century. The need to dominate the general native population played a role in the assaults and rapes of Indian females by the Spaniards. Indian families, in an attempt recover lost bride-price (which was the exchange for the “loss” of daughters upon marriage), might have encouraged their daughters to engage in prostitution so as to enhance their productive value. Girls and women took this up in the most desperate circumstances of starvation, Indian wars, and sexual assaults (Hurtado 1999, 15–16, 87). A more common fate for Indian girls (and boys) before the nineteenth century was their status as forced labor, one part-

ly shaped by the demands of an economy tied to mercantilist European powers. As early as the 1610s, English families in Virginia took in Indian children to rear. Motivated by a philanthropic desire to “civilize” the “savages,” this practice became a pretense to expropriate native labor when Virginia expanded its lucrative tobacco-growing plantations within the next few decades. Because of Indian parents’ opposition, children were often kidnapped or stolen and then sold to other interested parties. Though legally considered servants, most children were nothing less than slaves in spite of the laws passed to protect them (Roundtree 1990, 69–70, 92, 137).

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In this context of physical coercion and political disempowerment, Indian girls attempted to control their fate in several ways. Older girls, given the lopsided sex ratio of some war-torn societies, sometimes in the name of self-protection sought to marry Europeans; perhaps the best documented were the cross-cultural marriages between Cree, Ojibwa, and Chippewan young women and fur traders in western Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century (Van Kirk 1984, 9). Given Europeans’ indifference to reciprocity, such unions did not necessarily secure free access to provisions or respect for Indian rituals (Merrell 1991, 63–64; Van Kirk 1984, 9–13). Others chose to embrace Christianity—which offered empowering rituals and was to some degree conceptually akin to native beliefs—so as to subvert Indian patriarchy and control the social turmoil of diseases, increased warfare, and dispossession. Kateri (Catherine) Tekakwitha was one of the many late-seventeenth-century Iroquois who accepted the teachings of itinerant Jesuits and, later, like other neophytes, had to flee the harassment of the native non-Christian majority by joining a Catholic-influenced village in lower Canada. Rejecting marriage, Tekakwitha, in a career of almost pathological piety, dedicated herself to virginity, female-oriented Christian societies, and self-mortifications (Richter 1992, 115–116, 126– 128; Shoemaker 1995b, 52–54, 66). A far less widespread response on the part of girls to European colonization was participation in the pan-Indian revitalization movement that gathered momentum after the mid-eighteenth century. Centered around the Great Lakes region, this movement involved nativism and was often spearheaded by the spiritual guidance of prophets, who cajoled Indi-

ans of all societies to see their common history of oppression and the need to rise up against their white colonizers. Several of the prophets were late adolescent females; one of the earliest to challenge Anglo-American dominance was Wyoming Woman (real name unknown) of the Delawares, who claimed receiving a vision from the Great Power demanding that all Indians resist accommodationist Indians and Anglo-Americans. Another seer, known only as Delaware Woman, warned her people in 1806 that if rituals were neglected then a whirlwind would soon wipe them out completely (Dowd 1992, xxii, 30, 128). This revitalization movement did little to stymie the Anglo-American advance beyond the Appalachian range. In the early nineteenth century, especially after the War of 1812, the pressure for removal of Native American groups in the Southeast and Old Northwest to the inhospitable West so as to meet the insatiable demand for lands gathered momentum. The justification for this removal hinged on the assumption that Indians were “uncivilized” and could never assimilate into American life. Ironically, by the time the U.S. Congress debated the Indian Removal bill, which passed in 1830, many southeastern groups (such as Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws) had already imitated the Euro-American lifeway so as to find acceptance from the white-dominated society. The Cherokees, for example, had by then raised crops for sale, adopted a constitution and a written law code, and impressed education upon their children (Ehle 1988; Foreman 1932). While their elders lobbied and even sued to ward off the threat of removal, young Cherokee girls attending mission schools, of mostly mixed blood

Native American Girls and from acculturated families, played the role of cultural brokers. In their correspondence with white benefactors of the schools, they sought to convince Euro-Americans that removal would divest the Cherokees of their homeland and retard the progress of Christian endeavor. Even as they exhibited enthusiasm for the outside world and were contemptuous of traditional ways, they felt they could be as good as whites, thus expressing nascent tribal patriotism (Coleman 1994, 126–128, 132). Choctaw girls, however, resisted mission schooling since it alienated them, given its emphasis on manual labor and physical discipline that ran headlong into a clash with the Choctaw learning-by-example approach to childrearing. Furthermore, their attendance was intermittent because parents used them for manual labor or domestic chores (Kidwell 1995a, 54; Kidwell 1995b, 122–124). Neither resistive nor accommodationist strategies blocked the process of removal. The various, seemingly endless journeys west told the same story: fatigue, disease, privation, and the humiliation of capitulation took a toll, especially on children (Perdue and Green 1995, 160, 168–169). But the forced displacement of Native American groups to the West did not end Indian-white tensions. After the mid-nineteenth century, Indian nations of the western United States came under siege as American expansion gathered pace, motivated by the spirit of Manifest Destiny. Plains wars raged on for decades, exacerbating the deadly impact of epidemics of smallpox and other diseases along with existing intertribal hostilities. After the end of the Civil War, settlers moved west in increasing numbers into and across Indian homelands. In response to the land

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hunger, the federal government coerced Native American nations to sign unequal treaties that required the latter to confine themselves within reservation lands. A dwindling buffalo population, hunted for sport and hide, weakened Indian opposition to this loss of autonomy. With Apache warrior Geronimo’s capture in 1886, the American military conquest of the West was complete (Calloway 1999, 281–292). Even before the wars came to an end Indians were subjected to intense “Americanizing,” designed to remake them in the image of white American citizens. To that end, all vestiges of tribal life and culture had to be eradicated, to be replaced by Protestantism, individualism, and citizenship. The Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887 introduced the allotting of lands to Indians as private property, which white authorities deemed would weaken tribalism and push Indians into mainstream society. Education, however, was key in the attempt to prepare Indians for their new privileges and duties. White reformers and the government preferred to place Indian girls and boys in off-reservation boarding schools so that they could be isolated from “contaminating” native influences. Although education to “civilize” the Indian was nothing new, having existed since early English conquest of the eastern seaboard, what took place beginning with the establishment of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879 was far more intensive and had farreaching consequences on Indian children and their indigenous nations (Adams 1995). Government officials and concerned humanitarians aimed to transform Indian girls into middle-class, Victorian ladies who were domestic, pious, and chaste in line with the “true womanhood” ideology

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Native American girls were often forced to replace their traditional dress with AngloAmerican clothing and to speak English instead of their indigenous languages, as in this classroom scene at the Carlisle School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. (Library of Congress)

of the late nineteenth century. Female graduates, government officials predicted, would promote a Christian, “civilized” lifeway and support their husbands in the transition from hunters to farmers. To prepare for that fate, the curriculum for girls at boarding schools emphasized domestic chores, relegating academic learning to a secondary role. Since school officials believed in the educational value of manual labor, by the mid-1880s they relied on student labor for school operations. In many schools, girls washed and mended clothing, cooked daily meals, and cleaned dormitories. Another form of exploitation that grew out of this training for domesticity was the “outing” system,

which involved the placement of girls in white homes for the purpose of improving their domestic and English-language skills. The system, however, evolved into a source of cheap labor for white households (Lomawaima 1994, 82, 86–87; Trennert 1982, 271–277). Because authorities deemed Indians to be lacking in discipline, the entire school routine was highly regimented. Students’ adaptation to this new environment varied according to their families’ level of acculturation, students’ age when entering school, and the presence of siblings. Anna Moore Shaw, of a Christianized, Pima family background, had attended a reservation day school before she was

Native American Girls sent off to the Phoenix Indian School in Arizona at the age of ten. Her previous exposure to Euro-American culture along with her cognitive immaturity prepared her to accept without rancor the discipline meted (Shaw 1974, 132–136). In contrast, Helen Sekaquaptewa, whose Hopi people had had a long, conflict-ridden relationship with European colonizers, recalled how mothers attempted to pass their daughters off as older offspring so that soldiers would not take them away to the Phoenix School. And in 1906, when she and other children were finally taken from their families under military escort, she remembered that they were a “group of homesick, lonesome, little girls” (Sekaquaptewa 1969, 96, 121). Gender also differentiated the experiences of those who attended this forced assimilationist experience. Unlike boys who had more freedom, girls came under heavy scrutiny. At the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, girls could play only within the yards of their dormitories, but boys could freely roam the large campus. Mingling with the opposite sex was restricted to chaperoned Saturday night dances (Lomawaima 1994, 60, 95). Although some girls accepted the limits of movement and socialization, those who came unwillingly to the school or had to separate from traditional families often resisted these impositions. The writer and activist Zitkala-S˘a (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), a Sioux of the Yankton band and the daughter of a traditionbound mother, was outraged when told that she would have to forsake her long hair on her very first day in school. Since “short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards,” she recalled, her only recourse was to hide from the authorities. When later discovered, she

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“resisted by kicking and scratching wildly” (Zitkala-S˘a 1921, 54–55). Some girls even ran away from school. Other, less overt means of resistance included huddling in the dormitory rooms after lights out to share ghost stories; passing notes to boys in class or communicating with winks, waves, and sign language; and conspiring to outwit matrons so as to avoid wearing regulation bloomers (Lomawaima 1994, 115). Available evidence points to a failure in attaining the goals of the educational program. Because there were few job opportunities on the reservation and their education was irrelevant in an environment devoid of modern technology, most young women returned to traditional life upon returning home. Moreover, the young women discovered a conflict of values— their elders did not necessarily appreciate their educational achievements. Polingaysi Qoyawayma, a Hopi woman, recounts the tale of how her family rejected the cakes and pies she made in place of traditional food and even treated her as an outcast. Some young women who refused to accept the traditional lifeway returned to the cities, eking out a living as domestics or prostitutes (Qoyawayma 1964, 74; Trennert 1982, 389). The sense of displacement continued to haunt the lives of these young women well into the post– World War II years. Edna Manitowabi, an Ojibwa, dropped out of school in the 1950s at the age of fifteen. Alienated from her family—an emotional estrangement fueled by her resentment over being sent away to boarding school and by the cultural gap that ensued—Manitowabi moved to the city, drifted in and out of manual labor, became a single mother, and eventually landed in a mental hospital because of a suicide attempt (Manitowabi 1971).

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But in their adulthood some girls did use their schooling experiences to reshape their lives and those of others. They learned to adapt to a changing world, fused a bicultural identity, and functioned as cultural mediators. The Omaha sisters Susan and Suzette La Flesche parlayed their knowledge of the non-Indian world into efforts to champion Indian rights and improve socioeconomic conditions on the reservation (Tong 1999). Zitkala-S˘a penned published essays about the negative impact of American education on her ethnic consciousness, and eventually headed her own political organization, mobilizing the oratorical skills she honed while in school to lobby on behalf of her people. The arrival of cultural relativism in the early twentieth century somewhat reshaped the lives of Native American girls and boys. The Indian New Deal in the 1930s speeded up the effort to close boarding schools in favor of reservation day schools. Students were also encouraged to attend mainstream public schools. Federal funds were set aside for bilingual instruction and courses in native cultures. But residual prejudices on the part of officials, along with federal-state rivalry, undermined these idealistic goals (Szasz 1974). Even though forced assimilation via education has petered out, Native American girls in the late twentieth century still suffer from government interference in their lives. Beginning in the late 1940s, the government initiated a program of urban relocation as a means of ending reservation poverty and accelerating the pace of assimilation. Thousands of Indians who moved found the adjustment to city life difficult. Wilma Pearl Mankiller, who in 1987 became the first female chief of the Cherokee nation, recalled

that she and her siblings were terrified of the impending move from Oklahoma to San Francisco. In San Francisco they encountered a bewildering range of noises. A confused Mankiller hated her new school, where the students poked fun at her surname and southern accent. Without the support of the extended family or kinfolk, urban Indian girls endured poverty, emotional suffering, substance abuse, and poor health, the last generated in part by fetal alcohol syndrome (defects that stemmed from alcohol abuse during pregnancy) (French 2000, 41; Mankiller and Wallis 1993, 69–73). Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the rise of the counterculture, and unremitting poverty on the reservation, Indian girls who grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s faced the threat of cultural loss when raised by acculturated elders who had received Euro-American educations. Mary Crow Dog, a mixedblood Sioux, was raised by her mission school–educated grandmother, having been abandoned by a materialistic mother. When she had her first menstruation, her grandmother offered reassurance, but the ritual celebrating that passage of life had long been neglected. Crow Dog recalled that the “whole subject was now distasteful to them [Sioux Indians]” (Crow Dog and Erdoes 1990, 67). The neglect of such a ritual, which symbolically reminded the Sioux of how potent femininity was, suggests a devaluation of women’s status in the Sioux nation. Adrift, Crow Dog became a juvenile delinquent, engaging in violence, drinking binges, theft, and drug abuse. Her later involvement in the American Indian Movement would finally offer her the opportunity to reconcile with her ethnic identity. Native American girls in contemporary times are victims of a long history of

Native American Girls racial oppression, which engendered selfhatred among some Indian elders and a generational gap with the young. And yet Native American girls like Yvonne Thomas (Lummi tribe, Washington State) appreciate that history also provides lessons in survival; these lines from Thomas’s student writings suggest Indian identity endures amid marginalization: “echoing spirits / you, my people / who have gone / and left upon / ancient canoes / one day you shall / return to your people” (Thomas 1992, 99–100). Benson Tong

See also Education of Girls; Kinaaldá; Play; Pocahontas; Work References and Further Reading Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. 1984. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bennett, Kay. 1964. Kaibah: Recollections of a Navajo Childhood. Los Angeles: Westerlore Press. Calloway, Colin G. 1999. First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press. Coleman, Michael C. 1994. “American Indian School Pupils as Cultural Brokers: Cherokee Girls at Brainerd Mission, 1828–1829.” Pp. 122–136 in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker. Edited by Margaret Connell Szasz. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Crow Dog, Mary, and Richard Erdoes. 1990. Lakota Woman. New York: HarperPerennial. Dejong, David H. 1993. Promises of the Past: A History of Indian Education in the United States. Golden, CO: North American Press. Dowd, Gregory Evans. 1992. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815.

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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ehle, John. 1988. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Doubleday. Fletcher, Alice C. 1896. “Glimpses of Indian Child Life.” The Outlook (May 16): 891–892. Fletcher, Alice C., and Francis La Flesche. 1911. The Omaha Tribe. Bureau of American Ethnology Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1905–1906. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Foreman, Grant. 1932. Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. French, Laurence Armand. 2000. Addictions and Native Americans. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gutiérrez, Ramón A. 1991. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Horne, Esther Burnett, and Sally McBeth. 1998. Essie’s Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Horsman, Reginald. 1967. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812. 1992. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Hurtado, Albert L. 1999. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kidwell, Clara Sue. 1995a. Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 1995b. “Choctaw Women and Cultural Persistence in Mississippi.” Pp. 114–134 in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge. Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. 1994. They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Manitowabi, Edna. 1971. An Indian Girl in the City. Buffalo, NY: Friends of Malatesta. Mankiller, Wilma, and Michael Wallis. 1993. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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McElroy, Ann. 1989. “Ooleepeeka and Mina: Contrasting Responses to the Modernization of Two Baffin Island Inuit Women.” Pp. 290–318 in Being and Becoming Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers. Edited by James A. Clifton. Chicago: Dorsey Press. Merrell, James H. 1991. The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. New York: W. W. Norton. Perdue, Theda. 1998. Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. 1995. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. Pettitt, George A. 1946. Primitive Education in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prucha, Francis Paul. 1984. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Qoyawayma, Polingaysi. 1964. No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds. 1992. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Richter, Daniel K. 1992. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Roundtree, Helen C. 1990. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. St. Pierre, Mark. 1991. Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman’s Story. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sekaquaptewa, Helen. 1969. Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Shaw, Anna Moore. 1974. A Pima Past. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Sheehan, Bernard W. 1973. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy

and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Shoemaker, Nancy. 1995a. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–25 in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995b. “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood.” Pp. 49–71 in Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. Edited by Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge. Szasz, Margaret Connell. 1974. Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination since 1928. 3d ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. ———. 1985. “Native American Children.” Pp. 311–342 in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1988. Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Thomas, Yvonne. 1992. “Untitled.” Pp. 99–100 in Rising Voices: Writings of Young Native Americans. Selected by Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Beverly R. Singer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Tong, Benson. 1999. Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D.: Omaha Reformer and Tribal Leader. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Trennert, Robert A. 1982. “Educating Indian Girls at Nonreservation Boarding Schools, 1878–1920.” Western Historical Quarterly 13 (July): 271–290. Van Kirk, Sylvia. 1984. “The Role of Native Women in the Fur Trade Society of Western Canada, 1670–1830.” Frontiers 7, no. 3: 9–13. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1969. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Vintage Books. Zitkala-S˘a. 1921. American Indian Stories. 1985. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

O Orphans and Orphanages

develop as they come of age in an often explicitly unwelcoming world. From the songs of slavery, various Native American oral stories, and European fairy tales to Jane Eyre, Little Orphan Annie, Dorothy Gale, and the heroines of Disney films, orphan evokes an image of an isolated child—lonely and sorrowful, perhaps, but still special, even sacred. Deprived of parents and stripped of overt cultural support, the literary orphan makes her own way in the world, finding people or animals to support, advise, and assist her on her journey to independent adulthood. Cinderella is the classic example of an “orphaned” girl in the Western folk tradition carried to America by European settlers. In this tale, the princess-in-disguise is trained in the concept of “noblesse oblige” by her long, trial-filled period as an abused daughter of a wicked stepmother and weak father, waiting to be discovered by the prince who will rescue her from poverty and degradation. Literary critics have argued that the orphan at the center of the romantic tradition inherited from Europe represents not only real fears of the loss of parents but also the anxieties of American colonists separated from family, tradition, and “fatherland”— as well as expressing thinly disguised class-based ideals in an ostensibly “classless” society. Among the first and most popular children’s novels to be published

Although early European Americans considered an orphan to be any child who had lost her father, today, strictly speaking, an orphan is a child who has lost both parents and who therefore depends for her sustenance either upon other relatives or various public or private institutions. Orphanages, which emerged in the earlynineteenth-century United States, fell out of favor, though not entirely out of use, in the twentieth century. Orphan has since proved a powerfully evocative term to various American “child-saving” philanthropies and their advocates. Orphan has been thus used to designate impoverished children separated from their families for any number of reasons, including separations that happened only after the children had been “saved” by charity workers and sent to live elsewhere. Today, social welfare agencies typically use the term dependent child to include orphans, foster children, and other impoverished children who need more support than their parents or guardians can provide. But beyond the strict definition of the term, orphan is also an ancient literary category. A character type that recurs in many Native American, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and European cultural traditions, the orphan embodies the resiliency, heroism, ingenuity, and selfreliance that all human spirits need to

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in America was Little Goody Two-Shoes (1787), a didactic story of an orphan girl who eventually becomes a wise, virtuous schoolmistress. This exaltation of the literary orphan, however, has not protected real dependent girls from various widely held suspicions about their family origins, sexual lasciviousness, and even criminal tendencies. Hence, these potential heroines of romance have also long been recognized as a potential drain on the culture at large—not to mention public monies. In the New England colonies and the South, even young children were expected to provide cheap, much-needed labor, usually as an apprentice, in return for room, board, secular and religious education, and instruction in vocational skills. However, particularly in the case of orphaned or illegitimate children, it was frequently in the master’s interest to pay little attention to the provision of any of these rewards. The child might perform only menial tasks and remain illiterate, poorly clothed, and malnourished. Social welfare statutes were directly transported from the English poor laws (ca. 1601), which required local communities to provide support for orphans, usually through village “selectmen.” As Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), would later demonstrate, these men were authorized to oversee the town’s kinship structures, mediate all indentures, act in loco parentis for illegitimate children (like Pearl in Hawthorne’s novel), and later supervise and fund poorhouses. Sometimes their “charity,” however, took the form of auctioning off poor, unconnected women and children to the person who agreed to take them in for the least amount of money. Later, impoverished parents sometimes paid a minimal fee to a service, usually a woman in her private

home, to take infants “off their hands.” These children did not generally live long. In contrast to the twentieth century, orphaned infants were long the least desirable candidates for informal adoption or early versions of foster care because their care consumed time and money when they could not yet work. The primarily family-based structure of northern colonies did not, then, readily care for orphans or other dependent girls, but in the South, the Virginia Company explicitly sought orphans for use as indentured laborers in the New World in its earliest days. Indentured servants accounted for more than half of all people who came to the colonies south of New England, and most servants were under nineteen years old. Labor was especially critical to the large plantations, including domestic labor, so the City of London deliberately transported several groups of children in the early seventeenth century “from their superfluous population” (quoted in Mason 1994, 1) to Virginia. Many of those children did not live to see their freedom. In addition, at one point a group of young women were transported to Jamestown and sold as brides for a specified quantity of tobacco. The use-value of children was so high that strict new laws had to be enacted in England against “spiriters” who would kidnap children, regardless of their familial situation, and sell them to the colonizers for a fee. All children in both the North and the South were in dire risk of losing one or both of their parents while growing up. However, given the large number of indentured servants that were imported into the South, orphaned girls there were more likely to lack any kinship connections than girls in the North. As a result, these southern girls had greater freedom to determine their own marriage partners

Orphans and Orphanages than their peers with living relatives, but it also made them ripe for severe exploitation, as has been particularly documented in the Chesapeake colonies. Girls and boys there were viewed as passing from infancy to childhood at age three; children orphaned at infancy were so likely to die and yet demanded so much time and effort that caregivers had to be paid to take them in. After surviving to age three, orphaned girls were expected to earn their own keep—doing domestic labor, caring for livestock, and so on. Poorer mothers who had lost their husbands were often forced to place their children out with other families in exchange for food or livestock. Wealthier widows, however, also had to act quickly and carefully to preserve the inheritances of their children from first marriages before remarriage because stepfathers controlled all finances from the moment of the wedding and could readily strip stepchildren of any wealth or entitlements. Children without a parent nearby were likely to be worked harder than other children and to receive less education, particularly if they were impoverished or illegitimate children. And even if they did have property, it was in danger of embezzlement by desperate or unscrupulous caretakers. A girl whose father died when she was still a minor was, moreover, also more likely to become pregnant before marriage. To further complicate matters, in all the European colonies, north and south, enslaved children were, legally speaking, akin to orphans. If the child’s mother was classed as property, only the tie to the child’s master held legal sway. The system thus sought to create a child who was legally and emotionally without parents by invalidating slave marriages and regularly separating parents from chil-

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dren. Although its legal architecture was derived from other European social institutions designed to deal with orphans, especially involuntary indentured servitude, unlike even that asymmetrical power relationship, slavery actively and legally resisted many forms of education, particularly literacy training, in a way incomparable to any other “child care” institution. The lifelong servitude of slavery attempted a complete transformation of human beings into property from earliest childhood. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) has been credited by some scholars with attempting almost single-handedly and perhaps arrogantly to reverse that dehumanization by sentimentalizing enslaved people for an Anglo-American audience, particularly through such problematic but highly compelling female orphan stories as those of Eliza, Cassy, and Topsy. Slave narratives and modern histories of slavery, however, suggest that kin-based networks of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins still often managed to adapt to the vagaries of the system and counteract the powerful antifamily force of the institution. The narrative produced by Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), in particular, challenges and complicates the stereotypical views of enslaved girlhood, demonstrating a complex social welfare structure within slaves’ extended kin networks, sometimes extending to members of the white community and providing care for Jacobs after her parents died and for her children after she escaped north. As the nineteenth century progressed, the wage-based, industrializing, and increasingly capitalistic international economy—which was thoroughly entangled with slavery—also further broke down traditional European responses to dependent, nonenslaved children. Wage-based

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Mealtime at the New York Foundling Hospital. (The Byron Collection, Museum of the City of New York, 1900)

workers were required to move to wherever their labor was demanded, which caused not only waves of immigration to the United States but massive movements within the American states, straining kinship networks and breaking apart families. At the same time, ideals regarding the purity and innocence of children emerged in the broader American culture, popularized by a wide variety of magazines and novels. Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains the exemplar of this innocence, although she was not herself an orphan. A novel published one year earlier, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), was also one of the first American “best-sellers.” It features Ellen Montgomery, a middle-class child who loses both her parents. Ellen, like Cinderella, must endure a period of toil and

misfortune before being rescued to a life of opulence by her own “Prince Charming,” John Humphreys, a middle-class American minister. Sentimental notions about childhood thus retained their strongest connection to the earliest childhood of the white middle class but nevertheless helped to make the use of child labor, particularly in purely industrial settings, more problematic, even as they increased the urgent need to remove poor children from the streets. Orphanages, reformatories, and houses of refuge were thus created specifically for the care and custody of dependent or delinquent children during the early nineteenth century, to remove them from the influences of the adults on the streets and those in nonsegregated institutions like county poorhouses. And the

Orphans and Orphanages orphanages were themselves further segregated, typically on the basis of such categories as gender, religious identification, ethnicity, age, and especially race. Such institutions were designed to provide systematic, careful, and regimented training to counteract the chaotic life that reformers believed they saw in ethnic communities, urban and otherwise. Native American children, including Sioux writer and civil rights activist Zitkala-S˘a (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), were regularly removed from kin groups on reservations and placed in orphanages or boarding schools in order to be trained to “American” standards of industry, frugality, and patriotism. City-based reformers feared especially for the virtue of immigrant girls working and living on the streets and thus sought to “save” them from poverty and “degeneracy” and to reform them to domesticity and obedience. These girls were typically bound out to domestic service positions or factory work at the age of fourteen, under involuntary indentures that would last until age eighteen or marriage, whichever came first. Many such institutions, operating on a combination of both public and private funding sources, had to market themselves both to governments and individual, wealthy donors. The white male heads of these groups needed to transfer, in the minds of would-be donors, the sentimental qualities of little Eva or Ellen Montgomery to the seemingly less immediately appealing, rough-talking street waifs and even to potentially “fallen” girls, since life on the streets was often equated with rape or prostitution. Indeed, Horatio Alger’s stories of the orphan boy rising from rags to riches often were set in children’s charities like the Newsboys’ Lodging House and the Children’s Aid

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Society (CAS) in New York. E. D. E. N. Southworth, also an extraordinarily popular writer of the period, created a crossdressing New York street waif/southern belle in disguise, Capitola Black, at the center of her novel The Hidden Hand (1859). Capitola’s roguish voice is used to criticize the limited options for poor girls on the street who want virtuous employment and emphasizes the difficulty of avoiding sexual assault and harassment on the street. The term orphan was thus ripe for exploitation. Commentators from the late nineteenth century noted that the term was often used very loosely, describing half-orphans, illegitimate children, and others who, for reasons of “moral depravity,” abusiveness, or, most common of all, just plain poverty, were not able (or willing) to remain with their relations. When used as a marketing term, orphan thus avoided a direct confrontation with middle-class anxieties about poverty and sexuality, let alone the rights of poor families to remain together. It was thus almost guaranteed to evoke a sentimental response in the mass culture generally—and in wealthy and middle-class donors specifically—to support private social welfare programs for impoverished children. The term allowed people with power to view those children in isolation, easily separable from the taint of poverty that often engulfed their families and communities. Systemic cultural problems, which many social scientists would argue were at the root of mass poverty, could be more easily overlooked, and the children’s group connections could be disregarded when benevolent, middleclass administrators made decisions about their care. However, it is important to mention that poor children and adults were never

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Orphan train on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. (The Santa Fe Collection, Kansas State Historical Society)

simply inert pawns in these systems. Girls and boys sometimes sought help from “child-savers” themselves. Parents in dire economic straits, cut off from kin because of immigration, poverty, or death, would use whatever means they could to care for their children, even if it sometimes meant turning them over to an orphanage or other children’s philanthropy. Even the so-called orphan trains plan, an emigration scheme used most prominently by the CAS, sometimes helped to underwrite the costs of transporting adults and families west despite being overtly devoted to “rescuing” street waifs. The CAS was also in the vanguard of efforts that criticized orphanages, arguing that the best “institution” for raising children was the “Christian family,” ideally in a rural, Protestant setting. This anti-institutional rhetoric generally became stronger over the course of the twentieth century, and the CAS’s industrial-scale transportation plan, which itself ended in 1929, thus provided a model for the modern foster care system.

Additionally, an increased acceptance of both adoption, which was legally streamlined in most states during the mid- to late nineteenth century, and much later, abortion, legalized in the 1970s, finally led to a decline in the number and population of U.S. orphanages over the course of the twentieth century. At the end of the twentieth century, the desire of wealthy parents from the United States to adopt children from abroad led to an increasing market for the adoption of orphaned children from poorer nations. Indeed, cultural preferences for male children in countries like China, which instituted serious population control measures beginning in 1979, increased the numbers of girls in orphanages there. Their plight was described in controversial news stories, including a British television documentary entitled Return to the Dying Rooms (1999), which described the institutions as cruelly neglectful and maliciously abusive to these girls. This publicity gained the attention of adoption agencies and of adults in the United States to the point that thousands of

Orphans and Orphanages Americans and Europeans now adopt orphans from other countries each year. Many agencies and adopting individuals as well as the Chinese government believe that the abuses in the orphanages were exaggerated in the film, which they say played to Western stereotypes about Chinese people, and they cite the government’s requirement that anyone adopting from the orphanages must make a mandatory financial contribution to the care of the children left behind. In the eyes of many critics, orphanages and adoption agencies, originally designed to serve the needs of children, have increasingly come to serve the needs of childless adults. The “blank slate” of healthy orphaned infants holds an especial power in American culture: an innocent victim completely cut off from any potentially still-interested parent, available to be rescued from appalling living conditions and to be given a chance at a better life, is a kind of American dream. Older children with family ties or those with special needs, meanwhile, are much more likely to remain within institutions or trapped in the troubled American foster care system. Many modern dependent children thus lack consistent homes and suffer emotional and physical problems, which are often inadequately addressed by the resources made available to them. And despite the occasional roar of anger, millions of children orphaned by acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) remain in dire straits in Africa. Despite the continued sentimental power of the orphan in storytelling traditions, from the

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ancient oral genres to today’s electronic formats, contemporary response to these children remains, all too frequently, inadequate and sometimes even abusive. Lori Askeland See also Adoption; Child Abuse References and Further Reading Bellingham, Bruce. 1986. “Institution and Family: An Alternative View of Nineteenth-Century Child-Saving.” Social Problems 33, no. 6: S33–S57. Bremner, Robert A., John Barnard, Tamara K. Hareven, and Robert M. Mennel, eds. 1970–1974. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutman, Herbert G. 1976. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1725–1925. New York: Random House. Holt, Marilyn Irvin. 1993. The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Katz, Michael. 1986. In the Shadow of the Poor House. New York: Basic Books. Mason, Mary Ann. 1994. From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. May, Elaine Tyler. 1997. Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pazicky, Diana Loercher. 1998. Cultural Orphans in America. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Rothman, David J. 1971. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little, Brown. Trattner, Walter I. 1994. From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America. 5th ed. New York: Free Press.

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been practiced in some American families before the nineteenth century, was transformed from a personal indulgence to an act of high moral purpose, and it became inextricably linked with the course of childhood. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published advice for children about pets was usually directed explicitly to boys, but girls were active pet keepers, caring for a wide range of small animals and livestock. The rest of “Mary’s Lamb” is less well known today. Turned outdoors, the lamb waits patiently for his little mistress until school ends and greets her with joy. When her classmates ask why, their teacher replies that the girl’s love for the animal leads to affection returned:

Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And every where that Mary went, The lamb was sure to go.

When Sarah Josepha Hale, author and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, published “Mary’s Lamb” in 1830, she offered her young readers a concise story that connected little girls, kindness to animals, and keeping pets in a manner that reflected changing attitudes toward all three. At the time, middle-class culture was actively redefining what it meant to be a child generally and how little girls and boys should be socialized to their appropriate adult roles. A broad debate on society’s obligations to animals also took place in the popular print media of the time, articulating a “domestic ethic of kindness.” This ethic viewed the family as the front line for training children into self-consciously kind behavior, and it argued that animals were the first subjects through which children learned to be benevolent toward all dependent beings, including human ones. It also argued that animals were capable of recognizable feelings like love and were exemplars for the values a rapidly changing society needed, particularly loyalty and willing service. Thus pet keeping (selecting an individual animal for special attention and care), which had

And you each gentle animal To confidence may bind, And make them follow at your call, If you are always kind. (Hale 1830)

“Mary’s Lamb” could theoretically have been called “Harry’s Lamb,” but that would have been unlikely. In antebellum children’s literature, girls were almost always the untutored voices of kindness. This reflected the era’s assumption that girls were innately predisposed toward gentleness and nurturance, qualities that would achieve their full expression when they had families of their own. Fictional

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The Playful Pets, colored lithograph. (Courtesy Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, ca. 1850s)

Pets boys, however, seemed to have a propensity to inflict thoughtless cruelty on animals. They destroyed animal families by stealing birds’ nests and baby squirrels out of trees; they carelessly tortured and killed toads, turtles, and cats; and they hunted and trapped small mammals just for fun. This did reflect some common forms of play by boys, but popular authors such as Hale, Lydia H. Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe worried that such antics were a strong predictor of violence by adult men and had difficulty distinguishing unlovely but guileless acts from truly sociopathic behavior. Having made the diagnosis, however, authors recommended the cure: pet keeping. Almost forty years after “Mary’s Lamb,” Hale published an essay titled “Pets and Their Uses,” which argued that pets actually “humanized” boys and offered “a great preventative against the thoughtless cruelty and tyranny they are so apt to exercise toward all dependent beings!” (Hale 1868). For little girls, pet keeping simply reinforced their feminine qualities; it was useful but unnecessary. A double meaning in the very word pet also reflected on little girls. The noun was first used for coddled, spoiled children in the late sixteenth century; it was not applied to favored animals until the seventeenth century, when it was first associated with orphan lambs (like Mary’s pet). By the nineteenth century, however, pet had evolved to suggest a third related meaning, a “compliant, yielding creature” that could be easily bent to a superior (adult) will (Oxford English Dictionary). As popular prints of the time suggested, girls could themselves be seen as pets. Hence most nineteenth-century advice literature on pet keeping was directed to

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boys. A comparison of The American Boys Handy Book (1882) by Daniel C. Beard with The American Girls Handy Book (1887), a companion volume written by his sisters Lina and Adelia H. Beard, is revealing. Beard provided his readers with instructions on how to make, stock, and care for both freshwater and marine aquaria; he devoted two chapters to rearing young birds taken from the nest as pets; and he insisted that a boy without a dog was “almost incomplete . . . an unfinished story” (Beard 1983, 223). Lina and Adelia B. Beard’s ideal girl gardened and played tennis, gave parties, and painted, stitched, and modeled decorative accessories for her home; she did not, however, take care of pet animals. Given the assumptions of people who wrote advice literature for children, what was the actual experience of girls in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Girls were in fact enthusiastic pet keepers: they kept aquaria, bred canaries and gave young birds as gifts, created elaborate pretend games that included beloved cats and dogs, raised chickens and sold the eggs to their mothers, and wrote poetry and letters to their favorite animals. Although the archived papers of children are relatively rare, the voices of little girls from the past can be found in places like the letters column of St. Nicholas magazine, which published scores of enthusiastic letters reporting on pets. In 1877, Annie Curtis Smith wrote about her Maltese cat Pussine, who “rides in my doll-carriage, and don’t jump out. She climbs on the shelf outside the door, and rattles the door-knob to be let in. Papa has taught her to jump through our arms and to stand up in the corner” (Smith 1877). Enough letters, diaries, and memoirs do survive to indicate that, for middle-

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and upper-class girls, pets could be an important part of their emotional and play lives through early and middle adolescence. In 1850, Helen Kate Rogers of Philadelphia wrote a poem to her squirrel Chickey, a parody on a popular verse titled “Beautiful Spring,” asking: “How shall I woo thee dear little chick / What shall my offering be?” (Furness 1850). Alice Stone Blackwell, the only child of suffragists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, also wrote an “ode” to her cat Toby (she described it as “very dripping”) and was much put out when her mother published the poem in the Women’s Journal in 1872 without her permission (Merrill 1990, 37). As teenagers in the late 1850s, Ellen Tucker and Edith Emerson enjoyed the company of a small green parrot; Ellen reported in a letter that their father Ralph Waldo Emerson called Polly their “green cat” (Gregg 1982, 132). Emily Marshall Eliot of Boston relied on her dog Bounce as playmate and walking companion through the streets of Boston. In 1869, twelve-year-old Emily recorded dressing him up in “my old red plaid shawl, and then I tied a handkerchief on his head and tied an old veil anon and then we played organ grinder.” Bounce was a member of the “Free and Easy Club” (Emily, the family cat, her doll Nina, and her brother Willy were the others) (Eliot 1869). In 1870, Kitty B. Putnam of Albany, New York, began her adventures in aquarium keeping with goldfish purchased in Brooklyn during a family visit. By 1871, the fourteen-yearold girl was so fascinated by her aquatic world-in-miniature that she filled several pages of her composition book discussing the aquarium decor (which included “caves” and a small statue of Memmon, an Ethiopian king killed by Achilles in the Trojan War), her care for the popula-

tion of goldfish and minnows, and her active efforts to obtain more captives in a nearby stream. She was pleased that “my fish know me for when ever [sic] I come to the globe they all come out from their hiding places in the caves and sometimes they will take things out of my fingers they are so tame” (Putnam 1871). As the letter from Annie Curtis Smith suggests, pets also provided a medium for playful interaction between parents and children, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century when new ideas about more companionable marriage and family life gained favor in middle-class households. In the 1880s, the three daughters of Samuel (“Mark Twain”) and Olivia Clemens allowed their father to name all their pets, along with their dolls, because his suggestions were so amusing. This led to cats with names like Sour Mash and Famine; three collies received as a gift were dubbed I Know, You Know, and Don’t Know. Girls had very large, demanding pets, too. Nan Hayden Agle, a children’s author who published an entire memoir structured around the animals on her parents’ suburban property outside Baltimore in the 1910s, had as her own particular pet a donkey named Peanuts; she not only drove a cart but rode him saddled and bareback. Elizabeth Wood, daughter of the Pennsylvania artist George B. Wood, also had a donkey for a time, but she and her brother preferred harnessing the family dogs to draw their sleds in winter. Looking back, many people assume that all Americans knew how to ride horses before the 1920s, but in fact, few urban or suburban families could afford to keep them. Riding and driving for pleasure were elite recreations, and women and girls were further hampered

Pets from enjoyment by the requirement that they ride sidesaddle. Families that did own horses often treated them as pets, but the association of young girls with special love for horses seems to be a product of the twentieth century. The publication of books like National Velvet and increasing middle-class prosperity following World War II meant that the elite hobby spread as some families could afford riding lessons and even a horse or two for their daughters. Before the automobile, fast horses were something about which boys and young men fantasized. When tinkering with cars became a common hobby for teenage boys, some girls turned to horses instead. Recreational riding is now a predominantly female activity. The demise of a pet was often a little girl’s first self-conscious encounter with death, and it provided an opportunity to practice adult mourning customs. Children held funerals for animals that often included improvised coffins and tombstones, but some families had real pet cemeteries where several generations of four-footed friends rested. When Alice Hughes’s dog Dick was shot by a policeman for biting the postman, she commemorated the event with a poetic eulogy that included the lines: “And they laid him to rest / With his paws on his breast / Far, far from his own sunny home” (Neupert 1977, 88). Although girls from middle-class and elite households probably had more pets and certainly had more time to play with the ones they did have, the families of little girls in frontier communities and in working-class urban settings did cherish some animals, and families set aside time and resources to care for them. Ann Ellis, who grew up in hardscrabble Colorado mining towns in the 1880s, recalled that

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her mother always kept canaries, no matter how tough times were, and that if one died, “all of us cried at the funeral” (Ellis 1990, 60). By the twentieth century, then, pet keeping was an unquestioned part of the experience of growing up for both boys and girls. The activity received an additional boost in the post–World War II era, as families with more disposable income to spend began to keep more animals and to spend more money on supplies and equipment; by 1995 the “pet industry” was worth $20 billion each year. In addition to earlier merit badges associated with animals in the 1920s that encouraged girls to raise poultry or other livestock, the Girl Scouts of America acknowledged the expanded role of pets as both childhood companions and a medium for teaching responsibility by creating national merit badges called “Cat and Dog” (1947), “First Aid to Animals” (1947), and “Pets” (1963). Katherine C. Grier See also Domesticity; 4-H; Girls’ Culture; Rural Girls References and Further Reading Agle, Nan Hayden. 1970. My Animals and Me: An Autobiographical Story. New York: Seabury Press. Beard, Daniel Carter. 1882. The American Boys Handy Book: What to Do and How to Do It. 1983. Reprint, Boston: David R. Godine. Beard, Lina, and Adelia B. Beard. 1887. The American Girls Handy Book: How to Amuse Yourself and Others. 1987. Reprint, Boston: David R. Godine. Eliot, Emily Marshall. Diaries for 1869–1871. Entry for March 2, 1869. In Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Ellis, Ann. 1929. The Life of an Ordinary Woman. 1990. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Furness, Helen Kate Rogers. Letter to “Miss K. C. Brush” (the squirrel), dated

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April 25, 1850. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Gregg, Edith E. W., ed. 1982. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Grier, Katherine C. 1995. “Animal House: Pet Keeping in Urban and Suburban Households in the Northeast, 1850–1900.” Pp. 109–129 in New England’s Creatures: 1400–1900. Dublin Center for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 1993. Edited by Peter Benes. Boston: Boston University Press. ———. Forthcoming. Pets in America: A History. Hale, Sarah Josepha. 1830. “Mary’s Lamb.” Juvenile Miscellany 4, no. 1 (September–October): 64. ———. 1868. “Pets and Their Uses.” In Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round. 1972. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 244. Merrill, Marlene Deahl, ed. 1990. Growing Up in Boston’s Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874. New Haven: Yale University Press. Neider, Charles, ed. 1985. Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by Suzy Clemens, His Daughter, Thirteen. With a Foreword and Copious Comments by Her Father. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Neupert, Alice Hughes. 1977. “In Those Days: Buffalo in the 1870’s.” Niagara Frontier 24, no. 4 (Winter): 77–89. Putnam, Catherine Bonney. 1871. Composition Book. In collection of Historic Cherry Hill, Albany, New York. Serpell, James. 1996. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. 1986. Reprint, Cambridge University Press. Smith, Annie Curtis. 1877. “The LetterBox.” St. Nicholas 4, no. 11 (September): 765.

Pickford, Mary Known first as “America’s Sweetheart” and then as the “World’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford was the premier film star of the silent film era. For a generation she

was held up as the ideal of American girlhood. Pickford’s typical character was an energetic young girl who grew up by the end of the film and married the hero. Pickford’s small size and long golden curls allowed her to play young characters well into her thirties. In a career that lasted into the sound era, Pickford acted in 196 films, 52 of which were feature films. Although she was not the very first movie star, Pickford was unquestionably the most successful. She was beloved internationally, and her hold on moviegoing audiences was unchallenged for a decade. Pickford started making films in 1909 with D. W. Griffith, one of the great silent film directors. In 1913 she joined Famous Players, the organization that would become Paramount Pictures. For years she was the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Pickford was one of the first actresses to have creative control over her films and by 1918 earned $1 million a year. In 1919, Pickford became one of the founding members of United Artists, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. In 1920, she married Fairbanks, the other premier star of their generation. For the next ten years the couple were the unquestioned social leaders of Hollywood and arguably the most famous couple in the world. Their marital difficulties and divorce in 1935 were watched with as much interest as their marriage had been. Although Pickford’s popularity was challenged by younger stars starting in 1925, she retained a loyal following, and her films continued to earn a profit. She decided to retire in 1933 so that she could leave the screen while she was still a great star. Although she amassed a considerable fortune, her impoverished childhood was

Pickford, Mary an important part of Pickford’s star appeal. Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith in Toronto, Ontario, in 1892. The story of her impoverished childhood after the abrupt death of her father was well known to her fans. Gladys went onstage as a child along with her sister and brother. Of the three, Gladys was the most successful and was often the sole financial support of her family. The hardship of the life in a touring stock company and Gladys’s determination to rise in her profession were the stuff of legend. Eventually, she would join the company of the most important Broadway impresario of his day: David Belasco. It was Belasco who changed Gladys Smith’s name to Mary Pickford and gave her the prestige that she later parlayed into stardom and wealth. Many of the roles Pickford played imitated her rags-to-riches story. In the publicity that surrounded those films, Pickford’s poor childhood was often cited as proof of the sincerity of her performance. Pickford herself frequently claimed allegiance with working girls. Pickford’s ability to control a great fortune and yet convincingly identify with poor working girls was one example of the way she could embrace seemingly incompatible ideals. For her fans, Pickford reconciled the profound changes in the culture with older, more traditional values. She did this in a number of ways through different aspects of her life. The characters that Pickford played appealed particularly well to the film audiences of the 1910s and 1920s. They combined strength and vulnerability in a way that was modern without being too risky. They were rebellious and tender by turns. In character Pickford could ride bareback, clear a saloon, or take on a crowd of small boys. Yet even at their most mischievous, Pickford’s characters

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Mary Pickford. (Library of Congress, ca. 1911)

were always sweet: she could adopt small animals, care for invalids, and gather flowers. These coming-of-age stories followed the heroine as she developed from an unruly child into a lovely young woman. Her characters were notably physically active and independent throughout most of each film and challenged conventional expectations of girlish behavior. However, by the end of the story, the heroine’s energetic spirit was tamed: she matured and fell in love. Pickford managed to play characters that were rebellious without being shocking because she played little girls; their youth meant that the characters were sexually innocent and relatively unthreatening to bourgeois culture. By the time the little girls grew up and fell in love, they had learned their manners.

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Pickford’s stardom fell at a time when women were becoming more financially and politically independent. Within two generations, women had gained the right to own property, to retain their own earnings, to divorce their husbands, and ultimately to vote. Although some of these changes had developed gradually over time, for many middle-class families at the turn of the twentieth century, it must have seemed that the culture was transforming before their eyes. Pickford’s characters provided her fans with a kind of compromise between older values of hearth and home and newer attitudes toward marriage and women’s work and leisure. She created an image of female independence that challenged some conventions while adhering to others. Although it is impossible to re-create the experience of Pickford’s fans, both her film roles and the publicity that surrounded her off-screen life suggest that she responded to both her audience’s longing for change and their fear of going too far. Pickford carried this ability to be both innovative and conventional into the publicity of her off-screen life. She was a shrewd businesswoman and wielded enormous power over her own career, the film industry, and the Hollywood community. She accomplished all this before she had the legal right to vote. With her astute understanding of her value to Famous Players, Pickford negotiated salaries that stunned the world. As early as 1915, a caption that accompanied a portrait of the star published in McClure’s Magazine commented that she earned more money than the president. By the 1920s, Pickford had become famous for her business acumen and was identified as a woman who managed both her fortune and her production company successfully. She was an independent and successful woman.

Yet Pickford was also strongly associated with domesticity. She was often photographed with her mother and credited her success in large part to that relationship. Although Pickford had no children of her own, the fan magazines often provided her with surrogate children. Her work with a Los Angeles orphanage was widely publicized, as was her relationship with her niece, Mary Pickford Rupp. In fact, Mary Pickford was photographed more often with young Mary than was the child’s mother, Lottie Pickford, who also had a film career. During the 1910s, Pickford and her first husband Owen Moore were often identified as one of the many happy couples of the film industry, although they lived together only sporadically and separated definitively in 1917. In her public image, Pickford managed to combine the image of an independent and powerful businesswoman with that of a good daughter, wife, and mother at a time when these two images of womanhood were considered basically incompatible. She succeeded in this uneasy compromise in part because of the roles she played and in part because of the consistent publicity of her moderate lifestyle in the bosom of her family. The respectability of Pickford’s off-screen life matched the innocence of her characters. When Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks in 1920, her image in the popular press and movie fan magazines changed subtly. Pickford was able to hide her separation from Owen Moore for several years and kept most details of her personal life from her fans. In fact, the scandal that surrounded Pickford’s divorce from Moore and subsequent marriage to Fairbanks was the first time that the star really faced adverse publicity or even publicity that she herself could not control. Pickford hesitated for several years before divorcing Moore

Pickford, Mary and marrying Fairbanks, for fear that the scandal would ruin her career. She and Fairbanks both rode out the storm and were welcomed back into public favor mostly because they were the two most successful stars at that time and because they both avoided vulgarity or any hint of sexual suggestion in their films. Following her marriage with Fairbanks, Pickford rarely escaped the glare of publicity. She and Fairbanks were both important celebrities in their own right. Moreover, because theirs was the first marriage between major stars, the marriage itself was the focus of public attention. They were the first great celebrity couple of the twentieth century and attracted enormous crowds wherever they went. On their honeymoon tour in Europe, Fairbanks had to carry Pickford on his shoulders on one occasion to protect her from being crushed by the crowd. The scrutiny into their private lives also meant that Pickford and Fairbanks spent several years before their official separation denying rumors that they were on the verge of divorce. Everything in her life, from her home furnishings to the status of her marriage, was analyzed exhaustively in the press. Some of the attention Pickford invited, but some of it she could not avoid. Even before her marriage with Fairbanks, Pickford was conscious of her potential as a role model, and the advice she gave her fans corresponded to many elements of her film roles. Starting in late 1915, a daily advice column was published under her name. The column was syndicated across the country and ran until May 1918. From the beginning, the column had an intimate tone. Pickford referred to readers as her friends and told them often how much she enjoyed their letters and photographs. The columns

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ranged over a variety of topics, including anecdotes from Pickford’s work in the film industry, discussions of her close family relationships, and advice on beauty, clothing, or work. At the end of each column were replies to letters that readers had sent in to their local newspapers. Several themes recurred consistently. When consulted about romantic affairs, Pickford advised that her readers confide in their mothers. She discouraged her readers from using cosmetics or dying their hair. She repeatedly assured readers that she considered homemaking and motherhood the highest calling for all women and would sometimes express regret that she herself was not a wife and mother. This advice was entirely consistent with the culture of domesticity that was prevalent during the nineteenth century. However, Pickford often encouraged readers to find work that interested them outside the home and gave detailed, practical advice about how to get into the film industry. The column was actually written by Pickford’s close friend and screenwriter Frances Marion, but fans were repeatedly assured that Pickford wrote it all herself. In later years, after the termination of the column, Pickford would advise her fans in interviews and magazine stories along much the same lines. She continued to valorize work outside the home and domestic work alternately. She could discuss her work passionately and then voice regrets at not having had children, two roles that Pickford herself described as incompatible. This suggests that, like her fans, Pickford was ambivalent about the many changes in women’s lives during her lifetime. It was her ability to express this ambivalence so beautifully that fueled her success at the height of her career. By the end of her acting career,

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film audiences had become more accustomed to women having active careers outside the home and more comfortable with expressions of female sexuality. Pickford ultimately ceded her place as queen of Hollywood to younger stars like Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford. As the most important star of the early silent era and, moreover, a star who avoided scandal, Pickford was an important asset to the entire film industry. She lent the industry respectability when it most needed to prove its worth to political and moral leaders. Pickford not only brought prestige from her early experience acting on Broadway, but she also made decent, wholesome films. From early on in its history, the film industry fought attempts at local, state, and national levels to censor, regulate, and control motion pictures and their theaters. Most famously, on Christmas Day in 1908, the mayor of New York ordered all the movie theaters closed. The theaters reopened the next day, but it was just the first in a long series of battles that continue to this day. The industry attempted to raise the prestige of the films as one strategy to reassure reformers and avoid censorship. In the 1910s, film producers began to hire prominent theater and opera stars to make films. They also adapted famous novels and plays to film or hired well-known authors to write scenarios. The industry began to make longer films that allowed them to tell more complicated stories and to imitate more closely the experience of going to the theater. The opening of the 1914 film Tess of the Storm Country reveals how Pickford served the industry in this quest for respectability and prestige. The film was a huge success for Pickford, arguably the

film that made her a star. Tess was an adaptation of a best-selling novel that told the story of a squatter village struggling to survive on the shores of Cayuga Lake. Tess was the high-spirited heroine who ultimately saved the village from wealthy landowners who were determined to destroy it. The film opened with a prologue in which Pickford emerged from behind a stage curtain and arranged a large bunch of roses in a vase. She was beautifully dressed, and her hair was arranged in long curls down her back. She looked every inch the Broadway star. The prologue served no narrative purpose in the film, but it did remind the audience of Pickford’s association with prestigious theater productions. The prologue further reminded viewers that when not in character, Pickford was a very demure young woman. In contrast, the role of Tess required Pickford to spend the entire film barefoot and in rags. Her famous hair was a tangled mess, and she was generally very grubby. Tess was a hoyden and a mischief maker. Although she ultimately learned her manners and married the hero, Tess spent most of the film defying authority. When the story was introduced with the short scene of Pickford arranging flowers, the audience could see her as both the dainty young lady and the defiant spitfire. Pickford had it both ways: her character’s high spirits were daring and appealingly modern, and the prologue reminded readers of the star’s association with high culture. Pickford could appeal to audiences’ desire for new and exciting images of femininity while reassuring them that she continued to embrace middle-class values of gentility and sexual respectability. Anne Burri Wolverton

Play See also Movies, Adolescent Girls in; Temple, Shirley References and Further Reading Basinger, Jeanine. 1999. Silent Stars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Beauchamp, Cari. 1997. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. New York: Scribner. Bowser, Eileen. 1990. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. Vol. 2, History of the American Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brownlow, Kevin. 1999. Mary Pickford Rediscovered: Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Eyman, Scott. 1990. Mary Pickford: From Here to Hollywood. New York: Donald I. Fine. Koszarski, Richard. 1990. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928. Vol. 3, History of the American Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pickford, Mary. 1956. Sunshine and Shadow: The Autobiography of Mary Pickford. London: William Heineman. Whitfield, Eileen. 1997. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Play Girls’ play over more than 400 years of America’s past has been culturally constructed. In Puritan New England with its subsistence economy, play and playthings were widely regarded as unproductive distractions to adults and children alike. By the end of the colonial period, however, leisure invigorated laborers, and play became the work of children. Since the acceptance of play in the second half of the eighteenth century, adults have used toys, especially dolls and miniature household equipment, to

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socialize girls according to prevailing notions of gender. As the material culture of play, girls’ toys have been shaped as well by changing economies, philosophies, ideologies, demography, technology, and fashion. In response to the narrow limits imposed on their play, girls of all ages, classes, races, and regions over the past 300 years have contested play’s socializing purposes with the games, dolls, and toys given to girls or appropriated by them. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans, Seneca girls spent much of their infancy entertained by lavishly decorated hoops attached to fur-covered cradle boards to which they were swaddled. When they could walk, girls were free to play and pry and even indulge in early sexual experimentation. Seneca parents praised their daughters’ achievements and did not punish them for their wrongdoing, according to the many Euro-American trappers, traders, colonists, and missionaries who chronicled their observations. Despite the many differences between tribes, girls’ play aimed to teach cultural beliefs and traditions and to serve as instructional models of mothers’ work. According to one Jesuit missionary, “Whenever they begin to put one foot in front of the other, [girls] have a little stick put into their hands [in order] to train them and teach them early to pound corn, and when they are grown somewhat they also play various games with their companions, and in the course of these small frolics they are trained to perform trifling and petty household duties” (quoted in Axtell 1981, 34). Seventeenth-century Puritan girls, however, were allowed few indulgences. There were no nurseries, and what little baby furniture there was, such as walking stools, served to inhibit toddlers’

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movements and force them to imitate their “upstanding” elders. In her study of American portraits of children, Karin Calvert found no playthings before 1750, though girls in the middle and southern colonies raced, wrestled, played tag, and played with tops. Doll “poppets” symbolized the presence of dangerous demonic forces in New England, whereas rag babies were the only dolls durable enough for little girls in places like Pennsylvania. But everywhere in the seventeenth century, the word toy simply referred to something that was amusing to anyone, regardless of age. In Puritan New England, “Toys were temptations to idleness, reverie, and fantasy” (Calvert 1992, 50). And play at any age was generally discouraged, “lest they should think diversion to be a better and nobler thing than diligence,” explained colonial minister Cotton Mather (quoted in Pollock 1987, 148). Like their elders, Puritan girls’ ability to play was restrained by custom and also constrained by clothing. Swaddled in strips of linen and shoved into airless, hooded cradles, baby girls could do little but lie still. Puritan girls wore stiffened petticoats until the age of six, when they donned similarly restrictive garments also worn by adult women. Regardless of what they wore, there was little time to play in Puritan households, where girls spent their days assisting mothers and other females in an endless routine of household activities and farm chores. Aimed at lightening their labors were the spontaneous games played by siblings and teenage servants who tossed swaddled babies like footballs. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that girls in Andover, Massachusetts, challenged community customs by “night walking.” At taverns,

the “licentious” daughters of both elite and laboring-class families kept company with neighborhood youth, caroused, drank, danced, frolicked, fought, and fornicated. Also influenced by social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in New England were preadolescent and adolescent girls in Salem, Massachusetts, who played a dangerous game with fatal consequences. Using egg whites, water, and the supernatural, they attempted to decipher the identity of their future husbands. Their divining game caused unprecedented alarm among their religious elders, who were deeply troubled by fears of demonic possession. The play of girls and the recreations of their older sisters changed over the course of the eighteenth century because of the gradual decline of paternal control, the rise of prosperity, and the importance of privacy. For older girls, this meant greater choices in whom to spend their time with and how. Increasingly, young women could avoid adult surveillance by going to another room instead of having to share cramped domestic space typical of seventeenth-century dwellings. More young women clearly indulged in unsanctioned activity with young men as the percentage of pregnant brides rose to more than 40 percent in some eighteenth-century New England towns. Over time, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers led parents to view their daughters as innocent individuals with age-appropriate needs and abilities. Although reading material remained as limited as girls’ access to it, sex- and age-appropriate toys became acceptable when play was viewed as a learning process crucial to childhood development. Toys became the province of childhood and dolls the exclusive domain of girls now encour-

Play aged to practice the domestic and maternal activities of women. That is why George Washington ordered dolls and doll furniture for his stepdaughter Patcy Curtis from a London toymaker in 1760 and why New England sea captains brought back dolls to daughters in Salem and Boston. Using string, straws, rags, and water, girls pretended to spin yarn, wash clothes, and scrub floors. Whether playing with dolls or other gender-appropriate toys, girls in the eighteenth century were able to move their bodies in less restricted ways as loose-fitting dresses replaced the stiffened stays of a bygone era. Rousseau had recommended that the “limbs of a growing child should be free to move easily in his clothing; nothing should cramp their growth or movement; there should be nothing tight, nothing fitting closely to the body, no belts of any kind” (1762, 91). Nor were hairstyles to constrain girls, as an androgynous shoulder-length haircut with bangs replaced tight, hairpinned coifs. In South Carolina and elsewhere in the South, elite girls played more than had seventeenth-century indentured servants and hardworking daughters of planters. A higher standard of living (related to the rise of slavery) and family stability (because of decreased death rates and increased rates of life expectancy) led to a more child-centered family life. Members of the gentry experienced more parental intimacy, affection, and tenderness and were given more toys. Parents celebrated births and christenings and gave their children nicknames, and mothers in particular forged lifelong friendships with their daughters. But increasingly rigid gender-role expectations—that girls be compliant beauties with feminine charms—inhibited girls’ development. Acceptable play became those activities

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that imbued girls with the cardinal virtues of southern femininity: modesty, meekness, compassion, affability, piety, and passivity. Their brothers’ games and play encouraged autonomy, self-reliance, honesty, virtue, obedience, and self-control. But girls themselves were expected to be the precious, frivolous, and amusing playthings of their families. The aim of pleasing others was reinforced in the music, drawing, dancing, needlework, and poetry curriculum that comprised an elite girl’s education. In Victorian prints, pictures, portraits, and poetry, frail and fair girls dressed in their best clothes cradled exquisite dolls. These nineteenth-century representations had been influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, the doctrine of republican motherhood, and Victorian gender ideology that aimed to train daughters to assume their allotted role as middle-class wives and mothers. Girls’ play in particular was to instill such newly devised bourgeois values as restraint, regularity, self-control, and discipline and to nurture such feminine virtues as purity, piety, domesticity, and submission. In order to teach girls how to assume their proper role, they were to serve an informal apprenticeship in a female world sheltered from the corrupting influence of the masculine public sphere. The mastering of requisite feminine skills and sensibilities shaped girls’ play activities and vice versa. Widely represented as winged angels, shepherdesses, and gardeners, Christian girls were to find satisfaction in Bible reading and hymn singing and to observe the Sabbath by not playing. Books such as Anecdotes for Girls (1854) emphasized the importance of feminine submission and devotion to duty. Others taught deportment and decorum to future wives of business-

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men, professionals, or statesmen. Lydia Maria Child’s The Girl’s Own Book (1833) encouraged girls to practice polite social rituals while “visiting” and at tea parties and dances. Diary keeping was intended to record the development of a girl’s moral character, and fancy work and playing the piano were windows into the purity of their souls. Domesticity, consisting of a great variety of household skills and feminine accomplishments that built character, was to be mastered through sewing samplers, painting, making dolls, and participating in other leisure activities that signified middleclass status. Inventors and entrepreneurs responded to the concerns of middle-class families and the suggestions of domestic experts for sex-segregated toys that promoted utility, morality, and gender stereotyping. Girls’ toys—an increasing assortment of dolls, dollhouses, doll clothes, and miniature furnishings and housewares—were intended to nurture their inherent domestic and maternal nature. Made of china, wax, and other fragile materials, commercially produced dolls required delicate motions and careful play. Daughters received fewer toys than did sons, whose toys were also more varied and durable. The gradual proliferation of toys of all kinds over the course of the nineteenth century was due to the rise of international trade and the growth of a domestic toy industry. Although few toys were intended for both girls and boys, printers and publishers did produce games such as Mansion of Happiness for parlor entertainments. In the American popular imagination, shaped in large part by prolific images and iconography, Victorian girls were all white, middle-class, and uniformly angelic. In the words of one contempo-

rary poet, girls were “sugar and spice and all things nice.” But this idealized portrait reflected how things ought to be rather than representing a reality that was far more complex and contested. Through both sanctioned and unsanctioned play, Victorian girls resisted and rebelled against narrow definitions of acceptable feminine activities. For example, instead of making dolls or playing in the parlor with the expensive ones their mothers kept under lock and key, rural girls preferred more vigorous play. With little encouragement given to girls like Lucy Larcom by adults and experts, they nevertheless actively explored fields, rivers, quarries, and cemeteries where they rolled hoops, jumped rope, tossed snowballs, skated, sled, raced, and enjoyed other activities that inadvertently challenged gendered norms. With friends, they put on plays, and in attics girls secretly played cards with decks they created. The new “Brutus” or “Titus” haircut, which required no hairpins or small combs, contributed to girls’ ability to engage in unfettered play. Such changing fashions as loose-fitting and short frocks (hemmed well above the ankles) worn over “pantalettes” (later called “bloomers”) also freed girls from constraints. The introduction of “pantaloons” enabled girls to romp, roll, and run without embarrassment, though they were strictly forbidden from straddling hobbyhorses, rocking horses, or seesaws due to fears about sexual arousal. Yet once they started to wear undergarments, girls appropriated the game of jump rope from boys. How girls negotiated cultural prescriptions in their play can also be gleaned from the copious letters, diaries, and memoirs they wrote as well as from the

Play books they read. Often inexpensive juvenile periodicals, dime novels, and numerous domestic novels were filled with girl heroines who posed challenges to the patriarchal social order. Girls read “unsanctioned” works on their own and at raucous “reading parties,” even though mothers tried to supervise their daughters’ reading habits. Chagrined critics expressed their fears about the detrimental effect that reading “worthless” novels and magazines would have on girls, especially those on the brink of womanhood. In an effort to tame a rebellious nature and enforce conformity, parents typically curtailed the freedoms of girlhood during adolescence. “I can never jump over a fence again, so long as I live!” cried Frances Willard, the future founder of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (quoted in Green 1983, 10). This was a popular theme in Victorian girls’ books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), in which Jo gradually sheds her assertive masculinity and accepts prevailing standards of feminine modesty and propriety. It was a painful process experienced by many real girls as well. “Mother insists that at last I must have my hair done up woman-fashion,” complained Frances Willard. “My back hair is twisted up like a corkscrew; I carry 18 hairpins; my head aches miserably; my feet are entangled in the skirt of my hateful new gown” (quoted in Green 1983, 10). For most girls, a change in appearance marked their entrance into young womanhood. But the perception that Victorian marriages offered women little else but confinement, dependence, and vulnerability led many adolescent girls to perpetuate their largely unchaperoned courtships spent skating, biking, hiking, dancing, and attending country fairs, carnivals, and traveling circuses.

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Those girls and young women who worked for wages found ways to incorporate leisure into their labors. In the Northeast, mill girls pasted strips of poetry near their looms, read the latest fashion magazines, visited the library, and attended Lyceum lectures. In the plantation South, African American girls forced to care for the infants and children of white masters and slave parents rambled through woods, swam in streams, gathered nuts and berries, played with corncob dolls, played house, played hopscotch, and jumped rope. According to David Wiggins, “ring games” or “ring dances” were the most popular group activity of slave girls, who sang familiar songs with such coded lyrics as: My old mistress promised me, Before she dies she would set me free. Now she’s dead and gone to hell I hope the devil will burn her well. (1985, 177)

Play activities such as these provided girls with a venue to express deeply felt ideas and strong feelings. In the slave quarters, girls’ play activities also included singing secular and religious songs as well as telling stories. Grownups told survival tales such as the well-known “Tar Baby” story in order to impart wisdom to slave girls. This tale, in which the dark girl made of tar has no voice of her own, taught girls to endure physical mistreatment by masking their feelings. From slave children, nurses, and other house slaves, white girls who were largely shielded from work learned songs, folklore, religious principles, ghost stories, and African tales. The southern belle’s typical day consisted of playing with Topsy-Turvy and other dolls, read-

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ing, writing letters, visiting, shopping, fixing hair, gathering flowers, arranging flowerpots, arranging the bedroom, and mending kid gloves. On some days, older girls did nothing at all, but on others, they frolicked with friends and flirted with beaus at parties and balls. Until girls married, however, their leisure activities were typically chaperoned. For girls on the frontier, play activities were often integrated into work responsibilities. While collecting “cow chips” for fuel, girls transformed buffalo dung into weapons. While herding cattle, girls raced on horseback, and while picking berries they played “hide and seek.” With greater freedom from the gender-role prescriptions that shaped girlhood in the North and South, the collections girls assembled often consisted of snakeskins, fossils, and tarantulas. One girl who lived in Oklahoma bagged a dozen snakes for fun in 1872. Another girl recorded in her diary that she spent Thanksgiving Day riding 55 miles in a futile effort to catch coyotes. Frontier girls’ play was less likely to have been monitored, and their toys were less likely to have been manufactured. Until the widespread circulation of Sears Roebuck catalogues (“the farmer’s Bible”) that brought commercial toys to the Midwest, tree branches served as weapons, horses, and brooms, and inflated pigs’ bladders became balls and balloons. Melon rinds on wooden floors worked as well as ice skates on frozen ponds. Fox and geese, red rover, ringaround-a-rosy, ante-I-over, and other games that were transported from other regions and countries bridged gaps and forged cultural bonds between frontier girls of different nationalities, social classes, and races. In the frontier town of Deadwood, South Dakota, Estilline Bennet went sledding with black and Chinese

children. Native American girls in Indian boarding schools, however, were forced to renounce traditional games for Americanized ones befitting their sex. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mass production and distribution gave rise to a consumer culture that made dolls and other toys widely available to daughters of the expanding middle class. But parents who indulged their daughters with imported fashionable lady dolls from France and Germany were disturbed to find that when girls played, they were more likely to stage doll funerals than white weddings. Often girls preferred to play with paper dolls, toy soldiers, or wagons. When someone asked two girls pretending to be a horse and its driver if they would rather play with some dolls, they explained that they would rather run instead (quoted in Formanek-Brunell 1998, 30). Changing clothing fashions around the turn of the century provided greater freedom of movement for girls who loved sledding, jumping rope, playing tag and hide-and-seek, walking fences, roller skating, flying kites, and indulging in other rough-and-tumble play. Youth’s Companion, St. Nicholas, and book-length compendia such as The American Girls Handy Book (1887) provided girls with useful information for making toys, playing games, and exploring nature. Though overworked, underpaid, and often exhausted, working-class girls of immigrant and migrant families pursued their own pleasures in play. Perpetually strapped for cash, however, working-class girls were unlikely to have the latest doll, teddy bear, bicycle, or ice skates they saw displayed in department store windows. Instead of playing with toys, any girl with a nickel could attend an inexpensive neighborhood movie theater with friends

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Girl plays with a doll. (Library of Congress)

and family. Alarmed Progressive reformers and vice commissioners strategized about how to secure girls’ innocence in the “house of dreams.” They joined scholars and playground promoters determined to combat the evils of industrial capitalism. When not doing chores and watching siblings on front stoops, working-class girls played jacks on sidewalks and ball games on city streets. One study conducted in 1906 revealed that balls were the fourth most popular toy among girls by the age of thirteen (Ellis and Hall 1896). Whenever they could, girls also frequented penny arcades where older sisters flaunted authority, respectability, and conventionality as they reinvented

standards of female adolescent virtue. Working-class adolescent girls shopped for colorful clothes they wore to dance halls, vaudeville shows, movie theaters, amusement parks, and other new forms of commercialized leisure. In places like Coney Island, adventurous, stylish, thrillseeking, and pleasure-loving girls indulged in heterosexual experimentation with young working-class men on weekends. By the early twentieth century, a new ideal of girls as energetic, handy, and healthy, promoted by the Girl Pioneers, Camp Fire Girls, and Girl Scouts, replaced the image of the pale and passive, docile and domestic Victorian girl. Between 1900

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and World War I, girls could read about active and adventurous college girls and other heroines in new series fiction. In domestic novels of the period, motherless heroines such as Rebecca in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903) were plucky, young tomboys. The emerging image of modern girlhood was also given substance by toy, doll, and clothing manufacturers in the process of standardizing an American girlhood ideal for a national market. Doll producers replaced the vapid-looking French fashion dolls of the older order with girl dolls that sported bobbed haircuts and wore readyto-wear jumpers. Business-sponsored massmarketing events and product advertising aimed to make consumption (not production) an important part of twentieth-century girls’ play culture. Though the dolls and other playthings American manufacturers promoted would embody domestic and maternal ideals, girls continued to jump rope, play hide-and-seek and tag, ride bikes, and play hopscotch. Although the Girl Scouts championed the “new girl” ideal, they nevertheless opposed the teenage cultural icon of the flapper, who represented the new moral order in the post–World War I period. Adolescent “new girls” who explored the boundaries of acceptable standards of behavior in their play petted in cars, where they enjoyed privacy and freedom from scrutiny. Although small-town black girls and white girls were held to strict moral codes by parents, middleclass girls in the 1920s took to smoking and dancing just as working-class adolescent youth had in the prewar era. That young women wore shorter dresses and bobbed their hair enabled them to move their bodies in ways that the Victorian hourglass ideal had prevented. When not dancing, adolescent girls joined younger

ones at feature-length movies, which became an acceptable form of middleclass family entertainment in the 1920s. Alarm about the threat that “ill-bred young hoydens” posed to the social order, however, led experts to write books and magazine and newspaper articles (quoted in Goodsell 1924, 263). Ladies’ Home Journal was one among many that provided subdebutantes (known as “subdebs”) with advice and information about hosting house parties. School officials did what they could to discourage the sensuality, style, and spending of female adolescents who threatened traditional sensibilities of purity, restraint, and thrift. But in truth, students had already begun to enforce conformity to conventions. The Great Depression imposed financial hardships on families, but girls nevertheless went to the movies along with other Americans. Girls who saw Shirley Temple movies might have yearned for a Shirley Temple doll, which grossed millions of dollars despite curtailed budgets. Depression-era girls also read books such as Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink (1935), in which the youthful heroine triumphs over other challenges in our nation’s past. Girls between the ages of ten and fifteen were drawn to Nancy Drew’s gender-bending heroism and catapulted book sales of the soon-to-be-bestselling children’s series. With fathers abroad and mothers at work, wartime girls had more responsibilities but also less supervision. When not in school, girls watched newsreels, read magazine stories, listened to radio shows, played war games (despite the disapproval of adults and most boys), and devoured the newly created Wonder Woman comic books with origins in turn-of-the-century cartoon strips. Their

Play older sisters, many of whom had left small towns for employment, lodging, and sociability, participated instead in a youthful urban subculture. For excitement, comfort, and escape, “bobby-soxers” explored the growing consumer market of fashions, fads, hairstyles, music, movies, and magazines (e.g., Calling All Girls and Seventeen). Girls’ freedom from economic constraints and parental supervision led many adults at the time to worry about teenage immorality, delinquency, and truancy. Casual heterosexual experimentation increased rates of teen pregnancy as many adolescent girls became “war brides,” soon thereafter giving birth to the “good-bye” babies that ushered in the baby boom. Approximately 38 million girls were born between 1946 and 1964 to warweary parents eager to shelter their daughters in newly developed suburban neighborhoods. At a time when black girls’ play was limited by poverty, discrimination, segregation, and violence, “child-centered” middle-class families nurtured their daughters’ material, emotional, and educational well-being. Stayat-home mothers supervised and scheduled girls they shuttled to and from after-school activities. Unlike previous generations, white girls born after World War II were more likely to play board games and read comic books indoors than play games outdoors. Urban black girls, however, were in the process of making the city sidewalks arenas for double-Dutch jump roping (transformed into a sport by adults to contain them in the 1970s). Television and toys, such as a new generation of dolls and miniaturized modern household equipment, promoted a reconstructed ideology of maternity, domesticity, and fantasy. Teenage girls participated in the growing consumer

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culture in teen goods that catered to the power of the purse. An evolving teen culture fueled by rock and roll, however, had many adults worried about delinquency and dissent. The sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and 1960s youth culture changed how girls of all ages would spend their leisure. Although dolls like Barbie and TV shows like Gidget reflected changing roles for girls and women (albeit ambiguously), the popular movies teenage girls saw on weekends increasingly explored the continuum of adolescent female sexuality by both exalting virgins (e.g., American Graffiti in 1973) and rewarding teenage girls for their sexual exploits (e.g., Where the Boys Are ’84). Slasher films (e.g., Halloween) of the 1970s and 1980s, however, punished girls who threatened to destabilize the social and sexual order. The 1980s discourse about adolescent female sexuality led to a broader spectrum of representations in the books girls read by authors such as Judy Blume, author of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), and Louise Fitzhugh, The Long Secret (1965). Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist and author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994), was among many in the 1990s who argued that the “girl poisoning” culture limited “girls’ development, truncate[d] their wholeness and [left] many of them traumatized” (12). Attempts to counter the consumer culture images and messages about appearance, fashion, romance, and consumption were initiated by underground grrrl zines and cyberspace Internet sites such as Echick and Chickclick. These have been followed by cultural products—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Power Puff Girls, and Discovery Girls, as well as the American Girls

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Play malls or online has become a leisuretime activity for the roughly 37 million ten- to nineteen-year-old girls. Girls spend their allowance and leisure shopping for dolls, toys, accessories, electronics, and computer programs, often coded in hot pink and marketed “just for girls.” But whether it is dressing dolls, watching TV, sitting in front of a computer screen, or listening to compact discs on headphones, girls’ play has become more solitary and fantasy-oriented. The accessorizing and sexualizing of girls of all ages at play have also bridged a gap between little girls and their adolescent sisters. But for most American girls and young women, whether they are studying in extended day programs, participating in after-school activities, doing chores, or working as salesgirls, there is now simply less time to spare for play. Miriam Forman-Brunell

Friends playing on a tire swing. (Skjold Photographs)

series of dolls—all aimed to provide girls with positive images, useful information, emotional support, and opportunities for self-expression. Like the new girlfriendly TV shows, cartoons, magazines, and dolls, advice books written by girl writers and published by companies staffed by all-girl editorial boards utilize feminist notions about empowerment and autonomy to construct a more feminist girlhood. Although in the 1990s The Spice Girls promoted “girl power” among young girls, they also contributed to commercialization of an ideology. There is no doubt that in the twenty-first century, girlhood has become a vast commercial frontier where shopping for goods at

See also African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; American Girls Collection; Asian American Girls; Barbie; Chicana Girls; Dollhouses; Dolls; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture; Latina Girls; Nancy Drew Mysteries; Native American Girls; Pets References and Further Reading Axtell, James. 1981. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press, 34. Beard, Lina, and Adelia B. Beard. 1887. The American Girls Handy Book: How to Amuse Yourself and Others. 1983. Reprint, Boston: David R. Godine. Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Child, Lydia Maria. 1833. The Girls’ Own Book. New York: Clark Austin. Clinton, Catherine. 1982. Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South. New York: Vintage. Cross, Gary. 1997. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American

Play Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ellis, A. C., and G. Stanley Hall. 1896. “Study of Dolls.” Pedagogical Seminary 1, no. 2 (December). Farrar, Eliza Ware. 1837. The Young Lady’s Friend. Boston: American Stationers’ Co. Fass, Paula S. 1975. The Damned and the Beautiful. New York: Oxford University Press. Formanek-Brunell, Miriam. 1998. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gaunt, Kyra D. 1998. “Dancin’ in the Streets to a Black Girl’s Beat: Music, Gender, and the ‘Ins and Outs’ of Double-Dutch.” Pp. 272–292 in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. Edited by Joe Austin and Michael Willard. New York: New York University Press. Goodsell, Willystine. 1923. The Education of Women: Its Social Background and Its Problems. New York: The Macmillan Co. Green, Harvey. 1983. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon, 10. Grover, Kathryn. 1992. Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, chap. 3. MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1984. “The ‘Caddie Woodlawn’ Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century.” Pp. 97–120 in A Century of Childhood, 1820–1920. Edited by Mary Lynn Steven Heininger et al. Rochester, NY: Strong Museum. Mergen, Bernard. 1980. “The Discovery of Children’s Play.” American Quarterly 32 (Fall): 399–420. ———. 1982. Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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———. 1992. “Made, Bought, and Stolen: Toys and the Culture of Childhood.” In Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950. Edited by Elliott West and Paula Petrik. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Norton, Mary Beth. 1980. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 102–103. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working-Class Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pipher, Mary. 1994. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine. Pollock, Linda. 1987. A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 148. Pursell, Carroll W., Jr. 1979. “Toys, Technology, and Sex Roles in America, 1920–1940.” In Dynamos & Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History. Edited by Martha Moore Trescott. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762. Emile. 1974. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. Reprint. Thompson, Roger. 1984. “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts.” Journal of Family History (Summer): 127–144. Vallone, Lynn. 1995. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, chap. 5. West, Elliott. 1989. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, chap. 5. ———. 1996. Growing Up in the Twentieth Century: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Wiggins, David K. 1985. “The Play of Slave Children in Plantation Communities of the Old South, 1820–1860.” In Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective. Edited by N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Pocahontas Pocahontas, the legendary Native American girl, saved the life of Englishman John Smith, who faced execution by her father, a powerful seventeenth-century Algonquian chief. Her legendary staying of his execution, conversion to Christianity, and marriage to an Englishman named John Rolfe enabled successive generations to reinterpret her narrative within the context of changing American ideals. Born in the mid-1590s, Pocahontas was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, who in the 1570s had united diverse bands of Algonquian bands into a loose confederation. During the sixteenth century, Spanish and English traders and explorers traveled to the southeastern region of the North American continent inhabited by the Powhatans. In June 1607, newcomers established Jamestown, named after the English king, and called the land “Virginia” after the virgin queen, Elizabeth I. For the next six months, Pocahontas interacted with the Englishmen. Through a system of trading frequently carried on by females, she learned the language and about English culture. Over the next half-year, however, conflict and tensions increased between the newcomers eager to expand and the indigenous Powhatans. In an effort to protect his tribe from encroachment and seeking retribution for the murder of two Powhatans, Chief Powhatan captured John Smith. According to the English captain’s own published narrative, he was about to be clubbed to death when eleven- or twelve-year-old Pocahontas forcefully intervened. Unable to entreat her father to halt the execution, Smith recalled that she cradled his “head in her arms, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death.” His brave daughter’s devotion moved Powhatan to grant

Pocahontas, a Native American girl, dressed in colonial attire after she married Englishman John Rolfe. (Library of Congress)

Smith clemency, declaring that the prisoner “should live” (Kamensky 1995, 13). For the next six years, Pocahontas served as a translator between the English and Algonquian peoples, who otherwise lived in uneasy proximity. By 1613, however, tensions erupted between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatans. Pocahontas was captured by the Virginians, who held her captive in an attempt to improve their bargaining position with her father. Incarcerated for months, Pocahontas re-created herself as a Christian woman. She “renounced the religious traditions of her birth,” converted to Christianity, and was christened a member of the Church of England, changing her name to Rebecca. Just days after her release in April 1614, she married John Rolfe, an English tobacco planter she had known during her captivity.

Pocahontas In June 1616 she traveled to London for seven months with her husband and son, where she “was presented at the court of Queen Anne and honored at palace balls and affairs of state as Lady Rebecca, a symbol of the promise of the ‘new’ world.” The former Indian princess now impressed all as a proper Christian woman with a strong command of the English language and customs. However, Pocahontas, who became ill with pneumonia or tuberculosis while living in London, died on board the ship bound for home. She was “eulogized by an English preacher, buried in English soil, and entombed under her English name” (Kamensky 1995, 15). Much of what we know about Pocahontas derives from Smith’s own Generall Historie of Virginie (1624). But historians and other scholars in various disciplines have cast doubt upon the veracity of Smith’s published recollection. Was it fact or fiction? Is it possible that Smith misunderstood the nature of the stay of execution that is at the center of the Pocahontas story? Research on Iroquoian women (also Algonquian) reveals that stopping executions was one way in which Native American women exercised their political power. Another method was the right to call for an “adoption.” The Algonquians achieved retribution for a slain family member (and inadvertently added to their population) through an adoption process. It was often women who called for adoptions that led to raids. A recent anthropological interpretation maintains that Smith possibly misunderstood the nature of Pocahontas’s actions, casting it in romantic rather than demographic terms. Her real intention was, perhaps, to adopt Smith into the tribe. The “new” social history of Native American women further reveals that “a

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Pocahontas-like figure [was] at the center of virtually every major encounter between natives and Europeans from the 15th century through the 19th” (Kamensky 1995, 15). Other Native American women elsewhere also served as translators, emissaries, and guides to Euro-American men they occasionally married. However, scholars of Scottish ballads have demonstrated that even before 1300, narrative tales of the oral tradition are remarkably similar to the Pocahontas story. For example, in “Lord Bateman and the Turkish King’s Daughter,” the American version of “Young Beichan,” a man is captured by a ruler and then rescued by his daughter (who converts to Christianity). It would seem, then, that Smith’s story was informed by traditional literary conventions with which Europeans were already familiar. Because Smith’s story drew upon older European traditions, it was easily adapted by the British to express their concerns about colonization and by successive generations as well. The centuries-old icon of the preadolescent Native American girl has reflected concerns and shaped perceptions about a wide variety of issues: race, gender, class, sexuality, liberty, culture, and national identity. Pocahontas has been the subject of paintings, poems, plays, and prints that romanticize our past and contribute to a historical mythology. Whether as exotic and sexual or maternal or virginal, powerful iconographic metaphors of the Native American princess (in contrast to the degraded dark-skinned “squaw”) have been used widely, even to sell products such as tobacco, perfume, cigars, and flour. Just as she reinvented herself in her lifetime, Pocahontas has symbolized nobility, Christianity, Otherness, femininity,

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Disney’s historically inaccurate version of Pocahontas offended many Native Americans. (Kobat Collection)

and most recently, Disney’s view of bourgeois feminism. In this postfeminist animated movie version, Pocahontas is not only physically precocious but is also superhuman. Though she was only about eleven or twelve years of age when she “saved” John Smith, Disney’s Pocahontas is a towering titan with Barbie-doll proportions. Pocahontas also has the same romantic devotion that Barbie has to Ken. To heighten the devotion (and simplify the plot), the animated Pocahontas falls in love with John Smith and not John Rolfe, the Englishman she, in fact, did marry. Typically, the movie tied into a consumer market of Pocahontas clothing, accessories, toys, and books, makes shoppers out of little girls who can imagine themselves as gorgeous, independent, courageous, and deeply romantic. Miriam Forman-Brunell

See also Native American Girls; Puritan Girls References and Further Reading Green, Rayna. 1975. “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture.” The Massachusetts Review 16 (Autumn). Kamensky, Jane. 1995. The Colonial Mosaic: American Women 1600–1760. New York: Oxford University Press, chap. 1. Woodward, Grace Steele. 1969. Pocahontas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Young, Philip. 1962. “The Mother of Us All.” Kenyon Review 24 (Summer): 391–441.

Prom As a little girl, I always fantasized about this famous night where I would resemble Cinderella in my gown. —Female prom attendee

Prom The high school prom is an iconic event in American culture. One need only take a cursory look at the profuse media images that depict the prom to gain a sense of this event’s importance, not only to lives of teens but also to American culture. Many teen prom films are Cinderella-inspired tales of transformation. As the story unfolds, the central female character, usually a wallflower, submits to a series of changes culminating in her emergence as a beauty queen at the prom. In these Hollywood productions, the process of getting ready for the prom is a privileged space where bodies are magically reworked and identities refashioned. Predictably, the popular construction of the prom as a moment to reinvent the self is a gendered one; this story is usually told through the voice of a girl, and the transformation that occurs is mapped through her body. This is because the prom belongs to “the feminine.” Again and again, girls are told that going to the prom is fundamentally important to being and becoming feminine. In prom magazines, “making a statement” is the very promise of the prom—“the prom is your night to shine.” The message is that a carefully fashioned feminine self is the ticket to a memorable prom. This packaging of the prom virtually ensures girls’ participation in the consumption of goods and in feminine bodywork. There is tremendous pleasure in the project of self-change, in becoming someone else, even if for only one night. But even as girls are expected to take up the work of becoming feminine at the prom, they also are confronted with the inherent contradiction in doing this kind of work. The very practices in which girls are expected to invest and to find pleasure are also dismissed as trivial. The basic

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paradox can be summarized in this way: the project of becoming feminine is defined as frivolous, and that which is frivolous is also feminine. This contradiction, articulated by so many girls, reveals an ongoing tension many girls experience as they become women in a consumer culture that at once idealizes and trivializes those practices conventionally tied to femininity. Drawing from interviews with and narratives written by young women and observations of four high school proms, this entry explores how girls struggle to make sense of what it means to be feminine in American culture as girls prepare for and then attend their proms (Best 2000). Despite the tensions some girls felt initially about investing in an event that had been defined as superficial and silly, many young women looked forward to the prom as a moment to be seen. One young African American woman wrote, “When I stepped out of the limo I remember thinking that I was just the princess of the night. All lights were on me and this was my night.” Because of the importance of being seen in this setting, preparations are extensive and often expensive. A significant number of American girls spend what many would consider an extraordinary amount of money on their prom. According to one prom website, an average of $500 is spent to go to the prom (www.proms.net). A 1996 poll featured in Your Prom, one of the many prom magazines available for purchase each spring, reported that $188 is the average cost of a prom dress. These estimates are not surprising when one considers that many young women enlist the help of beauty professionals, even if their financial situation might prevent them from doing so on a more routine basis. One girl reported that she and her

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A couple going to their high school prom. (Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1947)

friends rented a limo to take them to the hair salon, and another girl and her friends hired a cosmetic representative to come to her home before the prom. Certainly, the availability of money determines the ease with which girls are able to engage in the extravagances of the prom, but economic circumstances do not seem to ultimately determine their willingness to do so. Girls whose economic situation might otherwise preclude their participation also manage to engage in the work of the prom. For many girls, the process of preparing for the prom was as important as the end product, if not more. As a young white woman wrote, “I don’t remember any-

thing eventful about the prom itself. I remember the major preparation that went into it. FINDING THE DRESS” (her emphasis). Several girls declared that getting ready for the prom was an entire day’s commitment. Hair was plucked, worked, and cajoled into shape, and faces were magically transformed; many girls attended tanning salons, some joined gyms, and others reported that they had dieted to lose weight before the prom. One young white woman wrote, “All I can remember was that the prom wore me out. From half a day at school, to a morning appointment to get my hair done, I was literally exhausted.” For a number of girls, how they transformed

Prom their bodies directly related to their having a successful prom. “When the day started off I thought it would be the best day. I had the perfect dress (no one had anything else like it) and my hair was done beautifully,” one young African American woman wrote. An important part of getting ready for the prom is finding the “perfect” prom dress. One local dress boutique, where a number of girls from one school bought their prom dresses, kept a detailed record of who bought which dress in an effort to prevent the unthinkable—two girls at the same prom wearing identical dresses. After all, an unforgettable dress secures an unforgettable night. Perhaps this also explains why one young woman never made it to her prom because her dress, which she had specially designed for the event, was not ready. Although preparations for the prom are fundamentally about setting oneself apart, these preparations were a collective process. Talk about how they intended to prepare for the prom began months in advance. Girls drew sketches of their dresses during study hall for friends to admire, and their discussions about who was wearing what echoed through school halls. These conversations often transformed their initial ambivalence about the prom into excitement about the prospects of working on their bodies for the upcoming event. It was not uncommon for family and friends to assemble at one girl’s house as girls dressed for the prom. Even at the prom, girls talked openly about the work they undertook to achieve what some might call an idealized feminine image. Their discussions about their bodies, dresses, and preparations were not only an obvious source of pleasure but were also an integral part of the actual prom,

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as important as the first dance and the crowning of the prom queen. This kind of talk helps girls make sense of what it means to be female in a culture that treats the body as the consummate canvas to express the feminine self. To transform themselves for the prom, girls depend on an almost endless consumption of products; makeup, dresses, hair accessories, shoes, and handbags are all products marketed as tools for feminine display at the prom. Since the expansion of a distinct teen commodity culture during the post–World War II 1940s, the prom in general has been heavily marketed, but it is the particular market emphasis on feminine consumption that is most striking. Today, the prom is a multimillion-dollar industry (www.proms.net). Popular girls’ beauty magazines, including Seventeen and Young and Modern, now dedicate entire monthly editions to preparing for the prom, and department stores host yearly prom fashion shows. Engaging in the work of becoming “beautiful” for the prom represents a struggle to stake a claim to one’s identity. For many girls, participating in beauty work enables them to occupy a position within a public space, a significant fact when considering women’s historical relegation to the private sphere. These young prom-goers occupied hair salons, nail salons, and dress shops in the same way middle-class women in the 1920s, just after winning the right to vote, proudly (and paradoxically) announced their new freedom: they wore shorter skirts, bobbed their hair, and smoked cigarettes in public. Not only are these girls able to demonstrate a public commitment to feminine practices, but they can also express their competence as beauty practitioners. Many young women are willing to endure

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what might be understood as the burdens of beauty for the prom in order to express their heterosexual desirability. But young women also do this work to please themselves (Radner 1989). The prom presents itself as an opportunity to indulge themselves in ways that many of them cannot do every day. Part of what made the bodywork of the prom worth doing, then, stems directly from how they experience everyday life as young women. Teenage girls are often denied control over their bodies, their desires, and their self-definition. Engaging in this elaborate consumption-oriented bodywork enables them to craft a space of self-control, selfdefinition, and self-pleasure that is experienced immediately. Of course, the consequence is that the pleasure of excess conceals the ideological workings of the prom; proms structure girls’ investments in upholding gender and heterosexual norms, ensure their participation in commodity culture, and focus their attention toward the all-consuming project of the body. The prom is a space where young women can play with a range of identities, many of which are closed off to them within what Nancy Lesko (1988) refers to as the “body curriculum” of schools, which operates to regulate girls’ sexuality and desire. Without romanticizing the practices of dressing up, one could argue that the prom represents a safe, playful space for many girls to negotiate cultural representations of adolescent girls’ sexuality. Girls repeatedly drew upon sexual codes as they discussed the dress they had selected for the prom. A Latina wrote: “I’m such a tomboy. The prom was an experience. Everyone kept commenting on how beautiful I looked, ‘You have a great figure; you shouldn’t hide behind jeans and a T-shirt.’ My

friends barely recognized me. People who’ve known me all my life stared at me.” Most girls wore long fitted dresses, many of them black, often with exposed backs and deep slits running up one leg. As one girl described her dress, what seemed most important was what it revealed: “It’s got spaghetti straps and a scoop neck. It’s got a slit up the midthigh and the back is completely open. It kind of comes in at the sides so your sides are showing.” When understood within the context of schooling that emphasizes modesty in dress for girls, a sexy and often revealing prom dress symbolizes a way to negotiate the sexual terrain of school. Girls have very few spaces in which they can claim sexual agency. Through what they wore, many girls seemed to claim a visible sexual identity that countered a racially based, middle-class image of the adolescent girl as the bearer of sexual innocence (Haug et al. 1987). Although the activity of dressing up binds girls to an unequal order of gender, they can nevertheless generate alternate meanings that enable them to exert some control over those sexual struggles that shape their everyday lives. Can girls resist the prom as a space to solidify their feminine identities without rejecting the prom fully? The discourses on beauty, pleasure, and consumption that take shape around this event secure girls’ investment in femininity, but girls also negotiate and at times refuse their total influence. For example, some girls wear tuxedos, instead of the expected prom dress. Wearing a tuxedo to an event that is profoundly tied to conventional femininity reveals nothing less than a struggle to distance themselves, if not physically, then symbolically, from the trappings of the feminine ideal. For other

Prom girls, resistance to these feminine conventions, if it could be called that, often arises because of budgetary constraints. Many girls simply do not have the money to buy expensive dresses; others think it too indulgent to spend considerable money on one night, unless they found that “perfect prom dress.” Rejecting the pressures to invent themselves anew, some girls bought their dresses at secondhand consignment shops or simply wore a dress they already had. Several girls had their dresses made by their mother or a friend. In short, they refuse the snare of the consumer market, but making their own dresses also set them apart from other girls by virtually guaranteeing that their dresses would be originals. These girls did not reject the project of inscribing images of femininity on their bodies; they welcomed this project but challenged its direct connection to a commodity market. Interestingly, many girls indicated that they were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to transform themselves for the prom. A number reported that they do not usually wear makeup and only periodically visit the hair salon. If young women invest in feminine bodywork for the prom but not necessarily daily, what, then, is the connection between gender and this cultural scene? Proms secure girls’ complicity in maintaining prevailing feminine forms. As a result, resistance seems to be possible for only a few. The limits of resistance to these gender precepts seem to be determined by the very social organization of this space— proms are the domain of the feminine, where girls’ desire to make a statement about themselves is especially pronounced. Perhaps this also explains why race and class seemed to exert little influence over how girls came to invest in the

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prom. Although one might expect meaningful race and class distinctions to be more prevalent, curiously, it was not the case. The cultural influence of gender appears to be so overwhelming that the differences across race and class lines, which are apparent elsewhere, are more or less subsumed. What girls wore to their prom and the activities they participated in tied them in many ways to gender structures that concentrate their energies on their bodies. At the same time, the prom emerges as a space for girls to respond to how their schools and culture have defined adolescent femininity, and thus them. Understanding what girls are responding to is important for understanding why they invest in these activities, the pleasure they derive from them, and the meanings they attach to them. Ironically, the very practices that seem to solidify their place in the culture also become a means for them to respond to that culture. As girls make sense of becoming women in a society where gender continues to operate as a pervasive force, they negotiate a slippery slope. These girls must find meaning in a cultural context that all too often limits the possibility for meaningful self-representation for them as girls. Amy L. Best See also Body Image; Clothing; Dances and Dancing References and Further Reading Best, Amy L. 2000. Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Brown, Lyn Mikel. 1999. Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Random House.

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Fine, Michelle. 1993. “Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire.” In Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race and Gender in United States Schools. Edited by Michelle Fine and Lois Weis. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Haug, Frigga, et al. 1987. Feminine Sexualisation: A Collective Work of Memory. London: Verso. Inness, Sherrie A. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Leadbetter, Bonnie, and Niobe Way, eds. 1996. Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities. New York: New York University Press. Lesko, Nancy. 1988. “The Curriculum of the Body: Lessons from a Catholic High School.” In Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture. Edited by Leslie G. Roman and Linda ChristianSmith. London: Falmer Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Radner, Hillary. 1989. “‘This Time’s for Me’: Making Up and Feminine Practice.” Cultural Studies 3: 301–321. Roman, Leslie G., and Linda ChristianSmith, eds. 1988. Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture. London: Falmer Press. Tolman, Deborah L. 1994. “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls’ Struggle for/with Sexuality.” Gender and Society 8, no. 3: 324–342. Walkerdine, Valerie. 1990. Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso. www.proms.net (accessed March 1999).

Psychotherapy Troubled and troublesome girls have always gone to the adults in their communities for help. Teachers, midwives, religious leaders, older sisters, babysitters, and aunts have provided comfort, counsel, and limits when a girl’s parents could not do so. Beginning in the mid-1800s,

this kind of help became the domain of medical specialists, and with the development of psychoanalysis at the end of the century, the practice of child psychotherapy began. Throughout the twentieth century, the field of psychotherapy was influenced by developments in child analysis and other theories of personality and technique and by social movements such as the American child guidance movement. Currently, girls receive psychotherapy from licensed practitioners in a number of fields. New ideas from therapists interested in family relationships, trauma and abuse, and feminist theory shape the therapies girls undertake today. Psychoanalysis is a theory of personality development and psychotherapeutic technique created by Sigmund Freud in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Freud’s work with women and girls played a crucial role in the early ideas and methods he developed. Like that of many nineteenth-century physicians, Freud’s career as a neurologist soon took him to the study of hysterical illnesses. Girls and women of this period often developed dramatic psychosomatic symptoms such as paralysis, coughing or stomach pain, inability to speak, amnesia, or anorexia, and these problems were increasingly understood as a manifestation of emotional conflicts rather than of neurological damage. Freud studied hysteria with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose large sanitarium, Salpêtrière, housed hundreds of girls whose behavior or social problems led to their separation from their families. Charcot believed that their hysterical symptoms stemmed from suppressed sexuality. Freud recalled this notion when his friend and teacher Joseph Breuer shared with him a story about a remarkable patient, Bertha Pappenheim. Bertha was twenty years old when she began seeing Breuer for severe symptoms

Psychotherapy of hysteria. She had first begun to cough while nursing her dying father and over a period of months developed paralyses, anesthesias (where parts of her body became numb), hallucinations, and dissociative states. After her father’s death, she had difficulty seeing and recognizing people, speaking in her native language, and keeping track of time. Breuer met with her daily, and together they developed what she called her “chimney sweeping” technique. She talked and talked, telling him stories and fantasies and tracing her symptoms back to the traumatic events in which they originated. Although Breuer’s treatment with Bertha ended painfully in her delusion that she was pregnant with his child, and although she required several subsequent periods of treatment in sanatoriums, Bertha Pappenheim went on to become a pioneer in social welfare. She provided homes for teenage mothers and their children, saved young Jewish women from sexual slave traders, and wrote and spoke about international efforts to improve the lives of disadvantaged girls. Freud learned much from her story, which Breuer published using the pseudonym Anna O. Freud too began to treat teenage girls, and Bertha’s “chimney sweeping” developed into the method of free association. Among his first patients was “Katharina,” a young girl he met during a mountain vacation whose depression followed sexual molestation by her uncle, and “Elisabeth von R,” whose chronic leg pain and difficulty walking were traced to painful losses and disappointments in love. Both girls found relief in his understanding of the unconscious meanings of their symptoms. His work with eighteen-year-old “Dora” was more difficult. She shared with him a complex history involving

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her awareness that her father was condoning his friend’s making propositions to her in order to facilitate his own affair with the friend’s wife. When Freud responded to this story by turning his attention to her own sexual knowledge and urges, Dora left treatment abruptly. Freud learned a great deal from this, both about the role of transference in psychoanalysis and about Dora’s love for the women in her life, especially for her father’s lover. Another adolescent patient who became suicidal when her father prohibited her romantic relationship with an older woman taught him more about female homosexuality. Freud’s work with these young patients was heavily influenced by his early theories of sexuality. By the early 1920s, his theory and technique had developed further. He became more aware of the importance of relational and developmental factors in normal and troubled personalities and came to place more emphasis on the analysis of the ways in which people protect themselves from anxiety and pain than on a search for hidden sexual memories. During the years Freud was studying ego psychology, defenses, and anxiety, his daughter Anna undertook her own training in psychoanalysis, and she played a pivotal role in extending his therapeutic work to children. The first child analyst was Hermine Hug-Hellmuth. Shortly after she began using play to work with young children, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein extended the field of psychoanalysis by applying it to their own work with troubled girls. Throughout their adult lives, these women were rivals, each claiming to be more true to the essence of Freud’s work. Klein emphasized Freud’s theory of sexuality and his work in the late 1910s on

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the death instinct. She worked with very young, very ill children, a number of whom had what would now be seen as pervasive developmental disorders. She interpreted their early fears about working with her as stemming from very primitive anxieties and used play and drawings to explore these girls’ fantasies about their own and their parents’ bodies. Aspects of her work were carried on by Donald Winnicott. In his case history The Piggle (1977), he described how a little girl responded to the birth of a younger sister by withdrawing into frightening fantasies. In contrast, Anna Freud, who had originally been trained as a teacher, emphasized the adaptive defenses girls used during different stages of development. She introduced therapy to them by teaching them something about how the mind works. She helped them become aware of and curious about their conflicts, proposing that the girl join with the analyst to understand the feelings behind her problems. Anna Freud worked with well-to-do youngsters in Vienna but also helped establish clinics and preschools for poor children. After the Freuds moved from Vienna to London to escape the Holocaust, she set up the Hamstead Nurseries, in which girls fleeing the bombings in London and refugees from the Holocaust were cared for and treated. In the 1940s and 1950s, students of Anna Freud began to work in the United States and made important contributions to the practice of child analysis. Bertha Bornstein and Edith Buxbaum continued Freud’s work on the importance of exploring girls’ feelings and the ways they protect themselves from anxieties. They explored problems corresponding to the early development of the conscience and threats to girls’ self-esteem. They studied

girls’ development at different stages and developed therapeutic techniques appropriate to different ages. In the 1960s and 1970s, their work was carried on by Selma Fraiberg, who wrote compelling case histories about her work with young girls with fears, psychosomatic problems, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She developed modifications of classical psychoanalytic techniques especially for children (such as the “what pops into your mind game” to approximate free association), wrote about how to begin a therapy process with young adolescents, and did sensitive work on the effects of family trauma, which she referred to as “the ghosts in the nursery.” Although child analysis in the United States was developed primarily by the students of Anna Freud, play therapy was developed by followers of analysts or therapists with different orientations. The neo-Freudians (Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan) influenced a generation of child therapists who were more active and direct than classical analysts, who focused less on conscious material, and who emphasized girls’ family and peer relationships. A compelling fictionalized portrayal of a psychotherapy process with Frieda Fromm-Reichman, an early relational therapist, is offered in the popular autobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Followers of Otto Rank, who based his psychoanalytic ideas on the concept of birth trauma, stressed conflicts involving separation and individuation. Therapists like Jessie Taft and Frederick Allen frequently worked with shy or inhibited girls and used play therapy to help them work through significant losses. These therapists emphasized the importance of working through interruptions and terminations in therapy for

Psychotherapy helping girls master separation anxieties. Carl Rogers’s nondirective psychotherapy was applied to work with girls by Virginia Axline. She used a warm, accepting relationship to encourage girls’ own strivings for growth and development. Child therapists who worked from the 1930s through the 1950s struggled with the question of how to manage freedom and limits in the therapy setting. Earlier therapists such as David M. Levy and Joseph C. Solomon tended to give girls free rein to express their impulses and emotions. They saw this as a way to help girls abreact traumatic experiences or to express repressed impulses. They might structure the play situation by selecting toys or play themes to allow girls to work on selected issues. By the late 1940s and through the 1950s, the importance of limit setting in therapy was recognized by such therapists as Roy H. Bixler and Haim Ginnott. Setting appropriate limits was seen as a means of helping girls feel safe, trust adults, and learn to manage impulsive acting out. Therapists did not allow children to hurt themselves, the therapist, or things in the office; did not extend the time limits of the therapy session; and did not allow children to remove toys from the playroom. The child guidance movement helped make psychotherapy available in community centers to children whose families might not have been able to afford it on their own. From the 1960s through the present, specific play techniques have been developed to help girls work on particular issues. Anatomically correct dolls are often used to help young girls express memories and feelings about sexual abuse. Structured games and storybooks help girls verbalize and explore feelings, learn assertiveness skills, and work through issues caused by bereavement, divorce,

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abuse, court appearances, and body image. Cognitive behavioral techniques have been applied with children to treat depression, and other behavioral techniques are used to treat phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and behavior disorders. Contemporary therapy with girls has been influenced by the findings of feminist psychologists. Following Carol Gilligan’s work on girls’ patterns of learning, moral development, and relationships, feminist therapists have explored girls’ tendencies to sacrifice their autonomy and “voice” for the important motive of preserving relationships and minimizing interpersonal conflict. Feminist therapists work with patients’ “resistance” to change by examining their ties to family members and friends; exploring their positive and negative identifications with their mothers and other women; and encouraging their ability to articulate their thoughts, feelings, and conflicts. Feminist therapists are sensitive to the importance of class, ethnic, and religious identity in girls’ development and explore sexual orientation and gender issues in terms of the difficulties girls with these issues encounter in society and in their families rather than as solely internal problems. Contemporary feminist therapists are also sensitive to the impact of social pressures on girls’ development. A rising divorce rate; the pressure of two-career families; community violence and media depictions of violence; uninhibited sexuality; sadomasochism; and the encouragement of intense competition around beauty, money, status, and academic or career success can create such intense distress for girls that they develop problems ranging from perfectionism and poor self-esteem to eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, self-mutilation, drug

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abuse, and profound depression. Treatment involves making girls and their families more aware of the ways that these external forces have become intertwined with personal issues and strengthening family ties, intergenerational mentoring, and supportive friendships. Whatever a therapist’s theoretical orientation or technique, the therapy process takes on a life of its own. If the therapist is attentive and receptive, the girl patient will feel safe enough to play or talk about her life. Soon a mutual language and set of references develop. Therapist and patient become familiar with each other’s temperament and style, and with growing spontaneity and mutuality they can recognize and create new ways of understanding the girl’s experience. The therapist will notice and comment on patterns in the girl’s play or talk and will address her resistance to their work. Gradually, the therapy relationship itself becomes the focus of the work. The girl patient may experience with the therapist feelings and conflicts that have been troubling in previous relationships. The therapist’s ability to notice and reflect on this, instead of reacting in ways that might feel insensitive, punitive, or seductive, allows the girl to take a new perspective herself on her ways of being with others. Sometimes she will be sad or angry as she recalls and reexperiences past disappointments, but this necessary mourning will allow her to move on to more satisfying relationships in the future. Her progress is facilitated by the therapist’s willingness to acknowledge mistakes or lapses in empathy without becoming defensive or losing perspective. This honesty allows the girl to be more comfortable with her own imperfection, to see adults as both fallible and responsible, and to identify with the therapist’s capacity to reflect on the relationship.

The therapy process must take into account a girl’s developmental stage; value her family and community relationships; and support her developing competence, autonomy, and relatedness. The therapist must be aware of the ethical issues involved in psychotherapy and must respect the patient’s right to appropriate confidentiality, personal boundaries, and safety from dangerous behavior of her own or of other people. The therapist must work carefully with her family and be responsible in matters of payment. Therapy will move toward a termination when the girl’s symptoms have been resolved and she has been able to resume her progressive development. During the termination process, important themes will be revisited, and problems may temporarily intensify. New skills and ideas will be appreciated, and the patient may leave therapy feeling a poignant mix of sadness and pride, doubt and confidence. Many girls today think about becoming psychotherapists. They might have been in therapy themselves or have friends or family members who have been. They may have read about therapy or seen depictions of it on television or in films. Often, they are aware of their own unaddressed problems, take pleasure in thinking about their inner lives, or sympathize with other people’s suffering. The best preparation for becoming a therapist is a broad educational and cultural background. Although taking psychology courses is important, so are reading fiction and poetry; cultivating exposure to art, music, and drama; and learning about history and the social sciences. As the interaction between emotional and physiological problems is increasingly understood, gaining an education in the life sciences becomes more and more important to the therapist’s

Punk Rock effectiveness. Knowing how to play and to express feelings and thoughts clearly is crucial. A young woman can take a number of professional routes to a career in psychotherapy, and the profession she chooses may depend on her interests and on what kind of training is possible and available. Psychiatrists, psychologists (clinical, counseling, or educational), and social workers provide most psychotherapy in the United States, but increasingly, nurses, pastoral counselors, and marriage and family counselors also offer psychotherapy. Professional therapists must be licensed by the state in which they practice, which requires a degree from an accredited university or professional school, a specified period of supervised practice, and passing written or oral examinations or both. Periodic relicensure ensures that therapists behave ethically and keep up with current knowledge. Sharon H. Nathan See also Adolescent Health; Body Image; Child Abuse; Child Guidance; Daughters and Fathers; Daughters and Mothers; Depression and Girls; Eating Disorders; Female Sexuality; Lesbians; Relational Theory; Substance Abuse; Suicidal Behavior in Girls References and Further Reading Axline, Virginia. 1947. Play Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Breuer, Joseph, and Sigmund Freud. 1895. “Studies in Hysteria.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Coppolillo, Henry P. 1987. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Children. Madison: International Universities Press. Fraiberg, Selma. 1987. Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Freud, Anna. 1946. The Psychoanalytical Treatment of Children. London: Imago Publishing.

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Gil, Eliana. 1991. The Healing Power of Play: Working with Abused Children. New York: Guilford Press. ———. 1996. Treating Abused Adolescents. New York: Guilford Press. Gilligan, Carol, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Tolman. 1991. Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance. New York: Haworth Press. Green, Hannah. 1964. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Klein, Melanie. 1932. The Psychoanalysis of Children. London: Hogarth Press. O’Conner, Kevin John. 1991. The Play Therapy Primer: An Integration of Theories and Techniques. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Schaefer, Charles, ed. 1976. The Therapeutic Use of Child’s Play. New York: Jason Aronson. Winnicott, D. W. 1977. The Piggle. New York: International Universities Press.

Punk Rock Because of the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to music making and the theoretically tolerant ethics in the punk rock community, the emergence of the punk subculture in the late 1970s marked the first time in popular music that a large number of girls were involved as instrumentalists and that many all-girl bands were formed. In the mid-1970s, punk rock developed in the United Kingdom and the United States. The ethics and aesthetics of punk were specifically targeted at rewriting the history of music in order to critique social injustice and the perceived banality of 1970s mainstream music. Girls’ involvement in punk rock was crucial to expanding their limited role in popular music. As a community of youth focused on politics, independent production, and the deconstruction of social roles, punk allowed young (mostly) white women to spurn the gender codes that restricted

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women’s social interaction and music making. The freedom girls claimed in punk opened a space for the female instrumentalists, feminist performances, and girl-positive fan communities that have occupied the arena of popular music ever since. The ethics of punk were the catalyst for the creation of a new generation of female musicians, a generation in which girls’ voices can be heard loud and clear. Through the work of the women of 1970s punk, the voices of the 1980s female pop sensations who learned their tactics in punk, and the explicitly feminist riot grrrl movement in the 1990s, girls have selfconsciously rebelled against the historical position of women in music, making way for female musicians with sophisticated political messages, large audiences, and a canon of female rock role models. Opening new spaces for women in popular music required this kind of critical voice from female musicians who were traditionally limited to “appropriately feminine” roles in music making. The deconstructionist project of women claiming a place in punk rock engendered a riot against the structure of the recording industry and musical traditions, as well as women’s subordinate position in this tradition. Questioning the expected activities of women in popular music and the generically restrictive framework of the recording industry opened the door for women to trade in their eyeliners and hairspray for electric guitars and the authorial pen. Historically, women in popular music have been singers. The connection of the voice to the body falls in line with women’s “biologically determined” social roles and the pressure for these singers to conform to white standards of beauty and sexual attractiveness. Because of the connection of singing with the

body, vocalists were not seen as skilled musicians. Mavis Bayton notes that “even [jazz singer] Billie Holiday’s singing was discussed in terms of an emotional response to her life history of personal suffering, rather than in terms of learnt craft” (Bayton 1998, 13). Vocalists in the big band era were paid less than instrumentalists and were often used only to give the “real musicians” a rest or as sequin-clad eye candy for audiences. This image of the woman in music carried through to the birth of rock and roll. A few female figures, like influential country guitarist Maybelle Carter and the racially integrated all-girl big band International Sweethearts of Rhythm, were able to make significant instrumental contributions to popular music. But these women, with the exception of the celebrity singers, have been all but written out of the history of popular music. Rock and roll, which emerged in the mid-1950s, further restricted roles for women. At the time some women were very important in popular music: for example, rhythm and blues (R&B) singer Ruth Brown’s popularity single-handedly carried the Atlantic label in the early 1950s. Until the early 1960s, there were no female voices in rock. In the late 1940s, as many as one-third of top-selling pop singles were by female vocalists; in 1957, only two of the top twenty-five were by women. Neither of these were rock and roll musicians. In the early 1960s, a new phenomenon called the “girl group” became important. In December 1960, the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” became the number one hit on the pop charts. This was the first time a girl group, notably one composed of four black teenagers, had hit number one. From 1960 to 1966 many of these girl groups,

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The Ronettes, precursors to punk rock bands of the 1980s. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos, 1964)

which descended from R&B, charted dozens of hits. Their music, characterized by thick vocal harmonies and orchestration, focused on girl talk— boyfriends, friendships, and teen angst. Despite—or perhaps because of—the popularity of the girl-oriented messages in the girl groups’ music, they have also been dismissed from the canon as cookie-

cutter groups created by genius male producers. At the time, the focus was on the producers’ talent and the girls’ bodies. In 1968, a Rolling Stone magazine article described the Ronettes as “tough whorish females of the lower class, female Hell’s Angels who had about them the aura of brazen sex. The Ronettes were Negro Puerto Rican hooker types with

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long black hair and skin tight dresses revealing their well shaped but not quite Tina Turner behinds. . . . Ronettes records should have been sold under the counter along with girly magazines and condoms” (quoted in Garofalo 1997, 190). As the girl groups died out in the mid1960s, attitudes like these about women became common in rock music itself. The rise of the rock supergroups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones refocused attention on male musicians and instrumental virtuosity in popular music. The girls’ place was in the audience, chasing and dreaming of male performers. In 1963, at the height of the girl groups’ popularity, female artists recorded 32 percent of the records on the year-end singles chart. By 1969, only 6 percent of the yearend singles were by groups with female vocalists. Despite the moderate success of women in folk and the strong pro-woman statements of some female soul artists (like Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT”), the mainstream of rock was often extremely offensive toward women. Songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” created a culture of hypermasculinity as the standard in rock. As a result, the few women, like Janis Joplin and Grace Slick, who were able to break into this boys’ club necessarily developed wild, masculine personas, conforming to the norm for men in rock. As in the prerock period, there were female artists like Goldie and the Gingerbreads and Fanny, two of the first all-girl rock bands, but the existence of these musicians has not been institutionalized in the rock canon or the history of popular music. The fragmentation of popular music in the 1970s into many genres and subgenres, which were divided along more than just racial lines, created more opportunities for women in music. Folk and soft

rock had many female voices, and out of the folk movement a specifically feminist genre called “womyn’s music” developed. Folk musicians like Cris Williamson and Holly Near recorded feminist albums on woman-oriented independent record labels. Even though these musicians were still mostly associated with the role of singer, womyn’s music successfully created new opportunities and a new market for women’s music at a time when the sexist music industry presented few female role models. However, the niche market nature of the separatist womyn’s music scene focused on women already involved in the feminist movement who were mostly middle-aged, educated, and white. Young women were still the focus of mainstream bubblegum groups like the Osmonds and the Partridge Family. A change in girls’ roles in popular music would come from neither the mainstream structure that limited girls to the feminine roles of singers, sex objects, and fans nor the feminist womyn’s music movement that paid little attention to young women and concentrated on a folk style that lacked mass appeal. Instead, the emergence of punk rock in the United States and United Kingdom broke open the music world for women. Punk music’s genealogy includes strains of early 1970s art rock, Britain’s androgynous glam/glitter rock, and U.S. garage/ surf bands. The convergence of these rock influences created a community that criticized social injustice, restrictive social roles, and the mainstream music industry with a particular focus on cultural satire. The term punk describes the subculture of youth that created and consumed the music that resonated from these American and British roots as well as a genre of music—punk rock—and the

Punk Rock style of dress associated with the subculture. It was contradictions that were most important to the creation of a punk community, and for this reason, it is almost impossible to universalize and extremely difficult to define. Punk ideals questioned prejudice, social injustice, and vicious circles of inequality. Punk tactics attacked the assumed naturalness of the structures and attitudes that perpetuate voicelessness, oppression, and institutionalized lack of opportunity, or “no future.” In punk, every aspect of the community—music, clothing, politics, lifestyle—is inseparable from the others. Each is designed to intensify the ideological basis for the movement. Penelope Houston of the Los Angeles punk band The Avengers explained, “The original concept of the band was the musical concept. The music is still important, but it’s like the music is a Tool. Rock & roll is easy to play. Anybody can learn to play, so you have to take it farther” (Vale 1996, 40). Greil Marcus goes further: “What remains irreducible about this music is its desire to change the world” (Marcus 1989, 5). The punk ethics system stood in opposition to the politics perceived in adult culture by the mostly white, workingclass teenagers involved in making punk music and style. Tolerance and openness were the crux of punk ideology. Although not practiced universally, the idea that punk was open to everyone was central to the rhetoric of punk rock, politics, and identity. Antiracism was also a central plank in the punk platform. A theme of lyrics, writing, and images, antiracism was addressed in music and in political activism. The creation of the Rock Against Racism (RAR) program, a series of concerts that featured high-profile punk bands paired with Jamaican reggae groups

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with an explicitly political agenda, reacted against the racial tension in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and laid down the punk community’s stance on the issue. Punk also criticized sexism on an ideological level through political songs on abortion, women’s oppression, compulsory heterosexuality, and other gender issues. Soon after the creation of RAR, a Rock Against Sexism (RAS) concert series was created to critique women’s roles in society and music, sexual assault, and mainstream attitudes about sexuality. These ideals were backed up through the tactics punks used to fight the “politics of boredom.” By challenging the everyday, punks attacked boredom as a form of social control. According to punk “theory,” boredom prevented massive uprisings among disgruntled and oppressed peoples by creating and enforcing a consensus around the mundane and expected. For punks, rebellion against boredom, no future, and unquestioned assumptions was essential to reinvigorating the ailing British state and the pathetic American culture. Rather than focusing on traditional political avenues, punks politicized and organized the disempowered, the young people who looked forward to no future. Punk youths turned every aspect of their lives— music, appearance, and behavior—into political fighting words. By wearing garbage bags as shirts, tearing apart clothing and putting it back together with safety pins, inscribing radical style on the body through tattoos and piercings, and idealizing extreme hairstyles that could not be covered or just put on for the weekend, punks strove to create category confusion. Class lines blurred when “appropriate” styles were discarded. Chronology and meaning became jumbled when vintage clothing

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Two punk girls. (Michael T. Sedam/Corbis)

was renovated and consumer products were used as sartorial accessories. There was a coherence between punk dress and the punk style of music making—it was all DIY. Flying in the face of the rock culture that required virtuoso skill in playing instruments, punk youth denied that technical ability on guitar or drums was necessary to make good rock music. The DIY ethic encouraged punks with no musical experience to start their own bands. Punk rock became a space where anyone could begin to play guitar, write songs, and perform in public. Anyone could learn along the way. For the first time in popular music, musical incompetence was aesthetically and politically valuable to further the deconstruction of mainstream ideas of “good”

and “valuable” music. Being a musician was no longer a goal but a means. Because of the tolerant, antisexist ideals of punk and the DIY ethic, girls became an early and important part of the punk scene. From the mid-1970s, artists like Patti Smith rewrote the trope of the female singer to include the role of the poet, activist, and critic. For the first time, women were able to learn to play electric guitar, bass, and drums because already knowing how to play was not required for them to enter the music scene. The open interrogation of femininity and gender roles among female and male punk musicians facilitated this—the electric guitar was divorced from its presumed masculine connotations. Punk also deconstructed the mas-

Punk Rock culine meaning of the band and public performance, allowing girls to form bands and play in public spaces, de-gendering the space of the stage and the position of musical authorship. By refusing the history of popular music and the baggage of traditional gender roles, punk addressed girls’ needs where mainstream popular music, the feminist movement, and womyn’s music had failed. The importance of punk to girls in popular music and girls consuming popular music is enormous. Punk created the first canon that was inclusive of female artists—some of the most famous bands, like the Slits, X-Ray Spex, Blondie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, were femaledriven. In addition, the beginnings of a specifically female canon of popular musicians emerged. Punk artists like Joan Jett rediscovered forgotten female musicians, often covering their songs and publicizing their names through the network of punk fanzines. The most significant legacy of punk for girls is what punk has added to this female canon. Not only are 1970s punk bands like Penetration and the Avengers a part of this influence, but so are all the female musicians that were jumpstarted into popular music by punk and the DIY philosophy. Punk allowed women to learn to play and write music, and in the 1980s, the promise of a large audience and professional status led many of these punk women to the pop mainstream. Female artists who learned to be musicians in the punk culture thrived in the 1980s mainstream. The latent punk ethic these women carried into the top forty brought feminism, strong female role models, and DIY musical tactics to the large audience of young white girls targeted by the pop industry. In 1981, the Go-Go’s, members of the Los Angeles

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Cyndi Lauper, a punk idol in the 1980s, in concert. (Corbis, 1984)

punk scene since 1977, became the first all-girl band in history to hit number one on the pop charts. Throughout the decade, strong female figures like Cyndi Lauper, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, and Madonna changed the face of popular music by bringing glimpses of feminism to mainstream audiences. Having grown up with the strong yet unapologetically female voices and images of musicians like the Go-Go’s and Cyndi Lauper, in the 1990s a group of punk girls were able to reinscribe female voices and feminism into punk, refiguring it as a platform for feminist political, musical, and social change. “Riot grrrls,” a movement centered around feminism

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and punk rock, was formed in 1991 to criticize and create an alternative to both punk culture, which had become extremely male-dominated and violent during the 1980s, and mainstream pop culture, which by that time was focusing on violence, male angst, and women’s bodies as marketing tools. DIY tactics and teamwork characterized the strategies these girls used to accomplish their goals: to create a feminist-punk community, to make girl-positive punk rock music, to politicize the position and the lives of girls, and to change the world. Not only were these bands (for example, Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, and Bratmobile) influential among punk girls, but their influence was also felt when explicitly feminist, pop-oriented artists like Alanis Morrissette, No Doubt, and The Spice Girls co-opted riot grrrl attitudes into the mainstream. Rebecca Daugherty See also Body Image; Girl Power; Hair; Zines References and Further Reading Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Gaar, Gillian. 1992. She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll. Seattle: Seal Press. Garofalo, Reebee. 1997. Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. 1994. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Independent Rock.” Pp. 250–274 in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. Edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge. Juno, Andrea. 1996. Angry Women in Rock. Vol. 1. New York: Juno Books.

LeBlanc, Lauraine. 1999. Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New York: Routledge. Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: The Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Brien, Lucy. 1999. “The Woman Punk Made Me.” Pp. 186–198 in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. New York: Routledge. O’Hara, Craig. 1999. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise! San Francisco: AK Press. Vale, V., ed. 1996. Search and Destroy #1–6, The Complete Reprint. San Francisco: V/Search Publications.

Puritan Girls Puritans girls were the daughters of religious dissenters from the Church of England who established the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early seventeenth century. Puritan girls’ lives were shaped by Old Testament notions, English traditions, and New World experiences. In seventeenth-century New England, a Puritan girl was born at home within a circle of women. Her birth was the culmination of a female social ritual attended by female family and friends and facilitated by a midwife. The mother-to-be ate “groaning cake” and drank “groaning beer” to facilitate labor. Her daughter was raised in a large nuclear family with many siblings (from six to eight). Healthy living conditions, early marriage, and no birth control were all factors that contributed to the large size of Puritan families. In rural New England where the vast majority lived, nine out of ten infants were likely to survive to at least age five. In bustling seaport towns like Salem or Boston, however, infant mortality rates were high; three out of ten infants were unlikely to survive their first year of life.

Puritan Girls Puritan infants swaddled in strips of linen and laced with staybands were held to adult standards. By the age of two, Puritan girls (and boys) were likely to face the arrival of another sibling and a very sudden weaning. Thereafter, it was up to the father, the central authority within the patriarchal Puritan household, to break the child’s will. Stern fathers inflicted physical and psychological punishments on their young children who exhibited signs of original sin or “infant depravity.” The task was to overcome self-assertion and aggression and become pious and submissive like their devout elders. Between the ages of six and eight, Puritan children abandoned their gender-neutral frocks, or “petticoats.” Instead they donned clothing that resembled adults’, a sartorial marker of a new relationship to the economy and society. Because the Puritan family was the main unit of production, each member of the family was expected to be economically useful. Sons followed their fathers from fields to pastures and from barns to workshops, where they built and maintained fences, forged tools and repaired utensils, tended livestock, hoed, plowed, planted, weeded, and harvested. Daughters shared another domain with their mothers and other female kin. They did the “indoor work,” assisting mothers in an unceasing routine of daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual chores: hoeing gardens; tending orchards; caring for animals; making soap, candles, and cloth; churning butter; baking bread; salting meats; stoking the fires; and milking the cows. Three times a day daughters assisted their mothers with meals. Since wives milked the cows early each morning, the first meal of the day consisted of leftovers: toasted bread, cheese,

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An idealized Puritan family scene depicted in a nineteenth-century print. (Library of Congress)

meat, turnips, cider or beer in the winter, and milk in the summer. “Dinner,” which was the main meal of the day, was a one-dish “pottage” prepared in cavernous hearths. “Supper” was a simpler meal of bread, cheese, and beer. At adolescence girls—along with boys—were “fostered out” to learn a trade, as was the custom in England. Until the eighteenth century, Puritan daughters were routinely placed in the families of others. Unlike boys, however, girls learned housewifery and needlework. Girls received no formal education: they were taught how to read (so as to study the Bible) but not how to write; that

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was for males, considered their superiors. Woven into the fabric of Puritan theology, society, customs, and culture was the belief that females were physically, intellectually, spiritually, and morally inferior. In all these ways, girls were raised to assume their allotted place as good wives and mothers in Puritan society. Marriage, especially between families of means, was an economic arrangement largely based on property. (Sometimes marriages resulted from sexual transgressions.) Fathers, who assumed central authority in marital negotiations, provided their daughters with a dowry when they could. Land inherited by married daughters (feme covert, or “covered woman,” that is, after marriage her rights became one with her husband’s) became the legal possession of their husbands under English common law. Sons customarily received two times as much land, though property titles were only relinquished after a father’s death, thereby prolonging a filial devotion born of dependency. Daughters received equal portions of an estate only if their father died intestate (not having left a will) and they had no brothers. Over several generations of families with large numbers of sons and daughters, the continuous division of land according to inheritance gradually diminished the size of inheritances; the consequences for young women were enormous. Unable to provide either “movables” (e.g., linens) or

a cash dowry, fathers lost some of their authority, and eighteenth-century daughters became more able to do as they pleased. To begin with, young women were more likely to engage in premarital sex than had their ancestors. By 1750, as many as 40 percent of the young women in a number of New England towns were already pregnant by the time they were married. Many also began to marry without parental consent. A growing number of younger sisters also wed before their older sisters, whereas others elected not to marry at all. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Daughters and Fathers; Daughters and Mothers; Witchcraft References and Further Reading Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Demos, John. 1970. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press. Earle, Alice Morse. 1899. Child Life in Colonial Days. New York: Macmillan. Greven, Philip. 1979. The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of ChildRearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. New York: Meridian, chaps. 2–3. Morgan, Edmund. 1944. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in the Seventeenth Century. 1966. Reprint, New York: Harper and Row.

Q La Quinceañera

social shift in her status in society. At the age of twelve or thirteen, the girl could attend two types of preparatory schools, the Calmacac or the Telpucucali. Young women who entered the Calmacac school were prepared to commit their lives primarily to religious service, whereas those attending the school of Telpucucali were primed for marriage (King 1998, 12). The selected daughters of nobles went to the Calmacac school, where they were taught by priestesses. As part of their rite of passage, the young girls participated in several nightly offerings of incense to the gods, practiced celibacy, and embroidered fine clothing. The daughters of commoners went to the less formal Telpucucali where women known as ichpochtlatoque, “mistresses of the girls,” prepared them for marriage. By fifteen the Aztec girl was ready to leave her parents and teachers and enter the life of adulthood either as a wife or priestess (King 1998, 40). In addition to its indigenous origins, the quinceañera may have European influences. Erevia indicates that, after the Spanish colonization in the Americas, the celebration took on variations of the religious, patriarchal, and colonial representations that were imposed on the early Indian civilizations (1980, 3). Incorporating Catholicism into the native ceremonies was an attempt by the Spanish to indoctrinate the Aztec into Christiani-

Many families of Mexican American and other Latin American backgrounds celebrate the fifteenth birthday of their daughters with a special coming-of-age ceremony called la quinceañera. The name quinceañera derives from the Spanish words quince, meaning “fifteen,” and años, meaning “years,” and may refer either to the girl or to the ceremony itself. In Mexican American communities, the quinceañera celebration marks the change from adolescence to womanhood. Scholars have long questioned the historical roots of the quinceañera, believing it has dual origins. Sister Angela Erevia, a Catholic nun in San Antonio, Texas, and an authority on the religious quinceañera, argues that it dates back to Mayan and Toltec customs in which fifteen-year-olds of both sexes were presented to their tribal communities in festive religious rituals (1980, 3). She suggests that the rite honored the childbearing capacity of the young woman’s body, thereby enhancing her relationship with her community, and explains the significance of this ritual as a time when the young woman recognizes the power of her womanhood. For the ancient Mayan and Toltec cultures, the quinceañera symbolized the power to procreate. Some historians argue that the Aztec celebration of a girl’s puberty signified a

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ty. The Spanish imposed their religious faith onto the Aztec ceremonies, which had created rigidly defined roles for young women in their society. Now the native young women had a choice of dedicating their lives to the church (most likely the modest life of a nun) or to motherhood (a similar choice, just under a different religion). In Quinceañera: Celebrating Fifteen, Elizabeth King documents a Mexican American quinceañera in Mission Hills, California. She argues that European cultural influences had an impact on Mexican celebrations, which reached a cultural zenith during the reign of Emperor Maximilian and his wife, the Empress Carlota (1998, 40), and included courtly European social customs such as elaborate ball gowns and ballroom dancing. Scholars of the quinceañera agree that there is no definitive way to conduct or administer the ceremony. Many factors may influence how it is celebrated, including the young woman’s socioeconomic status, Latina ethnicity, religion, geography, and individual preferences. As in other important Latino celebrations, families often spend several months or longer preparing for a quinceañera. Ethnographer Norma Cantú (1999), who has researched the quinceañera along the Texas-Mexico border, and anthropologist Karen Davalos (1996), who has written about the quinceañera in the U.S. Midwest, assert that in Mexican American culture most quinceañera celebrations have two distinct components, the religious ceremony that takes place at church and the secular celebration. The religious ceremony may be conducted by a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest. At the ceremony, the quinceañera usually wears an elaborate

dress (el vestido), comparable to a debutante’s or bride’s gown. She is accompanied throughout the ceremony by an honor court of friends and their escorts (damas y chambelanes), her godparents (padrino y madrina), family, and friends. There are multiple ways of conducting a religious ceremony, whether it is a Catholic mass or a Protestant service. Generally, the services include moments when the young woman reaffirms her faith by reading from the Bible and takes an oath to assume new responsibilities in her adult life. The religious ceremony includes various symbolic objects such as a metal cross necklace, a finger ring, crown, Bible, pillow, and flowers. Erevia documents the meaning of each symbol in her book A Religious Celebration for the Quinceañera. The metal cross represents the young woman’s Christian faith, and the ring symbolizes her responsibility to community and God. Worn during the ceremony to represent her success in leading a virginal life, the crown is her reward for maintaining purity against worldly temptations. Finally, the flowers signify a renewal of her commitment to continue a responsible, mature, and virtuous life (Erevia 1980, 9). During the religious ceremony, the symbols or images are presented to the young woman by the priest or minister, her parents, and her godparents. Cantú underscores that the religious ceremony may include other significant images and objects, such as a pillow (cojín), which is placed at the altar where the quinceañera will kneel; a rosary; and a Bible (1999, 88, 93). Priests or ministers conducting the religious ceremony take this opportunity to educate the quinceañera and other young members of the congregation on

La Quinceañera the teachings of the church and moral values. The secular part of the celebration usually includes a reception for family and friends, and a dance (la fiesta) oftentimes concludes the event. The dance may include a highly choreographed procession with formal introductions of the honoree, her parents, her godparents, her court of honor and their escorts, family, and friends. Cantú points out that there are often specified moments during the secular festivities when the young woman dances with her father, her escort, and other significant members of the celebration. A great variety of music and food characterize quinceañera customs, depending on region, ethnicity, social class, and financial resources (1999, 83, 84). For most ceremonies, food is an important element in the festivities. In Mexican American culture, traditional foods such as beans, tamales, chicken mole, flour or corn tortillas, and enchiladas are customary. According to Cantú, food preparation is one of the most significant changes in the celebration of the quinceañera dance or reception. The “traditional celebratory foods” have evolved into whatever the caterer offers or the family provides (1999, 83). In some quinceañera ceremonies, catered cold platters, finger foods, and buffet-style dishes have been substituted for a Mexican traditional menu. However, in most instances, family friends and community members still offer to cook traditional dishes and serve the food and cake to the honoree and the participants in the quinceañera. In contemporary practices, la quinceañera is celebrated in various forms. In less affluent and less traditional families, a

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simple birthday party suffices. However, a full-fledged quinceañera, featuring elaborate attire, grand decorations, specialized catered food, colored photographs, video recordings, special gifts, and a live musical band, can add up to an expensive affair. Although such an elaborate party has become a standard way of celebrating a quinceañera, many young women choose to commemorate their quinceañera in different ways. For example, Anna Maria Padilla from Santa Fe, New Mexico, interpreted this celebration as an opportunity to commit herself to a career in music. As a guitarist, she opted to record her first compact disc, which included a repertoire of classical and flamenco music, instead of a formal quinceañera (Salcedo 1997, 215). Other ways that young women celebrate their quinceañera are by having a surprise party, studying abroad, planning a cruise, and going dancing at a nightclub with family and friends. In modern discourse, la quinceañera is certainly not without its critics. Michele Salcedo, author of Quinceañera! The Essential Guide to Planning the Perfect Sweet Fifteen Celebration, notes that priests, ministers, and educators are concerned that the traditional quinceañera emphasizes a girl’s sexuality at a time when there are too many teen pregnancies. In some cases, priests have criticized the celebration as “advertising a young woman’s sexual availability,” which promotes a stereotype that young Latina girls are sexually permissive (1997, 6, 9). In addition, scholars of the quinceañera point out that religious officials construct a limiting view for young ladies. In particular, Davalos argues that the ceremony encourages the girl to take on a subservient role in life and to subject her wants and needs to those of her family

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A Cuban American girl celebrates her quinceañera celebration, Miami, Florida. (Patrick Ward/Corbis)

and the church. She claims that embedded in the ceremony is the religious doctrine that limits the girl’s future role to one of motherhood (1996, 111, 121, 122). The quinceañera presents a limiting view of a young girl’s position in life and constructs a narrow image of the roles played out in womanhood. Catholic officials contend that this rite of passage must be celebrated in order to preserve Catholic traditions. Priests claim that the event should be a public expression of religious devotion and commitment to the church and society (Davalos 1996, 111). As the issues of gender roles and sexuality are being debated among scholars and church officials, literary critics are beginning to use the quinceañera as a framework for discourse and analysis

in the coming-of-age experience in young Mexican American women. As a whole, the religious and secular celebrations provide general enjoyment and community goodwill. The coming-ofage rituals reinforce the young woman’s personal and spiritual identity and social position. Cantú asserts that after a young girl has gone through a quinceañera, she may be perceived by her community, family, and even herself as a young adult. Following the quinceañera, the young woman gains new privileges at home, including oftentimes the opportunity to begin dating. Most importantly, the consensus among young women who have gone through this ceremony is that it has a positive spiritual transformative effect in their lives (1999, 90). For many Mexi-

La Quinceañera can American young women, it is a time when they leave their girlhood behind and join the ranks of womanhood. Among Mexican Americans in the United States, the quinceañera event is a thriving and evolving ritual and celebration. Whether young Mexican American girls decide to have a quinceañera or not, these adolescents face different dynamics and anxieties based on their rite of passage into adulthood in a traditional culture. Ultimately, the quinceañera is an opportunity for young women to learn about their cultural identity and commemorate their Mexican ancestry. Today in Mexican barrios (neighborhoods), it is common to find a specialty store geared toward providing the essential material elements needed to prepare and conduct a quinceañera; there are also multiple websites that cater to families and young women who are preparing for the quinceañera. Scholars are optimistic about the future of the tradition. Cantú notes that the quinceañera tradition is now serving as an inspiration for new lifecycle ceremonies, for instance, the quinceañero (a quinceañera for boys) and the cinquentañera, which is the celebra-

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tion of a woman’s achievements in her life as she reaches the age of fifty (1999, 98). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, for many Mexican Americans the quinceañera is an old Aztec ritual tradition that connects modern young women to their Mexican cultural roots—it is a way of preserving history. Cecilia J. Aragón See also Chicana Girls; Latina Girls References and Further Reading Cantú, Norma E. 1999. “La Quinceañera: Towards an Ethnographic Analysis of a Life-Cycle Ritual.” Southern Folklore 56, no. 1: 73–101. Davalos, Karen Mary. 1996. “La Quinceañera: Making Gender and Ethnic Identities.” Frontiers 16, nos. 2–3: 101–127. Erevia, Sister Angela. 1980. A Religious Celebration for the Quinceañera. San Antonio, Texas: Mexican American Cultural Center. King, Elizabeth. 1998. Quinceañera: Celebrating Fifteen. New York: Dutton. Salcedo, Michele. 1997. Quinceañera! The Essential Guide to Planning the Perfect Sweet Fifteen Celebration. New York: Holt. Vigil, Angel. 1998. Una Linda Raza: Cultural and Artistic Traditions of the Hispanic Southwest. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.

R Radical Feminism

ed by the genesis of second-wave feminism during the Vietnam era. From its inception, activists within the women’s liberation movement were divided over what issues were most salient, how to effectively organize, or even what to call their nascent movement; “feminism” was discredited among many due to its association with the reformist first-wave feminism from the mid-nineteenth century through 1920, when women gained the vote. According to historian Alice Echols, much effort in the first years of the women’s movement was spent trying to reconcile these problems among participants who eventually split into so-called politicos and feminists, the latter becoming known as “radical feminists.” Both camps essentially offered the common leftist critique of the American system (including but not limited to its paternalistic foreign policies, racism, sexism, poverty, and the military-industrial complex) as inherently corrupt and in immediate need of a complete overhaul. Likewise, each believed the true enemy was not so much the overt manifestations of this diseased political and social system but instead the core institutions and people who served them. At the heart of their schism, however, were critical debates over whether women were primarily oppressed by capitalism (politicos) or men (feminists) and whether women should

Proclaiming that gender, not class, constituted the primary category of analysis for any critique of American society, for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s radical feminism became the heart and soul of the women’s liberation movement. Upon breaking with the New Left over the subordination of women’s issues within “the movement” in the 1960s, radical feminists rejected both the socialist perspective that the rising tide of a class revolution would inherently lift all women and the liberal feminist commitment to integration. Instead, radical feminists concluded that women made up a “sex class” in American society, thereby necessitating the need to reconsider all gender relations from a political perspective if equality of condition was ever to be achieved. Variously described as the most vital and creative wing of the women’s liberation movement, radical feminists sought to walk the point in a broad assault against patriarchy and a misogynist culture. Ultimately they facilitated many of the earliest and most comprehensive analyses of women’s roles within the family and marriage, as well as of sexuality, domestic violence, rape, birth control, day care, and sexual objectification. Radical feminism, whether manifested on urban streets or college campuses, grew out of several key debates precipitat-

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remain in the movement and help men tear down the system first before building a new one with greater gender equality (politicos) or organize outside the movement around women’s issues (feminists). Where radical feminists fundamentally broke with other male and female leftists was over the intractable nature of sexism and the ability of any type of revolution led by men, socialist or otherwise, to bring about liberation for all groups, women included. Although class, race, and sexual orientation divided radical feminists, the one common denominator they shared was the basic premise that women comprised a sex class in the United States and that issues of gender, not class, would be primary in restructuring society. Thus by subordinating class and race issues to gender, the achievement of women’s liberation could undermine male supremacy and capitalism at once. After making the determination to organize separately from men, the visionary core of radical feminism consisted of women in their twenties and thirties on the East Coast who organized groups such as the Redstockings, Cell 16, the Feminists, New York Radical Feminists, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), and the Furies. At a time when men and women were attempting to renegotiate nearly every facet of American society, each of these groundbreaking groups helped to shape the character, look, and nature of women’s activism while revealing the ongoing dialectics of the modern struggle for women’s liberation. Like those in the New Left and counterculture, many radical feminists rejected mainstream American cultural sensibilities, announcing their political orientation by sporting

faded jeans, long natural hair, and various elements of the hippie aesthetic. Yet what often set them apart in fashion and lifestyle was that these women openly celebrated their femininity and sexuality, all the while rejecting male definitions of sexual liberation. Founded in 1969 by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone, Redstockings is an excellent example of the radical feminist’s pioneering commitment to “consciousness raising” as the primary vehicle for meaningful change. Perhaps the hallmark of the women’s liberation movement, these often informal grassroots assemblies afforded women of all ages space to renegotiate gender roles and debilitating stereotypes, dispel feelings of inferiority, and forge new bonds of sisterhood. Although Redstockings—so named by Willis and Firestone because it appropriated the derisive term for early feminists (bluestockings) by combining it with the traditional color of revolution— focused chiefly on abortion, their early application of the truism “the personal is political” helped situate the confrontation with sexism firmly within existing social, familial, and marriage structures. Likewise, the Feminists, founded by radical feminist pioneer Ti-Grace Atkinson, and later New York Radical Feminists utilized consciousness raising as a vehicle through which they could create new self-conceptions and definitions of femininity and thereby deny men this historical tool of oppression. Different groups like the more radical WITCH, Cell 16, and the Furies also epitomized radical feminism’s original and creative forms of activism and highlighted other internal debates. Although still regarding personal experience as a sound foundation on which to base a movement, many radical feminists nev-

Radical Feminism ertheless labored over the importance and role of consciousness raising, fearing that by itself consciousness raising potentially impeded direct action. To address this concern, the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City was targeted for radical feminism’s first “zap action.” Inspired by the recent politically confrontational actions of the Youth International Party (Yippie) at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, radical feminists engaged in various productions of guerrilla theater, the countercultural method of using avant-garde theater to express dissent. Some of the more inspired productions included crowning a pig Miss America to decry the way women were judged; chaining themselves to a life-size “Amerika-Dollie” puppet to symbolize women’s subjugation to artificial beauty standards; and disposing of various items of oppression such as bras, high heels, false eyelashes, and Playboy magazine into a “freedom trash can.” Building on this precedent, Robin Morgan, Florika, Peggy Dobbins, and others formed WITCH in 1968 as an action-oriented group dedicated to tweaking corporate America. On a national level, WITCH garnered modest media attention with their zap actions at the United Fruit Company, Chicago Transit Authority, several bridal fairs, and the financial district in New York. Outside the East Coast, the acronym was often altered by numerous local “covens” to reflect local concerns, such as Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment, Women Inspired to Commit Herstory, and Women Intent on Toppling Consumer Holidays. On college campuses, WITCH covens disrupted fraternity and sorority parties, homecoming queen contests, and certain faculty functions to draw atten-

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tion to the systemic objectification of coeds. Eschewing guerrilla theater, Cell 16 simply chose to remove themselves physically and politically from male-dominated society, living communally and adhering to celibacy while training in martial arts for an eventual clash with American society. Taking Valerie Solana’s decidedly separatist SCUM Manifesto to heart, Cell 16, founded in 1968, developed the reputation as the vanguard of militancy among feminist groups, even influencing movement style with their distinctive short hair, khaki pants, work shirts, and combat boots. The Furies, a lesbian-feminist collective founded in 1971, rivaled the others in radicalism but because of their presumption that heterosexuality buttressed sexism, advocated lesbianism as the only viable method for toppling American patriarchy. The growing prominence and visibility of the Furies and other lesbian groups within the women’s movement eventually forced all female activists to address the “heterosexual presumption” and the political desirability of lesbianism. On college campuses, radical feminism manifested itself in a variety of ways. Throughout the Vietnam era, college women of all ages, both students and faculty, tentatively organized around such issues as university restrictions on female freedom, sexual objectification, birth control, women’s health, day care, equal employment opportunities, and equity in pay. Yet prior to 1968 the only formal organizations exclusively for women and dedicated to addressing these issues were dominated by NOW-style liberal feminists, and despite their efforts, most universities proved unresponsive or unyielding on most of these issues. In part, the suppression of women’s issues on campus resulted from the uproar then

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being created by male militants and the determination on the part of the nation’s universities not to reward dissent. Likewise, at a time when competition for publicity was intensifying among university and community dissenters, the actions of the nascent women’s movement were often carried out without fanfare or media attention, and thus it was comparatively easier to place them on the back burner. By the late 1960s, radical feminism developed on campus in response to these conditions and changes within the women’s movement in general. Countless young coeds flocked to local consciousness-raising groups to begin to, as a young woman at a large midwestern university explained, “face the fact of yourself as exploited—as a worker, as a ‘sex object,’ as a political unit.” For many young women coming of political age in the era, consciousness raising became the vehicle for them to “start thinking about obvious things like why women’s wages are low” and “why sex is used to sell everything.” Moreover, as the aforementioned coed concluded, the experience of talking and listening to various female perspectives instilled in them the conviction not to “let men’s systems of thought—new left men as well as old right ones—replace thinking for yourself” (Vortex 1970, 1). Aside from organizing thousands of consciousness-raising groups, radical feminists, disgusted with being perceived as “hot-pantsed groupies” to New Left men, joined the battles first begun by liberal feminists while articulating their own agenda. In many cases they demanded their universities create autonomous women’s studies programs or, at the very least, begin teaching courses on the subject of women’s liberation to institution-

alize the newfound emphasis on the uniqueness of women and their growing solidarity. They led protests ranging from “speak-outs” to brief occupations of campus buildings, with the aim of compelling schools to hire more female faculty, make the pay scale more equitable, and promote female administrators. On some campuses young activists organized “women’s centers” as clearinghouses for various women’s activities, including libraries, switchboards, self-defense classes, abortion counseling, birth control and child care information, and women’s education courses. Besides these genuine achievements that fundamentally altered college campuses, ultimately radical feminism unified a number of women and afforded an occasion to become more demanding and more visible. By the early 1970s, radical feminism was weakened by its own inherent debates and contradictions. With more radical women alienated by lesbian-feminists, cultural feminism—similar in many ways to cultural nationalism within the Black Power movement—grew out of radical feminism and supplanted it as the dominant wing of the movement. The exclusive dedication to the creation of autonomous female space at the expense of social confrontations, which was inherent in cultural feminism, ultimately allowed more active liberal feminists to regain their position as the most visible and therefore most widely acknowledged leaders of the women’s movement. Joel P. Rhodes See also College Girls; Girl Power; Red Diaper Girls References and Further Reading Cott, Nancy. 1989. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Reading Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eisenstein, Zillah. 1981. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. New York: Longman. Evans, Sara. 1979. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books. Freeman, Jo. 1975. The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Political Process. New York: Mayfield Publishing. Harrison, Cynthia. 1989. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press. Millett, Kate. 1971. Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Morgan, Robin. 1970. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage. ———. 1978. Going Too Far. New York: Random House. Vortex, Women’s Issue. 1970. Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1.

Reading Early Americans imported most of their books from England. American girls’ reading materials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consisted primarily of the Bible, Puritan tracts, educational texts like the New England Primer, and manuals written to teach young ladies how to behave properly. In the late eighteenth century, British authors like Maria Edgeworth and Anna Letitia Barbauld had a great effect on young female readers by providing a shift in emphasis away from Puritanism toward a more secularized didacticism. However, children’s magazines probably provide the most significant markers of the emergence of a distinct form of literature for children.

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Children’s magazines became popular in the 1800s and provided young readers with a greater variety of reading material than ever before, including short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork all wrapped up in one inexpensive package just for kids. More than 130 juvenile periodicals were launched between 1840 and 1870 and 105 between 1870 and 1900 (Avery 1994, 146). The Juvenile Miscellany, edited first by Lydia Maria Child and later by Sara Josepha Hale (1826–1836); The Youth’s Companion, originally published by Nathaniel P. Willis (1827–1929); The Riverside Magazine for Young People, edited by Horace Scudder (1867–1871); and St. Nicholas, edited by Mary Mapes Dodge (1873–1940), each provided a showcase for American women authors who made names for themselves through their magazine contributions. But it was the nineteenth-century division between the domestic novel and the adventure story that really marked the development of gender-specific literature. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–1869) were among the most popular domestic novels, exceeding even the sales of British favorites by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Domestic novels emphasized the home as the most important site for moral development that would penetrate the public realm. These texts took the roles of girls and women seriously as saviors of their culture and also offered distinctly American heroines who were independent, sturdy, and practical. Girls’ books were generally expected to reinforce the importance of women’s roles in society as private and domestic. However, the power of girls’ stories seemed to be in their allowance of moments of power beyond the home. The development of

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literature for girls was linked to the creation of characters who allowed girls to act out fantasies of power that may have been stifled in their real lives. Domestic novels often focused on a “naughty girl” who was reformed through the course of the story into an “ideal woman.” Ellen Montgomery, the heroine of The Wide, Wide World, is just such a girl. Ellen suffers a great loss with the death of her mother and is forced to live with her cruel aunt, who continually thwarts her desires. Despite the fact that Ellen is ultimately “tamed,” her wildness and rebelliousness provided girls with an acknowledgment of their own often denied or unsatisfied desires. Even Ellen’s frequent crying spells represent her ability to act out against patriarchal outrages for which she has no other recourse, and her eventual moral conversion allows her to influence and convert male figures of authority in the novel (Foster and Simons 1995, 49–51). Alcott’s Little Women is a less overtly religious story that, nevertheless, emphasizes a kind of moral conversion from tomboy to wife. Jo March cuts her hair off like a boy and acts in ways that are traditionally masculine. She disobeys authority, expresses dissatisfaction with accepted feminine roles, and launches her own career as a writer; eventually, however, she does marry (though not the typical hero) and settle down into some form of domesticity. Barbara Sicherman discusses at length the self-authorizing effect Jo’s assertive behavior has had on female readers for more than a century in her essay “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text” (1995). Overall, though, domestic novels suggest that growing into womanhood “is a learned and often fraught process, not an instinctual or natural condition of female development

(Foster and Simons 1995, 87). As Anne MacLeod notes, “The child who read latenineteenth-century books could hardly avoid the conclusion that the end of childhood was also the end of the best part of life. Certainly, a girl was unlikely to miss the message that puberty would be for her the beginning of imprisonment in a ‘woman’s sphere’” (MacLeod 1994, 29). Though the rebelliousness of the domestic novel is typically contained at the end, the possibility was open for girls to focus on and remember the subversiveness of the characters’ behavior and the regret felt by the girl who must “shape up” and prepare to enter adulthood. During the nineteenth century, the subject of girls’ reading became a hot topic of debate. John Ruskin’s emphatic warning to parents in Sesame and Lilies to “keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl’s way” (1864, 66) exemplifies the nineteenth-century conception that popular literature could be detrimental to female readers. The widespread concern about the dangers of girls’ reading was intimately linked to the explosion of the publishing industry in the mid-1800s, which made periodicals and novels inexpensive commodities easily obtained by middle-class readers. Technological advances in printing and paper production, along with the expansion of the railroads and the patriotic desire of Americans to create their own national literature, contributed to this publishing boom. By 1850 the United States was a full-fledged capitalist economy that was beginning to carve out distinct market niches. Thus, the publication of books that targeted the emerging audience of youthful readers became a central—rather than a marginal—part of the publishing industry. As M. E. M. Blake observed in 1891, one publishing

Reading firm alone produced 1,250,000 children’s storybooks, 100,000 bound literary annuals, and 75 novels. In addition, the “bewildering array” of magazines for juveniles constituted “not less than 1,200,000 individual volumes, with reprints in the shape of miscellaneous collections that would count at least 5,000,000 more” (475–476). The overwhelming abundance of reading material was seen as a particular problem for parents, librarians, and critics, who noted the need for strict regulation of children’s reading practices because “the readers of this worse than worthless literature mount every year into hundreds of thousands, and publishers are found reckless and vile enough to sow those seeds of death for sake of the filthy profits they receive” (Blake 1891, 477). Although the expression of fears about the proliferation of “bad literature” was standard critical fare, such hyperbolic language was most often used in relation to girls’ reading. Girls—especially those who were on the verge of womanhood—were conceived of as a special problem. At the turn of the century, girlhood was a vague category that included “any unmarried female of genteel family background between the ages of, say, five and twentyfive” (Nelson and Vallone 1994, 9). No longer playing with dolls but not yet marriageable, on the verge of sexuality and subjectivity, girls were liminal figures who floated between boundaries and resisted categorization. Girlhood, therefore, was potentially subversive of patriarchal values. Sally Mitchell notes that although most girls lived traditional, domestic lives that coincided with the values of the dominant culture, there was a consciousness of a particular “girl’s culture.” It was most evident in books

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and magazines that actually invented the word girl itself as a replacement for the outdated term young lady (1995, 3–6). The comparative freedom of girlhood combined with the free range of printed texts available to girls inspired responses such as F. M. Edselas’s “What Shall We Do with Our Girls?” (1895) and Lutie E. Stearns’s “The Problem of the Girl” (1906). These articles conceptualized girls’ reading as a particular conundrum that was vital to solve in order to produce women who would be good wives and mothers. Edselas pinpoints the problem by asking what one should do with the girl so that she may “become a truer, nobler woman? . . . Perilous beyond human ken is that transition state called maidenhood” (1895, 538–539). Stearns likewise reports that “there is no more perplexing problem that confronts the modern librarian, teacher and parent, than the selection of books for the girl . . . who is separated from womanhood by such a brief span that her ideas, acts and ideals are rapidly taking on the aspects of maturity” (1906, 103). Despite the efforts to improve librarians’ and teachers’ skills in directing girls’ reading, the burden weighed most heavily on mothers: The influence of home teaching is enormous; all the school can do pales before it. Let the mother add to the poet’s rhyme the music of her soft and beloved voice; let great fiction be read to the breathless group of curly heads about the fire; and the wonders of science be unrolled, the trilling scenes and splendid personalities of history displayed. Children thus inspired may be trusted to become sensitive to literature long before they know what the word means. (Burton 1898, 286)

This mid-nineteenth-century lithograph shows a mother teaching her daughter how to read. (Library of Congress)

Reading A girl’s proper reading of the right literature was seen as an antidote to the dangers of modern life and a sign of an effective mother. As Stearns’s survey of girl readers indicated, “Many girls whose reading showed contact with good, healthful literature showed also the influence of a refined home” (1906, 104). The influence of mothers on their children’s reading was deemed so essential that it was equated with their influence over their children’s cleanliness; just as mothers must coax their children into seeing the “intrinsic merit of soap and water” by “forced application three times daily for at least six to eight years,” so must they coax their girls into reading properly (Blake 1891, 482). As more and more dime novels, sensational tales, and series books were published, critics called for a return to the days when children and adults consumed the same great literary texts, when they were interested primarily in “classic” British novelists like Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and Dickens: Fashion in reading has changed and it must be confessed, for the worse. . . . After girls satiate their minds with the second-rate, the insipid, or the ultra-sentimental, they have lost the key to the great kingdom of the good and the beautiful. . . . The modern parent, teacher, and librarian cannot escape blame for the present state of affairs. The modern mother exercises far less supervision over her daughter than did the mother of a generation ago. (Stearns 1906, 105) Thus, mothers were called upon to play a more active role in guiding their daughters in the selection of literature. Renew-

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ing the habit of reading aloud, which formerly united the family around the hearth, was frequently suggested as “the greatest safeguard” for “sobriety and carefulness in the matter of approaching a book” (Blake 1891, 481). Containing girls’ reading within the domestic sphere would, it was hoped, eliminate the potential of girlhood rebellion. According to Nancy Tillman Romalov, the assumption among librarians was that with more extensive and fast-paced reading, the benefits of reading were lost. Romalov’s study of girls’ own letters to authors of the popular books they read indicates “the ways in which girls literally inscribed themselves into the books” and “engaged in this mass-marketed and consumer-oriented fiction in intensely public and meaningful ways” by creating communal reading experiences and joining together in collective fantasies that affected how girls saw themselves socially (1996, 93). So to a certain extent, the fears about girls’ were well founded: reading could further separate girls from traditional society and allow them to live in a liberating world of their own, if only for a short time. Although the moral lessons of domestic novels made them acceptable reading choices for girls, nineteenth-century dime novels and their offspring, twentieth-century series books, presented greater cause for concern among adults. As Romalov argues, girls’ reading of series books was a noisy, . . . public and communal activity rather than one characterized as quiet, private, or passive. When girls read non-sanctioned series books, they were engaging in a mild form of protest against those authorities who,

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believing the books not only inferior but dangerously habit-forming, would keep the books from them. . . . In contrast to mainstream literature, the series books did not attempt to woo the adult through their language, subject, or pedagogical value but were addressed exclusively to female readers. (1996, 90) Series books in particular inspired fear and disdain among librarians and critics, who saw the series as a fully capitalistic venture that was characterized by poor writing and sensational plots. Series books symbolized the plummeting taste of Americans. The most successful publisher of these books was the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Stratemeyer created girls’ series such as the Motor Girls, which exemplified girls’ independence and escape from traditional domesticity through their technological know-how and adventurousness, as well as the most famous of all series books, the Nancy Drew Mysteries. Nancy Drew books conveyed girls’ intellectual abilities, assertiveness, and practicality. Nancy’s dominance over her boyfriend Ned and her father, a lawyer, provided powerful wish fulfillment for girls who were used to seeing female characters demur to males. Nancy is essentially a female character who is allowed to fulfill a masculine role, though this is hidden beneath a conventional sense of propriety: “Autonomy is her right, won by her responsible and intelligent management of practically everything” (MacLeod 1994, 39–40). The independence of Nancy Drew and the series heroines was followed up by a return to domesticity in the 1950s stories that focused on accepting oneself and becoming a wife and a mother. However, series books have continued to thrive and are still an important part of girls’ reading

today. Sherrie A. Inness’s collection of essays, Nancy Drew and Company (1997), emphasizes the cultural importance of girls’ series books throughout the twentieth century. The increasingly consumer-oriented culture of the prosperous postwar 1940s and 1950s spawned a new wave in girls’ reading practices, with the birth of teen magazines such as Seventeen Magazine, which debuted in September 1944. The growing influence of school and peers on teens proved instrumental in creating an even more differentiated youth subculture that included its own fashions, music, and attitudes capitalized on by teen magazines. But Seventeen proved popular because it made girls feel that they fit in somewhere, that they were doing something more than just lurking on the borderline between girlhood and womanhood. As one girl reader of the magazine wrote: “some of these so-called magazines for the high school crowd . . . either have us in the Fifth Grade having our pigtails pulled or seated at a bar in some swanky night-club, fluttering our eyelashes at some Navy lieutenant” (quoted in Schrum 1998, 140). Although Seventeen defined the teenage girl as a means of promoting and selling products, Teena, the magazine’s mascot, was attractive to readers because of her sassy attitude, fashion sense, and consumer skills. Still, letters from readers indicate teenage girls’ willingness to resist the fashion, beauty, and dating advice provided by the magazine. Girls were particularly vocal about their objections to girdles, which the magazine pushed in its advice columns and advertising campaigns (Schrum 1998, 135, 151). This early example of the marriage between girls’ culture and marketing is taken even further today by a plethora of teen maga-

Reading zines, including Sassy and YM (formerly Young Miss), and fashion catalogues aimed specifically at girls like Delia’s, which has its own bedroom decorating products as well as a clothing line. And the Pleasant Company’s American Girl magazine features tie-ins to the American Girls Collection of dolls, including a line of historical books about girls, a matching catalog of dolls and doll accessories, and girl-sized clothes that match those for the dolls. Nevertheless, reading—in whatever form it takes—is considered a positive activity for girls, far preferable to watching television, the latest target of critical outcry. Today, the concerns adults have about girls’ reading have shifted from its ability to corrupt girls’ taste and values (which is now the primary venue of the media) to the effects of reading on a girl’s self-worth and development of an independent identity. As Angela Hubler’s recent study of adolescent readers shows, girls often ignore repressive endings and resist sexist stereotypes, instead engaging with and remembering the strong, independent, and heroic qualities of the girls about whom they read. In other words, girls often take from their reading what best suits their needs. Hubler calls this “liberatory reading,” an act that allows readers to imagine alternatives to traditional gender roles. Such “reading strategies suggest that [girls] are actively engaged with the literature they read: they participate with the author in the construction of the text” (1998, 270–271). Hubler further asserts that the “status of many classics for girls may, in fact, be based on their ability to foster this awareness of, and thus resistance to, repressive female gender roles” (1998, 282). Thus even as concerns about girls’ reading have changed, it seems that girls’ responses to

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A nine-year-old girl reads in her backyard garden. (Skjold Photographs)

their reading experiences have always been—to some extent—selective and potentially empowering. Jennifer Phegley See also Advice Books; American Girls Collection; Girls’ Culture; Girls’ Fiction; Girls’ Magazines; Literacy; Nancy Drew Mysteries; Zines References and Further Reading Avery, Gillian. 1994. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books 1621–1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Blake, M. E. M. 1891. “Literature and the Formation of Character.” Catholic World 53 (July): 475–484. Burton, Richard. 1898. “Literature for Our Children.” North American Review 167: 278–286.

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Edselas, F. M. 1895. “What Shall We Do with Our Girls?” Catholic World 61 (July): 538–545. Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. 1995. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Hubler, Angela E. 1998. “Can Anne Shirley Help ‘Revive Ophelia’? Listening to Girl Readers.” Pp. 266–284 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press. Inness, Sherrie A., ed. 1997. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls’ Series. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1994. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mitchell, Sally. 1995. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. New York: Columbia University Press. Murray, Gail Schmunk. 1998. American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood. New York: Twayne Publishers. Nelson, Claudia, and Lynne Vallone. 1994. The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Romalov, Nancy Tillman. 1996. “Unearthing the Historical Reader, or, Reading Girls’ Reading.” Primary Sources and Original Works 4 (1–2): 87–101. Ruskin, John. 1864. Sesame and Lilies. 1965. New York: Everyman’s Library. Schrum, Kelly. 1998. “‘Teena Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944–1950.” Pp. 134–163 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by Sherrie Inness. New York: New York University Press. Sicherman, Barbara. 1995. “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text.” Pp. 245–266 in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays. Edited by Linda Kerber et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Stearns, Lutie E. 1906. “The Problem of the Girl.” The Library Journal 31: 103–106.

Red Diaper Girls Red diaper girls are female “red diaper babies”: they are the daughters of communists, former communists, or socalled fellow travelers, nonparty members who regularly participated in political, social, or cultural activities sponsored by the Communist Party (CP) and its affiliated organizations. Although red diaper girls are still being born, the term generally refers to a mid-twentiethcentury experience of girlhood because the CP was most able to attract a following between 1920 and 1956. According to Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, the term red diaper baby originated in the 1920s, coined by CP activists who scorned those attempting to use birthright to move up in party ranks. In the 1960s the John Birch Society revived the label when they published a list of red diaper babies enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in an attempt to intimidate student activists. That effort backfired because the list actually enabled politically minded students to find one another. By the 1970s, adults who had grown up in the communist milieu began identifying themselves as “red diaper babies.” The waning of anticommunist fervor in the United States made it possible for them to begin assessing the ways in which the political culture of the party had shaped their sense of identity, values, ambitions, and life choices. Red diaper babies have had enough in common to make the label meaningful, but their experiences have varied in sig-

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A labor protest on May Day in New York City. (Courtesy of the Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, John Albok Collection, 1936)

nificant ways, not only from family to family but more generally according to generation, region, class, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Children growing up in cities with relatively strong radical traditions—such as New York or Los Angeles—were more likely to be part of a supportive left-wing community than those growing up in rural areas in the South or the Midwest. Jewish red diaper babies often took part in a vibrant, secular Jewish culture that combined radical politics

with Jewish traditions. Children of immigrants—that is, most of the first generation of red diaper babies—experienced unique issues around assimilation. Perhaps more than others, African American red diaper babies experienced the struggles against economic oppression and against racism as inseparable objectives. And red diaper girls, from varying backgrounds, had to reconcile a heightened political consciousness with contradictory messages about women’s roles, mes-

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sages that came not just from American society in general but also from the insular world of the left. But whether from New York or Birmingham; whether Jewish, African American, or first-generation Italian; whether a child of the Depression or the Cold War, red diaper babies grew up conscious of their status as “outsiders” in American culture. Most fundamentally, their parents questioned a core American belief in capitalism, but their childhoods were unusual in other ways as well. These children, forced to disguise their family’s politics in their everyday lives, led a split existence: at home they said “People’s Republic of China” and “Soviet Union,” though at school they were careful to say “Red China” and “Russia.” At school they learned that communists were destroying “the American Way of Life”; at home they were told that textbooks, teachers, newspapers, and movies were full of lies. The sense of having a split identity was often worse for girls than for boys, though their outsider status may have made it easier to question society’s constrictive gender norms. Red diaper girls tended to grow up with strong female role models, and they recognized gender equality as an ideal (if not always a practice in their own homes). This ideal of equality, coupled with their forced or chosen status as outsiders, meant that red diaper girls often saw norms governing femininity, fashion, and popularity as in conflict with many of the values they learned at home; thus girlhood itself was fraught, especially for red diaper girls growing up in the 1950s at the height of the “feminine mystique.” But whether a girl was mortified or proud when her date saw the Daily Worker on the coffee table had much to do with the particularities of her temperament and family situation. Those children who felt

nourished and nurtured by their parents’ commitments tended to relish their outsider status; those more keenly aware of their parents’ limitations often had a more difficult road. Girls and boys raised in the CP milieu and trained to identify social contradictions were quick to notice when parents did not put their “progressive” and democratic ideals into practice at home. One woman whose strict Marxist father forbade her religious Jewish mother from teaching the children any prayers or religious rituals remembers her father’s rigid control extending over the friends she chose, the books she read, and the clothes she wore; she even recalls being forced to change a school essay to conform with her father’s economic interpretation of history. Other girls felt that their parents spent so much time fighting for the world’s oppressed peoples that they had little left for their own children. But at least as many girls and boys had positive experiences: their parents were openminded, thoughtful, and willing to take their questions and opinions seriously. In either case, girls raised in the CP milieu grew up perceiving a clear moral universe that distinguished right from wrong and “progressive” from reactionary. They understood commitment to social change as a moral imperative and passive acceptance of injustice as a sin. Their oppositional identity and sense of solidarity with an international, multicultural working class were often sources of pride for girls. “As children of the left we had always known we had a meaningful place in the Communist vision,” Kim Chernin notes. “We were the hope and promise; it was we who carried the hope of the revolution they had expected in their youth” (1983, 243). For some girls that hope was a burden; others

Red Diaper Girls resented their families’ oddities and longed to be “normal.” Identification with the communist movement was all-encompassing. During the years that the CP was most able to expand its ranks (the 1930s and 1940s), members and related groups sponsored a wide variety of activities and created an array of cultural forms to socialize children. Activities included summer camps, after-school programs, singing societies, sports, theater, and even a special unit of the party for children, the Young Pioneers. Party-influenced secular-Jewish, ethnic, and fraternal organizations such as the Yiddish shules, Finnish social halls, and the International Workers Order had special programs and publications for children. Centers of Marxist education like the Jefferson School of Social Science and the California Labor School had story hours, dance, music, and other activities for girls and boys; communist publications from the Daily Worker to the Fraternal Outlook had children’s pages; and the CP published dozens of children’s books that openly or subtly criticized capitalism, racism, and nationalism, discussing history, science, and everyday life from a “working-class” perspective. Beyond party-sponsored culture was a less formal but perhaps even more significant “progressive” universe. For girls as well as boys it was characterized by certain children’s books (usually by radical authors) like the interracial picture book Two Is a Team; certain “progressive” schools like the Downtown Community School in New York; certain communities and community centers like the cooperatives in the Bronx or the Unitarian Church in Los Angeles (especially in the McCarthy era); and certain kinds of music: Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and

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anything from Folkways or the Young People’s Record Club. Hazy as the latter emblems of “progressive” childhood were, many recalling their red diaper girlhoods insist that most of the “communist” values and ideas they learned came more via “osmosis” than through formal party activities. There was no “party line” on parenting, although the CP discourse around childhood and socialization reflected the party’s changing relationship to American society and institutions, as well as more general trends in childrearing and education. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the CP attempted to develop a “proletarian perspective on childhood”; to do so it “focused on the poverty and social crisis that were part of so many working-class children’s lives, and on the ways these conditions were created by capitalism” (Mishler 1999, 20). Thus in the early 1930s when the Children’s Bureau was distributing a pamphlet that asked, “Are You Training Your Child to Be Happy?” the CP was distributing one on “Children under Capitalism” and urging children themselves to become militant activists. In addition to marching in May Day parades, Young Pioneers in the early 1930s protested child labor and rundown schools and called for free lunches and more playgrounds. The CP’s “proletarian” perspective on childhood included girls but was notoriously gender-blind, if not biased toward boys. Though party literature recognized the special burdens faced by working mothers, it rarely differentiated between boys and girls. Moreover, frequent criticisms of organizations like the Boy Scouts were rarely matched by attention to organizations serving girls or to typical girl activities. This began to change as the CP, attempting to enter the American main-

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stream in the mid-1930s, developed a rhetoric of inclusivity. Parenting advice in organs of the CP left became almost indistinguishable from the “progressive” or “democratic” childrearing approach characteristic of Arnold Gesell or Benjamin Spock. For the left, family “togetherness” meant that children were more likely to participate in left-wing activities with their parents, rather than through separate children’s organizations (although left-wing summer camps also proliferated during this time). The inclusive rhetoric of the “popular front” against fascism emphasized racial and ethnic diversity, but there developed as well in CP publications for children at least some attention to gender issues. Perhaps Sasha Small’s book for children, Heroines, was most striking in this respect: it contained portraits of Mollie Pitcher, Lucretia Mott, Frances Wright, Clara Zetkin, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mother Jones, Ella Reeve Bloor, Harriet Tubman, and “women under fascism.” The informal “movement culture” characteristic of the CP milieu became more important as McCarthyism eroded formal party structures and party membership dwindled. When anticommunism became a national preoccupation in the 1950s, the children of communists experienced McCarthyism as a threat to their own families. How much children were told about their parents’ activity varied, but all understood that there were secrets, that being “different” involved a risk. Even those children kept ignorant of their parents’ work in the party might not have been saved from the fear and anxiety parents communicated along with their beliefs and values. The fear was greatest, of course, for children whose parents were investigated, black-

listed, arrested, or moved “underground” by the party. Several red diaper babies spent their entire childhoods in exile; others lived apart from one or both parents for months or even years. All children of the left understood that their parents were at best unusual and at worst in grave danger. Those who grew up in the 1950s inevitably recalled the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage as a traumatic event: if the “innocent” Rosenbergs could be imprisoned and put to death, so might their own parents be. For red diaper girls growing up during the Cold War, the feminine mystique and McCarthyism were mutually reinforcing forces that contributed to profound anxiety and confusion. The obvious question to ask of red diaper girls is whether their experience in the CP milieu was more likely to make them feminists. Although communists typically dismissed “feminism” as a bourgeois movement that failed to consider the primacy of economic oppression, the “woman question” was regularly raised in party discourse in terms of the ways in which women (and especially women of racial minorities) faced a double burden under capitalism. Women were encouraged to take active roles in the party, and even the gendered division of labor within households was increasingly critiqued (at least in principle) by the late 1940s as part of a broader attack on “male supremacy.” Party discussions of children often arose in the context of discussing the “woman question”—thus reifying some of the very categories these discussions sought to counter—but this meant that concerns about children’s socialization might encompass, at least subconsciously, some attention to gender norms. Girls growing up in the communist milieu often had mothers who worked full-

Red Diaper Girls time, who took an active interest in politics and culture, and who played important roles in party organizations. Most red diaper girls were told by their parents that they were equal to boys and that all paths in life were open to them. But in their own households mothers tended to be in charge of housework and child care, whether they worked outside the home or not. Even in homes where domestic labor was shared, many girls understood that their fathers were the intellectual authorities and recognized that their mothers’ views—and the realm of the “feminine” in general—were less important. But other girls grew up in homes where mothers were even more committed activists than fathers. And if talk of the “woman question” subsided under the pressures imposed by McCarthyism, women nevertheless continued to show their daughters the importance of activism, even if that was by acting in a traditionally feminine capacity, for instance by serving on the “families committee” for the Smith Act prisoners or by joining Women Strike for Peace. (The Smith Act, passed in 1940, made it “illegal to teach or advocate the overthrow of the government or to join any organization that did” [Schrecker 1994, 15]. The United States government filed Smith Act charges against nearly 150 people, including most of the CP’s top leaders). As primary caretakers, women were perhaps the most important purveyors of the left’s values. Moreover, scholars have uncovered direct links between the Old Left and second-wave feminism (as well as other postwar social movements). Still, to the extent that the CP left enforced a division between public (political) and private (personal), red diaper daughters who joined the New Left, civil rights, women’s liberation, or gay libera-

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tion movements sometimes did so partly in reaction to their upbringing. Red diaper girls have come to terms with their political legacies in very different ways. A minority followed in their parents’ footsteps and joined the CP themselves; more often, young women translated their upbringing to fit a different kind of political activity and engagement. Some eschewed political involvement completely. Though many, if not most, red diaper babies retained a commitment to social justice and activism in some form, they often experienced a devastating loss of faith when they came to recognize the flaws in their parents’ vision. This was especially so for those whose adolescence coincided with the 1956 report by Nikita Khrushchev admitting to atrocities committed under Joseph Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. But however and to whatever degree it might occur, loss of political faith was in some ways a loss of childhood. As Kim Chernin puts it, “When for some of us the vision had collapsed, it left an emptiness that reached back into the earliest experience of childhood and shook the very fundamentals of memory” (1983, 243). In the post-Soviet, post–Cold War era, in which communism seems to many more like an anachronism than a threat, it is possible to romanticize childhood in the all-encompassing world of American communism. But in fact that experience, though different for every girl, was characterized by a complex combination of pride and shame, public activity and secrecy, a sense of specialness and a sense of alienation. The complexity of that experience and the full impact of red diaper girls on American society remain to be assessed. Julia Mickenberg

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See also Radical Feminism; Work

Relational Theory

References and Further Reading Belfrage, Sally. 1994. Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. New York: HarperCollins. Chernin, Kim. 1983. In My Mother’s House: A Daughter’s Story. New York: HarperCollins. Evans, Sara. 1979. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Vintage Books. Horowitz, Daniel. 1998. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kaplan, Judy, and Linn Shapiro. 1985. Red Diaper Babies: Children of the Left. Edited Transcripts of Conferences Held at the World Fellowship Center, Conway, NH. Somerville, MA: Red Diaper Productions. ———. 1998. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kimmage, Ann. 1996. An Un-American Childhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lieberman, Robbie. 1989. My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Meyers, Joan. 1999. “Secret Lives: The Making of Feminist Red Diaper Daughters.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University. Mickenberg, Julia. 2000. “Educating Dissent: Children’s Literature and the Left, 1935–1965.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota. Mishler, Paul. 1999. Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. Schrecker, Ellen. 1994. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press. Small, Sasha. 1937. Heroines. New York: Workers Library. Weigand, Kathleen A. 2001. Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Traditional Western developmental psychologies have emphasized a trajectory of growth for all people characterized by movement toward autonomy, separation, and independence. These models of growth and maturity are based on a dominant value system that privileges highly individualistic human beings. Self-sufficiency and autonomy are seen as desirable characteristics in North American Eurocentric culture. By these standards of development, girls and women are often viewed as lacking because they are seen as too dependent, too emotional, too needy, and not cognitively abstract and linear enough. Thus the psychology of “human beings,” based on values held for adult males, judges girls and women as “lacking.” New understandings of the psychology of girls and women, however, suggest that girls in American culture organize their sense of meaning and feelings of worth in relationship with others. Most theorists agree that gender differences arise from an interplay of biology and socialization and that there is considerable overlap between male and female psychological development. The core sex differences appear to revolve around the greater frequency of direct aggression and rough-and-tumble play among boys and greater attention to relationships among girls. And furthermore, it is likely that the primary gender differences that are reliably reported in social behavior occur in the context of exposure to different cultures in childhood: a boy culture and a girl culture. Boy cultures emphasize competition, power, and separation from others, whereas girl cultures emphasize cooperation, relationality, and nonaggression as gender ideals. More traditional models promoted the ideas that anatomy was destiny, that

Relational Theory penis envy heavily influenced a girl’s sense of worth, and that girls were destined to be objects to serve male subjectivity (Freud 1959; Beauvoir 1971). But there is abundant evidence that parents and teachers treat boys and girls differently, with boys accorded more status and encouragement for agency. Power differentials may be essential to the sex differences that have been observed and may also figure importantly in differences among girls and women in terms of race, class, sexual orientation, and other sources of “diversity.” Failure to acknowledge the white, middle-class, heterosexual bias of most gender theories leads to a major misrepresentation of everyone’s experience. Contemporary theories of girls’ development increasingly emphasize the centrality of relationships in girls’ lives and suggest that girls grow through and toward relationships (Miller 1976; Gilligan 1982; Jordan et al. 1991). These relational theories point to the inevitable interdependence that human beings experience but, in particular, note that girls in most Western cultures are socialized to create relationships that foster growth. Although all people undoubtedly yearn for connection and a sense of meaning in relationships, the emphasis on connecting is especially cogent for girls and women. In growth-fostering relationships, both people create a relationship that is characterized by mutual empowerment and mutual empathy and that encourages a sense of zest, clarity, mutual growth, productivity, and a desire for more connection. This model moves away from a psychology that overemphasizes autonomy. Mutual empathy is at the heart of growth-fostering relationships. All people are born with a certain readiness to

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develop empathic skills; in fact, there may be a neurological basis in the limbic system of the brain for the evolution of empathy (Maclean 1958). Modern Western cultures tend to encourage empathy in girls and discourage it somewhat in boys; boys are taught to control their emotions, whereas girls are taught to be responsive, tuned in, and “caring.” Individuals and relationships grow and flourish when there is an interactive, mutual empathy between people. People in such relationships gain confidence, feel good about themselves, and contribute to the well-being of the other person. This relational understanding of girls’ and women’s development is at odds with the prevailing models of development that emphasize an increasing capacity for separation, the development of the self, and the individual’s role as an autonomous and independent being. These more traditional models of development pertain to the valued socialization for boys in this culture: “the boy code” indicates that boys and men should be tough, autonomous, and abstract and linear rather than emotive and intuitive in their thinking; they most definitely should not show vulnerability or a need for connection (Pollack 1999). Thus the traditional sex-role prescriptions for boys suggest that boys need to separate firmly and early from mothers and fathers, control emotions that might make them vulnerable (sadness, fear, sensitivity, tenderness), and develop their aggressive potential. Control and independence have been celebrated as indicative of maturity for all people in Western culture (Broverman et al. 1970). The mature individual and the mature man are seen as possessing overlapping characteristics. When standards of maturity that were developed to explain male

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development are applied to women, however, women are seen as deficient. In Western cultures, little girls are encouraged to learn the empathic skills that are ultimately involved in mothering. They are supported in their expressions of care for others, allowed a wide range of emotional expression and awareness of their own vulnerability, and given permission to ask for help. Until adolescence, little girls can try out a variety of behaviors without regard to gender expectations (e.g., girls can be active, assertive, competitive, angry, instrumental and caring, or fearful). Young girls are often seen as sturdy, resilient, confident, and caring about connection. Using Carol Gilligan’s metaphor, they speak in clear, strong voices (Gilligan 1982). Girls are also relatively free to behave in ways that are stereotypically masculine; that is, they can be “tomboys,” athletic, assertive, and even competitive. Much of girls’ energy is devoted to making relationships that are characterized by dyadic pairings in which sharing, self-disclosure, and mutual support constitute the main “activity.” Gilligan (1982) reports research by Lever that suggests in play situations, when conflict arises, young girls stop the game to preserve the relationship, whereas boys head into the conflict with the aim of winning. Maccoby (1990) has also shown that in same-sex peer groups, boys tend to vie for positions of power and hierarchy and are directed toward activity rather than connection. Girls tend to talk, listen, and seek help and are motivated toward making good connection rather than establishing positions of power or advantage. Studies suggest that in schools, girls are shortchanged by systems that reward the more assertive and

sometimes impulsive style of many boys (Sadker and Sadker 1994). Boys get more “air time” because they raise their hands faster, blurt out answers, and exude a kind of confidence. Boys tend to attribute success to personal effort and failure to chance, whereas girls do the opposite (Dweck and Repucci 1973). But girls excel in school in the early years and show fewer behavioral problems than boys do. In the elementary years, boys are referred for mental health counseling at a much higher rate than girls. In most developmental theories, adolescence is seen as a time of great change, bridging the worlds of childhood and adulthood. It is commonly portrayed as a period of rapid and dramatic body changes brought about by hormonal shifts; psychologically, it is often seen as a tumultuous, conflict-filled period. Much that is written about adolescence suggests that the biological alterations and the appearance of overwhelming and peremptory sexual urges create havoc in the adolescent’s life. Until recently, the psychology of adolescence was often written as if what happened in adolescence for boys and girls had parallel antecedents and was experienced in similar fashion. An individualistic bias in most traditional developmental theories suggested that the teen years were the time for separation, for becoming one’s “own man” (Levinson 1978), for autonomy. Portrayals of parent-child relationships often referred to conflict, anguish, and the necessary separation between parent and child. Recently psychologists working on the development of girls and women have cast doubt on some of the traditional narratives about the development of adolescent girls. They have suggested that for

Relational Theory girls the “crisis of adolescence” is not so much caused by hormones, body changes, and the push to separate from family but may have more to do with the social context and debilitating messages girls begin to receive as they move into the adolescent world of heterosexual pairing, where socialization includes learning to be an object to another’s (male person’s) subject. During this time of transition, the hardiness, robustness, zest, and confidence of the prepubescent girl are often replaced by accommodating others, pretending not to know things, and keeping large aspects of self out of relationship (“staying out of relationship in order to stay in relationship,” Gilligan’s prototypical adolescent girl dilemma). Girls in adolescence learn that the rules of success in the world are made by men. They learn that they are to play a subordinate role, that they are not to be too angry, too bright, too big, or too outspoken. In the course of learning these “rules,” girls often lose their “voices” and sense of self-worth (Wellesley 1992). They lose a sense of authentic connection with themselves and with others. That is, they do not feel they can fully represent themselves in important relationships. In adolescence, girls are taught to close down on behaviors and emotions that are not sex-role appropriate. This process of disconnecting from certain aspects of their own experience may be similar to what happens to boys at about the age of three or four, when they are encouraged to disconnect from feelings suggesting vulnerability. A dilemma, and sometimes crisis, for girls in early adolescence occurs when the culture begins to give the message that girls must adopt prototypically feminine qualities. They learn that certain feelings, behaviors, and experiences are unacceptable for women in this cul-

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ture and that in order to be in relationships, notably with boys, they must begin to present themselves in certain ways and keep certain aspects of themselves out of the relationship. Just as boys at the age of three or four are pushed toward disconnecting from their feelings of fear, sadness, or desire for comfort from others, girls in adolescence begin to disconnect from their feelings of personal ambition, direct expressions of anger, and sexual initiative. They fear being “too bright,” “too assertive,” and “too strong.” They understand that this culture rewards power, individual achievement, independence, assertiveness, and abstract intelligence, and they learn that these are all qualities that are thought to be appropriate for boys but not girls. In adolescence these two modes of being tend to converge and collide. That is, boys socialized to be in control, instrumental, nonemotional, rational, and independent come into more intimate contact with girls who are taught to be loving, caring, and empathic. Furthermore, heterosexual intercourse is a rite of passage to manhood in our culture (where there are few rituals marking the movement from boyhood to manhood), and the girl sometimes gets objectified in the boy’s developmental step. In general, girls in adolescence struggle with this sense of objectification. Advertising and the media tend to capitalize on the female as object, and girls often learn to objectify their own bodies, trying to achieve impossible standards of thinness, beauty, and receptivity to males. The differences that show up in heterosexual dating relationships for boys and girls also continue to be manifest in same-sex groups. Thus groups of boys and men tend to organize around patterns of

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dominance and hierarchy. Girls and women tend to engage in self-disclosure, establishing bonds of closeness through sharing and helping one another. Much of this research on the loss of voice in adolescent girls has been carried out on white, middle-class girls, but girls of color and girls from different classes may experience the passage of adolescence differently: the study by the American Association of University Women and Wellesley College that showed that white girls experience a dramatic drop in self-esteem in early adolescence failed to find such a shift for African American girls (Wellesley 1992). Tracy Robinson and Janie Ward have suggested that African American girls face particular challenges in adolescence that do threaten their belief in themselves. These authors suggest several pathways for the “development of a belief in self far greater than anyone’s disbelief” (1991). These include the capacity for critical thinking vis-à-vis the values of the dominant culture. The relational model does not suggest that gender differences are essential, biological, or inborn. Rather, there is a clear emphasis on context and the importance of learning. Power issues shape gender differences, as well as race, sexual orientation, class, and so forth. In order to be resilient and maintain their authenticity, all girls must develop the capacity for “resistance” that Robinson and Ward delineated for African American girls. Girls and women from the dominant white, middle-class culture have much to learn from girls and women who are marginalized about the development of courage, resistance, and resilience. Judith V. Jordan

See also Communication; Domesticity; Emotions; Girl Power; Girls’ Culture; Psychotherapy; Radical Feminism; Riot Grrrls References and Further Reading American Association of University Women. 1992. The AAUW Report: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls. Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The Second Sex. 1971. Reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Broverman, I., D. Broverman, F. Clarkson, P. Rosenkrantz, and S. Vogel. 1970. “Sex-role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgments of Mental Health.” Journal of Consulting and Counseling Psychology 43: 1–7. Comas-Diaz, L., and B. Greene, eds. 1994. Women of Color: Integrating Ethnic and Gender Identities in Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press. Dweck, C., and N. Repucci. 1973. “Learned Helplessness and Reinforcement Responsibility in Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 25: 1090–1116. Freud, Sigmund. 1925. “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes.” Pp. 252–272 in The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud. Edited by J. Strachey; translated by J. Riviere. Vol. 5. 1959. Reprint, New York: Basic Books. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greene, B. 1990. “Sturdy Bridges: The Role of African American Mothers in the Socialization of African American Children.” Women and Therapy: Motherhood, Feminist Perspectives 10: 205–225. Hoffman, M. 1997. “Sex Differences in Empathy and Related Behaviors. Psychological Bulletin 84, no. 4: 712–722. Jordan, Judith. 1987. “Clarity in Connection: Empathic Knowing, Desire and Sexuality.” Work in Progress no. 29. Wellesley, MA: Stone Center Work in Progress Series. Jordan, Judith, Alexandra Kaplan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene Stiver, and Janet

Riot Grrrls Surrey. 1991. Women’s Growth in Connection. New York: Guilford Publications. Levinson, D. 1978. The Seasons of a Man’s Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Maccoby, E. 1990. “Gender and Relationships: A Developmental Account.” American Psychologist: 513–520. ———. 1998. The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maclean, P. 1958. “The Limbic System with Respect to Self-preservation and the Preservation of the Species.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 127: 1–11. Miller, Jean Baker. 1976. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon Press. Pollack, William. 1999. Real Boys. New York: Owl Books. Robinson, T., and J. Ward. 1991. “A Belief in Self Far Greater Than Anyone’s Disbelief: Cultivating Resistance among African American Female Adolescents.” Women and Therapy: 81–103. Sadker, M., and D. Sadker. 1994. Failing at Fairness. New York: Charles Scribner.

Riot Grrrls Riot grrrl is an underground feminist youth movement committed to empowering girls through self-expression and to combating sexism, homophobia, and misogyny. Initially coined in 1991 by members of the female punk music communities in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, D.C., riot grrrls are a call to action or to “Revolution Girl-Style Now!” in the words of their most wellknown rallying cry. Including girls and women from all over the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere, riot grrrls resist being defined by one particular code of beliefs and, in fact, proclaim that “every girl is a riot grrrl.” They do share

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some common traits, however: the aspiration to create all-female spaces where girls can express themselves and their experiences; a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos in which girls and women are responsible for their own modes of production, both musically and editorially; the call to embrace a pro-female, proactive stance; and the desire to oppose, even playfully mislead, members of the media and academe who would try to define and commodify them as the newest and hippest example of a vibrant youth culture. Although initially framed within the context of the underground music “scene” (as opposed to the more mainstream and capitalist music “industry”), riot grrrl quickly spread well beyond its musical roots to create a vibrant “zine” and World Wide Web–based movement, complete with local meetings and grassroots organizing to end ageism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and, especially, physical and emotional violence against women and girls. Various accounts claim that riot grrrl was born in 1991 when members from the bands Bratmobile and Bikini Kill sought to challenge the sexism of the underground music scene and empower girls and women to do the same. Kathleen Hanna, singer for Bikini Kill, claims that the phrase riot grrrl was coined when a musician friend of hers, Jean Smith, commented on the 1991 Mount Pleasant riots in Washington, D.C., by saying, “we need a girl riot too.” According to Hanna, members of the band Bratmobile then decided that they were going to start a fanzine called “Riot Grrrl” (Leonard 1998, 103). The idea that girls are angry about the treatment they receive in their daily lives, rebellious, and ready to do something about it

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quickly caught on to create a vast riot grrrl network. The message, forwarded through song lyrics, musical production and performance, and various manifestos included in the numerous riot grrrl zines, spoke to girls from Alabama to Alaska and from London to Dyfed, Wales. Contrary to the opinions of many music critics, who define riot grrrl solely in aesthetic terms as a subgenre of punk music—as “women in punk”—the movement from its inception was something much more far-reaching than a group of musicians with a penchant for a certain musical style. Riot grrrls also wanted self-definition through the written word and promoted a female-centered version of punk’s DIY politics. For riot grrrls, DIY is an attempt to short-circuit capitalist, exploitative, and frequently male-identified modes of production while also claiming the authority of self-definition. Riot grrrls exemplify this ethos on many different fronts— from women-run record labels and untraditionally structured musical performances to assertive bodily styles that attempt to disrupt traditional notions of “fashion” and “femininity.” In these ways riot grrrls can be placed in a historical trajectory not just with punk but also with another group from the 1970s: second-wave feminists and, specifically, lesbian separatists who developed alternative and pro-woman modes of living, both personally (outside heterosexual marriage) and professionally (through their own women-run businesses). So even as DIY as a political statement does align riot grrrls with members of the punk movement, riot grrrl’s version of DIY has the added twist of gender awareness. Punk rockers used thrift store fashions, body piercing, and unconventional haircuts in an overt attempt to define

themselves over and against a dominant adult culture that ignored their particular needs and concerns. Similarly, in the early 1990s many riot grrrls adopted overtly feminine modes of dress but then used markers to write derogatory words like “whore” on their arms or stomachs, a gesture that pointed directly to the ways in which femininity is often an oppressive social construction. By using articles of clothing from mainstream sources and then altering them in specific ways, riot grrrls were able to invest them with new and subversively gendered meanings. Also like the punks, riot grrrl is a youth movement—but unlike the punks who were typically quite suspicious of girls, riot grrrl is an overtly female youth movement. As the first youth culture to claim the word girl as a political identity and therefore the first to claim that adolescent girls’ subjectivities are different from women’s, riot grrrls are interested in exposing the fact that adolescent “girlhood” today brings with it more media objectification and consumer overload and perhaps even more physical and emotional violence than in previous generations. Riot grrrls are highly self-conscious of the negative forces affecting girls, and they want to talk about them in order to fight them. In other words, even as riot grrrl is like punk in that it is partially about subversive “style,” it has more to do with political activism. Even though many riot grrrl musicians do share the loud, hard, and fast musical style associated with punk, the aggressive in-your-face attitude of its performers, and a similar desire to do-it-yourself, their message is their mission, and that message has everything to do with empowerment for girls. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the DIY approach for riot grrrls can be

Riot Grrrls seen in their complicated network of “zines,” or independent, self-published texts that are written informally, produced inexpensively, and then distributed in a bartering or not-for-profit system to other grrrls via mailing lists. With names like Fat Girl, Hotskirt!, Girl Luv, and Housewife Turned Assassin, zines possess several qualities that make them a particularly powerful medium for youth grassroots activism. First, because zines are usually handwritten or handdrawn, photocopied, and mailed, they are inexpensive to produce and require very little technological savvy, characteristics that make them widely accessible to young girls without large financial resources as well as those in relatively isolated rural communities. Second, they represent the primary mode of communication within riot grrrl networks, communities dispersed from Leeds to Little Rock to Los Angeles. As a result, zines are generally intimate in tone and wideranging in topic. They offer girls the opportunity to discuss anything that concerns them: hobbies, music, books, film, or more seriously, racism, queer politics, abuse, rape, and other personal traumas. Third and most important, zines form a kind of conversation among girls in that the writers consistently invite comment and feedback from the others in the network; in fact, they expect it. As the Riot Grrrl Press Catalogue puts it, “I want to encourage people not to just order zines like they were any commodity but to write to anyone whose zine you feel inspired by or have a critique of. It would truly bumm [sic] me out if this turned into a commodification of ‘girl zines’ where if you have the cash you can have access to whatever you want” (Leonard 1998, 108). Accordingly, zines are more about encouraging dialogue than self-pro-

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motion. And finally, the act of producing their own texts allows riot grrrls a certain amount of control over their own representation. Teens are usually targeted as consumers who will willingly buy into the latest trend as a means to form an identity for themselves, but zines allow girls to become producers in the most basic sense and thus achieve a kind of cultural agency. This sense of agency translates to the riot grrrl music scene as well. In early riot grrrl musical performances, like those in the Bikini Kill–Huggy Bear 1993 joint tour, musicians attempted to dismantle the male domination of the physical concert space. At the beginning of shows they passed out flyers asking the girls in the audience to move to the “mosh pit,” or the space in front of the stage. Well aware that girls and women avoid the pit for fear of violent slam dancing or harassment by male concertgoers, the flyers made clear the bands’ intention of creating a safe space for girls when they wrote: “[We] really want to look at female faces while [we] perform. [We] want HER to know that she is included in this show, that what we are doing is for her” (Bikini Kill–Huggy Bear Flyer, quoted in Leonard 1997, 234). In addition to rearranging the gig space, riot grrrl performers broke down other concert conventions based on unequal power relations when they handed the microphone to girls at the front of the stage and asked them to voice their opinions or when they engaged in conversations with hecklers from the audience. Again, these shows put a premium on dialogue and debate instead of mere passive viewing. This desire to create safe spaces—both physically and editorially—where girls can articulate their own version of reality drives the riot grrrl community. Although

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some have critiqued the movement for its white, middle-class orientation, others have praised it for its earnest desire to understand, tolerate, and make room for difference. Media and academic accounts aside, however, it is clear that those involved in the riot grrrl community prefer to remain part of an underground movement. They are highly critical and suspicious of the media accounts describing their network and, in fact, went so far as to issue a press blackout in 1993. Riot grrrls are well aware that in defining them, even in an encyclopedic entry, writers run the risk of containing their dynamism. As one group of zine writers put it: “We are aware of the media . . . that crush anything it [sic] discovers. . . . Seeing all that, we use their media whilst we sneakily construct girl lines of communication” (Leonard 1997, 245). Kimberley Roberts See also Girl Power; Girls’ Culture; Punk Rock; Relational Theory; Zines References and Further Reading Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. 1994. “ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’: Riot Grrrls, Revolution, and Independent Rock.” Pp. 250–274 in Microphone Fiends. Edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 1997. “The Missing Links: Riot Grrrl—Feminism— Lesbian Culture.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London: Routledge. ———. 1998a. “ ‘Don’t Need You’: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Riot Grrrl Perspective.” Pp. 148–188 in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Edited by Jonathan S. Epstein. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 1998b. “Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture.” Pp. 285–310 in Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Edited by

Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press. Leonard, Marion. 1997. “‘Rebel Girl, You Are the Queen of My World’: Feminism, ‘Subculture’ and Grrrl Power.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. “Paper Planes: Travelling the New Grrrl Geographies.” In Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. Edited by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge. Rosenberg, Jessica, and Gitana Garofalo. 1998. “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from Within.” Signs 23, no. 3: 809–842. Wald, Gayle. 1997. “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth.” Signs 23, no. 3: 585–610.

Rural Girls Although they are a demographic constant, rural girls are infrequently part of any historical narratives except as casual beneficiaries of institutional services designed primarily for their brothers or parents. The dearth of literature makes defining the category a historian’s first challenge. For the purpose of this entry, rural girls will mean twentieth-century girls whose primary residence was a farm. The term rural girls presumes a distinctive context for girlhood, and as long as rural residence remained normative, it would be difficult to isolate significant elements of the experience or to differentiate between small-town residents and girls who were members of farm households. Two other groups whose experiences, at least temporarily, had common elements with the rural girls were Native American girls sent to off-reservation boarding schools and orphans put out for adoption into farm families. These girls are discussed in other entries. Even with this narrowing, generalizations about rural girls must be formulated

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Farm girls carry supplies on a horse-drawn wagon, in the foothills of the Ozarks, Arkansas. (Library of Congress)

cautiously. Regional variations were undoubtedly more significant for farm girls than for small-town and urban girls throughout most of the twentieth century. Crops, for example, establish work patterns, each having a logic of its own. Beyond that, regional demographic characteristics shaped daily life and social contexts. Race and ethnicity are obvious variables. Family composition, birth order, and economic cycles also influenced the content of rural girls’ daily lives. For twentieth-century girls, the dominant regional settlement pattern must also have mattered. In states like Rhode Island with more than 80 percent urban settlement by 1880, the experience would have been more distinctive than in Maine, Vermont, North and South

Dakota, West Virginia, or Mississippi, which remained more than 50 percent rural in the 1980 census. Rural girls participated in a family economy in which all labor was integral to the farm and each member’s contributions had real economic value. Class, commodity specializations, and family composition all influenced girls’ tasks within the family enterprise. For young girls, most of whom started “helping out” at about the age of five, tasks easily crossed gender lines. As age and strength made them capable of more skilled chores, the work assignments gradually became more differentiated. Girls worked with their brothers in the garden and fields but also became responsible for chores in the henhouse and garden. Most simultaneously assisted with baking,

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caring for younger siblings, cleaning and filling lamps, sewing, and housecleaning. After the age of twelve, midwestern girls added canning and churning to their responsibilities, but did fieldwork only when extra hands were needed. Girls without brothers who could assist, however, often remained involved in field labor. The labor intensity of the family crops was an important factor in the amount of fieldwork expected of girls. Tobacco demanded more hands; thus daughters remained heavily involved. For hybrid corn crops, tassels had to be removed from all female stocks to ensure proper cross-pollination. This labor-intensive process, which needed to be completed in a two-week window, looked like fun to an Iowa farmer’s young daughters in the early 1940s as they watched the teens hired from a nearby town. By the time they reached the requisite 5 feet, 2 inches and twelve years of age, the process lost some of its magic in the afternoon sun, but they remained members of the crew nonetheless. Girls who lived on wheat farms rarely did fieldwork because most tasks were mechanized. Instead, they worked with the livestock. Harvesting and threshing grain were tasks normally accomplished by men, at least until combines eliminated the need for a large crew of neighbors or hired hands to assist with the process. However, girls were involved in feeding the fieldworkers. One remembered looking forward to threshing so she could “wait on tables.” Even after the automobile shortened the travel time for neighbors and only two meals needed to be served during threshing, noon dinner and an afternoon lunch, much of the women’s days went to cooking. Younger girls refilled bread and butter plates in the

kitchen, and older daughters brought serving dishes and iced tea and lemonade refills to the eating area. By the time the women and girls ate their own dinners and finished the dishes, it was time to carry afternoon lunch to the field. Girls from less prosperous farms frequently turned to off-farm wage work as their contribution to the economically interdependent family unit. Housework, teaching, clerical jobs, nursing, and cannery work all provided monetary resources for farm family survival. This became a more common experience as commercial agriculture disrupted traditional work patterns. In 1939 the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that farm families accounted for more than 50 percent of the annual increase in working population. The juxtaposition resulted in an increase in subsistence agriculture in locations that permitted combining farm and nonfarm work. In this configuration, other family members joined rural daughters in contributing off-farm earnings to the family economy. Rural girls’ school experiences varied widely, but there are some identifiable national patterns. Most attended oneroom schoolhouses staffed by female teachers for grades one through eight. High school attendance required boarding or being able to get to the nearest town each day. Normal schools provided training for girls who wanted to become teachers. Many schools, especially in the early 1900s, were staffed by young women who needed to complete their preparation during summer school sessions. State licensing requirements gradually mandated normal school certificates or four-year degrees prior to appointment. How much schooling rural girls received depended primarily on family labor patterns, geographic location,

Rural Girls and race. Like their urban counterparts, however, girls seem to have been both more likely to attend school and to be kept home for family emergencies than their brothers. For those able to attend, the length of the school year depended on weather and local families’ needs for help with crops. In general, rural girls experienced shorter school years than urban students. This was particularly true in Appalachia and the South. Kentucky had no public schools in the mountains until 1918. Travel was difficult, and one young woman who came as the first teacher in the area found that the creek beds flooded each January. Because there were no other roads, school could not resume until these routes became passable. In North Carolina, the rural school year lasted less than six months until 1919, when legislation specified a 120-day minimum. Mississippi, the last state to do so, had passed its first compulsory school attendance law just the year before. In contrast, communities in the Midwest and West tended to establish accessible elementary schools quickly, often due to laws requiring that new schools be provided when a threshold number of students lived outside a specified radius of an existing facility. Except for anecdotal evidence from girls’ diaries and teachers’ memoirs, readily accessible contemporary studies of early-twentieth-century rural schools primarily documented their perceived inadequacies. The country life movement, a loose coalition of politicians and social service professionals that was particularly active in the Midwest from 1900 until 1920, decried the “absolute inadequacy” of rural schools in 1915. Much as they insisted that larger, scientific farms were more efficient, the

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reformers promoted school consolidation. They wanted several one-room school districts merged and the area served by a larger, graded school. Parents resisted, and after 1920 the movement subsided, with most rural children still attending local one-room or small graded schools until a renewed consolidation movement emerged in the 1950s. Some reformers also wanted to make materials more relevant to rural youngsters’ lives. Textbooks were rewritten so that math problems, for example, used crop-related details. One wonders if the changes made much difference to rural girls, whose activities and interests were still missing from assignments. The exception to this pattern was introduction of home economics courses as vocational education for girls after passage of the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917. Overlooking the network of socializing agencies that provided education for rural youth within the context of family life, reformers visualized the modern school as a centralized institution with total responsibility for preparing competent rural adults. In isolated areas the school building often served as the center of community life as well as a classroom. In more accessible and prosperous areas, however, it was one of several existing institutions, and parents frequently resisted educators’ expanded view of their role. Churches, subjected to similar recommendations that they consolidate for economic and practical reasons, also played a formal role in communities. Unfortunately, here again, written sources are primarily sociological studies of the “rural problems” or suggested denominational responses written for ministers. Except in areas where isolation precluded any institutions beyond family and

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neighborhood networks, churches were often in place before schools were built and provided a multipurpose gathering place for communities. Consistent with the organization of daily life, rural churches were family-centered institutions. After the 1940s ministerial associations encouraged some emphasis on providing recreational opportunities for youth, particularly for young men. Reform-minded adults hoped to counteract the attractions of urban life and secular amusements. Though church leaders focused on boys, the initiative provided new peer-group social opportunities for some rural girls. Recreation also combined families and strengthened community networks. Early in the 1900s, farm families in one Oregon community came to town to dance at the Grange Hall every other Saturday night. County and state fairs linked recreation and work as girls were encouraged to prepare contest entries. The excitement of these annual outings, particularly to the state fair, then became part of girls’ play as they recreated rides and “showed” their cats and dogs for siblings and local playmates. Innovations in transportation and technology increasingly brought farm families in contact with nearby towns or urban areas and national affairs. Between 1900 and 1940, the first purchases of midwestern households were an automobile and a telephone. Although much has been written about the mobility and independence automobiles afforded youth, neither purchase automatically altered girls’ familycentered patterns of work and recreation. In 1988 Joanne Meusburger recalled family vacations as the primary benefit of their beloved “Old Mere.” Rural electrification proceeded unevenly, even after adoption of the Rural Electrification Act (1936).

Although only 30 percent of southern tenant family households contained radios in 1940, the U.S. Housing Census revealed that nationwide almost three-fourths of U.S. farm owners and almost half of tenant families nationwide owned one. Telephones came much more slowly: only 29 percent of farm families nationwide had them in 1940. Many girls’ lives remained bounded by the local community. Rural girls had other routes to participation in activities that created contacts beyond the family circle. The Girl Scouts of America created a “Lone Scout” program for those who lived in isolated areas. Until 1926 this membership category never had more than 103 registrants; but after an article appeared in the March issue of The Farmer’s Wife, almost 6,000 girls applied. As one twelve-year-old Ohio girl wrote, “I have no brothers or sisters. . . . I get lonesome.” Letters, cards, and booklets sent from the Lone Scout Bureau, designed to give farm girls a sense of companionship with others, apparently succeeded. One girl wrote that belonging had given her “a new friend.” Others sent away for membership in the Junior Audubon Society. Technology and the consumer culture both influenced rural girls’ lives, but neither force quickly altered consumption practices or removed recreation from the family setting. Although much has changed about growing up female on a farm, which is strikingly epitomized in the U.S. government’s decision to eliminate discrete categories for nonfarm rural and farm residents within the census, it remains a distinctive experience. Children across the country currently attend 400 oneroom rural schools. Agricultural labor remains a categorical exemption from child labor laws, and girls still do fieldwork on southern family tobacco farms.

Rural Girls Even when farmers’ daughters have automobiles of their own, many retain family and community as their primary units of identification. Kathleen C. Hilton See also Education of Girls; 4-H; Home Economics Education; Mennonite Girls; Puritan Girls References and Further Reading Bremner, Robert A., et al., eds. 1971. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Danbom, David B. 1979. “Rural Education Reform and the Country Life Movement, 1900–1920.” Agricultural History 53, no. 2: 462–474. Hagood, Margaret J. 1939. Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hargreaves, Mary W. M. 1979. “Rural Education on the Northern Plains

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Frontier.” Journal of the West 18, no. 4: 25–32. Inscoe, John C. 1988. “Memories of a Presbyterian Mission Worker: An Interview with Rubie Ray Cunningham.” Appalachian Journal 15, no. 2: 144–160. Lindstrom, David Edgar. 1946. Rural Life and the Church. Champaign, IL: Garrard Press. Martin, William C. 1948. The Church in the Rural Community. New York: Board of Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Church. Meusburger, Joanne. 1988. “Farm Girl.” The Palimpsest 69, no. 1: 34–48. Neth, Mary. 1995. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. “One-Room Schoolhouses in the United States.” http://www.laca.org/ Johnstown/Cornell/states.html. Accessed July 29, 2000.

S Samplers

succession of accomplished samplers, ornamenting her cloth with borders, figures, pictures of houses or flora and fauna, and lines of poetry, or she could move on to other sampler variants. The genealogical sampler incorporated names and life dates of family members. This type of sampler might begin as a wedding sampler that the bride would then add to as children were born and relatives died. The map sampler depicted the continents and nations of the world in embroidered outline, and the globe sampler did the same in three dimensions as a stuffed spherical model of the earth. Akin to the needlework mourning picture, the mourning sampler featured a suitable design and verse in memory of a departed loved one. As an early form of values education in America, sampler verse promoted ideals of femininity of the period: virtue, industry, piety, friendship, and a humble awareness of human mortality. Samplers sometimes included the girl’s name and the date she worked on her sampler and occasionally her birth date, the town where she lived, or even her teacher’s name. In addition to marking items for identification purposes, the sampler maker would use her embroidery skills throughout her life to ornament clothing and household textiles. Her sampler also served as a model of stitches she might refer to in the future. Thousands of samplers were pro-

The earliest European settlers brought with them the girlhood tradition of sampler making, that is, exercising skills in embroidery by decorating a piece of cloth with rows of letters and numbers, pictures, and edifying verses. Sewing samplers was a common feature of girlhood education but began to decline in popularity in the 1840s. Whether under the instruction of a private sewing teacher or as part of other various forms of private and public education, a girl sewed her sampler to gain a repertoire of embroidery stitches and designs that would have a practical use when she became a homemaker. A girl as young as six years old began her first sampler on a small rectangle of cloth, most often using silk thread on linen fabric to form alphabets and rows of numbers. This would create a “marking sampler,” primarily composed of one stitch: the marking stitch, now more commonly known as the “cross-stitch,” one tiny “X” sewn beside another to form lines and curves. The term marking sampler suggests one application of a girl’s embroidery: to mark valuable household linen and family garments with identifying letters, numbers, or symbols. Through age fourteen or fifteen, as her skills increased, a girl moved on to create larger and more complex samplers. Under her teacher’s tutelage, she might complete a

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Mothers often had their daughters make samplers before they were allowed to participate in a quilting bee such as this one in colonial times. (Library of Congress)

duced by girls throughout America, and the custom moved westward with settlement, remaining popular well into the nineteenth century. However, sampler making was most common in the eastern states. Though practical in their original purpose, samplers eventually became decorative objects to be displayed in the family home. After its decline as a teaching medium for budding homemakers, sampler making continued through the nineteenth century, though never with the enormous popularity it had until 1850. Today adult women continue to sew samplers as ornamental handiwork; many of their designs derive from the samplers of early America.

The Sampler’s History Although sampler makers in America developed distinctive styles, the sampler itself had a long history before its arrival in the New World. Probably developing in the Middle Ages in Europe, samplers were well established by the 1500s, and Shakespeare mentioned them in his plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Titus Andronicus. Although sampler making thrived in several European countries, the traditions in Great Britain, Holland, and Germany were the most influential in America (Harbeson 1938, 43). As in America, the original purpose of the sampler in Europe was practical: to practice embroidery skills and to prepare a refer-

Samplers ence catalogue of stitches. In fact, the earliest European samplers merely featured rows of blocks or horizontal stripes, each exemplifying a different stitch. These were sewn upon a long, narrow rectangle of cloth, the width limited by the narrow looms of the period. As a girl gained skill, she added new examples of stitches (hence the name sampler). She would then store the cloth until she needed to consult it for future projects. This process would continue through her adulthood. The earliest extant American sampler is sewn on such a long narrow strip of cloth. Now on display in Plymouth, Massachusetts, it was embroidered by Loara Standish (1633–1656), daughter of Miles Standish, the well-known member of the Plymouth colony. Probably made about 1643–1646, Loara’s handiwork shows us that when the sampler came to America it had become more complex in design and, as hers does, often included a verse. As time passed, American samplers continued to evolve, acquiring a short, squarer shape; employing new preferences in thread colors; and using a finer woven cloth and new designs. Sampler Making as a Girlhood “Accomplishment” Sampler making was considered to be one of the girlhood “graces” or “accomplishments,” along with drawing; painting on glass or on ladies’ fans; making pictures out of shells, hair, wax, feathers, or quills; “japanning” (like present-day decoupage); performing a variety of other needlework skills; practicing elocution; and singing, playing musical instruments, and dancing. This curriculum might be pursued after a short, early period of study in the rudiments of reading, writing, and “ciphering.”

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From the earliest settlement period, education of the young took many forms. Mothers often gave children their earliest lessons, and local clergymen provided some instruction. Women took in pupils for the community, creating what were called “dame schools,” “penny schools,” or “reading schools” that offered the basics of literacy and arithmetic. Here a girl might receive instruction in sewing. Girls were often taught the feminine “accomplishments” by private teachers, women who advertised their services to teach girls sewing or other things that were thought to add polish to a girl’s education. There are numerous extant advertisements of such teachers, and the samplers themselves tell us about these schools and their instructors. Samplers made in a certain time and place sometimes include the teacher’s name and use the same verses or design features, showing us that the teacher’s influence was strong in determining the sampler’s content. We can also see by the quality of the girls’ handiwork and, by the improvement in successive pieces by the same girl, that some instruction must have been excellent. There were a few pattern books available for inspiration, but clearly each teacher developed her own favorites in design, verse, and style. The evidence of these sewing schools also suggests the social element that sampler making provided for young girls. Not uncommonly, sisters, cousins, and friends attended these schools together. Even in the early settlement period, as communities grew, schooling was an official concern. For example, Nieuw Netherland, now New York, made provision for public schooling in the 1660s, and in 1647 Massachusetts required that schools be established in communities of

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fifty families or more. Of course, the development of regular educational institutions took time. Some families were able to hire private tutors, which was especially suitable for prosperous families who lived far from town, such as those who lived on the plantations of the South. In the eighteenth century, girls’ boarding schools became common, but by whatever means a girl’s education was received, it was widely true throughout this era that after her early education in the rudiments, a girl’s education took a different direction from a boy’s. The “graces” a girl went on to learn were intended to bring charm, beauty, taste, and refinement to her character and her home. Of course, embroidery was of practical use, too. As an adornment it was widely used on quilts and coverlets, bedhangings, tablecloths, sheets and pillowcases, purses and pinholders, as well as on garments for all members of the family— from baby’s christening gown and cap to Mama’s best dresses, Papa’s waistcoat, and Grandmother’s shawl. The marking of family linen was no trifle either. A family’s linen was costly and was given a prominent place in wills and estate inventories. The marking of it served to identify ownership and to record the extent of the collection and the origin and acquisition of each piece. Yet even in the eighteenth century, there was criticism of the lack of academic content in girlhood education, with its emphasis on handicrafts rather than intellectual development. It should not be forgotten, though, that sampler making encouraged patience, discipline, self-confidence, and aesthetic sensitivity. Remaining samplers from this period are often stunning specimens of needlework, precision creations that must have demanded care and concentration from a

young girl to a degree that amazes people living today. A Source of Wisdom Like the emphasis on the “graces” in girlhood education, the verses girls inscribed on their samplers give us insight into what were thought to be the ideals of femininity. Since samplers made by several girls in a teacher’s school sometimes featured the same verses, we know that teachers influenced the choice of poetry. Other evidence tells us that parents sometimes chose the verses, and certainly girls themselves had their influence. Of those samplers that include poetry or mottoes, universally the verses of this period encourage aspects of ethical personal conduct and belief. Of all qualities they promote, the lines a young seamstress would learn as she sewed most frequently spoke of virtue: See here the Youth by Wisdom led The paths of life securely tread The dangerous lures of folly shun And virtue’s course serenely run.

In pursuit of girlhood virtue, verses warned against vanity and worldly temptations. “Favor is deceitful and Beauty is vain,” they reminded these girls. “The joys of earth” should be spurned, for “youth and beauty fade away.” Time is ever flying, they counseled, and “life is like a summer’s day,” quickly passing by. Sampler poetry encouraged humility, diligence, and piety. Parents were duly honored, and the “guiding hand of Parent fondness” was welcomed because it “prunes every fault and every worth improves.” Reverence for God was a girl’s first concern: “Duty, Fear and Love / We owe to God Above,” a common motto proclaimed. The poem Loara Stan-

Samplers dish inscribed on her seventeenth-century sampler incorporates many of these concepts: Lord, guide my Heart that I may do thy will And fill my hands with such convenient skill As will conduce to Virtue void of shame, And I will give the Glory to thy Name.

The patience, care, and usefulness this needlework encouraged and the virtues its verses promoted reflect the role of womanhood up until about the 1840s. In this world, infant mortality was high and life expectancy was low; women were economically and legally dependent on fathers and husbands; and a woman’s role as a “domestic being,” to use Abigail Adams’s famous phrase, included educating children, nursing the sick, attending births and keeping deathbed vigils, performing laborious household chores, assisting in a family business or farm, raising large families, and providing strength and guidance in a precarious, difficult world. Virtue, duty, faith, friendship, usefulness—these were the qualities a girl would need to survive. The sampler “craze” of an earlier era invites provocative questions about our own preparation of girls for womanhood and about the ethical framework accompanying that preparation. The accomplishment of these young seamstresses has also had an effect on modern needlework and on the practice and study of needlework in art and textile programs in colleges in many parts of the world (Edwards 1983, 18–20). Samplers by American girls through the midnineteenth century are a resource in the study of needlework and provide an

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authoritative model of excellence in its development. Girls and Their Samplers The many historic American samplers in museums, historical and preservation society collections, private collections, and homes of sampler makers’ descendants testify to the popularity of sampler making in the past. The large number of surviving samplers suggests, as well, the value placed on them by the individuals, families, and communities preserving them. These collections also show us that the girls who made these samplers valued them. Many a museum donation or heirloom sampler is accompanied by a note from the maker or testimony passed down from descendants stating that this was a treasured souvenir of the maker’s childhood. Diaries and memoirs recall the pride girls took in their samplers and the admiration they brought from others (Swan 1977, 52–53). Of course, there must have been girls who rebelled at the long, painstaking labor of needlework, girls who longed to be at play or engaged in another favorite pleasure. One such disgruntled little girl sewed her dismay right on her sampler with these words: “Patty Poke did this and she hated every stitch she did in it. She loves to read much more” (Bolton and Coe 1973, 96). Yet most evidence shows that girls took pride in their samplers. Sampler makers passed down their samplers in their wills, often leaving them to a favorite child or grandchild. These women regarded their girlhood embroidery as a precious accomplishment. By the late seventeenth century, families began to frame their daughters’ samplers for display, as the markings and fade patterns show. Increasingly, girls placed their own names in the embroidery, and sometimes

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their verses included their names, especially in this popular pattern: “Betsy Browne is my name / And with my needle I wrought the same.” To this was usually added the humble declaration: “And if my skill had been better / I would have mended every letter.” Another common name pattern cites the child’s home and declares her faith: “Hannah Wilcox is my name / New England is my nation / Springfield is my dwelling place / And Christ is my salvation.” The most touching evidence of a girl’s relationship to her needlework lies in those samplers that show she knew that what she created with her needle would outlive her. Many a sampler proclaims, with varying lines, the idea that “the twining texture of this thread / Will speak of me when I am dead” and asks us to “look at this and think of me / When I am quite forgotten.” The Sampler’s Decline Several factors led to the decline of girlhood sampler making. In the 1840s indelible ink was developed, which provided a simpler means of marking garments and linen. In that same decade Elias Howe patented his first sewing machine, and the invention was so popular that Howe was hard-pressed to protect his patent. The key factor, though, in the decline of this craft lay in the movement to reform education for girls. The year 1825 saw the opening of the first public high schools for girls, one in Boston and one in New York. Advocates urged that girls be prepared for adulthood by studying more academic curricula. Although sampler making declined both in popularity and artistry throughout the nineteenth century, it continues to this day, but as a pastime for women rather than girls. Yet the sampler’s heyday as a girlhood enterprise

has left us with a vision of American girlhood and femininity important in the history of American culture. Luise van Keuren See also Arts and Crafts; Domesticity; Education of Girls; Girls’ Culture; Literacy References and Further Reading Bolton, Ethel S., and Eva J. Coe. 1921. American Samplers. 1973. Reprint, New York: Weathervane. Edmonds, Mary Jaene. 1991. Samplers and Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700–1850. New York: Rizzoli. Edwards, Joan. 1983. Sampler-making, 1540–1940. Surrey, UK: Bayford Books. Harbeson, Georgiana. 1938. American Needlework. New York: Bonanza Books. Ring, Betty. 1993. Girlhood Embroidery, American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework, 1650–1850. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Swan, Susan Burrows. 1977. Plain and Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700–1850. New York: Routledge.

Saturday Evening Girls The Saturday Evening Girls’ (SEG) Club was established in 1899 through the combined efforts of two working women, Edith Guerrier, a librarian, and Edith Brown, an artist, and their upper-class patron, Helen Osborne Storrow. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for the intellectual advancement of young immigrant women and girls, they conceived of a library club program to provide educational, cultural, economic, and social resources for the growing numbers of poor young Jewish and Italian girls and women living in the North End of Boston. Initially held on Saturday evenings for young women who worked dur-

Saturday Evening Girls ing the week, this club soon expanded into eight library clubs, identified by the days of the week on which they met, each day holding meetings for girls and young women of different age groups. At their peak in the mid-1910s, the clubs supported approximately 250 members, published a newspaper called the S.E.G. News, operated the Paul Revere Pottery, and struggled to improve their community and their own lives. For almost twenty years the library clubs offered girls a refuge and an alternative to work, domestic, and familial responsibilities. It was Edith Guerrier’s early frustration with the continual neglect of girls’ and women’s intellectual and social lives that resulted in her establishing the Saturday Evening Girls’ Club. Guerrier originally began work in the day nursery at North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS) in the early 1890s. Within a few years, she was appointed head librarian for North Bennet’s reading rooms, which became a station of the Boston Public Library. Through the library, Guerrier was able to establish a new class of clubs for girls and young women that addressed their intellectual needs. Burdened by the directive to “draw these girls in, from the perils of the street” (NBSIS Archives, Annual Report, 1897–1898, 4), Guerrier sought instead to organize the clubs along the same lines as the more literary and educational clubs that already existed for boys. The emphasis on “perils of the street,” a constant theme throughout the reform literature of the time, reflected middleclass observers’ assumption that all poor, immigrant women needed to be morally and physically protected. The reformers’ language was, therefore, typical of the time and low expectations of immigrants’ moral character but did not reflect the reality of these young women’s lives.

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During the fall of 1899 Guerrier began her Saturday evening meetings for the benefit of young unmarried working women of the neighborhood. Guerrier successfully enticed prominent political, professional, educational, and reform leaders of the day to come speak to the SEG Club on a variety of classical and contemporary issues. In the meantime, while taking evening courses at the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Guerrier became close friends with a talented young artist named Edith Brown, who was hired by NBSIS to teach drawing and, later, clay modeling to the various clubs. Brown and Guerrier moved in together and started a lifelong personal and professional relationship that would span forty years of dedication to each other. As a result of her work in the library, Guerrier met Helen Osborne Storrow, who had joined the board of managers of NBSIS in 1898 and was a member of the board of visitors of the Boston Public Library. Storrow was the granddaughter of Martha Coffin Wright and grandniece of Lucretia Coffin Mott, who, together with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were among the small group that organized the first women’s rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. Married to James Jackson Storrow, Jr., a prominent Boston lawyer and banker, in the early 1890s, Helen Storrow was just emerging as an important philanthropic figure in the Boston community when she met Guerrier and became interested in her work in the library. It was through Guerrier that Storrow began to learn of the difficulties facing poor and immigrant young women. Although Storrow was instrumental in establishing new programs at NBSIS for both boys and girls, her involvement with the Saturday

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Evening Girls developed into a more personal and lifelong relationship. Storrow would later draw upon her experiences with the SEG when she became involved with the fledgling Girl Scout movement in the 1910s. In 1906, Storrow purchased an acre of land at Wingaersheek Beach in West Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she built a cottage with fourteen bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen for the club members. Monitored by a camp director, who was often a professional social worker, the girls were scheduled for one- or two-week vacations of fresh air, swimming, hiking, playing, and resting. To accommodate the different religious and cultural customs of the club members, no meat was served at the camp. Only fresh fish, which the girls occasionally caught themselves, and fruits and vegetables that Storrow had delivered weekly were served. These clubs for girls and young women became an important part of the Americanization process, not only because of the programs that focused on civic and educational agendas but also because of their self-governing organizational structures. A governing body of ten members was elected yearly by the most senior group, the Saturday Evening Girls. A house committee was formed that met on a weekly basis to generate policies and rules concerning the running of the clubs, which were then voted on by the entire body of the clubhouse once a month. The girls and young women learned on a microlevel the concepts of democratic government. They found discipline and confidence in a system whereby they could create an organization with rules and laws, resolve problems, and reach decisions based on a vote of the majority. By participating in the

everyday running of the clubs, the members learned valuable lessons about responsibility and the use of power, lessons particularly important for young women and girls who lacked opportunities in the public sphere as well as the private sphere to govern their own lives. Guerrier, Brown, and Storrow recognized that immigrants girls’ need to contribute to family income conflicted with the pursuit of education beyond grammar school. Although settlement houses and other reform organizations were providing educational, vocational, and Americanization programs, very few addressed the fact that many immigrant youths could not fully take advantage of the opportunities because their financial contribution to the family far outweighed the importance of higher education. Establishing a commercial industry to provide financial resources rather than just skills training was a step toward resolving that problem. By 1906, Edith Brown had been teaching clay modeling for more than five years at North Bennet Street, so her artistic training and background played a major role in the decision to start a pottery. With Storrow’s approval and her donation of funds to purchase the equipment, Guerrier and Brown started training in the specifics of pottery making. By the summer of 1907, a few library club members began to learn pottery making at Guerrier and Brown’s Chestnut Hill home. They proudly signed their pottery “SEG,” for Saturday Evening Girls, along with their own initials and date; and the pottery works, or Bowl Shop as it was first known, was established. In early 1908 Storrow purchased a fourstory brick building at 18 Hull Street in the North End to house the pottery and the eight library clubs. The building was

Saturday Evening Girls located near the Old North Church where Paul Revere had hung his famous lantern, and therefore the pottery was named the Paul Revere Pottery. Guerrier and Brown moved into the fourth-floor apartment of this building to continue directing the activities of the clubs and the pottery. Many of the girls worked a few hours on Saturday mornings, if only to sweep, clean, pack, assist, work off their weekly or monthly dues, pay for summer camp, or earn a few extra dollars to help them pursue higher education. A few worked either full-time or on a more regular parttime schedule. The pottery became known for its children’s dish sets, which were decorated with Brown’s designs of children, witches, chickens, roosters, rabbits, ducks, flowers, trees, camels, squirrels and other animals, and nursery rhymes or mottoes that could be personalized with a child’s name and birth date. Shock and surprise have often characterized the response of reformers and native-born privileged classes to demonstrations of intelligence and eagerness to learn by immigrants and the poor. Still, these attitudes informed the establishment of educational and training programs and were used to social reformers’ advantage when trying to raise support. Exhibitions were held every year to showcase NBSIS programs and individual craft pieces made by the students, not only to celebrate their achievements but also to raise badly needed funds. Although the students were proud of their work, there was some resentment over these expectations of inferiority. When tourists came to view the remarkable work these supposedly illiterate and ignorant immigrant girls were doing at the pottery on Hull Street, the girls sometimes acted out by pretending to be deaf and mute or feigned ignorance of English and exhibited a gen-

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eral lack of intelligence, all for the visitors’ benefit. Over the next few years the pottery continued to expand, gaining national recognition. SEG wares were sold across the country in gift shops; in department stores; in their own stores in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and Martha’s Vineyard; and on Boylston Street in Boston. By 1914 the pollution from the kilns was adding to the dirt and filth in an already highly congested area, so the pottery was relocated to nearby Brighton, Massachusetts. Though its products were artistically acclaimed, financial success for the Paul Revere Pottery remained elusive. Not only did Helen Storrow subsidize the pottery, but the SEGs were expected to help raise funds as well. Throughout the history of the library clubs, the girls performed Shakespearean plays, operettas, recitals, and folk dances to raise funds for their club work, the pottery, and summer vacations in West Gloucester. They performed at North Bennet Street, the openair theater at the Storrows’ home in Lincoln, the Vendome Hotel in Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court, and many other Boston locations. The SEG Club was originally conducted at the North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS), a charitable institution founded by Pauline Agassiz Shaw in the early 1880s to provide social services, industrial and vocational training, and “Americanization” programs to the immigrant population of the North End. By 1895 the North End of Boston had become a crowded settlement point for a new wave of eastern European Jews and southern European immigrants. Crowded together in old, dilapidated tenement neighborhoods where poverty was pervasive, many immigrants kept within their

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own ethnic spheres, separated by a street corner from another ethnic enclave. Reformers of the Progressive era recognized the perils of overcrowded neighborhoods and the stress placed upon cities and their residents, both native-born and immigrant. Organizations such as NBSIS sponsored many Americanization programs in their own building and in the public schools. Viewed as agents of socialization, these programs also provided many services to immigrants to help mediate the effects of poverty, displacement, and unemployment. Heavily burdened with thousands of young immigrant children speaking dozens of languages from eastern and southern Europe, Boston educators scrambled to accommodate and teach them. In horribly overcrowded schools, children struggled to learn English and the basics of compulsory elementary education. Significant language barriers, poorly educated parents, and economic need also forced many children out of public schools and into the labor force prematurely. During this period NBSIS developed and refined a variety of manual and industrial training programs to augment the public school programs in the city. NBSIS represented a new trend in the development, use, and ideology of industrial and manual training during the late nineteenth century. In addition to a kindergarten and nursery school, it provided classes and manual training programs in woodworking, printing, clay modeling, metalsmithing, sewing, and leatherworking. A library and a kitchen where girls were instructed in housework were also established. Completely supported by private donations, the school maintained programs for Boston’s public school children throughout the early part of the twentieth century.

Through club work at the North Bennet Street facility, many new ideas of social reform were played out. Here reformers capitalized on opportunities for “social intercourse” and “good citizenship” (NBSIS Archives, Annual Report, 1904–1905, 24). Through the multitude of literary, debate, and athletic clubs for boys and young men and the sewing, cooking, and occasional literary clubs for girls and young women, reformers and immigrants often experienced their first cross-class and cross-cultural exchanges. Library clubs, manual training, and other activities for boys flourished and dominated most efforts directed toward immigrants. Education, self-improvement programs, vocational training, and clubs for girls were much slower in coming, and most, if not all, efforts were centered around domestic training and related skills such as needlework, cooking, and cleaning. According to popular social work magazines of the day, teaching young girls Latin and Shakespeare did not help them keep a cleaner home. As one Saturday Evening Girl noted, “the girls were the drudges in housework and chores” (Story of the Saturday Evening Girls 1929, 4). By 1915 there were more than 250 girls and young women in eight different library clubs from grades four through adult. The library club programs included courses in literature, history, sociology, economics, science, civics, music, art, and current events. The Monday Afternoon Girls group was for eighth graders; Monday Evening Girls, third and fourth years of high school; Tuesday Afternoon Girls, seventh graders; Wednesday Afternoon Girls, fifth and sixth graders; Thursday Afternoon Girls, first and second years of high school; Thursday Evening Girls, high school seniors and some working girls; and

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Saturday Evening Girls folk dance at a Library Club story hour. (Boston Public Library, ca. 1914)

Friday Evening Girls, eighteen- to twentyyear-old working young women. The oldest group, the Saturday Evening Girls, monitored and conducted many of the younger library club groups. They also spent time investigating community organizations to foster cooperation among different agencies for improved housing, education, and urban planning. The goal of most young library club girls was ultimately to become a Saturday Evening Girl. In June of each year, the Friday Evening Girls who were over twenty years old were formally invited to join the SEGs. From 1912 to 1917 the library clubs published a newspaper entitled the S.E.G. News, which focused on contemporary issues such as immigration, education,

the library, social reform, democracy, employment opportunities, literature, religion, community features, and social news. For the most part, the newspaper avoided controversial issues such as woman suffrage and trade unionism, but an underlying tension was evident in editorials about women’s roles in society, social workers, and life in an immigrant community. The editors were particularly irritated by the criticism that “education and social work among the poor retard marriages” among the social workers (S.E.G. News, February 12, 1916, 2–3). They admonished social workers whose desire to “uplift” was derived from a sense of superiority, and they were particularly resentful of the reformers who

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spent all their time making “microscopic studies . . . of the children of the slums” but who ignored the voices of the children themselves (S.E.G. News, December 11, 1914, 5). Although it was never financially stable, the pottery continued to operate until 1942, providing refuge and employment for some of the SEGs hardest hit by the consequences of the Depression. The financial importance of the pottery to the girls varied: some earned their livelihood from it, whereas others earned enough to enable them to stay in school. They supported the pottery as a collective effort for the benefit of all. Without it, their eager pursuit of economic independence would have taken on a different meaning. Making marmalade or fruitcake and hemming napkins and dishtowels were domestic chores and typical female fundraising venues, but for the SEG the pottery represented a new identity, as women and as workers, and offered them greater economic opportunities. In the aftermath of World War I, as the SEGs aged and moved out of the North End, the structure of the clubs weakened. The individual library clubs consolidated, and thereafter they were all identified as Saturday Evening Girls. Edith Brown, artistic director of the pottery for twentyfive years, died in 1932. Helen Storrow died in 1944 after forty-five years of personal involvement with the SEGs and thirty-five years of providing financial support for the Paul Revere Pottery. Guerrier retired from the Boston Public Library in 1940 after forty-six years of library service. She died in 1958 at the age of eighty-eight. The SEG Clubs were a successful response to the new urban industrial order that also provided an alternative to the cult of domesticity, which offered

only one image for women, particularly poor and immigrant women. The richness of their experience in the library clubs enabled the majority to complete high school at a time when that was often not possible for immigrant and poor girls and young women. An unusually high number attended college, and many went on to inspire and educate others. They became teachers, librarians, office and clerical workers, social workers, saleswomen, secretaries, artists, musicians, and other professionals. These working-class Jewish and Italian women negotiated native-born white middle-class ideologies and expectations into a cultural framework within which they could identify themselves. In the process they were all changed into active participants in the forging of a new ideal of womanhood. The bonds that were created motivated many Saturday Evening Girls to continue meeting in the Boston area on an irregular basis. They finally voted to dissolve in June 1969. Kate Clifford Larson See also Camp Fire Girls; Education of Girls; 4-H; Girl Scouts; Home Economics Education; Immigration; Little Mothers; Summer Camps for Girls References and Further Reading Boris, Eileen. 1986. Art and Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Boston Public Library. 1890–1920. Records of the Corporation. Lazerson, Martin. 1971. Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Matson, Molly, ed. 1992. An Independent Woman: The Autobiography of Edith Guerrier. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McCarthy, Kathleen D. 1991. Women’s Culture, American Philanthropy and

Sexual Harassment Art, 1830–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Muncy, Robyn. 1991. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press. North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS) Archives. Manuscript Collection 269, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA. Paul Revere Pottery Gallery File. Fine Arts Department, Boston Public Library. Personal interviews with descendants of Saturday Evening Girls, by author, 1995–1999. S.E.G. News (Boston). November 1914–May 1917. S.E.G. News: 1899–1952. 1952. Boston. S.E.G. News, Cherry Tree Edition, 1899–1954. 1954. Boston. Solomon, Barbara Miller. 1985. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1989. Ancestors and Immigrants. Boston: Northeastern University Press. The Story of the Saturday Evening Girls’ Reunion. 1929. Boston: Privately printed, December 12. Ware, Leonard. 1970. Helen Osborne Storrow, 1864–1944: A Memoir. Northhampton, MA: Privately printed.

Sexual Harassment The practice of sexual harassment is an old one, but one without a recorded history. As a result, this entry draws upon recent results of surveys and other empirical research. At first, most of the literature on sexual harassment pertained to the workplace, usually confined to women’s harassment by men, but more recently the focus has been on sexual harassment in schools. Sexual harassment began to be discussed in the 1970s when feminist activists sought a way to address the unwanted sexual attention that women

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faced in the workforce. The concept originally included the many types of offensive behaviors that women considered as impeding their job performance and making them vulnerable to retaliation. The 1980 definition by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) elaborated on two main types of sexual harassment: the coercive quid pro quo (i.e., pressure for sexual favors as a condition of employment) and the more common “hostile environment.” As a form of sex discrimination, sexual harassment thus became illegal. Public attention focused on sexual harassment in the workforce with Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, whom she described as having harassed her in the workplace. Sexual Harassment in the Schools In school settings, the hostile environment form of harassment is the most common type. In contrast to work settings, sexual harassment in school often occurs in public; thus it may be more damaging because of its potential for public humiliation and damage to one’s reputation. When public sexual harassment occurs and is not condemned by the school authorities, it may be viewed as encouraging a hostile environment. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 had outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs receiving federal aid. A landmark 1992 Supreme Court decision heightened public awareness of sexual harassment, coming the year after the above-mentioned Senate hearings. Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools directed that schools could be held liable for compensatory damages if they fail to provide a school

More than 80 percent of girls report experiencing sexual harassment in school. (Sue Ficca)

Sexual Harassment environment free from sex discrimination. Although the victim’s gender was not specified in sexual harassment cases, in the popular view harassment was thought to occur between female and male students. However, harassment is not confined to heterosexual students, and several states (Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) now have laws that specifically protect gay and lesbian students. Bullying is a troublesome behavior that resembles sexual harassment and is common in schools. Moreover, teasing and bullying may be the antecedents of sexual harassment and should not be accepted or ignored by parents and teachers (Stein 1999b). Bullying in western European schools and measures taken to stop it have been investigated, particularly in England (Whitney and Smith 1993) and in Norway and Sweden. Dan Olweus states that “a student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other students. An additional criterion of bullying is an imbalance in strength (an asymmetric power relationship)” (1995, 196). Name-calling is a common type of bullying, as are extortion, physical violence, rumors, exclusion from groups, damage to belongings, and threats. Boys tend to bully more often than girls. In studies, boys are reported to bully both girls and boys, but girls bully only girls. Boys and girls also use different types of bullying behavior. Boys engage in more physical forms of attack, whereas girls give and get more indirect forms such as being ridiculed or victimized by rumors. Although bullying is more common among boys, girls and boys can be both bullies and victims. However, boys are more likely to be

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attacked by boys, whereas girls may be attacked by girls, boys, or mixed groups (Schuster 1996). The incidence of bullying in U.S. schools has been reported to range from a high of 80 percent, with only 20 percent of students reporting no bullying behavior in a thirty-day period (Bosworth, Espelage, and Simon 1999), to much lower estimates. Barry Thorne (1993) has reported that, in U.S. elementary schools, boys use sexual insults against girls and regard girls as a source of pollution. Her example is the game of cooties, which highlights the social status of children and is a way of keeping children outside a given group. The rules are that boys do not give cooties (i.e., by touching) to boys. But when girls give cooties to boys, they are acting aggressively, not in keeping with their female social role. The cooties game is found among prepubescent children and may be interpreted as a precursor of later sexual harassment. Surveys of Sexual Harassment in Schools The first survey was large but not systematic, appearing in Seventeen magazine in 1993. Three major themes emerged from the girls’ responses. Sexual harassment in the schools was public; the targets were not passive when harassed, and when girls informed school officials of the harassment, their reports were often trivialized or dismissed. Although much was learned from this survey, it was neither systematic nor random, and findings could therefore not be generalized. In 1993 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) published the results of a survey in a book titled Hostile Hallways. The AAUW report concludes that sexual harassment is very

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pervasive in high schools; that students consider harassment unwelcome and problematic; that, as the Seventeen survey found, sexual harassment occurs in public places; and that students have difficulty receiving help from teachers and administrators despite their requests. The AAUW survey aimed to provide a profile of the problem of sexual harassment in public high schools. The sample included 79 randomly selected schools across the country with 1,632 students in grades eight to eleven participating. Because the sample was large and students were randomly selected, findings may be generalized to all U.S. public school students in eighth through eleventh grades. Sexual harassment was defined by the survey as unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that interfered with a student’s life, and students were queried about their experiences with fourteen different forms of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment in the schools was found to be widespread: four in five students (81 percent of 1,632 students from 79 schools) said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment. Overall, 83 percent of girls and 60 percent of boys reported experiencing unwanted sexual attention in school. Twenty-five percent of the girls and 10 percent of the boys reported being harassed by a school employee. African American girls reported suffering more harassment from school employees than girls in other ethnic groups. Students did not usually report harassment incidents to teachers or other authorities or even to their families. That schools often constitute a hostile environment was emphasized by the finding that 66 percent of the boys and 52 percent of the girls admitted to sexually harassing someone in a school setting.

Janet Sawyer’s interviews with students illustrate types of sexual harassment. Seventy-five high school girls told of being harassed on a daily basis in school. In fact, “over 90 percent of the girls reported incidents of verbal abuse, and 10 percent reported physical abuse” (1994, 70). “Boys call girls fat. Girls who are pretty and have lots of boyfriends are called ‘sluts.’ If a girl goes out with a guy for a while, guys start a rumor called ‘haunting.’ They make up a story about the girl having sex, and keep the story going for weeks until they ‘haunt’ another girl” (72). According to Sawyer, although a girl is called a “slut,” a guy is called a “stud” and feels complimented. But the girl’s reputation is hurt. Even though they felt angry, frustrated, violated, and powerless, the girls did not confront their harassers or tell them to stop. They reported that harassment goes on everywhere, even in the presence of other students and sometimes teachers. Teachers often ignore verbal abuse and do not reprimand students who engage in it. A large and in-depth study drew its subjects from the AAUW sample of high school students reported in Hostile Hallways. V. E. Lee et al. (1996) searched for students who could verify their experiences of harassment by identifying a school-related location for the harassment, reporting a school-related person associated with their experience, and indicating that the experience upset them. Based on these criteria, 425 respondents were dropped from the sample because their experiences with sexual harassment were considered ambiguous. Results based on the remaining 1,203 students showed that 83.4 percent of girls and 60.2 percent of boys said that they had received unwanted sexual attention in school. These results confirm the results of the AAUW survey.

Sexual Harassment Lee et al. state that sexual harassment is strongly related to gender; that neither the occurrence nor the severity of harassment is related to either family social class or race and ethnicity. Although students’ academic performance is unrelated to the probability of being harassed, those with lower academic performance report more severe harassment experiences. The study authors express concern over the “environment of harassment” because more than half of all students reported having both experienced harassment and harassed others in school. Harassment by school employees was found to be more severe than that from other students. In an examination of different theories that might have a bearing on sexual harassment, only the “abuse of power” theory, particularly the abuse of organizational power, seems applicable. That is, individuals have differing amounts of power in organizations, depending on their roles: principals have power over teachers; teachers over students. Males typically occupy higher authority roles in school and are therefore in positions to abuse that authority. Females in such roles could of course be equally prone to such abuse. While this formulation does not explain peer harassment in schools, abuse of power might contribute to the climate of harassment. Researchers on bullying have reached the same conclusion. Because the existence and pervasiveness of sexual harassment in schools are well established and no longer controversial, research has leveled off. Research does exist, however, on methods to stop harassment. Nan Stein states that her research since the 1970s “on peer-to-peer sexual harassment has confirmed that schools may well be the training grounds for domestic violence through the practice of and permission for sexual harass-

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ment” (1999b, 213). Between 1995 and 1998, Stein surveyed nearly 500 sexual assault and domestic violence organizations concerning their work in kindergarten through grade twelve in regard to gender violence. She has also developed a teaching guide for grades seven through twelve, entitled “Gender Violence/Gender Justice.” Despite the work of community organizations in the schools, their skills are inadequately used because they are rarely allowed to see the same group of students more than 2.7 times. This reduces the impact of their presentations, also minimized by their materials, which are frequently of inferior quality. Stein recommends the following to reduce and prevent sexual harassment in schools: 1. Heightened awareness among all school staff about the problems of sexual violence in schools. 2. Cooperation between the schools and domestic violence or sexual assault groups in working to eliminate or reduce the problem. 3. Redesigned and readministered sexual harassment surveys that probe the relationship between the harasser/perpetrator and the target. 4. School-based restraining orders. 5. Expansion of restraining orders, also called orders of protection, to include noncohabiting minors in abusive relationships. Most states exclude orders of protection for either minors and/or noncohabitants. Thus adolescents remain in danger until all states permit them to request orders of protection from the violence of a dating partner. 6. Permission for domestic violence and sexual assault organizations to apply for more government funding to be used in the schools.

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7. A more unified definition of sexual violence. 8. The inclusion of gender-based and gender-motivated hate crimes in the national and state definitions of hate crimes. (Stein 1999, 214)

The 1999 Supreme Court Decision In 1999, efforts to eliminate sexual harassment in public schools accepting federal funds received considerable encouragement from a five-to-four Supreme Court decision. In a New York Times front-page report on May 25, 1999, entitled “Sex Harassment in Class Is Ruled Schools’ Liability,” reporter Linda Greenhouse writes: “School districts can be liable for damages under Federal law for failing to stop a student from subjecting another to severe and pervasive sexual harassment.” Justices opposed to the ruling stated that the issue represented an unwarranted federal intrusion into the classroom and into the “routine problems of adolescence.” The majority decision was based on an interpretation of Title IX and was a response to the Court’s review of one of many sexual harassment lawsuits. The lawsuit considered by the Supreme Court was brought by Aurelia Davis of Forsyth, Georgia, to help her daughter LaShonda, who had been harassed for months by a boy in her fifthgrade class. The school had done nothing to stop the boy, who had become increasingly provocative. LaShonda, upset and despondent, talked of suicide and had a difficult time in class. LaShonda’s mother, who under the ruling is now eligible to sue, poignantly stated, “They make you send your kids to school, right? So don’t you think they should protect them while they’re there?” (Greenhouse 1999, A25). Ruth Formanek

See also Acquaintance Rape; Body Image; Child Abuse; Depression; Education of Girls; Female Sexuality; Psychotherapy; Relational Theory; Suicidal Behavior in Girls References and Further Reading American Association of University Women (AAUW). 1993. Hostile Hallways. The AAUW Survey on Sexual Harassment in America’s Schools. Washington, DC: AAUW. Bosworth, K., D. L. Espelage, and T. R. Simon. 1999. “Factors Associated with Bullying Behavior in Middle School Students.” Journal of Early Adolescence 19: 341–362. Greenhouse, Linda. 1999. “Sex Harassment in Class Is Ruled Schools’ Liability.” New York Times (May 25): A25. Lee, V. E., R. G. Croninger, E. Linn, and X. Chen. 1996. “The Culture of Sexual Harassment in Secondary Schools.” American Educational Research Association Journal 33: 383–417. Olweus, Dan. 1995. “Bullying or Peer Abuse at School: Facts and Intervention.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 4: 196–200. Sawyer, Janet. 1994. “What Could You Possibly Learn by Studying Us? A Qualitative Study of the School Lives of High School Girls.” Ph.D. diss., Hofstra University. Schuster, B. 1996. “Mobbing, Bullying, and Peer Rejection.” Psychological Science Agenda (July–August): 12–13. Stein, Nan. 1995. “Sexual Harassment in School: The Public Performance of Gendered Violence.” Harvard Educational Review 65: 145–162. ———. 1999a. Classrooms and Courtrooms: Facing Sexual Harassment in K–12 Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. ———. 1999b. “Gender Violence in Elementary and Secondary Schools.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 27: 212–217. Thorne, Barry. 1993. Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Whitney, I., and P. K. Smith. 1993. “A Survey of the Nature and Extent of Bullying in Junior/Middle and Secondary Schools.” Educational Research 35: 3–25.

Slumber Parties

Slumber Parties Slumber parties are a composite of folk rituals, festival practices, and girls’ cultural activities that enable preadolescent girls to behave in ways that are generally considered both inappropriate and unacceptable. In the absence of restraining routine and the monitoring of teachers and parents, slumber parties serve to provide girls with a wide variety of opportunities: to safely engage in gender-role subversion, define female identity, and transmit girls’ culture. Whatever meanings slumber parties have for girls, they have been appropriated by adult experts and entrepreneurs. Pornographic portrayals eroticize slumber parties, and manufacturers and marketers have commercialized and commodified them. Slumber parties are most typically unisex sleep-overs with three or more girls and are often given to celebrate a birthday or other event. Slumber parties usually begin among elementary school girls and continue into adolescence. They consist of storytelling (often involving horror), pillow fights, pranks, jokes, and late-night snacks. Although the origins of the slumber party are unclear, sleeping over at a friend’s house dates back to the nineteenth century. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Meg spends a fortnight with her friend Annie Moffat. References to slumber parties do not appear in popular magazines, however, until the early 1950s. The postwar emphasis on a childhood free from adult responsibilities like work and the perceived importance of peer groups were factors that gave rise to slumber parties. So did suburbanization. The new houses provided children with more room and parents with access to quieter parts of the house. Slumber party activities can be understood as a series of age- and sex-appropri-

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ate developmental tasks. For example, pillow fights provide girls with “an opportunity to grow in muscular coordination within a nonthreatening environment” (Oxreider 1977, 128). Although failure can lead to unhappiness and societal disapproval, a successful party can lead to personal happiness and social success: “Having mastered most of the problems of childhood within the slumber party framework, the girl gains confidence in her ability to direct her own life, and in so doing she discovers who she is and what she is becoming” (133). According to this view, a girl will learn “socially sanctioned behaviors appropriate to her sex” (130). In addition, slumber parties can challenge prevailing gender norms. Though slumber parties are a composite of various folk practices, they function much like festivals, carnivals, and holidays that enable participants to behave in ways that are usually considered both inappropriate and unacceptable. Although some holidays aim to assert the authority of the dominant culture, still others tolerate riotous challenges to political dominants and social elites. Female peasants in early modern France, for instance, created a topsy-turvy world in which women dominated, if only for a short time. With no one to restrain them, girls at slumber parties behave much like boisterous carnival participants. In the protection of the slumber party, girls can misbehave as boys have greater license to do. Girls temporarily contest gender-role norms as obedience is replaced with ritualized defiance. Slumber parties allow girls to be uninhibited and unself-conscious; to indulge in scatological and sexual jokes and songs and not patrol the borders of decency; to express aggressive feelings (pillow fights) and be

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Teenagers at a slumber party in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Genevieve Naylor/Corbis, 1953)

assertive; and to behave subversively and mischievously (pranks, phony phone calls), not conscientiously. Levitation (where a group of girls levitate another with only their fingers) enables participants to feel the thrill of remarkable strength. Séances, a popular activity that involves invoking the spirits of great leaders (e.g., Elizabeth the First, Mary Queen of Scots, or Martha Washington),

suggest girls’ interest in exercising extraordinary power in the present and over the past. (Séances also have deep roots in nineteenth-century girls’ culture. Many schoolgirls who pioneered the spiritualist movement acted as mediums who contacted the spirit world.) The subversion of modern girls’ slumber parties derives from a variety of factors. First, as time is held in abeyance,

Slumber Parties ordinary life is suspended and is replaced with an alternative reality. Second, staying up late and indulging in hilarious laughter add to a giddy intoxication that extends the oblivion of their “day out of time.” One mother in the late 1950s described the “fever of delight” her daughter experienced as a result of the raptures of her slumber party. Third, slumber parties are tolerated because everyone knows that order will be restored in the end. Thus, the expression of transgressive actions is safely contained. Fourth, slumber parties (like other kinds of festivals) generate solidarity and provide cohesion and integration, especially so in the midst of unsettling developmental changes. Fifth, slumber parties are similar to other festivals that serve to define identity (e.g., female identity) and transmit culture (e.g., girls’ culture). Adults’ anxiety about slumber party subversion has led to a growth in books and gadgets meant to provide redefinition. In The Berenstain Bears and the Slumber Party (1990), a prescriptive story about appropriate behavior for girls and their mothers, the daughter rhetorically recites a mantra about privilege and responsibility as she prepares for a slumber party. But in her excited anticipation, the wellbehaved cub forgets all about her mother’s prescription and thoroughly enjoys herself when things at the party get out of control. Although overreactive Mama bear responds punitively, Papa bear proffers insightful advice. Lessons are learned. Elsewhere in the culture, slumber parties have been appropriated by an entrepreneurial ethos that markets feminine submission rather than female subversion. The pornography industry has not only contributed to the commercialization of the slumber party but also to the eroticization of girls and this all-female cultur-

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al ritual. “Teen Sluts Slumber Party” is one of many titles with links to hard-core pornographic websites. Slumber Party 2 and The Last Slumber Party are among a number of pornographic movies currently available that sexualize (and slash) teenage girls whose all-girl ritual is presented as the ultimate male sexual fantasy. To other businesspeople, slumber parties incorporate feminine indulgence in romance, adornment, cosmetics (games such as “Blind Makeover” and “Rainbow Nails”), and consumerism. Like other holidays that have been commercialized, slumber parties have been commodified by makers of “Slumber Party Dolls” and “Pillow Buddies.” In a company’s cyberspace handbook, “The Ultimate Slumber Party Survival Guide,” girls are informed that they will want to hold on to their pillow-sized stuffed animal while watching a scary horror movie. Not surprisingly, this website also promotes Blockbuster Video’s choice of the “Top 10 Recommended Slumber Party Movies.” In the new juvenile advice or self-help books—some of which are allegedly written by girl authors—slumber party activities center around food. “How to Have the Greatest Slumber Party of All Time,” the chapter on slumber parties in Girls Know Best 2: Tips on Life and Fun Stuff to Do (1998), is modeled after a cookbook. Books such as Super Slumber Parties (1977) aim to provide girls with advice, guidance, and tips on making their next slumber party a big success. To be a successful hostess depends upon following a recipe that identifies “the main ingredients” of party planning. For example, rule number three suggests girls provide an abundance of food for games and hide the rest for “Midnight Madness,” the forbidden late-night snack. Girls compete over food in such recommended

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party games as “M&M Master” and “Hanging Doughnuts.” Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Advice Books; Consumer Culture; Eating Disorders; Girls’ Culture; Sororities References and Further Reading Berenstain, Stan and Jan. 1990. The Berenstain Bears and the Slumber Party. New York: Random House. Manson-Burton, Marianne, comp. 1998. Girls Know Best 2. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Worlds Publishing, 25–32. Oxreider, J. W. 1977. “The Slumber Party: Transition into Adolescence.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 43, no. 3: 128–134. Paulsen, Susan B. 1988. “Sociable Speech in the American Slumber Party: An Ethnographic Study.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington. Simons, Elizabeth Radin. 1980. “The Slumber Party as Folk Ritual: An Analysis of the Informal Sex Education of Preadolescents.” Master’s thesis, University of California at Berkeley.

Sororities A sorority is a society of young women or girls who typically join organizations that are most active in colleges or universities. Aiming to foster friendship among members and sponsor group activities, the majority of sororities are social in nature. Since their origins in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sororities have been a major part of the college experiences of many American girls. The first sororities evolved in response to the male fraternal societies that excluded women during the early development of higher education. The avowed goals of these early groups were to promote the academic and social development of the female minority of students. Through the years, they have continued to provide a source of fellowship and community for women but have

also sparked controversies. Sororities have been criticized for emphasizing the social side of university life over academics, for fostering elitism through their exclusivity, and for racial and religious discrimination. In recent years, sorority leaders have striven to address these aspects of their organizations and reassess the ways that sororities shape campus culture and influence members. When a college student decides to become a sorority member, she determines how she will experience many aspects of her university life. To join a sorority, a college woman participates in a process called “rush.” During rush, potential members visit the different sororities and, by a process of mutual selection and rejection, may accept an invitation to join a specific group. A new member may then participate in a pledge program filled with activities designed to forge bonds of friendship between members and teach new members about the sorority’s history and rituals. Pledging has been controversial because new members are sometimes asked to perform dangerous or demeaning activities before achieving full membership. Once initiated, most sorority women live together in a house or specified sections of dormitories. The sorority provides a steady schedule of social events, typically including formal dances, parties, hayrides, and homecoming celebrations. Sorority members also participate in charity projects, administrative meetings, study hours, and group retreats. To cultivate unity and loyalty among members, sororities have developed rituals, symbols, and mottoes. Members often refer to each other as sisters and wear jewelry and clothing inscribed with the sorority insignia. Both sororities and fraternities can trace their roots to the university liter-

Sororities ary and debating societies that formed around the time of the American Revolution. The typical college curriculum emphasized rote memorization and the indoctrination of a canon of knowledge rather than encouraging thoughtful debate or discussion among students. As a result, students formed their own forums to address literary and social issues. Phi Beta Kappa, founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776, was the most prominent of these societies. Although Phi Beta Kappa evolved into an honorary society that recognized members for academic accomplishments, other social fraternities developed during the early 1800s. They adopted many of the attributes of the fraternal societies that existed outside universities, such as the Freemasons, and created secret rituals, handshakes, and Greek letter acronyms from which they took their names. Fraternity life came to be characterized by a sense of rebellion against both the social and intellectual regulation of universities. Campus officials opposed the existence of fraternities because they seemed to undermine discipline, threatened school loyalty, and because the selectivity and the rivalries that existed among them were antidemocratic. But fraternities continued to grow on college campuses and developed national organizations with affiliate chapters throughout the young nation. By the Civil War, these groups were a major force in social and extracurricular life at American universities. Until the 1830s, women were excluded from universities and from participation in Greek letter societies. But in 1836 the Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College) was founded, and in 1837 Oberlin became the first coeducational institution. As other colleges followed this

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trend, higher education became a real option for women but one that Victorian social norms discouraged. The first female students were rebels who challenged the doctrine of separate spheres, which encouraged “proper” women to devote themselves to their homes and families rather than to intellectual ambitions. During the nineteenth century, female students were often viewed as social misfits and were resented by their male classmates, who vastly outnumbered them. Excluded from extracurricular activities such as student government and publications and ostracized socially, women students struggled to cultivate intellectual and social communities for themselves. In 1851, nineteen women at Wesleyan Female College formed the Adelphean, a secret sisterhood and literary society. A year later, they had a rival, the Philamathean. Like fraternities, each group had secret rituals and mottoes but did not form chapters on other campuses until the 1900s, when they adopted the Greek names Alpha Delta Pi and Phi Mu. The first sisterhood to pattern itself directly after fraternities and establish chapters on campuses throughout the country was founded at Monmouth College in Illinois in 1867. It began under the name I. C. Sorosis before adopting the Greek name Pi Beta Phi twenty-one years later. The first women’s societies to officially adopt Greek letter names were Kappa Alpha Theta at DePauw University in Illinois and Kappa Kappa Gamma at Monmouth College, both founded in 1870. The woman who founded Kappa Alpha Theta was first offered a token membership in her brother’s fraternity, but she demanded full membership. Her request was met with a gift, a silver cake basket, rather than real membership. Her father suggested that she start her own

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group, and Kappa Alpha Theta was formed in direct reaction to women’s exclusion from all-male organizations. The founders and earliest members of sororities defied social convention to pursue higher education and occupied a precarious position on the outskirts of male-dominated college campuses. This situation prompted them to place academic development at the forefront of their sorority agendas. Female students were concerned with proving themselves worthy in the classroom, as well as with demonstrating that women could be both feminine and intellectually vigorous. Sorority founders enshrined the ideals of scholarship and intellectual achievement in sorority mottoes and rituals. Sororities provided these pioneering students with camaraderie and encouragement. Women’s position on campuses became more secure around the turn of the century, and by the 1920s higher education had become more of a socially acceptable option for middle- and upper-class women. As females from these groups streamed into universities, they brought new sets of values, often prizing social and economic enrichment over academic achievement. Like education itself, sorority membership became an index of class status. By the early twentieth century, students could view their sororities as social networks rather than expressions of solidarity against a hostile academic environment. These later generations of sorority women focused more on social activities than had their scholarly predecessors. They transformed the goals of sorority life to emphasize the cultivation of traditionally “feminine” attributes— grace, poise, social charm—and began to use appearance and sociability as their criteria for selecting new members.

This era also saw the emergence of an autonomous youth culture in the United States, which fueled sorority members’ enthusiasm for socializing. During the 1920s, youth was increasingly defined as a distinct life stage, separate from both childhood and maturity. Young people assumed distinctive ways of dressing and speaking, created their own dances, and adopted common tastes, all of which distinguished them as a group from their elders. Increasingly, they constructed their own social worlds, subverting adult supervision and regulation to plan their own parties and outings. As sorority girls bobbed their hair, did the Charleston at homecoming dances, and wore short skirts to fraternity parties, Greek organizations provided social venues for the propagation of youth culture on college campuses. As the Greek system grew more elaborate, it influenced social life in more subtle ways as well by organizing students into “cliques” and defining their social status. These functions invited critics to note that sororities and fraternities chose only the more socially favored as members and then encouraged a conformist style of thought and behavior among them. School administrators and state legislators campaigned against the Greek system and abolished sororities and fraternities at some schools. But nationwide, the organizations continued to expand throughout the 1920s. Only the Great Depression slowed the growth of Greek organizations during the 1930s, and after World War II sororities and fraternities gained in popularity throughout the 1950s. One pernicious aspect of the Greek system during these years was exclusion based on class, race, and religion. The selection process, which emphasized

Sororities social graces and outward appearances, discriminated against those whose class backgrounds had not provided them with the leisure or opportunity to cultivate such attributes. Meanwhile, both sororities and fraternities typically excluded blacks, Jews, and other minority groups. Christian, Anglo-Saxon ideals and symbolism were embedded in the rituals of most sororities and fraternities, and some organizations even had “Aryan clauses” overtly forbidding the membership of nonwhites or non-Christians. Surveys done in the 1920s at Syracuse University revealed the depth of prejudice: less than 6 percent of non-Jewish students indicated that they would willingly admit a Jew to their Greek organization. Group photographs of fraternities and sororities that excluded blacks and Jews made prejudice explicit and visible. Just as the founders of sororities had responded to the gender discrimination of fraternities by establishing their own organizations and patterning them after those that had excluded them, the African Americans and religious groups who found themselves cut out of Greek life created their own groups. The early twentieth century saw the development of predominantly African American, Jewish, and Roman Catholic sororities and fraternities. Students also founded organizations dedicated to promoting tolerance and diversity through which minority students could have access to Greek life, but these groups remained outside the mainstream sorority and fraternity systems. Sororities have played a particularly significant role in the history of African Americans’ struggles to gain political and social equality. Although they developed many of the same problems as their white counterparts, including intense

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rivalries among groups and an emphasis on social status, black sororities were also strongly committed to uplifting the race. In 1919, the black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha pioneered efforts to promote education in the African American community with a nationwide campaign aimed at high school students that urged them to “Go to High School, Go to College,” and featured the dissemination of literature to younger students as well as speeches and workshops. By the 1930s, “Go to High School, Go to College” had been replaced by the “Education for Citizenship” campaign that embodied the hopes of many black leaders that education would help African Americans challenge their disenfranchisement by preparing them to make informed voting decisions. Black sororities also organized social welfare programs aimed at improving health conditions and developing job skills within impoverished black communities. Throughout the twentieth century, black sororities have shown greater commitment to social and political causes than most Greek organizations, participating in the movements for woman suffrage and civil rights. Sororities were important among the array of voluntary organizations that provided institutional structure and common meeting grounds where middle-class blacks could develop critiques of racial prejudice in American society and devise methods for combating political and social inequality. After World War II, in the shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust, a self-segregated system of Greek organizations for different races and religions seemed inadequate to many people. The majority of students, administrators, and lawmakers began to believe that student organizations should represent democratic ideals

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Sorority sisters pack into a tiny Renault to try to set a car packing record in Sioux City, Iowa. (Bettmann/Corbis, 1959)

and that all groups should be equally open to all students. As the United States became entrenched in a Cold War mentality, these efforts to distinguish American organizations as democratic institutions in opposition to “totalitarian” structures intensified. Universities pressured national fraternities and sororities to remove discriminatory restrictions based on race or religion. Although surveys indicated that most students applauded these efforts, efforts to abolish prejudicial practices incited conflicts within fraternities and sororities, as small sectors of students tried to continue informal discrimination and resist efforts toward integration. Even without formal rules, some groups simply neglected to invite nonwhites or non-Christians to join.

In the late 1960s, college campuses became hotbeds of political activism where students held demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War, demand equal rights for women, and denounce racism. In this atmosphere, Greek organizations that emphasized social life and had histories tainted by elitism and prejudice seemed out of step with the social and political causes that many students were championing. Although the original sorority founders, in their efforts to empower an oppressed female minority at universities, had shared some of the sentiments of twentieth-century feminists, decades of sorority experiences that emphasized feminine rather than feminist virtues left the organizations ill prepared to become potent participants in the women’s rights movements of the

Sororities 1960s and 1970s. For the first time in history, sororities and fraternities began to decline in membership and popularity. In 1972, less than 5 percent of students belonged to Greek organizations. The 1980s brought renewed enthusiasm for fraternities and sororities, and their membership numbers began to climb again. As sororities have regained popularity and influence in campus culture, leaders and members have shown an increasing level of awareness about the dangerous tendencies inherent in the structure and history of their organizations, as well as their potential to make positive contributions to university communities and enrich members’ educational experiences. Some of the social structures traditionally established by sororities have made members particularly vulnerable in certain areas that are problematic for college women. By organizing “happy hours,” “champagne brunches,” and other festivities involving drinking, sororities have placed alcohol at the center of social life. Excessive consumption of alcohol, especially at fraternity parties, also contributes to a social environment in which women may be more vulnerable to sexual pressures or harassment. Sorority culture emphasizes social life and includes rituals such as “pinning ceremonies” for members with boyfriends, thus celebrating romantic and sexual relationships and encouraging members to focus on socializing and dating, sometimes at the expense of other aspects of college life. Perhaps because sororities have tended to emphasize outward appearances in their selection processes and encourage conformity among members, eating disorders have been a particular problem for many sorority women. The close living quarters and communal aspects of sorority life also

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provide an environment in which behaviors and attitudes toward food and weight are quickly transmitted. Although problems with alcohol, sexual harassment, and eating disorders are not endemic to sororities, some educators have pointed to the organizations for establishing conditions in which these issues may have a greater potential of emerging. Contemporary sororities’ newsletters are filled with articles describing the organizations’ efforts to mitigate these problems and highlighting the positive contributions that sororities can make. These publications are a central means by which sorority leaders and members consciously represent their agendas to themselves and others. They demonstrate participants’ ongoing efforts to reevaluate the meaning of all female societies in changing campus environments. The educational campaigns that sororities have launched to confront these issues feature an abundance of articles on eating disorders, alcoholism, and sexual harassment that describe ways in which various chapters have addressed these problems through lectures, seminars, and support groups. Newsletters note the changed policies of national sorority organizations, which have recently initiated programs to monitor and limit alcohol consumption at Greek events, instilled antiprejudice clauses into their bylaws, and issued statements forbidding chapters from “hazing” new members. Articles laud the philanthropic projects of various sororities, which raise money for causes ranging from children’s cancer hospitals to rape crisis centers. Sororities also offer scholarships for both undergraduate and graduate students to pursue higher education. By including stories and articles that discuss the goals and structures devised by their

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founders, sororities use their publications to keep their traditions intact and reinterpret them in modern contexts. In their attention to these issues, sorority leaders and members are demonstrating a current awareness that the meaning of all female societies for university students shifts in changing historical circumstances and that participants are engaged in a continual process of redefining the place of sororities in modern campus culture. Mary Miles

See also Acquaintance Rape; African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; College Girls; Eating Disorders; Education of Girls; Relational Theory; Sexual Harassment; Substance Abuse References and Further Reading Beach, Mark. 1971. “Fraternities and Sororities.” Pp. 93–98 in The Encyclopedia of Education. Edited by Lee Deighton. New York: Macmillan. Horowitz, Helen. 1987. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lee, Alfred McClung. 1955. Fraternities without Brotherhood: A Campus Report on Racial and Religious Prejudice. Boston: Beacon Press. Palmieri, Patricia. 1995. In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schilling, Peter, and Daniel Soyer. 1996. “Fraternities and Sororities.” Pp. 1047–1052 in Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History. Edited by Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West. New York: Macmillan. Solomon, Barbara. 1985. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Turk, Diana. 1999. “Bound by a Mighty Vow: Sisterhood in Kappa Alpha Theta, 1870–1920.” Kappa Alpha Theta Magazine (Summer): 6–7.

Southern Belles Southern belles, the adolescent white daughters of wealthy slave owners in the antebellum South, were a unique phenomenon of the American South. Unlike slave girls in the South or free white girls in the North, the white daughters of elite plantation masters were shaped by dominant Victorian ideologies in regard to race, gender, and class. The representation of the belle was a deliberate creation of southern aristocratic male culture heavily invested in maintaining a patriarchal society and slave economy. The ornamental southern belle placed on a gilded pedestal was extolled by southern writers for her unsurpassed propriety, purity, and piety. Symbolizing her father’s wealth, status, and power, her ultimate purpose was to cloak the violence, vices, and immorality of fathers, brothers, and other plantation males whose sexual abuse of female slaves was widespread. The southern belle was culturally constructed in order to mask the violence and inhumanity of slavery. Though often initially disappointed by the birth of a daughter whom they regarded as inferior, parents sheltered southern girls within the family circle. Indulgent parents, especially mothers, guided their daughters according to the precepts of the prevailing nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity. According to this ideology (also referred to as “separate spheres”), females were to cultivate gendered characteristics that contemporaries believed were biologically determined. From their mothers, southern white girls learned how to be modest, pious, humble (not vain), proper, presentable (e.g., maintaining a light complexion), and fashionable (accomplished by lacing corsets tightly). Southern girls received very little practical training useful in their future capac-

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In this scene from Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s famous novel, Vivien Leigh portrayed the ultimate southern belle. (Photofest, 1939)

ity as plantation mistresses. Despite the centrality of motherhood among southern women, girls were not taught how to care for children, even though most had numerous siblings. (Because they often married early, southern women had fertility rates that were 20 percent higher than the national average.) White girls learned little about how to care for children because that was the responsibility of enslaved girls and women, not of plantation mistresses. Generally speaking, toddlers and infants were left in the care of nurses and other house slaves, from whom young girls learned songs, folk-

lore, religious principles, ghost stories, and African tales. Although older siblings accompanied their mothers on daily rounds of tasks and trips, they learned little more than how to supervise gardens, put up preserves, and sew. According to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The primary household responsibilities of slaveholding daughters included the care of their own rooms and clothing. . . . Gertrude Clanton’s day normally consisted—beyond reading, visiting, and shopping—in dressing and fixing her hair for the evening, gathering flowers to dress flower pots, arranging her

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room, gathering roses and putting the leaves up to dry, and mending her kid gloves. Occasionally she passed a whole day in doing nothing at all” (1988, 114). Instead of assuming ever-greater responsibilities of household management as she got older, the belle focused on acquiring the rules of rituals. It was largely mothers—as opposed to mammies—who supervised daughters in regard to manners. Daughters learned about deportment from their mothers, whom they accompanied (along with a male chaperone) as they made social visits and attended church services and frequent parties and balls. Daughters also learned about the proper forms of letter-writing etiquette from their mothers, who corrected drafts, making sure that forms of address were as appropriate as the sentiments expressed. Elizabeth Morrow Nix (1996) has explored the variety of responses of young girls to their role in southern society. In novels, diaries, and periodicals, adolescent girls were depicted as resisting the limitations imposed upon the belle by means of restraint and decorum. Although Morrow Nix also found evidence of their culture’s simultaneous tolerance of their resistance, unrefined behavior could be dealt with harshly when southern girls challenged the boundaries of their tightly regulated upbringing. Mothers were a formidable force in the plantation household and occasionally meted out punishment with a slap of a face or a crack of a whip. Whether stern, indulgent, or somewhere in between, it was fathers who exercised ultimate authority. They assumed control over their daughters’ formal education, though usually not until their daughters reached adolescence. Because of the daughter’s financial dependence, her father’s will usually prevailed. Around age thirteen, most upper-

class girls could attend one of the South’s female academies or boarding schools, which emphasized the importance of the “polite arts” in a fundamentally ornamental education. They learned grammar, composition, music, languages, literature, and geography but neither science nor mathematics. At school (and accompanied by a servant), schoolgirls also had more opportunities to socialize with friends than was often the case on remote plantations. Nevertheless, they maintained close relationships with siblings and especially with sisters. “These few years between puberty and marriage were the closest that most women came to freedom,” according to Catherine Clinton. “The great decision of their lives—the choice of when and whom to marry—lay ahead, and their time to choose was filled with fun and frivolity. This period—when women were most carefree, most hopeful—was therefore cherished by planter-class females. Young girls anticipated being a belle. Belles themselves conveyed a sense of exhilaration” (1982, 61–62). But belles also faced certain constraints. It was often mothers who selected, supervised, and chaperoned suitors, whether at home or at parties. One contemporary observer noted: “In the South it is deemed indecorous for them to be left alone, and the mother or some member of the family is always in the rooms; and if none of these, a female slave is seated on the rug at the door” (63). Despite the presence of others, however, flirting was an acceptable—even expected—form of behavior for the adolescent southern belle. According to one historian, “many belles raised it to an art form” (Goldberg 1994, 27). To be a “reputed belle,” coquettish girls like Cary Bryon aimed to engage as many men as she could in playful banter, but

Sports absolutely no sex: “Southern planter society placed an absolute premium on the bride’s ‘purity’” (28). In the event that a young woman’s sexual purity (or “honor”) was transgressed by an overly amorous suitor-turned-seducer, he could find himself a mere ten paces from her paternalistic father or protective brother. But more often than not, courting ended with a pen, not a pistol, as families forged the financial bonds of matrimony. Most southern daughters married by the time they reached twenty; some by ages fifteen or sixteen, when parents agreed to solid marriage proposals from insistent bridegrooms. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Dating and Courtship; Daughters and Fathers; Daughters and Mothers; Domesticity; Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Girls’ Culture References and Further Reading Clinton, Catherine. 1982. Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South. New York: Vintage. Farnham, Christine Anne. 1994. The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South. New York: New York University Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Goldbert, Michael. 1994. Breaking New Ground: American Women 1800–1848. New York: Oxford University Press. Morrow Nix, Elizabeth. 1996. “An Exuberant Flow of Spirits: Antebellum Adolescent Girls in the Writing of Southern Women.” Ph.D diss., Boston University.

Sports American girls have encountered a mixture of opportunities and obstacles over

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the past century as they have sought entry into a modern sports world dominated by men. Historically, sport has been not only a site of male recreation and competition but an arena in which boys and men learn or display “masculine” skills. In this capacity, the sports world has served as a major proving ground for masculinity, with female athletes often perceived as unwelcome intruders. Consequently, girls and women seeking to participate have met institutional and ideological roadblocks that have discouraged female athletic involvement and success at almost every turn. Despite these impediments, however, girls and women have consistently sought out athletic opportunities, taking advantage of school, municipal, and elite amateur and professional sports programs whenever they were available. The history of girls’ sports is not, therefore, a history of discrimination so extensive as to stifle all interest in competitive athletics but rather an uneven patchwork of avid female athletic participation set within a broader context of pervasive discrimination. Discrimination typically has taken two forms: explicit prohibitions on or criticism of female athleticism and implicit discouragement through lack of opportunity or support. By the 1910s, popular magazines had begun to note a new phenomenon called the modern “athletic girl,” who loved outdoor sports and play just as much as men did. The excitement about this new type of athlete reflected both the growing popularity of sport in American society and a profound shift in gender ideals. Nineteenth-century Victorians had praised women only in their domestic role as mothers and wives while emphasizing their purity and frailty. By 1900 this image began to fade before the far more robust

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image of the “new woman,” noted for her bold, adventurous spirit and her eagerness to embrace public activities like business, education, politics, and sports. The break from Victorianism toward modernism was often represented by the figure of the physically liberated girl emancipated by bold new dress styles, liberalized sexual mores, and a heightened interest in sports. By the 1920s, female tennis players and aquatic champions—many of them girls in their teens—rivaled movie stars for celebrity status as the popular press and advertisers featured them in stories and photos celebrating modern womanhood. National attention bestowed upon teenage stars like swimmers Aileen Riggin, Helen Wainright, and Gertrude Ederle capped a much broader and deeper expansion of girls’ and women’s sports at the grassroots level. Girls’ sports blossomed through the efforts of recreation leaders and physical educators who believed that athletic activity was an important part of female physical and social development. In urban workingclass neighborhoods, sports developed through service-based organizations like the Young Women’s Christian Association, Catholic Youth Organization, or newly formed municipal parks and recreation departments. Teenagers and young women also found opportunities in industrial leagues sponsored by businesses interested in promoting goodwill among workers and within local communities. Concurrently, middle-class girls and women seized upon a growing array of athletic opportunities in high school and college athletic programs. Schoolgirls frequently competed in intramural sports programs and newly created interscholastic basketball, baseball, field hockey, or track competitions. The pop-

ularity of girls’ sports prompted the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which governed men’s amateur sport, to establish national championships in women’s swimming, track and field, and basketball during the 1920s. The capstone of women’s new athletic freedom came during the international Olympic Games where, by the 1920s, girls and women competed for medals in skating, swimming and diving, and track-and-field events. The enthusiasm for the “new type of athletic girl” did not go unchallenged. Critics viewed sports as an inherently masculine activity appropriate for men only and thus unsuitable for girls who, by this logic, could succeed only by sacrificing their natural femininity for masculine qualities of body and mind. They also complained that vigorous athletic activity exposed the female body to public view and would inevitably damage a girl’s reproductive organs, possibly ruining her chance for future motherhood. Moreover, opponents predicted that aggressive physical competition would unleash physical, sexual, and emotional passions that put girls at risk of bodily injury, sexual impropriety, and nervous collapse. Oppositional forces succeeded in limiting or altering competitive opportunities for girls in at least three ways. First, forced into a defensive posture, female physical educators adopted a philosophy of “moderation,” which sought to stamp out all interscholastic competition. Under this policy, educators modified girls’ athletic rules for the purpose of reducing physical strain and containing competitive impulses. At many high schools and colleges, rigorous interschool competition gave way to exclusively intramural

Sports sports with the occasional exception of a “play day,” which brought together different schools for a single round of friendly competition and socializing. These policies lasted until the 1960s in many regions, limiting girls’ competitive opportunities and sending the message that “real sport” was an activity suited for boys or men alone. Anticompetition forces also succeeded in banning girls and women from certain athletic events. For instance, in the 1920s International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials refused to allow college student Sybil Bauer to swim against men in the Olympic backstroke competition, despite the fact that she had previously broken the world (men’s) record for her event. In another move, the IOC eliminated all long-distance running events for women after 1928, so that women ran no race longer than 200 meters until 1960, when the IOC restored the 800-meter race. Finally, opposition to girls’ sports manifested itself through foot-dragging and inequitable distribution of athletic resources. Recreational leaders and school officials regularly slighted girls’ sports in favor of extensive programming for boys, channeling girls into arts or crafts activities deemed more appropriate for their gender. Similarly, despite sponsoring national championships for women’s swimming, track, and basketball, the Amateur Athletic Union did little at the local, district, or state level to support girls interested in pursuing these sports. Countervailing forces for and against women’s athletics created a complex picture in which certain female athletes achieved great stature, modeling a positive image of liberated, assertive, and alluring new womanhood, whereas the great masses of girls and women found

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Child dressed for tennis. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

only limited opportunities for athletic competition and were as likely to reap scorn as to earn praise if they pursued athletic excellence. This pattern persisted in the 1930s and 1940s as the team sports of softball and basketball became the most popular activities among athletic girls. Typically, a girl might first get involved in informal neighborhood play, then join a team through the local recreation program, and as she entered her late teens or twenties,

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Mildred “Babe” Didrikson breaks the record in hurdles at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California. (Library of Congress, 1932)

play for an adult recreational team sponsored by her employer or some other local business. The most skilled might, as a teenager, join a semiprofessional team that competed regionally before traveling to the national championship tournament. However, the axiomatic assumption that sporting ability and success were fundamentally masculine continued to pose obstacles to girls and women’s participation. The mixed reception that women’s sports received during the Depression and World War II eras is best illustrated by the two most high-profile events of these decades, the 1932 Olympic per-

formance of Babe Didrikson and the establishment of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in the early 1940s. Mildred “Babe” Didrikson grew up in a working-class Texas community, excelling at every sport she tried. In the summer of 1932 the eighteen-year-old Didrikson took the Olympics by storm, winning two gold medals and a silver in track-and-field events. Didrikson’s astounding abilities made her an instant national celebrity among reporters and fans. Appreciation for her abilities, however, went hand in hand with more derisive comments about Didrikson’s appearance and per-

Sports sonality, described in wholly masculine terms. Criticisms of track athletes as “manly women” gained momentum in the succeeding years, so that by the late 1940s women’s track and field occupied such a marginal position that to any observer it would appear that girls and women simply had no interest in the sport. Only in black communities and a few other ethnic enclaves did girls’ track continue to receive support. African American girls who grew up competing for positions on local track squads and black college teams eventually became the backbone of postwar national track teams of the 1950s and 1960s. Softball, unlike track, continued to thrive throughout the Depression and war years. In 1942, enterprising midwestern businessmen launched a professional women’s softball league, which they quickly converted to baseball. The AAGPBL demonstrates, paradoxically, both the strength of girls’ and women’s sports in the 1940s and the persistence of attitudes that discouraged female athletic activity. The league operated for twelve seasons from 1943 to 1954, thriving in midsize cities like Rockford, Illinois, and South Bend, Indiana. It received press coverage in major national magazines and became the subject of a 1947 Movietone newsreel film, Diamond Gals. League players, many of them girls in their late teens, thrilled at the chance to play professional baseball and regularly held clinics to encourage the next generation of girls to take up competitive ball. Yet the league’s male leadership never trusted that athletic skill could by itself draw the crowds necessary for financial success. League directors conceived of their product as a dramatic contrast of “feminine girls” with “masculine skill.”

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The league required players to wear skirted uniforms, keep their hair long, and attend preseason charm and beauty classes. Such policies sent a mixed message to players and the public: athletic skills were essentially masculine, and femininity existed outside—and in contrast to—athletic ability and passionate commitment to sports. The notion that femininity and athletic skill were contrasting attributes served, in the long run, to reinforce the axiom that sport was inherently masculine and that girls and women, therefore, would always remain a sideshow to the “real” game of men’s baseball. In the conservative post–World War II years, a renewed emphasis on family, marriage, and conventional femininity caused a gradual erosion of support for girls’ and women’s sports. For instance, as burgeoning Little League programs enrolled more and more boys, fewer girls grew up playing neighborhood baseball on mixed sandlot and playground teams. Those girls who wanted to play were excluded by the Little League’s boys-only policy. In high schools and colleges intramural activities vastly outnumbered the few interscholastic and intercollegiate sports programs for girls. In municipal settings, recreation programmers put new emphasis on activities that occurred away from athletic fields or gymnasiums, including classes in “beauty culture,” baking, and sewing. Recreational leaders commented that their task had changed from one of discouraging the competitive zealot to stimulating interest among the majority of nonathletic girls who did not want to sweat, mess up their hair, or, worst of all, be accused of being masculine. A general climate of suspicion surrounded female athletes, causing a decline in the number of girls’ and

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women’s leagues and the number of female athletes willing and able to devote time to sports. Girls who continued to seek high-level sporting opportunities faced a set of stereotypes that described female athletes as “grotesque,” “ugly,” “unnatural,” and “masculine.” Rumors associating female athletes with lesbianism, behavior also stigmatized as “masculine,” underpinned more open criticisms and created a powerful disincentive for girls’ athletic involvement. Even in this chilly climate, an undercurrent of more sympathetic views of girls’ and women’s competitive sports slowly gained momentum, emerging in the 1960s along with the first stirrings of a reborn feminist movement. In the field of physical education a younger generation of professionals, many of whom had grown up playing competitive sports in their local communities, pressed conservative leaders to relax their stand against intercollegiate competition. This approach gained institutional ground with the founding in 1966 of the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW). Established to govern and promote major intercollegiate tournaments for women, the CIAW was the direct predecessor of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which from its founding in 1971 became the sole sponsor and chief advocate of women’s intercollegiate sports during the 1970s. For younger girls, the decade of the 1960s began to see a more favorable attitude develop toward athletic activity, influenced in part by the nationwide fitness campaign initiated during the Kennedy administration through the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. The expansion of suburban parks, athletic facilities, and recreation programs created more space for athletic activity in

general, with girls reaping a portion of these benefits. The subtle changes of the 1960s opened the door to more dramatic changes to come. Responding to momentum from within the sports world and external demands by feminists for gender equality, girls’ and women’s sports underwent a sea change in the 1970s and 1980s. For the first time, female athletes successfully challenged traditional beliefs in the masculinity of sport, positing instead that athletic play was a human endeavor appropriate to any girl, boy, woman, or man. The U.S. Congress set this process in motion in 1972 by including in the Education Amendments Act a section, Title IX, that outlawed sex discrimination in any educational setting receiving federal assistance. Since almost all schools, from elementary through college institutions, receive some federal monies, the law had enormous implications, especially in the field of sports. At the time of Title IX’s passage, the most generous college and university athletic programs allocated only 1 to 2 percent of their funds to women’s athletics. Twenty-five years after the passage of Title IX, girls and women received approximately one-third of athletic scholarships, and one-quarter of operating budgets for collegiate sports went to women’s teams (Sklover 1997, 12–16). Although the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs intercollegiate sport, has recognized that this figure falls far short of full gender equity, the enormous shift in resources that has occurred has meant opportunities for girl and women athletes that earlier generations could only have wished for in their wildest dreams. In 1972, only 300,000 high school girls—or one of every twenty-

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Two thirteen-year-old friends playing basketball in a city park. (Skjold Photographs)

seven girls—participated in interscholastic sports. By 1997 the number had reached 2,400,000, about one of every three girls, compared to a steady rate of one of every two boys. The number of women in intercollegiate athletics has more than tripled in the same time span, from 32,000 in 1971 to more than 110,000 in 1997, or just under 35 percent of college athletes. Women’s current standing in professional and Olympic sports, as with interscholastic and intercollegiate sports, has not reached parity by any definition. But the phenomenal changes in both the numbers and skill levels of highly competitive female athletes have put a permanent, deep dent into long-standing discriminatory practices and the corresponding belief in women’s athletic infe-

riority. Schoolgirls report that athleticism is a source of popularity and seem unfamiliar with the idea that female athletic ability carries any sort of stigma. Parents express a similar attitude, with a vast majority now maintaining that sports are as important for daughters as for sons. A dramatic increase in girls’ involvement in community-based sports has underwritten many of these changes. Since interscholastic sports do not begin until junior high school at the earliest, athletic programs for younger children offered through public recreation departments or independent athletic bodies provide an important avenue for early female athletic involvement. Joining a local soccer, softball, or basketball team is often a girl’s first encounter with organized

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sports. Between the ages of six and twelve girls gain the fundamental athletic skills—how to run, jump, kick, throw, and slide; how to swing a bat or racket; and how to practice, learn from coaches, and get along with teammates—necessary for later success. At this time they also gain the initial confidence and pleasure that will ensure later participation in athletics, whether oriented toward health, recreation, or high-stakes competition. Opportunities for girls still fall short of the number and variety of opportunities offered to boys. In the absence of equal opportunities, girls miss out on formative athletic experiences, placing them a full step behind boys (or other girls from localities where opportunities do exist) who grow up participating in informal playground sports and organized athletics. This in turn makes the achievement of gender equity in intercollegiate, Olympic, or professional sports more difficult to attain. As girls bid for full equality in sports as well as other arenas of American life, they raise a critical question, one with both legal and policy implications: What constitutes “equality”? Under Title IX, the abolition of sex discrimination has been interpreted to mean an equitable—but not identical—allocation of resources with the goal of establishing equivalency in the number of sports and scholarships offered, athletic budget size, training facilities and travel arrangements, and the number and salaries of athletic staff positions. The exact meaning of equity has been somewhat loosely defined in schools and even more so outside the schools, but it remains the goal toward which most athletic programs claim to strive. Yet some have asked whether girls and women want to follow along the same path as male competitive athletics. Responding

to the prevalence of eating disorders and serious injuries in sports like gymnastics; the emphasis on competitive success over participation and pleasure; and a system that rewards winning, playing through pain, and individual excellence at the expense of health, cooperative learning, and well-rounded physical and emotional development, some advocates for girls’ and women’s sports have begun to explore “partnership” models of sport that encourage mutual respect, competitive striving, and shared enjoyment at all levels of ability. We can expect that struggles over gender equity and the culture of sports will continue in the courts and on the playing fields. But in the meantime, more and more girls play organized sports, considering themselves fully entitled to physical strength, athletic skill, and the pleasure and confidence that sports can bring. Even though gender equity is currently a goal to strive toward rather than an achieved reality, already girls have reaped enormous benefits from their increased participation. Researchers have found that athletic activity correlates with higher graduation rates, lower rates of teenage pregnancy, stronger body image, and higher self-esteem. Susan K. Cahn

See also African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; Play; Surfer Girls; Tomboys References and Further Reading Acosta, Vivian, and Linda Jean Carpenter. 1994. Women in Intercollegiate Sport. Brooklyn: Brooklyn College Press. Cahn, Susan. 1995. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in TwentiethCentury Women’s Sport. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Festle, Mary Jo. 1996. Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women’s

Substance Abuse Sports. New York: Columbia University Press. Guttmann, Allen. 1991. Women’s Sports: A History. New York: Columbia University Press. Nelson, Mariah Burton. 1991. Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women. New York: Random House. Sklover, Beverly. 1997. “Women/Sports.” AAUW Outlook (Winter): 12–16. Women’s Sports Foundation. 1989. “Minorities in Sports: The Effect of Varsity Sports Participation on the Social, Educational, and Career Mobility of Minority Students.” New York: Women’s Sports Foundation.

Substance Abuse Substance abuse among girls appears to be a growing problem in American society. Many Americans believe that only “bad” girls indulge in drinking, smoking, and drug use, activities that seem fundamentally “unladylike” and have often been linked with “promiscuous” or “deviant” sexual behavior. Although it is probably impossible to determine with precision how many girls used and abused alcohol, tobacco, and other substances in the past—especially since many people tried desperately to keep such habits secret—girls’ consumption rates appear to have been generally lower than boys’ throughout American history. Even as conformity to conventional gender roles has made girls less likely to use alcohol and other drugs, cultural assumptions about femininity have brought a double standard of judgment down on those girls who do. Further, although fewer girls than boys consume such substances recreationally, medical experts and social scientists have maintained that individual females may be more vulnerable than males to substance abuse, especially addiction to drugs or alcohol used medic-

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inally. Since addiction has been linked with biological and psychological turning points, it is not surprising that adolescence has been seen as an especially dangerous time; in particular, substance use can complicate the development of girls’ sexual identities, frequently bringing an increased level of vulnerability. For some substances, particularly alcohol, the line between moderate, recreational use and addiction is not clear, especially in the case of girls, for whom any consumption can be perceived as a violation of fundamental gender norms. Drinking, smoking, and drug use have been adopted as features of a “youth culture,” especially in the 1920s (during Prohibition), the 1960s, and afterward. Girls’ participation in these behaviors has alarmed many social critics because it seems to represent the most radical break with the past. Indeed, the fear that girls’ consumption rates are “converging” with those of boys, or “closing the gender gap,” has been expressed frequently by such critics as part of widespread concern about the direction of social change. Although rates of adolescent substance use and abuse have become increasingly similar across gender lines over time, the motivations for and consequences of these behaviors still demonstrate important differences for young men and women. In addition, patterns of substance use and abuse diverge significantly among girls, with important variations by age, race, class, region, and other factors. Finally, experts agree that more research on substance abuse among adolescent girls is needed to ensure better prevention efforts and treatment programs. Examining patterns of substance use and abuse throughout American history reveals many changes in girls’ habits. During the colonial era, alcohol consumption

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in general was more widespread than it is today, due in part to an unreliable water supply. Girls might consume alcoholic cider or other beverages, but strict community standards shaped their drinking practices and brought dire consequences for intoxication. By the nineteenth century, although many young women, especially immigrant women, continued to enjoy liquor, the increasingly heated temperance debate cast women and girls as symbols of innocence, purity, and domesticity—and as antidotes to the saloon. Reflecting the presumed connection between alcohol consumption and “deviant” sexual behavior, moreover, many people assumed that young women who spent time in saloons were prostitutes. Reformers argued that such young women had often been “seduced” by drink and unscrupulous men; trapped in a life of prostitution, these women often relied on alcohol and other drugs to cope with their difficult lives. In fact, the link between prostitution and saloons shows that young women who drank were considered sexual threats to “respectable” society even as these women were themselves sexually most vulnerable. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, the alleged connections among public drinking by young women, prostitution, and the saloon provided powerful ammunition for temperance campaigners. At the same time, though, girls and women did use liquor, as well as highly alcoholic “patent medicines” and other drugs as medicine for “female complaints,” a catch-all term for gynecological difficulties or any other health problems linked with the female condition. Believing that female physiological processes rendered women especially vulnerable to addiction, doctors warned girls and women against consum-

ing alcohol or other drugs to relieve the discomforts of menstruation and to aid recovery from childbirth. Many women who developed addictions to alcohol or other substances such as morphine later recalled that their addiction had begun this way. Since it followed from private, medicinal use, however, this consumption pattern seemed more appropriately “feminine” and generally attracted less attention than did young women’s public drinking. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, both the youth culture and patterns of substance use and abuse underwent fundamental changes. During the 1920s, the increasing number of young people in high school and college, as well as the general affluence of many Americans and the availability of new technologies such as the automobile, fostered the development of a modern youth culture focused on leisure and consumer goods. At the same time, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution ushered in national Prohibition in 1920, making the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages illegal. Many young people, attracted by the additional excitement of violating Prohibition, responded by drinking more than their predecessors had. Drinking and smoking became increasingly glamorized in the images of popular culture; young people explained that they engaged in both to demonstrate their freedom from previous restraints. The behavior of girls, especially the “flapper” who bobbed her hair, wore short skirts, and drank and smoked, represented one of the most significant breaks with the past. At least some young women smoked and drank in the belief that doing so represented “equality” with young men. Liquor consumption also played a major role in dating customs, and many female alcoholics

Substance Abuse later recalled that they had begun drinking in their teens or early twenties in order to feel less inhibited in social situations. Drinking and smoking in these circumstances, however, did not necessarily mean abuse in a clinical sense, although conservative experts did portray these new consumption patterns, especially by young women, as evidence of a general breakdown in social standards and gender roles. The repeal of Prohibition with the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution in 1933 lessened the symbolic significance of alcohol consumption for young people, and the Great Depression and American involvement in World War II ended or at least greatly curtailed the affluent, carefree lifestyle that had shaped the youth culture of the 1920s. The unsettled conditions of the war years, however, contributed to new fears about juvenile delinquency, especially among girls who drank, smoked cigarettes and even marijuana, and engaged in sexual activity with soldiers. Criticism directed at these girls demonstrated that a double standard continued to influence assessments of substance use and of sexual behavior. Although drinking and smoking had symbolized the glamorous youth culture of the Roaring Twenties, a wider constellation of drugs characterized the “hippie” culture of the post–World War II era, particularly the 1960s. Marijuana and psychedelics, especially lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), became drugs of choice for young Americans who sought to demonstrate the breadth of the “generation gap.” As with previous drug and alcohol use by American youth, this consumption did not necessarily qualify as clinical addiction, but it was heavy enough to bring a host of associated medical, emo-

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A young hippie girl smokes a cigarette at a “love-in” in Los Angeles. (Henry Diltz/Corbis, 1967)

tional, and social problems. Girls partook alongside boys, but for them, as in earlier periods, the sexual “freedom” that accompanied drug use frequently meant sexual vulnerability. As a result of a renewed focus on addiction among women more generally and the perception that drugs are an increasing problem among young people, substance use and abuse among girls have received more attention since the 1970s. Despite this increased focus, however, adolescent girls still fall through the cracks in research designs and treatment programs. Their unique motivations for—and patterns of—substance use as

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well as their special needs in treatment, distinct from those of both adolescent boys and adult women, are too frequently overlooked. Since the 1970s, as in earlier periods in American history, patterns of substance use and abuse among girls resemble those among boys but in important ways continue to differ from them. Numerous researchers and commentators have insisted that girls’ consumption rates are approaching those of boys or even, in some cases, surpassing them. Adolescence is a time of strong peer pressure for both genders, and both boys and girls are experimenting with various substances at younger ages. Yet important differences remain between young men and women in consumption patterns; substance preferences; motivations for using; and the consequences, especially those related to sexuality, that result from substance use and abuse. Prohibition and its repeal and the recent “tobacco wars” illustrate continuing American ambivalence about alcohol and cigarettes. Legal for adults but forbidden for children, the two substances remain popular among many teenagers who argue that age restrictions represent hypocrisy and discrimination. Although recreational drinking and experimental smoking have often been dismissed as youthful indiscretions, a substantial number of adolescent girls and boys find themselves struggling with drinking problems or smoking “habits”—or both—that are extremely difficult to break. Surveys and other research indicate that fewer girls than boys drink heavily, but girls’ consumption rates do seem to be catching up to those of boys. In addition, some studies suggest that girls require fewer drinks than boys to reach a given level of intoxication. Gender differences in alcohol metabolism have been attributed to girls’

generally lower body weight, smaller amount of body fluid, and lower levels of enzymes implicated in the breakdown of alcohol by the body. Whatever the reasons behind it, this gender difference has important ramifications in the recognition and treatment of alcohol-related problems among females. Although girls may be influenced to drink less since they experience intoxication sooner, for that very reason they may also be more vulnerable to alcohol-related medical, psychological, and social problems. For the moment, girls’ rates of liquor consumption continue to lag behind those of boys. When it comes to smoking, however, young females have apparently closed the gap. Indeed, research indicates that smoking is the most significant substance abuse problem among young women. Girls seldom use smokeless tobacco—a substance that presents a growing problem among males—but girls’ rates of cigarette smoking equal and in some cases even exceed those of adolescent boys. Beginning in the 1920s, cigarette smoking among women was increasingly glamorized in advertisements and the media, and by the 1960s and 1970s, the number of girls who smoke cigarettes had grown significantly. Although incidence rates have declined somewhat since then, the smoking rate among boys has decreased more quickly, thus narrowing or even eclipsing the gender gap. One reason for the prevalence of smoking among girls is the belief that cigarettes aid weight control efforts. Some girls report that they rely on cigarettes in order to avoid other behaviors that they consider even more destructive, such as overeating. Many girls thus apparently believe that the positive cultural value placed on being slender compensates for the health risks associated

Substance Abuse with cigarette smoking, and their tobacco use today is linked with concerns of sexuality and body image. Like alcohol and cigarettes, prescription drugs and narcotics are considered acceptable for some sectors of the population, even as they are considered illicit among others. In general, females are more likely to use drugs in a medicinal, therapeutic context, whereas males are more likely to consume drugs recreationally. This long-standing historical pattern echoes conventional gender roles. In the late nineteenth century, for example, women who would never have entered a saloon nevertheless partook freely of high-alcohol patent medicines. Similarly, girls today are more likely than boys to use amphetamines, which also can be rationalized as a tool for weight control. Addiction to substances that were initially prescribed by a physician is more of an issue for women, who take more such medicines than do men. Further, many young women attempt to “self-medicate” with alcohol and other drugs, using them in addition to or instead of prescription medications such as psychotherapeutics to cope with depression and stressful life events. When it comes to illicit drugs that are consumed primarily for recreation, however, rates of use are lower among girls than boys, although here too girls seem to be closing the gap. Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug among adolescents of both genders, but even though overall prevalence rates are similar, boys are more likely than girls to be heavy or frequent users. Female adolescents are less likely than boys to use or abuse other drugs, including cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, opiates, and phencyclidine (PCP), although the trend appears to be toward convergence.

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The deep and abiding connections between issues of substance use and abuse and sexuality and reproduction have very different implications for adolescent females and males. For both sexes, substance use often accompanies dating; young men and women turn to alcohol and other drugs to alleviate shyness and overcome inhibitions. Girls frequently acquire substances or gain access to them through young men, often in exchange for some kind of sexual activity. This sexual barter might range from girls engaging in kissing or petting with dates who buy beer to young women prostituting themselves in order to feed a cocaine habit. Recent research indicates, in fact, that female adolescents who use alcohol and other drugs are also more likely to become involved in sexual activity at an early age. Discussion of these issues in recent years shows that the double standard continues; girls’ sexual activity, like girls’ substance use, is still judged more harshly than boys’. The consequences of sexual experimentation, especially when combined with alcohol and drug use, can be much more severe for girls. When substance use impairs their faculties, girls too easily become victims of sexual assault; binge drinking and certain drugs sometimes given to girls without their knowledge have been linked with date rape. Girls who have sexual intercourse while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs are less likely to use contraception, increasing their chances of getting sexually transmitted diseases, including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and of becoming pregnant. Pregnancy and early motherhood frequently diminish the educational and occupational opportunities young women enjoy. At the same time, clinical research suggests that addiction to alcohol and other drugs among

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women has reproductive consequences, threatening the long-term health of babies born to mothers who abuse these substances. Indeed, the powerful image of the “crack baby,” allegedly born disproportionately to young, unwed, especially African American women, demonstrates further the confluence in modern American culture of ideas about substance abuse, teen pregnancy, poverty, and race. Michelle L. McClellan See also Acquaintance Rape; Body Image; Dating and Courtship; Depression and Girls; Eating Disorders; Female Sexuality; Girl Gangs; Juvenile Delinquents; Psychotherapy; Suicidal Behavior in Girls; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Bodinger–de Uriarte, Cristina, and Gregory Austin. 1991. “Substance Abuse among Adolescent Females.” Prevention Research Update 9 (Fall). Burnham, John C. 1993. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History. New York: New York University Press. Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press. Kandall, Stephen R. 1996. Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sandmaier, Marian. 1980. The Invisible Alcoholics: Women and Alcohol Abuse in America. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Suicidal Behavior in Girls This entry examines suicidal behavior in adolescent girls from a contemporary perspective. Suicidal ideation and behavior are serious problems among girls in the United States. Suicidal thoughts and behavior are far more common in girls

than in boys in this country, and during adolescence, depression is also more common in girls than in boys. The term suicidal ideation refers to thinking or talking about killing oneself. A behavior is defined as suicidal when a girl intends that behavior to end her life, or when she engages in a life-threatening act and does not care about surviving it. This definition includes intentionally suicidal acts that are interrupted before any harm occurs, such as the behavior of a girl or boy who intentionally lies across railway tracks but is rescued before the train arrives. A suicidal act may be fatal or nonfatal. The outcome of the suicidal act is not a reliable measure of intent. Not every suicidal death is planned, but conversely, some suicidal acts intended to be fatal do not result in death. A range of suicide methods may be used, including cutting one’s wrists, deliberately ingesting medication in excess of the therapeutic or generally recognized dosage, deliberately crashing a car, hanging oneself, or shooting oneself with a firearm. In addition, the suicide method does not accurately measure intent. The same method may be used with different intentions. Some individuals survive what they may have thought of as a lethal suicidal act, for example, a car crash. Others will die of an action they did not think would kill them (e.g., an overdose of Tylenol). Suicide methods tend to be culturally specific. Methods common in one culture may be unusual in another culture. Females and males tend to use the methods that are permissible for them in their community. In some communities, young women and men use different suicide methods; in other communities they use the same methods.

Suicidal Behavior in Girls In the United States, adolescent girls are two to three times more likely than adolescent males to report suicidal ideation. It appears to be particularly common among Mexican American youth. Adolescent girls are also more likely than adolescent boys to engage in nonfatal acts of suicidal behavior by an average ratio of 3 to 1. Approximately one in ten adolescent girls reports having engaged in some form of suicidal behavior. Gender differences in nonfatal suicidal behavior are not found in all ethnic groups in the United States. For example, among native Hawaiians and Native Americans, adolescent girls report similar rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior as adolescent boys. Rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior appear to be particularly high among Mexican American girls. Adolescents who engage in nonfatal suicidal behavior seem to come from lower socioeconomic strata. For example, low levels of parental education are associated with higher adolescent suicidal risk (Canetto 1998). Adolescent females in the United States, however, are less likely to die as a result of a suicidal act than are adolescent males, by a ratio of 5 to 1. The gender difference in mortality holds across ethnic groups, although suicide rates vary greatly from group to group. Native American girls have lower rates of suicide than Native American boys but higher rates of suicide than European American boys. Gender differences in suicide mortality among adolescents are not universal. For example, in Mauritius, young females and males have the same rates of suicide mortality. In other countries, the gender trends in youth suicide mortality are reversed relative to the United States. For example, in several Asian and South American countries, including Brazil,

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Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Hong Kong, Paraguay, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, young females’ suicide mortality exceeds that of young males. In the United States, suicidal behavior, both nonfatal and fatal, is uncommon in childhood and early adolescence, when it is seen almost as often among girls as among boys. No differences in rates of depression are recorded until adolescence. The incidence of suicide increases less rapidly among females than among males during adolescence and young adulthood. In recent decades, the gender gap in suicide mortality has been widening, especially in some U.S. ethnic minority groups. Rates of suicide mortality among girls of all U.S. ethnic groups have tended to remain stable. However, rates for U.S. ethnic minority boys have increased markedly. It is important to remember, however, that the majority of adolescent suicidal acts are nonfatal. Very few adolescents actually take their own lives. At the same time, they engage in a very high number of suicidal acts. At no other time in the life span is the ratio of nonfatal to fatal suicidal behavior as high as during adolescence. Why are adolescent girls in the United States more depressed and more likely to engage in suicidal behavior but less likely to kill themselves than boys? What protects girls from dying of suicide, despite the fact that they engage in more suicidal acts than boys? Many explanations have been proposed for the gender paradox of suicidal behavior, but it seems to be a culturally specific and historically fluid phenomenon, which suggests that it needs to be understood in light of cultural variables.

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A promising theory is that of cultural scripts, which is based on the observation of a correspondence between social expectations and actual behavior in different cultures. Individuals tend to engage in the behaviors (including suicidal behaviors) that are meaningful and permissible in their community. In each cultural community, there are scripts of suicidal behavior, that is, specific conditions under which suicidal behavior is expected and specific ways to commit suicide. Cultural scripts define the scenario of the suicidal act, including the actor, method, precipitating factors, and themes. In each culture there are also common reactions to and consequences of suicidal behavior. In the United States, girls’ high rates of nonfatal suicidal behavior make sense in light of the fact that these behaviors are viewed as feminine. Studies show that nonfatal suicidal behavior in females receives less disapproval than the same behavior in males. However, killing oneself is viewed as masculine behavior and is thus less acceptable in females than in males. Among the young, female suicide is judged as more wrong, more foolish, and weaker than male suicide. Girls who kill themselves are viewed as less well adjusted than boys who kill themselves, independent of what caused the suicide. These cultural scripts of gender and suicidal behavior may be particularly powerful for adolescents, since they are in the process of defining their identity and may take messages about gender-appropriate behavior more seriously and more literally than adults. The fact that nonfatal suicidal behavior is viewed as feminine does not mean that suicidal females are treated in a caring manner. Studies suggest that young

persons respond negatively to their suicidal peers. They view them as cowardly and tend to avoid them out of a mixture of shock, anger, repulsion, and helplessness. In one study, young suicidal persons reported that their peers had made fun of suicidal ideas that they expressed. Caregivers also tend to respond in a critical and even hostile manner to suicidal persons, especially when they perceive them as “not serious” in their intent to die. For example, caregivers tend to interpret nonfatal suicidal behavior as manipulative, despite evidence that most persons describe their suicidal act as motivated by despair rather than by the desire to influence someone. Similarly, mental health clinicians have little empathy for their (overwhelmingly female) suicidal clients and often dismiss them as immature and hysterical. Gender differences in method probably account in part for girls’ higher rates of survival from suicidal behavior. In the United States, girls are more likely than boys to use poisoning and cutting as suicide methods, although the use of firearms is growing among girls. Poisoning is a method that allows for more possibilities for rescue, at least in the United States. The rescue potential of a suicide method depends on a number of individual and community factors, including the immediate lethality of the method, the place of the suicide, the likelihood of being found quickly, and the likelihood of quick and effective care once found. The more rapidly lethal the method and the less public the suicidal act, the lower the likelihood of survival. In developing countries, suicide by poisoning, even one that is carried out in a public area, carries a high death potential because of the toxicity of the poisons used (e.g., agrochem-

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High school students comfort each other outside a mortuary in San Pedro, California, as they mourn the suicide of two female classmates who jumped to their deaths from a 15-foot cliff. (Associated Press AP, 1996)

icals) and the likelihood that good medical care may not be available quickly enough to make a difference. The question of whether U.S. girls’ choice of suicide methods reflects their lesser intent to die is difficult to assess because adolescents’ knowledge of the lethality of suicide methods is often limited. It is likely that more female suicidal acts than males’ are intended as nonfatal. Most suicidal acts are in some ways planned. There is also evidence of a correlation between intent and lethality. At the same time, it is important to remember that in the United States, girls’ choice of suicide method and scenario takes

place against a cultural script that prohibits girls from taking their own lives. The search for causes of suicidal behavior, fatal and nonfatal, spans many fields of study, from biochemistry to psychology to sociology to astronomy. A sampling of proposed risk factors includes genetic markers, the menstrual cycle, mental disorders, sexual and physical abuse, parental divorce, parental education, rates of unemployment within families, cognitive style, coping skills, low self-esteem, and phases of the moon. Information on risk factors and dynamics unique to suicidal females, however, is limited because most researchers do not

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focus on questions of gender and do not separately analyze data for females. In addition, information on risk factors has not advanced enough to help predict suicidal behavior at the individual level. Many young persons experience some or many of the risk factors and never become suicidal. Among mental disorders, depression, alcohol and substance abuse, and antisocial behavioral disorders have been most commonly associated with risk for suicidal ideation and behavior, both fatal and nonfatal, among adolescents. For girls, depression appears to be a stronger predictor of suicidal behavior than for boys. Drug abuse for suicidal girls may involve the abuse of over-the-counter medications rather than illegal substance abuse. Adolescent girls with eating disorders constitute another risk group for nonfatal suicidal behaviors. Suffering from more than one disorder increases the risk for all suicidal behavior. Disease and impairment may also play a role in nonfatal suicidal behavior. In the late twentieth century in the United States, sexual abuse has increasingly been recognized as a factor in girls’ nonfatal suicidal behavior. There is considerable debate about whether sexual orientation is a risk factor for suicidal behavior among lesbian and bisexual girls. Low self-esteem, low academic achievement, peer difficulties, and social isolation have been identified as factors in nonfatal suicidal behavior. In addition, experience with suicidal behavior, including a family history of suicidal behavior, recent suicidal behavior by a friend, or a girl’s own past suicidal episodes, has been found to increase the risk of all suicidal behavior. Stressful life events, including turmoil and instability in key relationships, particularly with parents, seem to be typical precipitants of suicidal behavior in adoles-

cents. In general, the more difficulties a girl has or has had, the more likely she is to engage in suicidal behavior. At the same time, although adversities increase the risk for suicidality, they are particularly potent in those adolescents whose thoughts and coping strategies are dysfunctional. The impact of these risk factors in terms of probability of nonfatal suicidal behavior is stronger for females, which suggests the influence of a facilitating cultural script for girls. In the United States, the risk for death by suicide is predicted by a similar set of factors as nonfatal suicidal behavior. At the same time, the availability of firearms seems to be less of a risk factor for suicide in girls, possibly because guns are still perceived as a more masculine method. The main fact is that U.S. girls are far less likely to kill themselves than boys. Relative to boys, girls are protected from suicide. Thus, in the case of suicide, the impact of the risk factors is lower in girls than in boys, suggesting the influence of an inhibiting cultural script. Many questions about girls and suicidal behavior remain unanswered. At the same time, the data on gender, culture, and suicidal behavior suggest some important new directions for primary prevention. In the United States, given the gender differences in patterns and meanings of suicidal behavior, suicide prevention programs should consistently address questions of gender. Educational programs should evaluate the participants’ beliefs about femininity and nonfatal suicidal behavior. They should also be prepared to engage girls in challenging the idea that nonfatal suicidal behavior is an acceptable feminine way of coping. Suicide prevention programs should also consider the implications of girls’ empathic attitudes toward suicidal persons. Although these

Summer Camps for Girls sympathetic responses are usually taken as a sign of maturity and a protective factor, in girls they may signal an acceptance of nonfatal suicidal behavior as a way to deal with difficulties. Awareness of girls’ socialized behavior also matters in evaluating the impact of secondary prevention services such as crisis lines. Girls are high users of crisis lines. This has traditionally been taken as an indication that these services benefit suicidal girls. In reality, the fact that young women are the highest users of crisis services simply tells us that many girls are suicidal and that they are willing to disclose their suicidal thoughts to a stranger—a behavior that is understandable in light of the fact that talking about one’s suicidal feeling or behavior is considered more acceptable for females than for males. Whether or not crisis services actually meet suicidal girls’ needs and reduce girls’ suicidal behavior remains to be tested. Finally, evaluations of the effect of suicide prevention programs should not measure outcomes solely by changes in suicide mortality records, since death by suicide is a relatively rare outcome, particularly among girls. Program evaluations should include assessments of changes in suicidal ideation and nonfatal suicidal behavior because these are the most common forms of suicidality among adolescents and are uniquely epidemic among girls. Information on depression, suicidal ideation, and nonfatal suicidal behavior is particularly important in testing the impact of these programs on girls. Finally, program evaluations should include measures of cognitive styles and coping behaviors, as these seem to mediate the risk of suicidal behavior. Silvia Sara Canetto

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See also Acquaintance Rape; Adolescent Health; Body Image; Child Abuse; Depression and Girls; Eating Disorders; Lesbians; Psychotherapy; Substance Abuse; Teen Pregnancy References and Further Reading Canetto, Silvia Sara. 1998. “Meanings of Gender and Suicidal Behavior among Adolescents.” Suicide and Life Threatening Behaviors 27: 339–351. Canetto, Silvia Sara, and David Lester. 1995. “Gender and the Primary Prevention of Suicide Mortality.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 25: 58–69. Garland, Ann F., and Edward Zigler. 1993. “Adolescent Suicide Prevention: Current Research and Social Policy Implications.” American Psychologist 48: 169–182. King, Cheryl A. 1997. “Suicidal Behavior in Adolescence.” Pp. 61–95 in Review of Suicidology. Edited by Ronald W. Maris, Morton M. Silverman, and Silvia Sara Canetto. New York: Guilford. Lewinsohn, Peter M., Paul Rohde, and John R. Seeley. 1996. “Adolescent Suicidal Ideation and Attempts: Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Clinical Implications.” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 3, no. 1: 25–46.

Summer Camps for Girls Since the late nineteenth century, American girls between the ages of four and eighteen have left their families and neighborhoods behind, if only temporarily, to attend camps during the long summer vacation. These child-centered leisure institutions were first organized on behalf of elite white Christian boys. By the turn of the century, adults were establishing camps for girls of similar backgrounds— and later, as the industry extended and diversified its reach, an increasingly wide spectrum of girls and boys. These camps attested to the intensifying social value of childhood, the rise of supervised, age-specific activities (including playgrounds and high schools as well as camps), and the

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Summer camps have been a bonding and learning experience for girls, as this photo from Camp We-Ha-Ha on the New York–New Jersey border shows. (Courtesy of Hyman Bogen)

expanding market in children’s recreation. The rise of girls’ summer camps more particularly and their growing success in the twentieth century have also highlighted gender shifts flowing across generations. Summer camps for girls have provided access to adventurous and athletic outdoors experiences, many of which had once been near-exclusive male prerogatives. Prior to industrialization, rural American children often played significant roles in the family economy. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing numbers of urban middle- and upper-class children were no longer helping their parents on farms during the summer. For a cohort of white Protestant men working with youth, this long vacation was an opportunity in the making. Worried about the effects of “artificial”

leisure in the city and of modern urban life more generally, these men decided to provide physically strenuous vacations to the elite boys whom they believed would grow up to lead the nation. For “muscular Christians,” camping vacations for both men and boys were antidotes to the “softness” of the modern work regime and of vacations at resort hotels. A “primitive” sojourn into savagery, as contemporary psychologist G. Stanley Hall contended, was particularly critical to the development of white boys, providing, amid the safety of select peers and adult supervision, a kind of inoculation against the feminizing effects of civilized culture. The first camping experiment for boys took place at the Gunnery Camp in Connecticut (1861–1879) and the North Mountain School of Physical Culture in Pennsylvania (1876–1878). The first church-spon-

Summer Camps for Girls sored camp was established by George Hinckley during the summers of 1880 and 1881 in Rhode Island, and Ernest Balch’s Camp Chocorua, which operated from 1881 to 1889 in New Hampshire, was the first commercial organized camp for boys. Most early camps served boys, but a few pioneers started camps for elite girls as well. The Nature Science Camp, established in 1890 by Albert Fontaine, originally served New York boys. By 1891, Fontaine had started a separate girls’ camp, which ran for five seasons. Also in New York, Arey’s Natural Science Camp, established in 1890, accepted girls from 1892 onward; in 1902, renamed Camp Arey, it began to serve girls exclusively. In 1896, the French Recreation Class for Girls on Lake Placid, New York, offered outdoor exercise, walking and rowing, daily French study, optional classes in botany and sketching, and special college preparatory courses. Other pioneering girls’ camps included New Hampshire’s Redcroft (1900), Kehonka (1902), and Pinelands (1902) camps, and the Wyonegonic Camps in Maine (1902). In Vermont, Camp Barnard (1903) and Camp Aloha (1905) were the pioneering camps in a cohort that would become particularly active in the upper Connecticut valley. From their inception onward, American camps were never spread out equally across the nation. Some clusters developed in the upper Midwest, the southern Appalachians, and the Rocky Mountains. Because camps responded so directly to anxieties about urbanization, they achieved their greatest popularity close to the cities of the densely settled Northeast, in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. The populations that they served, however, were increasingly diverse. By the turn of the twentieth century, private camps were joined by orga-

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nizational camps sponsored by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), and settlement houses, all of which originally served middle- and working-class boys. After all, a greater number of city-based organizations focused on boys and their leisure needs, including camping, and traditional ideas about boys’ purportedly greater need for “primitive” experience and adventure persisted well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the Young Women’s Christian Association’s (YWCA) first camp, which opened in 1898 at Altamont, New York, benefited somewhat older “working girls” of limited means rather than younger girls. Only in the 1910s did girls’ camps achieve the beginnings of parity. The network of private girls’ camps expanded rapidly, and several new youth groups for girls offered camping opportunities. Shortly after the Boy Scout movement was imported from Britain to the United States (1910), two similar organizations for girls were founded: the Camp Fire Girls (1911) and the Girl Scouts (1912). Both walked a fine line between traditional domestic ideology and new modes of adventure. The first, the Camp Fire Girls, was modeled on Luther and Charlotte Gulick’s private Maine camp, WoHe-Lo, where the Gulick daughters and a few paying friends had been spending their summers. Charlotte Gulick’s sisterin-law, Harriet Farnsworth Gulick, and her husband Edward Leeds Gulick had founded Camp Aloha in 1905, and in 1908 Harriet’s brother Charles Farnsworth and his wife Ellen had started the Hanoum Camps, also in Vermont. At Camp Wo-He-Lo (named for “work, health, and love”), the girls adopted Indian names and made ceremonial dresses

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A group of girls learn to light a safe campfire at a church camp in Jamesport, Long Island, New York. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos, 1955)

with Indian-style symbols. But for the Gulicks, camping and Indian ritual were meant to buttress traditional female skills, not to explore, as Boy Scouts might, the regenerative possibilities of “savagery.” This popular girls’ organization provided thousands of its mostly middle-class members the opportunity to attend affordable local camps.

The Girl Scouts, founded in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia, by Juliette Gordon Low, provided similar kinds of camping opportunities. Like the Camp Fire Girls, whom they would outnumber by the 1930s, the Girl Scouts blended traditional and modern gender expectations; girls acquired badges for laundry as well as for outdoors pursuits. Still, at Girl Scout

Summer Camps for Girls camps, girls experienced rugged camping. Low’s Savannah troop first went camping in 1912 dressed in long bloomers, which they decorously covered in skirts until they were out of town. Out of the public eye, they swam, cooked for themselves along the Savannah River, and slept on the sand. By the late teens, a number of Girl Scout troops were, like their male counterparts, going camping: sleeping in tents, saluting the flag, marching in unison, knot tying, and swimming. Vigorous and active, Girl Scout camping exemplified new possibilities for girls in outdoor recreation and more generally as active players in American life. Many of the directors of girls’ camps (sometimes called “directresses”) were college-educated women who worked during the school year as teachers and social workers. In 1916, a number of girls’ camp directors, male and female, banded together to form the National Association of Directors of Girls’ Camps (NADGC). This organization was the professional counterpart to the Camp Directors’ Association of America (CDAA) that had been organized in 1910 by the directors of boys’ camps. In 1924, the CDAA and the NADGC merged into a new Camp Directors’ Association, a manifestation of the increasingly important role of girls’ camps in the industry. To a significant extent, the earlier rhetoric of “muscular Christianity” gave way to more secular ideals of leisure for its own sake and healthy outdoor living for both sexes. Still, girls’ camps remained ideologically and materially distinct from their male counterparts. Girl campers had increased access to “the primitive life,” but their camps were likely to offer crafts and dancing, while boys’ camps gave lessons in carpentry or riflery. Girls’ camps often had a higher staff-to-camper ratio

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than did similar camps for boys, meaning that girls were under greater adult supervision and protection than their brothers. Gender has, however, been only one of several factors in play where camping is concerned. The parents of middle- and upper-class children have been able to choose among many options, whereas working-class parents have relied on local settlement house and charitable camps. And some ethnic groups have supported camping more fervently than others. For example, Jewish camps, serving both religiously observant and acculturated families, have been particularly successful. In the early twentieth century, native-born Protestant and Jewish girls were somewhat more likely than Catholic girls to attend camps. And only in the late 1930s and early 1940s would many northeastern organizational camps move toward racial integration. Until then, only a few American camps accepted African American girls: organizational camps such as Camp Atwater in Massachusetts and Camp Guilford Bower in New York and segregated YWCA and Girl Scout troop camps. A small number of self-consciously progressive and politically radical interwar camps, such as the Pioneer Youth Camp in New York and Camp WoChi-Ca in New Jersey, made racial integration central to their programs. Only in the postwar era would interracial camping become more common. The postwar era also saw the expansion of coeducational camping. At their inception, most camps were spaces of real, although not total, gender separation. Some girls never saw boys during the camp season. Others had a nearby “brother” camp, often under the same management, with which they socialized. Most of the first coed camps, in which boys and girls lived on opposite sides of a single

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camp, only served preadolescents rather than teenagers of “dating age.” The earliest camp leaders tended to believe that gender segregation of campers was natural and appropriate. By the interwar years, however, child-study experts began increasingly to suggest that late childhood and adolescence represented a necessary time of heterosexual development. Girls’ camp crushes on one another became more controversial. In other words, the larger culture’s intensified emphasis on heterosexuality affected girls’ leisure institutions as well. From the 1930s onward, more camps went coed (and doubled their potential clientele in the process). At many of those camps that remained single-sex, social encounters with similar kinds of boys from neighboring camps constituted increasingly important seasonal or even weekly rituals, particularly for older girls. At the turn of the twenty-first century, girls and boys attend camps in fairly equal numbers. Along with boys, girls attend day camps and overnight camps, single-sex camps and coed camps, and even specialty camps with emphases ranging from computers to horseback riding to weight loss. The traditional eightweek private camp is no longer as popular as it was during the postwar era, when the baby boomers were of camping age. Now, the significant majority of camps are run by organizations rather than individuals. Each summer, more than 8 million children and adolescents between the ages of five and seventeen attend a wide variety of camps. Regardless of their specialty or orientation, most camps draw on traditions that are a century old, including swimming, camp songs, campfires, overnight hikes, and learning to live apart from one’s family. Here, they prom-

ise, girls can take social risks and learn new skills within protected and sheltering environments. Attending summer camp is no longer the challenge to gender conventions that it once was, but it remains, for many girls, a formative rite of passage. Leslie Paris See also Camp Fire Girls; 4-H; Girl Scouts; Play; Saturday Evening Girls References and Further Reading Bederman, Gail. 1995. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Buckler, Helen, Mary F. Fiedler, and Martha F. Allen. 1961. Wo-he-lo: The Story of the Campfire Girls 1910–1960. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Cavallo, Dominick. 1981. Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cohen, Daniel. 1990. “For Happy Campers, Nothing Beats the Old Rites of Passage.” Smithsonian 21 (August): 86–94. Deloria, Philip J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eells, Eleanor. 1986. Eleanor Eells’ History of Organized Camping: The First 100 Years. Martinsville, IN: American Camping Association. Gibson, H. W. 1936. “The History of Organized Camping.” Camping 7 (January–December). Gutman, Richard J. S., and Kellie O. Gutman. 1983. The Summer Camp Memory Book: A Pictorial Treasury of Everything, from Campfires to Color Wars, You Loved about Camp. New York: Crown. Joselit, Jenna Weissman, ed., with Karen S. Mittelman. 1993. A Worthy Use of Summer: Jewish Summer Camping in America. Philadelphia: Museum of American Jewish History. Mishler, Paul C. 1999. Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer

Surfer Girls Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Paris, Leslie. 2001. “The Adventures of Peanut and Bo: Summer Camps and Early Twentieth Century American Girlhood.” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 4 (Winter). ———. Forthcoming, 2001. “ ‘A Home Though Away from Home’: Brooklyn Jews and Interwar Children’s Summer Camps.” In The Jews of Brooklyn. Edited by Ilana Abramovitch and Séan Galvin. Boston: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press. West, Elliott, and Paula Petrik, eds. 1992. Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Zelizer, Viviana. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

Surfer Girls Though female surfers have been around since the kings and queens of Hawaii rode waves at Waikiki, the symbolic figure of the energetic, naive, but determined surfer girl emerged only during the affluent postwar years. In the summer of 1956, surfer Kathy “Gidget” Kohner told her screenwriting father about her days on the beaches at Malibu. Frederick Kohner fictionalized these into the novel Gidget (1957), which was made into a 1959 film starring Sandra Dee. Both attracted huge audiences and created lucrative new markets for water sports products as well as for novels, movies, television shows, and popular music detailing the lifestyle of surfing. Over the next ten years, the original Gidget novel spawned six sequels reprinted in ten languages: Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Gidget Goes to Rome

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(1963), The Affairs of Gidget (1963), Gidget in Love (1965), Gidget Goes Parisienne (1966), and Gidget Goes New York (1968). A series of well-known films followed the original as well, as did about thirty “spin-off” beach blanket movies featuring, most famously, Elvis Presley. By the mid-1960s, American families were on first-name terms with Gidget. The beach sounds of Dick Dale and the Del Tones and the Beach Boys cinched the craze, making “Surfer Girl” and “Surfin’ USA” American musical classics. Because of the overlap between the fictional promotion of surfing and the actual surf community that promotion described, facts and fictions about surfer girls cannot be entirely disentangled. To determine which came first, the fact or the fiction, is impossible. But if Hollywood’s beach movies exaggerated the frequency of luaus or the warmth of the southern Californian night air, they remained true to the fact that the “girl surfer” represented by Gidget had begun to be noticed in the waters of the Pacific by the summer of 1950. Linda Benson from Encinitas, the best woman surfer in the world by the time the Gidget craze struck, doubled for Deborah Walley during the actual surfing scenes portrayed in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961). A decade earlier, Mary Ann Hawkins Morrissey had been recruited by Hollywood to work as a stuntwoman precisely because of her legendary reputation, during the 1940s, as an expert Malibu surfer and all-around water woman. Of course, male surfers of this period, Mickey Dora being the most colorful, boasted relatively extensive Hollywood connections. And Hollywood stars—including Peter Lawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie “Butch” Jenkins, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Walker, and Red Grange—

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Female surfboarders form a star as they lie on the beach in Santa Monica, California. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos, 1935)

nurtured surfing connections. But Benson and Morrissey were surfing women, and the money they received was Hollywood money. Compared to dime-store work, a principal employment option for white women in the 1950s, Hollywood money was “real” money. Though the history of women’s surfing in California during the 1950s is sketchy, there is evidence of a Malibu “girl crowd” surfing as early as the summer of 1950. Vicki Williams Flaxman, Aggie Bane Quigg, Darilyn Zinc, Marge Gleason, Robin Grigg, Patty O’Keefe, and others formed the “Hele Nalu” Girls’ Surf Club—adopting a Hawaiian name that translated as “going surfing” to christen their efforts. Most of these girls already

were capable young tennis players or skiers before they took to the water, and surfing struck them as a new, better kind of sport because it brought them in touch every day with the sea, sand, wind, and tides, and it gave them deep pleasure. O’Keefe, Quigg, and Flaxman later became champion canoe paddlers in Hawaii and continue to surf today. This group of girl surfers figures largely in the history of the sport because to please them (especially Aggie Bane, who later became his wife), Malibu board shaper and surfer Joe Quigg designed “girl boards,” a lighter-weight, more dynamically shaped, balsawood surfboard. Quigg combined tail and rail rocker end to end, permitting a new range of motion and

Surfer Girls control. This retooled board served as the template for all future board innovations and ultimately paved the way for surfing’s short board revolution. Malibu was not the only place on the California coast that had breaking surf in the 1950s, and membership in surfer girl clubs probably proved more the exception than the norm for the surfer girl in search of waves. Then as now, surfing attracted into its ranks very independent, persevering personalities. If it required of its young men considerable body strength, agility, and mental composure (imagining an approaching 10-foot wall of water provides a good idea of the mentality needed for surfing), it required all of that and more for the young woman who wanted to learn. For in no way was surfing considered “normal” for a girl. Though by most accounts relations between the sexes enjoyed a profound cordiality in this period, suggesting why the era goes by the name of “surfing’s golden age,” nonetheless the standard expectations for women during the 1950s suggested girls’ time was better spent preparing themselves to be future mothers—not combing the beaches, day and night, marching to an entirely different drummer. That “difference” can be seen in the life histories of women like Claire Cassidy and Shelly Merrick of Malibu, Rosemari Reimers Rice of Hermosa Beach, and Marge Calhoun of Laguna Beach—all embodiments of the original independent surfer ideal. Cassidy, Reimers Rice, and Merrick report surveying the coastline looking for surf, sometimes from San Onofre to the Ventura County line (more than 200 miles in the days before interstates). Calhoun, as did Linda Benson, found her way to the big waves at Makaha in Hawaii, and handed on an enormously powerful legacy to the surfing

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world in general and to her two surfing daughters in particular, Candy and Robin. Unlike most female surfers of the period, Calhoun and Reimers Rice continued their daily searches for waves even with young children in tow. Reimers Rice remembers packing small children and playpen into her station wagon, along with a nice young babysitter and, of course, always her surfboard. If Malibu was not the only breaking surf, neither were Gidget or primarily blonde “California girls” the exclusive inspirations for the surfer girl mythology. The mainland surfing community had, for most of the twentieth century, evidenced a deep regard for Hawaiian peoples and cultures. Many books and magazines produced by surfers report that as early as the 1400s, Polynesian chants and legends remembered a volcano goddess who surfed named Pele. In the early nineteenth century, before missionary incursions into Hawaii convinced natives of surfing’s supposed evils, courtship rituals of royal Hawaiian families demanded that young women signal their choice of husband by riding a wave with the chosen man. By the 1890s, in defiance of missionary teachings, Hawaiian queen Emma, Surfer magazine reports, ruled the royal waters at Waikiki (George 1999, 112). Certainly, most surfers in the United States eventually learn of Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympian swimmer from Hawaii who in the 1920s introduced American audiences to surfing. They are also likely to learn about Rell Sunn, “Queen of Makaha,” another all-around water woman named first president in 1976 of Women’s Professional Surfing (WPS). When she died of breast cancer in 1998, she left behind a community in mourning. If surfers look upon the “aloha” spirit of surfing with fondness and reverence,

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many are also aware of the more complicated relationship between the surfing industry and Hawaiian culture and history, a relationship that some locate within the colonial tradition. Since the early 1900s, Americans have visited the Hawaiian islands, both imaginatively and literally. As tourist industries became increasingly important to the economies of the western United States in particular, Hawaii’s image as a landscape of sublime peoples and nature grew and with it the profits such an image promised. The question of whether Hawaiian culture is truly respected within surf culture, or is instead “lifted” out of its historical roots in order to serve profit-making ends, is a fair one asked by many longtime surfers. The aloha spirit has undergone yet another test as women surfers, in the years during and after the craze, took to the water in record numbers and with less apology. Many report that the gentlemanly behavior of men changed during the mid-1960s. On her very first time out in 1963, Jericho Poppler reports to Wahine magazine, the guys suggested she come back when her “tits were bigger” (Douglas 1999, 25). In an era of social revolution, antiwar protests, and civil rights agitation, on the threshold of the sexual revolution, tensions between men and women in the water might be understood as reflecting the growing pains of American society. Poppler herself, emblematic of changing times, went on to become a world-class surfer, a woman of many talents, and founder in the 1970s of the first women’s professional tour. But as early as the 1950s, the bohemianism of surf culture served to affirm female physical strength, pleasure, and fun, while it simultaneously challenged the expectation that women of the period should give

their lives wholly to the reproduction of Cold Warriors. By the mid-1960s, some surfer girls clearly were more than mere “Gidgets.” Accomplished and risk-taking athletes who surfed far better than did the vast majority of men, young women like Joyce Hoffman from Capistrano Beach emerged as the first female star surfer, winning world titles and leading female surfing worldwide. In the Hoffman era, many other women rose to public prominence: Gail Cooper and Phyllis O’Donnell from Sydney, Australia; Gerry Stewart of New York; Linda Merrill, the first girl ever on the cover of Surfer magazine; Joey Hamasaki; Little Mimi Monroe; and at the end of the 1960s, Margo Godfrey Oberg, who at sixteen won the world championship while riding the new, radical short board—ending the reign of Joyce Hoffman and changing the women’s surf scene forever. During the 1970s, surfer girls “grew up,” so to speak, formulating the organizational structure that supports women’s professional surfing today. The Women’s International Surfing Association (WISA) was founded; contests like the Hang Ten Women’s Pro at Malibu showcased new talent; and International Professional Surfing (IPS) named, for the first time, a female world champion, Margo Godfrey Oberg. After the mid-1970s, the names of able new stars grew too numerous to list. Some came from newer places, like Jane “from the Lane” Mackenzie, whose home break is Steamer’s at Santa Cruz, or Wendy Botha, who hails from South Africa. Others included Mary Lou Drummy, Linda Davoli, Lynne Boyer, Kim Mearig, Australia’s first professional surfer Pam Burridge, and the overnight sensation Frieda Zamba.

Surfer Girls Though much is known about “the best” surfer girls in the water from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, a mystery hangs over the majority of surfer girls, who did or did not surf competitively or did not live in areas where surfing was a highvisibility sport. About these young women, we can only wonder. Does the surfer girl mythology live on? How has it met up with changing rules circulated by the contemporary women’s movement and women surfers themselves, about women’s abilities, “rightful” community roles, and potential? The enormous commercial boom of surfing in the mid-1990s has fostered a renewed interest in women’s surfing and its history. First, the unprecedented accomplishments of stars like Lisa Andersen, Rochelle Ballard, Layne Beachley, Pauline Menczer, Megan Abubo, and Serena Brooke suggest this truly is a new age for women’s surfing. At the same time, the commercial potential of surfing has undergone a massive renaissance—a watershed not unlike that inspired by Gidget in the late 1950s. In 1991, Quiksilver debuted its new surfwear made for women, especially girls’ board shorts, creating a huge market of new female surfers and surfer-wannabe women consumers, whose purchases account for most of its sales. As in the 1950s, magazines and books that detail the world of surfer girls are again popular: Wahine is in its fifth year, and regular spreads on women’s surfing appear in other sports magazines. Joy Nicholson’s first novel, The Tribes of Palos Verdes, is slated to be a major motion picture. But unlike in the

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1950s, women business owners are now principals in the new industry, heading up women’s surf shops, schools, film companies, photography studios, equipment manufacturers, tours and vacations, and competitions. The notion of “girl power”—the power of girls to excel in sports and in life, as well as the consumer power of girls and women—is a central tenet of the renaissance. At the time of this writing, girl power remains one of the most intriguing forces for change in recent memory. Krista Comer See also Girl Power; Girls’ Culture; Movies, Adolescent Girls in; Sports; Television; Tomboys References and Further Reading Comer, Krista. Forthcoming, 2003. From Gidget to Surfergrrrls: Cultural History and Gender Formation in an Era of Globalization. (See for oral histories with Rosemari Reimers Rice, Linda Benson, and Jane Mackenzie.) Douglas, Theo, and Elizabeth Glazner. 1999. “The Real Gidget.” Wahine 5, no. 2: 20–25. Duclos, Jeff. 1999. “In Trim: Women of Malibu.” LongBoard Magazine (May–June): 50–58. Finney, Ben, and James D. Houston. 1996. Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport. San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books. Gabbard, Andrea. 2000. Girl in the Curl: A Century of Women’s Surfing. Seattle: Seal Press. George, Sam. 1999. “500 Years of Women’s Surfing.” Surfer 40, no. 3: 112–113. Nicholson, Joy. 1997. The Tribes of Palos Verdes. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Warshaw, Matt. 1997. Surfriders: In Search of the Perfect Wave. New York: HarperCollins.

T Tea Parties

tor of refinement was often among the very first household acquisitions for those colonial families with social aspirations toward gentility. Only certain kinds of tables, tablecloths, trays, teapots, cups, and saucers were regarded as acceptable among the genteel. Using coded equipment, eighteenth-century elites mastered the etiquette of the highly disciplined social ritual of the tea ceremony. Those who achieved mastery of the elaborate performance of steeping, serving, and sipping acquired prestige and the social acceptance of a powerful elite. Those unfamiliar with the rules and roles of the ceremony, however, were marginalized. Portraits of refined-looking girls with tea set props were painted in the late eighteenth century, when teatime became a family ritual (except during the Revolutionary War, of course). It was customary for the mistress or her eldest daughter to serve the tea. Tea parties at home provided adolescent girls and boys an opportunity to socialize and for parents to scrutinize potential suitors. Courtship might also include dancing, singing, and playing. For younger children, diminutive ceramic and China tea sets were sold in cities like Boston and Philadelphia, where little Peggy Livingston received a complete tea set from her uncle so that she could hold tea parties for her dolls (Roth 1988, 450).

Since the nineteenth century, tea parties have been an encouraged form of play for girls by grownups concerned with promoting genteel feminine behavior. Tea parties were encouraged by nineteenthcentury middle-class mothers committed to raising daughters to assume their allotted role as wives and mothers. The widespread production of miniature tea tables (some painted to represent marble) and porcelain tea sets (including doll-sized ones) enabled girls, friends, and their dolls to imitate adult lavishness as they practiced the social rituals of polite society. Fewer household responsibilities and increased leisure—a consequence of industrialization—led to more play activities that imitated work. Mothers hoped that ritualized girls’ teas would cultivate civility, a central feature of bourgeois domestic values promoted by middleclass advisers. An elaborate code of table manners required girls, along with others, to achieve discipline over the body, emotions, and appetite. Tea drinking as a marker of civility began as an upper-class English custom that spread to the colonies. Because both tea and tea sets were expensive, it was an activity that only the well-to-do could afford to enjoy until 1750, when increasing availability lowered the cost of tea and tea equipment. This new material indica-

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Two little girls have a tea party with a stuffed panda. (Lambert/Archive Photos, 1950s)

It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that children’s tea parties became more widespread because of the greater availability of less expensive pottery along with the increased purchasing power of the middle class. Numerous stereographs, advertising trade cards, illustrations, and postcards portrayed girls reenacting the elegant social performances of their elders with child-sized tea sets. Doll-sized china tea sets cost between 25 cents and $2 at the 99-cent and variety stores. There were even children’s books such as The Dolls’ Tea Party (1895) that codified the ritual for little ones. Whether in the Midwest or Northeast, tea parties were staged with great

regularity. One late-nineteenth-century study revealed that out of 242 girls who played with tea sets, 73 considered it their “favorite” activity (Croswell 1899, 354). Believing that all girls “longed for” tea nooks or tea tables (preferably with two lower shelves for extra cups), turn-of-thecentury interior decorators recommended them as standard furnishing for girls’ rooms. “No girl’s room can be complete,” one decorator wrote, “without its little tea table which makes her realize, perhaps more than anything else, that here she is responsible for the comfort of her guests; and so she will soon learn to dispense hospitality gracefully” (Tachau 1915, 10). But not all girls delighted in

Technology the conventions of teatime. One study conducted in 1899 suggests that far fewer girls preferred tea parties to other play activities. Out of 929 girls in Worcester, Massachusetts, 687 preferred sledding, jumping rope, and playing tag, hide-andseek, and other games to playing with dolls’ tea sets. Some clearly objected to the intentions of adults who sought to inculcate gender roles through ceremony. Seeing her brother having fun with a pack of friends, one girl (who later became a feminist and a writer) wreaked havoc on her tea party by smashing her unsuspecting dolls to bits. One woman in her memoir described the raucous tea parties of her girlhood. Instead of sedately sipping tea, the girls took turns sitting on top of the tea tray and sliding down the hall stairs. That is probably not what Italian educator Maria Montessori had in mind when she incorporated tea sets into her curriculum to teach poor children middle-class mores. After all, pouring tea from one vessel into another could have functional uses; its fine motor control has appealed to progressive preschool educators ever since. (Tea sets are a standard part of the Montessori equipment in preschools today.) At home, tea parties became more formalized shortly after World War II. House Beautiful recommended tea parties for Valentine’s Day and Good Housekeeping promoted the Christmas tea. Some tea parties in the extravagant 1980s were conspicuously ritzy. Mother-and-daughter teas also became a popular form of entertainment. Still considered within the domain of girls, tea parties are as popular as ever among birthday party planners, many of whom market theirs as old-fashioned, Victorian-style high teas. Little Princess Tea Parties by Lynda is one of many busi-

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nesses nationwide that offer elegant tea parties with lace and frills for girls ages four to eleven. At formal tea parties, girls dress up in long lacy dresses, don large hats, nibble small sandwiches, and drink tea served on a silver service. For presents, girls are likely to receive inexpensive and less fragile china tea sets or safer plastic ones. Tea parties held in cyberspace—such as Hello Kitty’s interactive tea party—provide children with social opportunities, even in the absence of friends. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Consumer Culture; Dollhouses; Dolls; Domesticity; Girls’ Culture; Play References and Further Reading Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Croswell, T. R. 1899. “Amusements of Worcester School Children.” Pedagogical Seminary 4 (September): 354. Roth, Rodris. 1988. “Tea-Drinking in Eighteenth-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage.” Pp. 439–462 in Material Life in America 1600–1860. Edited by Robert Blair St. George. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Tachau, Nina. 1915. “The Girl’s Room.” House Beautiful 38 (June): 10.

Technology When Pocahontas, Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman, and Amelia Earhart were girls, technology did not mean computers and the Internet. In fact, a girl growing up during the Revolution or the Civil War would not have used the word technology—the word can be found during the 1800s but did not become common until the 1930s. When we talk about girls and technology in American history, we have to think about technology as “knowing how” and

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examine all the ways of making and doing things girls learned at different points in time. This view of technology is used by historians and anthropologists to understand the tools and techniques of widely varying cultures. Thus “girls and technology” includes grinding corn and growing squash, mending clothing, tending fires, churning butter, and even playing with dolls as well as using sewing machines, riding bicycles, and surfing the Web. Just as modern toddlers practice grownup work by playing with small pots and pans or trucks or toy cash registers, children in earlier times learned how the technologies of their cultures worked by playing with a small horse and wagon or making doll clothes. Learning about technology is part of how girls learn to be women and boys learn to be men. In some places and times, girls and boys learn about the same technologies: for example, a child who has the job of taking out the garbage learns about garbage cans and garbage trucks. In other cases, grownups expect girls to know about some technologies and boys to know about others, as in the days when girls took home economics in school and boys took shop. Before the Word Technology Girls in Native American communities, the British colonies, and the new United States learned all about the tools and techniques of women’s work as they grew up. Among Native Americans, girls learned to tend and harvest crops, cure meat and fish, cook food, and make clothing and leather goods, depending on where they lived. Among European Americans, most girls lived on farms, so while their brothers were out in the fields helping their father, girls learned all the household and garden jobs that kept the

family going. Families often made the things they used from day to day: clothing, soap, candles, bread, and furniture. African American girls in this period grew up in enslaved families, often on farms growing cash crops such as tobacco, so they learned all the work of farms but also knew more about fieldwork— hoeing and keeping bugs off tobacco plants and drying the leaves for sale— than their free counterparts. Their parents did not have much say in what slave children did all day. In all these communities, even small children learned to be careful of fire, and older girls would be taught to tend the hearth. The big cooking pots might be too heavy for her to lift, but she would be instructed in making stews and how to make a hotter fire, find the warm spots away from the flames, and keep the temperature even while cornbread was cooking. In European American communities, fieldwork—except at harvesttime when everyone’s help might be needed—was mostly for boys and men, but vegetable gardens were planted and tended by women. Girls learned how to pick vegetables when they were ready, save seeds for the following year, and plant and tend seedlings at the right time in the spring. Seasonal tasks like salting meat or pickling vegetables preserved food through the winter, and in northern areas, potatoes and beets and apples stored in a root cellar had to be checked every now and then to remove any items beginning to go bad. Families with a dairy cow had milk and cream, and girls and women churned butter and processed cheese. Sometimes such goods could be traded at the local store for items not made at home. In the modern days of the World Wide Web, a butter churn seems quaint—but more than 1,000 patents had been issued for different kinds

Technology of churns by 1873 when the U.S. government tallied all the patents since 1790. In the days when family members might make all their own cloth and then all their own clothes, mothers and daughters had very important jobs. Little girls practiced sewing scraps together until they had learned to sew straight seams, and then they could help make underwear and shirts and help with the mending. Making clothes took so much time and effort that only the oldest and most worn-out clothes went into the rag basket. Even then, the fabrics were recycled: girls pieced patchwork quilts from good scraps or sewed rags together in long strips so they could braid the strips and then coil them to make a rug. When they were between seven and ten years old and were good at sewing, in many families or schools they sewed a sampler using all the stitches they knew and pretty colored threads, if they could afford them. Older girls often learned to spin linen or wool and eventually to weave, and teenagers set up the loom with warp threads so their younger sisters could do simple weaving. Spinning and weaving were useful activities in households with older girls or teenagers, and sometimes these girls worked for neighbors; a mother with very small children would usually trade some of her squash or beans for having her weaving completed. Then, of course, there was the laundry. Girls learned to make soap as they helped their mothers, as well as how to wash and hang the clothes. Ironing had to be done using a solid metal “iron,” heated in the fire (or, later, on the stove). The iron was heavy, and if it was too hot it might scorch the clothes, but if it was too cool it would not smooth out wrinkles. Thus even very young girls knew about many important technologies, and by the

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time they were teenagers they were very helpful people to have around the house. Often a teenage girl from a family with other sisters would go live with a neighbor’s or relative’s family for a while, so she could learn from a different woman and help in a different household before she began her own. Sometimes her family set up the arrangement as a formal apprenticeship, with a contract called “indentures” signed by both sides, especially if one of her parents had died or if an older woman had particular skills. A town girl learning fancy dressmaking or mantua making (coat making) usually did so under formal indentures, promising to serve her mistress faithfully until she was eighteen years old in return for food and lodging and clothing provided in her new mistress’s household. Industrialization and New Machines During the first 150 years of U.S. nationhood, Americans changed the technologies for almost everything they did. In the early days of the republic, the vast majority of Americans lived on farms and worked in agriculture, but by World War I more than half of all Americans lived in towns, and increasingly they expected that food would be purchased rather than grown. This long, slow process of industrialization meant that many of the tasks girls and women had learned and performed changed dramatically—slowly at first but more and more noticeably as Americans thought theirs a nation of “progress” and tied “progress” to expanding production of all kinds of material goods. When we think about girls and technology, it is important to remember that someone had to buy all the things the new factories were making: consumption is the other side of the coin of production.

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Even by the early nineteenth century, items like soap and candles were being made in small factories, and families could purchase them in local stores. Girls might have some extra time, but buying goods meant the family needed extra money; many farm families added tasks such as making extra butter or plaiting straw for bonnets as part of their household routines. Some families could acquire a stove for cooking, and girls and women learned new techniques for keeping fires going and for cooking and baking. New technologies brought major changes early on for enslaved girls as well. Most important, perhaps, was the cotton gin: with a machine to pick the sticky seeds out of cotton, landowners could make large profits from growing and selling the soft fibers. But more cotton fields meant more people picking cotton, and the number of slaves in the United States grew from less than 700,000 in 1790 to 4 million by 1860. A girl on a cotton plantation helped care for the smaller children until she was old enough to help with household chores for her owners or with the cotton picking in the fields. The cotton was the raw material for the new textile mills in the North that got under way by the 1820s, for by that time fewer people were making cloth at home. The factories turned out yards and yards of standardized cotton and also woolen fabric, all of it carded, spun, and woven by large, fast, noisy machinery. Factory owners thought teenage girls would be good at tending machines like looms, watching for bobbins near empty, or tying broken threads. They also found that girls were good at making craft-based items for the stores, such as cardboard boxes or artificial flowers. In this period many people,

African American and European American and new European immigrants, were moving to cities, and by the middle of the century and especially after the Civil War, girls who lived near factories often worked long hours doing repetitive jobs for cash wages, a new kind of contribution to the family economy. Or they worked in wealthier households, cleaning and cooking, learning all about the new household technologies even though they were too expensive for many working people to have at home. For most of the nineteenth century, even with factory-made cloth, making clothing and household linens was a job for women and girls at home, or, for fancy dresses, for dressmakers and their apprentices. Girls learned to sew just as consistently in the 1800s as they had in the 1700s, although the new coeducational public schools meant sewing was a home activity rather than a school one for many children. But this task, too, changed with the new machines: besides machine-made cloth and machine-made thread, in the second half of the century families with enough money could buy sewing machines to help with straight seams. By the end of the nineteenth century, sewing machines and paper patterns were common tools in many households. Girlhood in Industrial America By World War I, a wide range of readymade household items were available: flour was sold in packages by national distributors, prepared food was sold in cans, and clothing could increasingly be found already sewn. Besides underwear and men’s shirts, in cities the new department stores sold entire gowns and suits to middle-class customers. Meatpacking plants in the Midwest packaged hams and

Technology sausages and shipped them by train to the cities, and railroads brought factory-made goods out to the new towns in the western states. By the turn of the century, even rural people could choose items from thick catalogues—Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward—and order them by mail, getting a taste of all the items people in big cities could find in the stores. For women and girls, being consumers was one of the jobs of running the household, along with old jobs like cooking and cleaning and gardening. But the old jobs changed as more and more houses had hot running water, gas hookups, and even electricity for washing, cooking, lighting, and eventually running small motors. Girls’ roles changed as public schooling became not only more widely available for more of the year but mandatory by state and local law. Industrial society meant everyone in the family had new roles to play and new technologies to learn. When Americans imagined their ideal family, many of them thought of a married couple with children, in a household managed by the mother (possibly with the help of a servant), using money earned by the father. In this image, children went to school and played until sometime in their teenage years. And when Americans thought about machines and progress and engineering and modern cities, they thought of these things as good but also as so noisy and so fast that everyone needed a break from them—and they imagined that “home” was a peaceful place in comparison to work, school, travel, and commerce. In fact, many technologies and even many modern machines could be found inside this cozy peaceful place, but people came to think of machines as belonging somewhere

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else. More importantly for girls in the twentieth century, many people came to think of home as a place of consumption, not production. Making, designing, producing, and repairing things—these activities were seen as industrial, not domestic. And so they also came to be seen as boys’ and men’s activities, not girls’ and women’s. We can see these differences in the kinds of indoor toys children played with in the first half of the twentieth century. Girls had not only dolls but toy kitchens, small versions of household appliances installed once electricity or natural gas was available to run them. Most of these toys were not designed to be taken apart and reassembled but to serve as props in role-playing games. Girls played at homemaking and shopping—but they also practiced using the new technologies and came to understand grown-up versions of gas stoves and electric appliances. This period was one of much technological change in the kitchen, so a girl who learned to bake or to help her mother put up tomatoes was, as in past periods, acquiring significant technological knowledge even if she did not think of it in those terms. Meanwhile, the building toys of the period were marketed to boys, who were encouraged to play at designing, constructing, and repairing the material world. These activities were the ones regarded as “technological” as the word came into use in the 1930s. And these differences in expectation were reflected in the adult world, as well, for example in the ways auto manufacturers marketed to women (via color, upholstery, comfort) and to men (through design, engine type, mechanical innovations) from the 1920s on. These ideas also played out in schools. Educators reintroduced technological

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Girls investigate a phonograph made for children. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis).

activities into schools, partly because they believed children should learn from activities as well as books but also because it seemed that children from immigrant families and children who would grow up to work in factories needed different kinds of schooling from children who might go on to college. The new “progressive” education for girls meant cooking and sewing, starting in the 1880s and becoming more popular with the home economics movement of the early twentieth century. Home economics meant incorporating scientific ideas about nutrition and public health

into girls’ education, but it also focused girls’ learning on domestic issues. For boys, who were thought to suffer from city life, progressive lessons meant basic carpentry and sometimes metalwork, a standard class often referred to as “shop” or sometimes “industrial arts.” In the later decades of the twentieth century, these classes became coeducational and then, in many towns, obsolete, but they were standard fare for well over fifty years. Some boys learned drafting and advanced metalwork in preparation for careers in engineering; girls in high school could learn clerical

Technology tasks, including the use of typewriters and bookkeeping machines. In these school activities, too, girls were taught in terms of using machines, whereas boys were taught about either building them according to someone else’s design or designing machines themselves. Even when they were mostly users, boys were taught to believe they should understand and interact with machinery—for nice girls, messy dishes and diapers were appropriate, but greasy overalls were not. Nonetheless, as machines became more ubiquitous, everyone acquired new knowledge of the changing material world. Girls growing up with radios, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and curling irons acquired mechanical understanding under the rubric “housework.” Just as girls had learned to churn butter or make soap in the past, twentieth-century girls learned about wash cycles, thermostats, circuits, and fuses. But in the age of steel mills and fighterbombers, this knowledge was not labeled “technological.” Most twentieth-century households depended on large technological systems supplying electricity, gas, or drinking water, and those who ran the households made technological choices on a regular basis, but the technological nature of domestic spaces was invisible in the common understanding of where technology might be located. Girls did have a few daring role models, women who defied stereotypes: to drive cars, early on, and soon to fly airplanes. The publicity on “first women” such as Amelia Earhart or Bessie Coleman and then the women pilots of World War II, who ferried every type of military aircraft used during the war, showed girls that women could handle machines reserved mostly for men. The wartime

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campaigns to persuade women to enter heavy industry, known now by the emblematic “Rosie the Riveter,” also taught girls that the rules were not steadfast. Despite the home-and-family ideology of the baby boom decades, for most of the century girls had a widening range of role models skilled at manipulating machines everyone came to recognize as technology, as well as role models knowledgeable about technologies. But being publicly technological took real courage, and even these unusual women had to remind everyone that they were still feminine. By a broad historical definition those reminders can be called “technologies of identity”: shoes with high heels, hosiery made of the finest silk or the latest laboratory-made fibers, and makeup designed to provide a range of pigments in convenient and safe powders, creams, and solids. Aviator Jacqueline Cochran sold her own lines of cosmetics, and women’s events like the All-Women’s Transcontinental Air Race were commonly known, from the 1930s through the 1960s, as “powder puff derbies.” Similarly, most girls learned how to “dress up,” and in doing so they learned not only to choose among the many products of the mass production economy but to design their own external identity using a range of tools: colors, fabrics, chemicals, and fasteners. Similar options—with a larger apparent budget—could be exercised in the world of Barbie and other fashion dolls, as well. By the end of the century such choices were treated more generally as choices, but beginning by the 1920s and continuing at least into the 1970s, girls most often learned that without performing such feminine rituals they might jeopardize their access to a proper place in society.

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Girls of the Information Age Girls in what is now called the “information age”—the recent decades when computers and chips and wireless communications have been changing what the older mechanical machines can do—are also girls growing up after the major changes in men’s and women’s roles of the 1960s and 1970s. The rigid differences between boys’ work and girls’ work, men’s work and women’s work, along with many legal distinctions in property rights and economic controls, have given way to greater choice about who learns how to do what and what kind of adult life a child can imagine seeking. Meanwhile, girls assume they will be able to see pictures of the other side of the world almost instantly and that they will be able to purchase a wide range of items on the telephone or the Internet; kids and parents keep in touch via cell phones or beepers. Food often comes ready to eat or at least ready to heat, and restaurant chains sell standardized meals to people who are, accordingly, producing fewer meals at home. These behaviors and expectations can be attributed to the combination of technological, political, social, and economic changes that have shaped modern American society. Thus, in the middle of the twentieth century, a girl wanting to be a veterinarian, an engineer, or a race car driver might have been told, “That’s for boys, dear”; in the beginning of the twenty-first century, she is more likely to be encouraged. Even Barbie rollerblades and flies an airplane. Girls meet women doctors, see women on highway construction crews, and learn about women astronauts. Both girls and boys take home economics and shop, or else such subjects are left out of the curriculum entirely. The budding female

electrician will probably find supportive adults who will say, “Of course you can,” in addition to discouraging ones who say only that it is difficult, that there will be mostly boys in her classes, or even that boys will not like girls who do jobs like repairing air-conditioning systems. In other words, many of the activities though of as “technological”—heating soup in the microwave, calling home on a cell phone—are now performed by men and women and learned by boys and girls. Nonetheless, despite all the changes, girls and boys continue quite frequently to be assigned different kinds of technological tasks. When women in fields like engineering tell girls about how much they love their exciting jobs, they wonder whether or not to reveal the stories of fighting for the opportunity or the other obstacles they faced along the way. A trip through the aisles of any large toy store at the turn of the twenty-first century reflects these examples of change and continuity. Boys and girls both will find computer chips and electronic enhancements in their toys; grow up familiar with the possibility that inanimate objects talk, move, and even respond in lifelike ways; and assume that images move, morph, and portray unreal scenes in very realistic ways. These features can be found in toys for toddlers— cheerful dinosaurs, monsters, and other creatures—as well as for older children. But on the aisle where most of the plastic and packaging are pink, lavender, and white, most of the toys re-create homes and fashion choices; on the aisle where most of the plastic and packaging are black and green, most of the toys emphasize transportation, adventure, and combat. “Pink” technological choices are most often about consumer activities and

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A sixteen-year-old girl working on a computer. (Skjold Photographs)

domestic settings; pink technological design focuses on how bodies look and on domestic settings. “Black and green” technological choices are most often about making machines go places, dig holes, build things, or kill imaginary enemies; black and green technological design focuses on mechanical, architectural, or military capabilities. Girls and boys both learn to use computers, but the “Barbie” computer, in pink and white floral casing, comes with a digital camera and fashion design software, and the “Hot Wheels” computer, in blue and flaming yellow casing, comes with a steering wheel, foot pedal, and racing scenario software. The users of both computers learn about graphics and the capabilities

of computer processing. But the uses of the tool in these color-coded packages encourage different kinds of technological knowledge and portray interaction with different technologies: pink technological knowledge includes fabrics and colors and the visualization of how things look; blue and yellow technological knowledge includes engines and speed and the visualization of what things do. It can still be quite difficult to cross these lines, in either direction. But knowing there are computer chips in things or knowing what computerized tools and toys are likely to be able to do is not the same as knowing how to make them work. The earliest computer programmers, including Navy Rear Admiral

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Grace Hopper, were mostly women, but the field of computer science, as it developed, became a terrain populated mostly by men. Girls today often do not think of programming as a career option. Teachers report boys are more interested in how computers work, whereas girls work with them as tools for other tasks. Books teaching computer programming often compare a program to a recipe, a set of instructions to follow using particular “inputs,” and Web design depends on visualization of how things look, so perhaps in the twenty-first century women will be heavily involved in these areas based on what they learned as girls. In general, the trends since 1800 have resulted in less difference in what girls and boys know and what work men and women do and greater difference in what machines do versus what people do. This pattern can most easily be seen in the food we eat, if we think about who grows it, who harvests it, and how it is processed, cooked, heated, and eaten. Consider potatoes. Instant mashed potatoes and fast-food French fries are industrial products just like cars and disposable diapers. But machines doing more work affect areas far beyond consumer choices. Large jets now have automatic controls, for example, so pilots make fewer minute-to-minute decisions about flying the plane. In this technological world, some people are learning how to use devices, while others are deciding how to design them. Who will learn which approach? In some schools students can study computer science, and in general right now more boys than girls choose to do so. But in other schools there are not enough computers or even electrical outlets for all the students to get a chance to use the word

processors. At various points in our nation’s past, adults debated how to prepare their children for adulthood partly in terms of what technologies they should learn. Nobody can predict the future, but what girls (and boys) learn now shapes what choices they will make about technology later, when they grow up and teach technology to children of their own. Nina E. Lerman See also Consumer Culture; Domesticity; Education of Girls; Mathematics and Science; Mill Girls; Work References and Further Reading American Association of University Women. 2000. Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls for the New Computer Age. Washington, DC: AAUW Educational Foundation. Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Canel, Annie, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, eds. 2000. Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990. London: Harwood Academic Publishers. Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins. 1998. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books. Douglas, Deborah G. 1990. “United States Women in Aviation, 1940–1985.” Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space no. 7. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Douglas, Susan. 1994. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. New York: Times Books. Dublin, Thomas. 1994. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Teen Pregnancy Jellison, Katherine. 1993. Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913–1963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Jensen, Joan. 1986. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press. King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lerman, Nina E., Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, guest eds. 1997. “Gender Analysis and the History of Technology.” Technology and Culture 38, no. 1 (January). McGaw, Judith, ed. 1994. Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Peiss, Kathy. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Owl Books. Scharff, Virginia. 1991. Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Spector, Janet. 1993. What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Stanley, Autumn. 1995. Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1990. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Teen Pregnancy Teen (or teenage) pregnancy is a term that emerged in the 1970s and has been used since then by politicians, policymakers, educators, the medical community, and others to refer to a social problem: the consequences of what many Americans consider the inappropriate sexual behavior of unmarried girls

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younger than twenty. Since the 1980s, the term has been commonly used to refer particularly to the pregnancies of young women who are poor, unmarried, nonwhite teenagers. The relatively short history of the term teenage pregnancy reflects a long-standing concern in the United States with youthful, unmarried female sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. Since at least the early nineteenth century, families, communities, and government authorities have mounted strategies to define, assign responsibility for, and respond to the unsanctioned sex and pregnancies of adolescent girls. State legislators have, over time, crafted many kinds of laws and policies to constrain female sexuality, some particularly targeting youthful sexuality and its consequences. Among these laws have been slave laws, age-of-consent laws, antiprostitution laws, eugenics laws, anticontraception and antiabortion laws, various welfare regulations, and “parental notification” laws. In general, champions of such legislation have claimed that the incidence of youthful, unmarried female sex and pregnancy is an index of social disorganization. Laws and policies, they have claimed, have been necessary to regain sexual control of youthful females and set society and social relations right again. Crucial to an understanding of social, political, and legal responses to youthful female unmarried sex and pregnancy in the United States is that, across the centuries, private and public strategies to deal with what we now call teenage pregnancy—and the ideas fueling these various strategies—have always been inflected by race and class. No data survive from the early decades of the young republic to indicate accu-

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rately the incidence of unmarried sex and pregnancy among young women. Historians have argued, however, that when such women had babies, “bastardy,” the consequence of unmarried pregnancy, was more an economic than a moral problem. Young white women at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries were unlikely to be ejected from their family homes or ostracized from their communities for this misstep. A nonconforming young woman would typically remain with her family. She would eventually marry, and in the meantime, both parents would be responsible for the child born out of wedlock. Young African American girls and women were, of course, at this time almost all enslaved. Often they were forbidden to marry, and their sex and reproductive experiences were frequently under the control of “owners.” Throughout the nineteenth century, age-of-consent laws (in the tradition of British common law) were meant to protect only very young girls and to inconvenience few males. In 1886, twenty-five states had laws that set the age at which a girl could rationally agree to engage in sexual relations at ten years old. By the late nineteenth century, adolescence was defined as a discrete and increasingly important phase of girlhood. Class status came to define life more and more, and reformers around the country built various kinds of female-rescue institutions to save the victims of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. All these developments shaped the ways white Americans experienced and responded to the pregnancies of young white unmarried women. Again, it is important to stress that most African American young women remained enslaved for twothirds of the nineteenth century, and after-

ward, most lived under apartheid in the American South. Youthful out-of-wedlock sexuality and childbearing were family and community matters for African Americans. Historians have argued that for most women in this group at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, youthful pregnancy was premarital; marriage generally followed soon after the birth. Among native white and white immigrant populations, unmarried youthful pregnancy rates doubled between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1910, with the largest increase occurring among urban, working-class girls. In response, evangelical, social purity, and temperance organizations created institutions to provide refuge for “fallen girls” and pushed for vice commissions and state laws to protect “innocent victims.” In the 1880s, for example, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union mounted crusades to convince state legislators to raise the age of consent for girls to sixteen. At the same time, child labor laws, compulsory education laws, and child protection laws all drew attention to the vulnerability of the young and helped define a new upper limit of youth: adolescence. Adolescence was defined as a time when girls, in particular, needed protection against victimization, especially by sexually predatory males. The new life stage was generally defined as a phase through which young women should properly pass before entering into the adult activities of sex, marriage, and childbearing. Social commentators and reformers found many girls at this time who violated the new norms of adolescence. They pointed to the sexual behavior—and unwed pregnancies—of some young girls as evidence and symbols of social disintegration. Assertion of control over

Teen Pregnancy urban, working-class girls was posited as the most potent antidote to family and community breakdown. Rescue homes, such as those under the National Florence Crittenton Mission, affirmed their commitment to girlhood innocence in part by sorting their target population into redeemable girls and others who represented fatally compromised innocence. A poor, pregnant, resourceless, immigrant girl, for example, might be more likely to end up in court for adjudication as an “incorrigible” or a prostitute than in a rescue home. Distinguishing between categories of young, pregnant girls continued to be important to doctors, moral reformers, and others into the twentieth century. As more white girls had access to education and more were attached to the middle class, many had much to lose by engaging in premarital sex and risking unmarried pregnancy. For girls from “respectable” families, a mistake could be so consequential that secret pregnancies and relinquishments and secret criminal abortions became crucial strategies for many. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, white, working-class girls who became pregnant while unmarried were often treated by professionals schooled to believe that unmarried pregnancy was symptomatic of environmentally induced disease, for example, low intelligence quotient (IQ) or parental alcoholism, the wages of slum living. In these early decades of the twentieth century, most in this group kept their babies since adopters were not clamoring to take the offspring of girls whose pregnancies were believed to indicate biological inferiority. By the 1920s, when more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time, many adolescent girls—both working and middle-class, both white and

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The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) was founded to help girls lead “moral lives.” (Library of Congress, 1919)

black—experienced aspects of what has been referred to as “sexual emancipation.” Many lived away from family and religious controls, and many young women earned their own wages. At this time, social commentators under the influence of Sigmund Freud and other emergent sexologists did not strongly associate youthful female sexuality with pregnancy. After all, being a modern girl meant protecting oneself, using birth control and illegal abortion. Even so, fears flourished about weak young girls who lacked the strength of character to protect themselves. Influential commentators claimed only the state was strong enough in the new urban context to maintain distinctions between good girls and bad ones, between moral and deviant behaviors.

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Whatever state-sponsored or private institutional solutions were devised to this end—Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCAs), maternity homes, or “white slavery” laws, for example—were sure to be racially segregated, thus preserving the distinctions between white girls and girls of color, as well. For about a generation after the 1940s, the experience and assessment of youthful pregnancy cut along two well-defined axes. First of all, youthful pregnancy embraced large numbers of married as well as unmarried teenage girls. After World War II, increasing numbers of teenagers gave birth; in 1950 27 percent of all first births were to teenagers. And by 1965, 39 percent were to married teenage girls. Second, for a number of reasons, public policies and community institutions racialized the treatment of unwed teen mothers and their babies more formally than before in this era. In what was promoted as a generous reform, white unwed mothers (the term teenage pregnancy had still not yet been coined) were pressed to hide their pregnancies, which were now defined by professionals as the result of psychological maladjustment, and relinquish their babies—now seen as valuable commodities—at birth. This way, teenage girls who erred could preserve the public appearance of purity and the possibility of proper marriage and motherhood in the future. Politicians and policymakers treated the youthful pregnancies of African American and other young, unmarried, pregnant girls of color (all members of populations struggling to overthrow apartheid in the second half of the twentieth century) as occasions for punishment. These pregnancies also became justifications among whites for resisting

both the dismantling of apartheid and the enfranchising of people of color as full citizens. Resisters used the specter of the unwed pregnancies of some young women of color to argue for blocking integration of public schools and public housing and to stimulate hostility to young mothers of color who collected welfare benefits for their babies (who were tarred simultaneously as too costly to white taxpayers and as valueless children). The very fact that poor young mothers of color were newly eligible for welfare benefits in these decades stimulated white hostility to the welfare system itself. In this hostile context, African American girls who gave birth kept their babies and struggled with or without government assistance to be mothers. By the mid-1960s, it was clear that the state’s and community’s determination to control youthful sexuality and its consequences, including controlling which girls got to be mothers of their children and which did not, gave authorities the “right” to treat different groups of girls differently, depending on race. During this same era, the development of the birth control pill gave millions of young women significantly more ability to manage their own sex lives and fertility. The Pill also gave medical and social work professionals a tool many defined as the best method for fighting poverty (again, linking youthful female sexuality to a rise of massive social problems and the venue for controlling those problems). In the 1960s and 1970s, poor girls and girls of color were pressed to fulfill their duty to avoid pregnancy by using birth control, dispensed at one of the quickly growing number of publicly funded family planning clinics. Liberals tended to champion these clinics for their contribution to the antipoverty

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Teenage pregnancies have been treated differently by society depending on race and class. (Shirley Zeiberg)

effort, whereas conservatives began to speak out against them as governmentsupported facilitators of illicit, youthful sex. Birth control represents yet another area in which politicians and various experts constructed the experiences of girls according to race and class scripts. The term teenage pregnancy emerged in the 1970s in several government documents. In this decade, the teenage population was very large in relation to the adult population, and increasingly, adults defined adolescence as a problem-fraught life stage. Politicians, government officials, birth control advocates, educators, and others routinely referred to the “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy in the 1970s, despite the fact that the rate and

ratio of adolescent pregnancy had been much higher in the 1950s than they were in the 1970s. Between 1955 and 1977, the rate dropped 44.8 percent. A number of factors account for the intense public attention to and concern about pregnant teenage girls. For one thing, it is notable that the “epidemic” was named during a period when teen pregnancy rates were rising dramatically among whites, in fact, four times more rapidly than among black teenagers. Also, many of the teenage girls who had babies in the 1950s, but not those who gave birth in the 1970s, were married. By the 1970s, significant numbers of teenage pregnancies could no longer even be considered premarital. Many Americans

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were alarmed at the rise of youthful single motherhood. In addition, teenagers’ access to sex education in public schools and to birth control and abortion—their new “privacy right” to make choices about such matters—alarmed some parents, who felt they were losing the ability to transmit values to their daughters. A number of Supreme Court decisions and other federal government actions in the 1970s underwrote teenagers’ reproductive autonomy. In Ordway v. Hargraves (1971) public school girls were granted the right not to be expelled from school because of pregnancy. In 1972 Congress required welfare offices to offer birth control services to teenagers who were sexually active. In the same year, the Supreme Court, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, ruled that unmarried persons had a right to birth control access, and five years later, in Casey v. Population Services International, this right was explicitly extended to unmarried minors. And, of course, Roe v. Wade (1973) legalized abortion for all women, including teenagers. In 1978, Congress passed the Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act. All these developments and the explosion of data and media coverage available about teenagers and their sexual behavior transformed teenagers’ sexual secrets, even their “shameful” pregnancies, into common knowledge. Not surprisingly, there was a swift backlash against the sexual empowerment of teenagers and against the new federally sanctioned supports for pregnant teenagers and their “choices.” The Reagan administration, which assumed office in 1981, set to work at once to restigmatize and politicize teenage pregnancy and limit the options and benefits available to pregnant teenage girls. President Ronald Reagan and others began to

name teenage pregnancy (and its association with welfare and “welfare queens”), along with the crack cocaine epidemic and inner-city violence, as the chief causes of poverty and other social ills in the United States. Despite the fact that black rates of teenage pregnancy continued to fall in relation to white rates in the 1980s, New Right politicians and political commentators boldly defined teenage pregnancy as a black problem at this time. Also, despite the fact that myriad studies could not prove the charge, politicians accused black teenagers of getting pregnant in order to collect welfare. Public attacks on this vulnerable population were frequent, strident, and counterfactual. In response, advocates and young women themselves raised questions about the New Right agenda as one that cast the teen pregnancies of African American girls as a deeply unacceptable assault on male power and white authority. During the 1980s, policy initiatives regarding teenage pregnancy turned away from focuses on personal empowerment and choice or public health. Instead policy initiatives embraced abstinence-only education and the importance of economic self-sufficiency for poor young mothers. Abstinence education revived a 1950s theme—that teenage sex was dangerous physically and mentally—and partly because sex and marriage were so frequently uncoupled, youthful sex was also cast as dangerous financially for teen mothers. This retro sex education also drew on the 1950s idea that vulnerable females made bad choices; they were prerational “babies having babies.” Meanwhile, Reagan-directed policies cut federal support for a number of programs that could have assisted pregnant teenagers toward self-sufficiency, includ-

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Abstinence-only sex education dominated public policymaking regarding teen pregnancy during the 1980s and 1990s. (Associated Press AP)

ing child care, birth control, job training, and public housing programs. Reigning antistatism attitudes in the 1980s mandated that the government minimize its interference in the economy, especially regarding efforts to help vulnerable young mothers and their children. In the 1970s, teen pregnancy was often cast as a result of insufficient access to birth control and abortion. In the 1980s, however, sexual permissiveness (symbolized by teenagers’ access to birth control and abortion), welfare programs, and the weak cultural values of minorities were cast as the causes of teen pregnancy. Tellingly, at this time more than ever before, the sexual activities of young women were becoming more like the sexual activities of young men and youthful white sexual patterns more similar to

youthful black patterns. Far more young white mothers were keeping and raising their babies, as African American young mothers had always done. These new developments were startling and disturbing to many white adults. Yet the willingness to blame and try to constrain young women for their “bad choices” and for causing the worst problems in American society had the effect of deflecting attention from the larger social and economic forces that caused and sustained poverty. A number of progressive commentators and scholars began to point out in the 1980s that, in the United States, poverty caused teenage pregnancy (80 percent of babies born to teenagers were born to poor teenagers), not the other way around. These voices were typically drowned out by voices demonizing poor,

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black teen girls who had sex, got pregnant, and sometimes became mothers. Racialized and politicized concern about teenage pregnancy continued into the 1990s and the era of “welfare reform.” During this period, studies showed that 80 percent of the American public and 80 percent of U.S. senators agreed that teenage pregnancy was ruining the country. As before, this heightened concern did not seem to incorporate the news that teenage pregnancy rates were declining steadily, as were teen abortion rates. In 1991, almost two-thirds of teen births were to girls eighteen or nineteen years old. More teens than ever were using birth control, including longacting contraceptives. By the late 1990s, the teen pregnancy rate was at its lowest level since 1973. Still, teenage pregnancy remained the focus of public worry about abortion, out-of-wedlock births, and sex among unmarried young girls. It also remained the focus of public hostility to welfare, despite the fact that studies in the 1990s showed that at any given time, more than 90 percent of the women on welfare were not teenagers. (Many women on welfare did enter the rolls as teenage mothers, but threefourths of the teenagers who have been welfare recipients collected benefits for less than three years.) Crafters of welfare reform foregrounded the problem of teenage pregnancy by featuring abstinence-only sex education, limited access to abortion, and cuts in family planning support but giving scant support for programs focusing on young males. The introductory sections of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (welfare reform) presented a raft of statistics indicating that teenage mothers produce inferior children; little attention is given to the impact of pover-

ty and lack of educational and employment opportunities on the decisions of young girls to achieve adulthood via the only available route: motherhood. Recent legislation and public relations campaigns have emphasized educating teenagers about the financial responsibilities and consumerist aspects of motherhood. The motto of the government’s National Strategy to Prevent Teen Pregnancy is, “Don’t become a parent until you are truly ready to support a child.” A Baltimore anti–teen pregnancy program’s slogan is “A baby costs $474 a month. How much is your allowance?” Scholars have shown, however, that because young people, minorities, and women are victims of wage discrimination in the United States, many girls and women could never become mothers without some kind of government assistance. These writers have pointed out that for poor women, delaying motherhood has not helped them avoid poverty. They have also raised questions about the fairness of excluding significant groups of females from motherhood because of their poverty and inability to earn a living wage. The changing behavior of teenagers over time has pushed the development of public policies that recognize and respond to teenagers’ needs. Teenage girls, through their changing relation to sex and reproduction, have forced Americans several times to redefine their notions of respectability, deviance, self-determination, and girlhood itself. At the same time, however, large segments of the American public continue to believe that teenage girls should not have sex, should not get pregnant, and should neither have abortions nor become mothers, especially if they are poor. Rickie Solinger

Teenybopper See also Adolescent Health; Adoption; Birth Control; Body Image; Female Sexuality; Indentured Servants; Menstruation; Orphans and Orphanages References and Further Reading Kaplan, Elaine Bell. 1997. Not Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ladner, Joyce A. 1971. Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman. New York: Doubleday. Luker, Kristin. 1996. Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nathanson, Constance A. 1991. Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Solinger, Rickie. 1992. Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Sharon. 1995. Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance and Pregnancy. New York: Hill and Wang.

Teenybopper A teenybopper is, in the most general terms, a girl in her very early teens with a predilection for popular music and the boys who play it. The word was coined and popularized in the United States sometime in the mid-1960s and is most likely a modernized form of bobby-soxer, the name given to the young female admirers of Frank Sinatra. A versatile term, teenybopper can be used not only to describe musical artists and genres but also to define an entire subculture of adolescent female fandom. Teenyboppers were not primarily associated with the performance of pop music until 1968 or 1969. Prior to that time the word was also used to describe any high school–age girl who followed cultural fads. Initially the term possessed a neutral tone; a 1966 Australia Telegraph arti-

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cle proclaimed that the “teenybopper is aptly named because her two distinguishing features are her teeny size and her cool boppy with-it attitude to life” (quoted in Simpson and Weiner 1989). One year later the term was eroticized in the novel I Was a Teeny-Bopper for the CIA, which depicted adolescent Lolly Popstick as a “sizzling teeny-bopper” whose miniskirted body danced seductively at the wrap party for a local drama club. Although these references are admittedly outdated and obscure, the sentiment behind them remains static: teenyboppers are often equated to “little Lolitas” at pop concerts, adolescents who dress with the intention of attracting the attention of a particular teen idol and inadvertently capture the gaze of other men. In 1968, teenybopper was defined by the editors of Current Slang as a “young person trying to be a hippie,” a change that indicates that the word was derogative even before it became associated with the music industry (Dill and Burkholder 1966, 124). This stigma has persisted ever since. Being called a teenybopper has negative connotations regardless of the context in which it appears; if the reference is positive or neutral the word will often be shortened to “bopper.” It is important to note that the creation of the category “teenybopper” roughly coincided with the rise of bubblegum music, a subgenre of pop that was manufactured specifically by studio-based musicians for preteens. Intending to capitalize on an audience for whom the Beatles were already too advanced, this development reflected the increasing importance of the teenage demographic within the music industry. With more economic capital at their disposal than ever before, girls were able to influence trends in popular culture for the first

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Teenyboppers at a Herman’s Hermits concert in Washington, D.C. (Wally McNamee/Corbis, 1967)

time. As a result, music groups were created to appeal specifically to this population, a practice that eventually demonstrated a strong connection between age, gender, and musical preferences. Bubblegum music was generally enjoyed by girls ages ten to fifteen. The genre, pioneered by producer Neil Bogart, is characterized by male teen vocals and a basic lyric structure that revolves around juvenile sexual innuendo. The Monkees are one of the first examples of a bubblegum-influenced marketing phenomenon. Hired to play a rock band in the 1966 television show of the same name, the actors eventually became a band who recorded and released albums. The group is representative of the entire genre: manufactured, studio-based recordings performed by attractive young

men who were engineered to be the next teen idols. In one of the earliest references to the word, fans of the Monkees were called “teenyboppers” and “pre-teenyboppers” in an edited collection of their love letters. Although this reference is not necessarily derogatory, it marks the Monkees’ fans in another way: teenyboppers are girls who are excessive, unable to control their emotions or distinguish between fantasy and reality. The sentiments expressed in many of the letters indicate that fans believed that they each had a special relationship with Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Mickey Dolenz. This fantastical belief, that the members of the band were to be considered friends and potential boyfriends, was created and reinforced by the scores

Teenybopper of teenybopper fan magazines that were published while bubblegum dominated the radio airwaves. Gloria Stavers’s teenybopper publication, 16 Magazine, achieved its peak circulation during the Monkees’ reign. Bubblegum music is significant because it not only pioneered early conceptions of teenybopper fandom but set the precedent of style over substance in the musical consumption of teenage girls. Bubblegum groups such as Ohio Express, Tommy James and the Shondells, and the 1910 Fruitgum Company flourished in 1968 and 1969 before the genre was transformed into what is today more commonly referred to as “teenybop pop.” In the 1960s and 1970s, radio broadcasters referred to the evening hours as “teenybop drive” because teenagers driving around with friends were thought to make up the majority of the listening audience. Although that term is most likely obsolete, the relationship between youth and pop music has remained solid. Teenybop pop has become synonymous with Top 40 radio. Much like bubblegum music, the genre is primarily a commodity to be marketed and sold to teenage girls. Pop utilizes a specific formula to turn a profit, leaving many to believe that the fans who consume the product are cultural dupes, unsuspecting victims of the machinery of commercialization. This tenet has important repercussions for adolescent girls, for whom the style is specifically created. Pop music and teenyboppers are inexorably linked, and criticisms of the genre are automatically transposed onto its fans. Distinguishing between “cock rock” and “teenybop,” Simon Frith (1981) and Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1975) maintain that males are regarded as active participants in the former,

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whereas females are seen as passive consumers of the latter. The melodies themselves are a blend of pop and soft rock, and the lyrics are characterized by frustrated tales of adolescent loneliness. In teenybop ballads, the male teenage performer has either been scorned in love or is seeking a meaningful relationship with a soulmate. Accepted cultural stereotypes are often inverted within this context: teenage girls are portrayed as sexual predators, whereas the boys they heartlessly abandon are looking for serious emotional commitment. The use of sexuality within teenybop pop is representative of the larger themes of the subculture. Fans are encouraged to believe that they have an individual relationship with the performer and are not merely part of the collective. The vast majority of teenybop songs are sung in the first person; through his words and actions onstage, the performer positions his audience as potential friends or lovers. Despite the glitter of fireworks and pyrotechnic light displays, concerts are framed as intimate gatherings. This paradox obscures the manipulation that lies at the heart of every teenybop phenomenon: these are musical acts that claim sincerity and often attempt to bolster the self-esteem of adolescent girls, yet their primary motivation is financial gain. Teenybopper fandom is essentially a subculture of consumption, and nothing is more valuable to an adolescent girl than the simulated possession of a teen idol. Teenybop fan magazines help facilitate this fantasy. The earliest and most widely imitated publication was 16 Magazine. It presented teen idols in a way that readers could understand; articles never focused on music. Editor Gloria Stavers knew that teenyboppers were more inter-

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ested in what their “fave rave” ate for dinner or what qualities he found most attractive in a girl than the actual songs he sang. The magazine’s favored style of prose facilitated an intimate, imagined relationship between fan and performer; much like teenybop songs, features were written in the first person, often resembling personal correspondence. Teenybop idols are marked by their nonthreatening, feminine mannerisms and appearance. Although there are successful formulas that are typically followed, performers are often cast in response to generational and marketing trends. Each idol enjoys an approximate three-year span of popularity; this cycle makes sense within the context of the subculture. If it is assumed that girls as young as ten become teenyboppers as a safe way of exploring their sexuality, then the idol would logically be abandoned after the girl reached adolescence and was ready for a “real” relationship. Fandom, therefore, is perceived to be innocent. The prepubescent girls who proclaim their love for the teenybop act of the moment do so, it is assumed, without knowledge or experience of the sexual implications of their actions. Although their appearance may at times be similar, teenyboppers and groupies have different intentions. In contrast to the celebrity singers of the previous decade, the teen idols of the mid-1960s consisted primarily of male music groups. Reflecting the Beatles-initiated British invasion, Herman’s Hermits and the Doors were topping charts and stealing the hearts of teenage girls on both sides of the Atlantic. The early 1970s were dominated by family acts, many of whom garnered fan bases from both television and live musical perfor-

mances: the Partridges, Bradys, Osmonds, and Jacksons. That era also produced what some consider to be the three biggest teenybop idols of all time: David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and Bobby Sherman. However, a teenybopper backlash could be detected by the end of the 1970s. For the first time, potential teen idols resisted the label that had been applied to similar acts for more than a decade. Being associated with teenyboppers was tantamount to professional suicide, and performers with aspirations toward adult singing or acting careers went to great lengths to avoid this stigma. In the early 1980s, an era marked by heavy metal bands like Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, and Poison, developing a fan base of adolescent girls was the surest way to lose artistic legitimacy. Singer George Michael declared: “There’s nothing wrong with teeny-boppers. They’re great kids, but the minute you’re lumped with teeny-bopper bands, no one listens to the music anymore” (quoted in Pareles 1985, 24). The development of Music Television (MTV) fostered this belief. Teenyboppers have always been characterized as cultural grazers, fans who follow the hippest band only to move on to the next a few weeks later. The advent of the music video provided exposure for a wide variety of artists, and teenage girls soon began appearing in droves at concerts they would not have otherwise attended, most notably the performances of Duran Duran. However, by the end of the 1980s, the phenomenal success of New Kids on the Block reacquainted teenyboppers with their bubblegum roots. Newspapers and music industry publications lamented the “dying scream of the teenybopper chorus” just a few years later. With mainstream popular musical

Teenybopper styles more representative of the emerging Seattle grunge scene, there was no room on the Billboard charts for the lighter sounds of pop. Scores of fan magazines, both in England and in the United States, reported sagging subscription rates; Britain’s teenybopper television show “Top of the Pops” recorded its lowest ratings in thirty-two years. President George Bush, running for reelection in 1992 against Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, briefly returned attention to the word when he rejected an MTV campaign appearance, explaining, “I’m not going to be a teeny-bopper at 68” (quoted in Cummings 1992, 4). Five years later, the trend would reverse itself. The 1997 success of Hanson instigated the resurgence of bubblegum pop. Music industry insiders credited the reversal to the inherent negativity of grunge. “Angst is tiring after a while,” one marketing manager for Virgin Music remarked (quoted in Monk 1997, D9). Following the boy band formula created by Maurice Starr and popularized by New Kids on the Block almost a decade before, groups like the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync inspire a new generation of teenyboppers. This demographic has begun to attract the attention of academics and marketers alike; it is estimated that by 2010, there will be 35 million teenagers living in the United States, the largest number in the nation’s history. That projection, combined with the growing scholarship on adolescent girls, marks teenybop as an important new topic for cultural analysis. Teenybop is considered one of the most accessible subcultures for adolescent girls because membership is not contingent upon location, socioeconomic, or class status. For many preteen girls, teenybopper fandom is thought to facili-

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tate the transition from childhood to adolescence. Frith and McRobbie and Garber have all prefaced their analyses of girls and subcultures with the assumption that girls do not have, for varying reasons, the same access to public spaces as their male counterparts. This limitation is precisely the element that makes teenybopper fandom so attractive; it can be, for the most part, carried out within the girl’s bedroom. As a subculture, teenybopper fandom is located primarily within the girl’s home and can be picked up or discarded at will. This practice, called “bedroom culture,” is essentially commercial in nature and involves the purchase of inexpensive fan magazines and merchandise. Bedroom culture remains prevalent today, despite increasing opportunities for girls in sports or after-school activities. The most obvious exception to this is, of course, the pop music concert. Within the context of this venue girls possess, for at least a couple of hours, a freedom to express themselves that is unmatched in any public space besides the local shopping mall. There are indications that teenybopper fandom is evolving. Frith’s assertion that girls grow out of the fantasy sexuality of teenybop as they begin to date and go out with boys more seriously is negated by the fact that many bands maintain an active fan base for years, sometimes even decades, after reaching peak popularity. A recent Monkees reunion tour sold out venues across the country; an annual New Kids on the Block convention is bringing fans together ten years after the teenybopper group stopped touring and releasing albums. This phenomenon can be credited, in part, to the nostalgic quality of pop music. Bands are revived to conjure the feelings,

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fantasies, and memories of their fans’ youth. Yet there is paradox building within the subculture that cannot be ignored: in an effort to maximize profits, producers of teenybop pop have begun to target younger and younger audiences. Originally, the subculture encompassed girls ages ten to fifteen; that market has spiraled downward with each succeeding generation. Girls as young as five years old are now encouraged to become teenyboppers. It has become common for groups like N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys to have both preschool and adult fans. The transgenerational attraction of teenybop bands might be related to the fact that today’s adolescents most likely had mothers who loved the Beatles or the Monkees and can therefore identify with, or at least appreciate, their daughters’ hysterical fandom. This wide range of popularity obviously leads to increased profits, so record labels are happy to indulge the nostalgia factor by manufacturing more groups in their image. Yet there are larger implications to this practice that must be considered. One of the benefits of teenybop subculture is that membership carries few risks involving personal humiliation or degradation and provides emotional benefits that come with the vicarious expression of sexuality. This idea can be extended to the culture as a whole. Teenyboppers are inherently placed in a subordinate position in society. To be marked in such a negative way at the onset of adolescence could have lifelong repercussions for girls whose sense of self is defined by this affiliation, a phenomenon that Ien Ang (1998) terms “the ideology of mass culture.” In her study of Dallas viewers, Ang found that a fan’s sense of self-worth was connected to the perceived value of the popular culture products that he or

she consumes. Therefore, individuals who derive pleasure from “inferior” texts like soap operas or pop music risk not only their position in the cultural hierarchy but their self-esteem as well. Teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to this classification. The exact ways in which girls use pop music, the ways in which they recode it for their own purposes, have not yet been completely identified. There is, however, causal evidence that suggests that teenyboppers might use the concert venue as a site of cultural rebellion. Usually the object of what Laura Mulvey (1989) calls “the male gaze,” girls have the power to subvert this phenomenon for two hours during a pop music performance. Within the frame of the concert, girls have the power to actively consume a male image, a privilege traditionally denied to them by the dominant culture. The prognosis for the genre and its fans is good. After dominating the airwaves and concert halls for nearly half a century, teenybop pop is likely never to go out of style. The adolescent girls who classify themselves as teenyboppers increasingly do so with a sense of affiliation and agency. Kristen Kidder See also Consumer Culture; Fan Clubs; Girl Power; Girls’ Magazines; Movies, Adolescent Girls in; Punk Rock; Riot Grrrls; Television References and Further Reading Adler, Bill, ed. 1967. Love Letters to the Monkees. New York: Popular Library. Ang, Ien. 1998. “Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture.” Pp. 265–274 in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Edited by John Storey. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Cummings, Jeanne. 1992. “Election ’92 TV’s Starring Role.” Atlanta Journal and Constitution (November 1): C4.

Television Dill, Stephen H., and Clyde Burkholder, eds. 1966. Current Slang. Vol. 1. Vermillion: University of South Dakota. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. 1986. “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Pp. 84–106 in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. New York: Routledge. Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon Books. Mark, Ted. 1967. I Was a Teeny-Bopper for the CIA. New York: Berkley. McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. 1975. “Girls and Subcultures.” Pp. 209–222 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. New York: Holmes and Meier. Monk, Katherine. 1997. “Resurgence of Bubblegum Pop Takes Music Industry by Surprise.” Ottawa Citizen (April 7): D9. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pareles, Jon. 1985. “The Pop Life: Wham Facing Up to New Popularity.” New York Times (February 13): C24. Reisfeld, Randi, and Danny Fields. 1997. Who’s Your Fave Rave? New York: Boulevard Books. Simpson, J. A., and E. S. C. Weiner, eds. 1989. The Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press.

Television Since television was first mass-marketed to Americans in the late 1940s, girls have been included in its various programs, appearing primarily in prime-time situation comedies (sit-coms) and, to a lesser extent, in dramatic series and made-forTV movies. Girls have also appeared in morning cartoons and in prime-time animated series. Although television programs focusing on young people traditionally have privileged boys over girls, there have been many shows that feature

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female youth as lead characters, a trend particularly noticeable in the 1960s and 1990s. Most girls in television programs are white, heterosexual, middle-class suburbanites between the ages of eight and eighteen. Television plots involving female youth usually center on their moral, social, and physical development, and many place them in activities stereotypically associated with female youth, such as obsessing about boys. More recently, however, television series featuring girls are including contemporary concerns of female youth, such as sports, sexual initiation, and preparing for college. As in real life, girls on television have relationships primarily with family members, friends, schoolmates, and teachers and are depicted typically in the homes of families and friends (especially girls’ bedrooms), schools, and teen hangouts, such as fast-food restaurants. Older girls are also shown in after-school jobs and other extracurricular activities. The history of girls on television goes back to the introduction of this medium. In an attempt to attract audiences during the early years, many successful radio programs were adapted to television. Early sit-coms like The Goldbergs (CBS/NBC; 1949–1954) and Mama (CBS; 1949–1957), which featured ethnic, working-class, urban-dwelling families with children, connected audiences to a collective memory of U.S. history and explained transformations occurring in postwar American society. New values, such as the privileging of consumerism, were associated on these shows primarily with younger characters. As postwar prosperity encouraged the pursuit of the American Dream via suburban life, a distinct transformation in television programming began to develop by the early 1950s. In contrast to televi-

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Mia Farrow in a scene from Peyton Place. (Photofest)

sion’s original family shows, the sit-coms that emerged during the mid- to late 1950s—The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC; 1952–1966), Father Knows Best (CBS/NBC; 1954–1962), Bachelor Father (CBS/NBC/ABC; 1957–1962), Leave It to Beaver (CBS/ABC; 1957– 1963), and The Donna Reed Show (ABC; 1958–1966)—focused on white, middleclass, nuclear families living in suburbia. These shows established many of the conventions still used in domestic sitcoms today. Although the gender politics of the immediate postwar period contributed to the privileging of male youth in many early sit-coms, often at the expense of exploring girls’ experiences, female youth had considerably more representational space in programs introduced in the late

1950s, such as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Bachelor Father. As with earlier shows, the girls on these sit-coms often functioned as romantic interests of male characters, yet they also served as the center of story lines that explored the transformation of female roles in the postwar United States. For example, these shows often depicted girls as having nondomestic ambitions in addition to their primary objectives of being wives and mothers. Father Knows Best was unique in its portrayal of two sisters of different ages, a technique that allowed audiences to experience the many stages of girls’ lives, especially the androgyny of prepubescent girlhood. As female youth received greater recognition during the late 1950s and early 1960s for their important place within our consumerist economy, five sit-coms were introduced that centered specifically on teenage girls: Too Young to Go Steady (NBC; 1959), The Patty Duke Show (ABC; 1963–1966), Karen (NBC; 1964–1965), Gidget (ABC; 1965–1966), and Tammy (ABC; 1965–1966). As their titles suggest, the keystones of these sit-coms were the female adolescents who held together narratives exploring the unique experiences of modern girlhood. Too Young to Go Steady, television’s first girl-centered series, dealt with the sexual awakening of fourteen-year-old Pam Blake (Brigid Bazlen). The Patty Duke Show, the longest running of the 1960s’ girl sit-coms, revolved around the teen exploits of Patty Lane and her identical Scottish cousin, Cathy (both played by Patty Duke). Karen focused on the experiences of urban adolescent Karen Scott (Debbie Watson), and Gidget involved the adventures of Frances “Gidget” Lawrence (Sally Field), a trendy teen who lived in California. Tammy, like Gidget, was adapted from a

Television popular film series and focused on eighteen-year-old Tammy Tarleton (also played by Debbie Watson), who lived with her relatives on a houseboat in the rural South and worked as a secretary for a plantation owner. As the first television programs to focus specifically on the experiences of female youth, Too Young to Go Steady, The Patty Duke Show, Karen, Gidget, and Tammy crystallized many of the representational and narrative strategies relied upon in future programs about girls, including the use of voice-over narration and direct address to convey girls’ thoughts. These sit-coms regularly included story lines about girls’ obsessions with their appearance, as well as their assimilation into the world of heterosexual relations, especially their “first crushes” and initial dating experiences. However, given the difficulty of representing sexuality on television during the 1960s, these shows devised several ways of depicting girls’ emerging sexuality without offending morally conservative audiences and advertisers. For example, by privileging the girls’ relationships with other female youth above those with boys, these sit-coms reinforced the primacy of same-sex friendships during girlhood. In addition, these shows often portrayed the strong relationships the girls had with their families. As much as these shows, like earlier sit-coms, reproduced the traditional notion that “a woman’s place is in the home” and their characters often spoke of marriage as one of their primary goals, the girls’ independent and assertive attitudes suggested that as they aged they most likely would pursue additional goals, including college and work outside the home. Unfortunately, the success of the 1960s girl shows was short-lived, as

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Americans became more enamored of young adults and the social and political conflicts of the time. During the late 1960s to the late 1980s, many family and school shows included girls in their mixed-sex, multigenerational casts; however, female youth were seldom the focus of such programs. Girl characters during this period often reproduced stereotypes about the primary interests of female youth: their appearance, shopping, and boys. Although both The Brady Bunch (ABC; 1969–1974) and The Partridge Family (ABC; 1970–1974) featured their girl characters in episodes about feminism, most television shows shied away from exploring such controversial issues. Fortunately, there were several series that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s that signaled transformations occurring in American girlhood, including One Day at a Time (CBS; 1975–1984), Family (ABC; 1976–1980), The Facts of Life (NBC; 1979–1988), The Cosby Show (NBC; 1984–1992), and Roseanne (ABC; 1988–1997). One Day at a Time focused on a divorced mother and her two daughters, a premise that allowed the show to address the difficulties women and girls were facing at a time when gender norms were changing dramatically in American society. Although the younger sister Barbara (Valerie Bertinelli) represented an oldfashioned type of girlhood, her older sister Julie (MacKenzie Phillips) signified a liberated form of female identity by exhibiting qualities typically associated with male adolescents, such as rebelliousness and independence. The two sisters’ emerging sexual identities received considerable attention on this show, which was the first to candidly approach the subject of girls’ premarital sexual activity.

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Marcia and Cindy Brady in a scene from The Brady Bunch. (Photofest)

Another television show that explored contemporary social issues was Family, a dramatic series that revolved around a Californian working couple and their children. The younger daughter, Buddy (Kristy McNichol), was the center of many episodes, and as she aged, several plots focused on issues of concern to contemporary youth, such as homosexuality and substance abuse. As an assertive and physically confident tomboy, Buddy became a role model for many female youth who identified with her nontraditional approach to girlhood. Of the several school-oriented shows that emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s, The Facts of Life was the only sit-com to feature girls. Centered on a prestigious girls’ boarding school in New York, the show originally included seven girl characters, several of which

were cut in its second season so as to focus more specifically on a smaller group. The primary girl characters on the show were Blair Warner (Lisa Whelchel), a rich, attractive girl; Tootie Ramsey (Kim Fields), a gossip and television’s first middle-class African American girl; Natalie Green (Mindy Cohn), an impressionable girl; and Jo Polniazek (Nancy McKeon), a tough, independent girl. The Facts of Life was one of the first television shows to portray girls outside the family home. In turn, it was one of the first to depict girls moving from high school to college and, finally, into adult life. Another program to feature several girls transitioning from girlhood to womanhood was The Cosby Show. Although this series was known best for resurrecting the happy, wholesome nuclear family of earli-

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A scene from The Facts of Life. (Photofest)

er sit-coms, The Cosby Show’s focus on middle-class African Americans was groundbreaking. With several girl characters between the ages of five and twenty, the show allowed viewers to experience the full spectrum of female subjectivity, particularly from an African American perspective. Although several of the Cosby daughters displayed traditional forms of femininity through their primary interests in dating and shopping, one of the daughters, Denise (Lisa Bonet), represented an independent and assertive personality more in keeping with contemporary women. When Denise left home to attend college, a spin-off series called A Different World (NBC; 1987–1993) was created, making it the first television show to focus on a black woman in college.

Although most shows featuring girls on television have depicted middle-class families, several series from the 1980s focused on the difficulties working-class families faced during the Reagan era. Roseanne’s primary focus was on the mother character (played by Roseanne Barr/Arnold), who, along with her two daughters, sister, mother, and female friends, constructed a matriarchal family environment. In keeping with the show’s alternate view of American families, the younger daughter, Darlene (Sara Gilbert), was an intelligent and cynical young woman into sports, vegetarianism, and horror comic books who eventually left home to pursue a college education and prepare for her career. With witty, sarcastic repartee that rivaled that of her moth-

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er, Darlene became a role model for many girls who identified with her independent and assertive personality and nontraditional interests. Since 1990, female youth have been featured in more than ten television series, the largest number of girl-centered shows since the mid-1960s. Many transformations have occurred in television’s representations of girlhood in recent years. Although girls still appear primarily in family and school sit-coms, several shows feature girls as lead characters in action dramas. In addition, programs that focus on girls no longer present marriage and motherhood as their primary objectives, and girls often discuss their nondomestic plans for life after high school, including college and careers. This does not mean that these girls are no longer interested in boys; in fact, many female youth in contemporary television still give romance and male attention high priority in their lives. Although girls are typically not explicitly as sexually active, several shows have made a point of exploring the conflicting emotions girls have over their first sexual experiences. Perhaps most significantly, the worlds in which today’s television girls live are more culturally and racially diverse than ever before. Shows like Sister, Sister (ABC/WB; 1994–1999), Moesha (UPN; 1996–present), and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo (Nickelodeon; 1996–1999) have pushed the traditional boundaries of television by privileging nonwhite characters and cultures. (The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo is the first television program to star an Asian American girl.) In turn, an increasing number of shows featuring white girls include nonwhite youth as secondary characters. Unfortunately, the experiences of working-class girls continue to be underrepresented,

and adolescent lesbians are rarely depicted in prime-time television. Contemporary shows featuring girls can be broken down into three main genres: sit-coms, dramatic series, and animated cartoons. The first girl sit-com of the 1990s was Blossom (NBC; 1991– 1995), which starred Mayim Bialik as Blossom Russo, a smart, responsible white teen growing up in a dysfunctional, male-dominated family in a Los Angeles suburb. Clarissa Explains It All (Nickelodeon; 1991–1994) focused on Clarissa Darling (Melissa Joan Hart), an assertive blonde teen who attempted to educate young people about how to grow into responsible and confident individuals. The Baby-Sitters Club (HBO; 1991) was a short-lived attempt to adapt for television Ann M. Martin’s popular book series about a group of adolescent girls who work part-time as babysitters. One of the first shows to tap into the increasing number of girls participating in sports was Phenom (ABC; 1993–1994), a sit-com that focused on the experiences of Angela Doolan (Angela Goethals), who struggled to balance her extraordinary talent as a tennis player with her desire to grow up as a normal teen. Sister, Sister, the first television program to star African American girls, borrows its premise from the film The Parent Trap. The show features Tia Landry and Tamera Campbell (Tia and Tamera Mowry), identical twins who were separated at birth and reunited during adolescence. Another show to feature a black girl is Moesha, which focuses on Moesha Mitchell (played by music star Brandy Norwood), a teenager who lives with her family in Leimert Park, a multicultural neighborhood in Los Angeles. Like many other girl sit-coms, this show focuses on Moesha’s dilemma of remaining loyal to her family and friends while

Television struggling to find an independent identity. In the fantasy sit-com Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (ABC; 1996–present), adapted from the comic book series by the same name, Sabrina Spellman (Melissa Joan Hart) struggles with growing up as both a “mortal” and a witch. Clueless (ABC/UPN; 1996–1999), adapted from the blockbuster film by the same name, focused on a group of overprivileged teens living in Beverly Hills, including Cher (Rachel Blanchard), the show’s protagonist and narrator; Dionne (Stacey Dash), her best friend; and Amber (Elisa Donovan), their catty rival. One of the most popular dramatic series of the 1990s to include girls as primary characters was Beverly Hills, 90210 (Fox; 1990–2000), the first prime-time serial to feature teenagers since Peyton Place (ABC; 1964–1969). By relying on strategies used in the prime-time soap operas of the 1980s, this show appealed to its audiences through a combination of melodrama and realism as it attempted to present the various problems facing contemporary teens and, more recently, young adults. Although Beverly Hills, 90210 was transformed considerably over its lengthy run, it always included a variety of girl characters, including Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty), who at the show’s start had recently moved with her family to Beverly Hills; Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth), a snobbish rich girl who became Brenda’s best friend; and Donna Martin (Tori Spelling), Kelly’s and Brenda’s naive friend. The first dramatic series of the 1990s to feature a girl in the starring role was My So-Called Life (ABC; 1994–1995), which focused specifically on the coming-of-age experiences of an introspective fifteen-year-old named Angela Chase (Claire Danes). In this show, Angela dealt

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with conflicts in her own family as well as among her friends and schoolmates, particularly Rayanne (A. J. Langer), who exposed her to the less conformist experiences of contemporary girlhood. Like many other television shows featuring sisters, My So-Called Life contrasted the increasingly independent Angela with her younger, less experienced sister, Danielle (Lisa Wilhoit). Although My So-Called Life portrayed the internal experiences of contemporary female adolescence, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, The Secret World of Alex Mack (Nickelodeon; 1994–1998), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB; 1997– present) focus on the chaos of girls’ external worlds and their abilities to bring order to those spheres. Although there are many differences between these three action-oriented dramatic series, especially in terms of their target audiences and production budgets, they each represent an alternative to other girl-centered programs previously (and currently) on the air, which tend to reproduce stereotypes about female youth. Most significantly, each of these dramatic series features a girl in the traditionally male role of action hero and in doing so embraces the concept of “girl power,” the idea that female youth are intelligent, confident, assertive, and powerful. In turn, each of these shows privileges the qualities of loyalty and support by teaming its lead girl character with another girl and boy, who help her to solve mysteries, track criminals, or fend off demons. Many contemporary cartoons include girl characters in their casts, but several recent animated programs make a more direct appeal to female viewers by featuring girls as lead characters. The PowerPuff Girls (Cartoon Network; 1998–present) focuses on a group of young girls who are

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action heroes, whereas Pepper Ann (ABC; 1997–present) and Daria (MTV; 1997– present) have more realistic portrayals of older female youth. Pepper Ann focuses on Pepper Ann Pearson, a junior high student who is undergoing the transformation from childhood to adolescence. Significantly unlike other cartoons, Pepper Ann has themes more common to real girls’ experiences, such as developing acne and purchasing a first bra. Produced for an older teen/young adult audience, Daria (a spin-off of Beavis and Butt-head [MTV; 1993–1997]) focuses on the experiences of sixteen-year-old Daria Morgendorffer, a disaffected yet highly intelligent girl who, along with her best friend Jane Lane, has little respect for the conformist members of her community. The proliferation of girls on television in the 1990s is no doubt due both to the increasing number of women involved in the television industry today and to commercial attempts to appeal to the female youth audience. In addition, the increase in programming slots made available through cable and satellite delivery systems has made room for numerous shows that specifically focus on and are produced for girls. Indeed, with the Fox Family Channel’s introduction of the Girlz Channel, we may see more portrayals of girls in the twenty-first century than ever before. Mary Celeste Kearney See also Consumer Culture; Movies, Adolescent Girls in References and Further Reading Denis, Christopher Paul, and Michael Denis. 1992. Favorite Families of TV. New York: Citadel Press. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 1998. “Girls, Girls, Girls: Gender and Generation in Contemporary Discourses of Female Adolescence and Youth Culture.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California.

Leibman, Nina C. 1995. Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lipsitz, George. 1992. “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television.” Pp. 71–108 in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer. Edited by Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Luckett, Moya. 1997. “Girl Watchers: Patty Duke and Teen TV.” Pp. 95–116 in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. Edited by Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Ella. 1989. Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Temple, Shirley A child motion picture star in the 1930s, Shirley Temple continued making movies until 1949. After signing her first contract with Educational Studios in 1932, she performed in twelve short films. By 1934 she had signed with Twentieth-Century Fox and made seven feature films, including Little Miss Marker (Paramount, 1934, loan), one of her greatest triumphs. During the next five years, Americans of all ages found inspiration in the way Shirley Temple acted, danced, and sang her way through the Great Depression. In 1940, at the age of twelve, her mother bought out her contract with Fox, and Shirley signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. During the 1940s “the World’s darling” grew up, got married, had a daughter, and got divorced. In the 1950s, after marrying Charles Black and becoming an ordinary housewife, she had two more children. She returned to show business in 1957, ran for Congress in 1967, and in 1974 became the U.S. ambassador to Ghana.

Temple, Shirley Temple is significant to the history of American girlhood because she influenced many young girls to pursue their dreams. By creating an on-screen image of hope, she allowed girls to overcome insecurity. She represented positive and animated energy at a time of great despair and gave girls a respite from an economically and socially tumultuous world. Little girls as well as teenage girls identified with her. Shirley Jane Temple was born on April 23, 1928, to George and Gertrude Temple in Santa Monica, California. Her parents adored their only daughter: Gertrude described her daughter as a “sunny and pretty child” (Basinger 1975, 19). According to her mother, Shirley was given an extra amount of attention even before she was born. George was able to pay for dance lessons for Shirley by the time she turned three years old. At the dance school, she was discovered in 1934 by Charles Lamont, a director and talent scout at Educational Studios. Lamont cast Shirley in a series of movies called the “Baby Burlesks” and paid her $10 a day and, later on, $50 a picture. The series included War Babies (1932), The Runt Page (1932), Pie Covered Wagon (1932), Glad Rags to Riches (1932), Kid’s Last Fight (1933), Kid in Hollywood (1932), Polly-Tix in Washington (1933), and Kid in Africa. She met all the Baby Burlesk requirements, which included height, curly hair, bright teeth, infectious smile, and a distinctive personality. She was cast in old comedy favorites that featured kids in satires on the popular movies of the day. In short films such as Glad Rags to Riches (1932) and War Babies (1932), the children were dressed in adult costumes on the top and diapers on the bottom. The combination of adult and baby attire appealed to both

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young and teenage girls in the audience. Shirley made four major films outside of her work on the “Bay Burlesques” series in 1932, six in 1933, and three in 1934 for Educational Studios, and was loaned out to Tower Productions in 1933 to play a small roll in Red-Haired Alibi. By this time, Gertrude Temple had figured Shirley could get good work as a child actor and took her to casting offices. Shirley appeared in small parts for Paramount’s To the Last Man (1933) and Universal’s comedy Out All Night (1933) while under contract to Educational Studios. In 1934, she was given a roll in Paramount’s New Deal Rhythm. Because of the strong public reaction to her performance in New Deal Rhythm, Paramount planned for her to star in Little Miss Marker after completing her contract with Educational. Paramount waited patiently for Fox to loan Shirley to them for their production of Little Miss Marker. In 1934 the film paid off, not only in dollars, but it made Temple a star. Because of its success Shirley Temple became a gold mine for her home studio. Fox was more than happy to bring her home and star her in Baby Take a Bow (1934), where, with James Dunn, she sings an audience-pleasing duet, “On Accounta I Love You.” From 1934 until 1940, Shirley acted in seventeen films for Fox and in Paramount’s Now and Forever (1934), with Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard. During the Great Depression, films such as Curly Top (1935), Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) featured an “overcoming all odds” theme that allowed moviegoing girls and other audience members to forget their troubles for a mere 10 cents. Curly Top, in which Shirley appears with Easter Dale, John Boles, and Ro-

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chelle Hudson, allowed girls in the audience to look into the life of the wealthy, with a home in Southampton, silk pajamas, and a bedroom for the former orphans (Hudson and Temple) decorated in an expensive nautical motif. The theme of poor little orphans escaping poverty and cruelty hit close to home for those trying to survive hard times. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the story of an orphan who becomes a radio performer, also proved to be a hit with audiences down on their luck. It includes everything audiences learned to love about a Temple film. Shirley sings “If I Had One Wish to Make” and “Come and Get Your Happiness,” and panders to the power of the box office in one scene in which she sings songs from past movies like “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” a favorite number from Bright Eyes (1934), and “Animal Crackers in My Soup” from Curly Top. In Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) Shirley played in the now-familiar story of the lonely only child with the workaholic father, played by Michael Whalen. The first scene opens with Shirley singing to her expensive doll collection “I Want to Make Mud Pies (Then I Know I’d Find Happiness).” When her father comes home, she snuggles in his lap to sing a romantic ballad, “When I’m with You.” Other songs include “But Definitely” and “You’ve Got to Eat Your Spinach, Baby,” sung by Alice Faye. The movie’s story line progresses when an automobile strikes Shirley’s nanny, who is taking her to boarding school. Shirley then stumbles on two hopeful radio performers, Alice Faye and Jake Haley. The audiences loved the story, and Shirley’s performance encompassed everything they had come to see: great timing, excellent dancing, and a charming theme.

Because of her successful acting career, Shirley became a national commodity and helped sell everything from soap to toys. It is estimated the family grossed over $10,000 every ten days, a handsome sum during the Depression. There were Shirley Temple dolls, sheet music, jewelry, clothes, sewing items, and playing cards, to name just a few of the products bearing her name during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1940 Gertrude Temple bought out the rest of Shirley’s contract with Twentieth-Century Fox and announced her daughter’s retirement from films. It appears that Gertrude Temple spoke too soon concerning Shirley’s retirement, however, because in a short time a contract was signed with Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM). In 1941 Kathleen was released starring Laraine Day, Herbert Marshall, and Gail Patrick. Shirley, appearing as Kathleen, wore her first long dress on-screen and, at age twelve, remained poised and pretty. Kathleen did not fare well with the critics, however, and the MGM contract was canceled by mutual consent. Shirley ended her childhood career with an Edward Small Production released through United Artists entitled Miss Annie Rooney (1942). Shortly thereafter, Shirley took two years off from making movies. She attended Miss Westlake’s school for girls, where she was popular with her classmates. After graduating, she announced her comeback by signing a personal contract with David O. Selznick. Shirley starred with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Joseph Cotten in Since You Went Away (1944), her first Selznick production released by United Artists. In this movie she portrayed some of the childhood charm seen in her earlier performances. Now sixteen years old, she gave her first interview without the presence of her

Temple, Shirley mother. The transition from childhood actor was a success, and Shirley made several other adult movies before announcing her engagement to John George Agar. The couple married September 19, 1945, at the Wilshire Methodist Church with 15,000 fans waiting outside. Shirley continued to work after the wedding and released Honeymoon, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and That Hagen Girl in 1947 and Fort Apache in 1948. After Fort Apache, Shirley’s daughter was born on January 30, 1948. Although Shirley and her husband starred in several pictures together, the marriage fell apart, and on December 5, 1950, the couple divorced. Just two weeks after her divorce was finalized, Shirley married Charles Alden Black, a San Francisco businessman. They had met in Hawaii while Shirley was on vacation recovering from her divorce. Black, “a solid citizen,” war hero, and the son of a prominent California businessman, held his own next to “the world’s darling.” He admitted never having seen a Shirley Temple movie. Shirley retired from the screen and became a suburban housewife during the post–World War II period when domesticity and maternity were exalted for women. Black adopted Linda Susan, and together he and Shirley had two more children. In Atherton, California, Shirley was active in groups such as the Allied Arts Guild, the Peninsula Children’s Theatre, and the Sierra Club. By 1957 she agreed to do a television series called Shirley Temple’s Storybook. The series, sponsored by Breck Hair Products, ran from 1957 through 1961 and was shown on NBC. Shirley continued to act until 1965, when she decided to work instead for the Republican Party as a speaker and fund-raiser. In 1967 she ran for a seat in Congress after discovering that Representative J.

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Arthur Younger of California was too ill to run again. Ronald Reagan and George Murphy were among those advising her to run. She lost the seat to Democrat Roy Archibald but went on to make more than 200 speeches that year. In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed her the U.S. delegate to the United Nations, and President Ford named her ambassador to Ghana in 1974. In 1972 Shirley discovered she had breast cancer and decided to share her experience with the public. She discussed her operation and her recovery in a McCall’s magazine article, on the radio, and on television. Her autobiography, Child Star, was published in 1988. Shirley Temple Black is a mother and grandmother and lives with her husband of more than fifty years in northern California. Rita Papini See also Dolls; Movies, Adolescent Girls in; Pickford, Mary References and Further Reading Basinger, Jeanine. 1975. Shirley Temple: Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movie. New York: Pyramid Publications. Black, Shirley Temple. 1988. Child Star: An Autobiography. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Smith, Patricia R. 1979. Shirley Temple Dolls and Collectibles. 2d series. Paducah, KY: Collectors Books. Zierold, Norman J. 1965. The Child Stars. New York: Coward-McCann.

Tomboys Tomboys in American fiction provide valuable lenses through which to consider gender identities and autonomy in both public and private. Tomboys appear in stories before and after the Civil War as athletic, often masculine or crossdressed, female children and adolescents

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who resist conventional ideals and practices of femininity and obedience to institutional authority. Many of these stories warn that masculine and often dark-complected tomboys, if allowed to reach adulthood unchecked, could refuse feminine behaviors or even engage in public sex (prostitution). Twentieth-century texts add the threat of lesbianism. Tomboy narratives often answer such challenges with abrupt and improbable shifts to “feminine” dress and behavior, Christian obedience to authority, and sudden interest in heterosexual relationships and marriage. These last-minute capitulations seem designed to reassure readers that sex and gender conventions will survive all challenges. The shifts also illustrate the arbitrary nature of the conventions themselves. Tomboy stories—from the etymological origins of the term tomboy to the impressive variety of tomboy characters in American literature—illustrate the complexity of cultural work literally “at play” in seemingly straightforward stories of childhood and adolescence. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists a 1553 reference to “whiskyng and ramping abroade like a Tom boy” and another, in 1622, that links masculinity to tomboys through its mention of “short-haired Gentlewomen.” Tomboyism has been associated with 1860s theatrical and Beadle dime-novel burlesque conventions, with female cross-dressing and performances of masculinity “a central feature” (Habegger 1982, 173). By 1876, the OED states, Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Womankind provides a description of the tomboy: “What I mean by ‘tomboyism,’” she says, “is a wholesome delight in rushing about at full speed, playing at active games, climbing trees, rowing boats, making dirt-pies, and the

like.” The OED also provides a clear connection between the ubiquitous term tom in British and American culture (“often a generic name for any male representative of the common people”) and working-class promiscuity. A measure of the term’s depth as a marker of class and sexuality is that it serves as a prefix for more specialized terms denoting both consumers of sex (“tomcats”) and the objects of that consumption (“tomrigs”). Tom-rig is synonymous not only with “strumpet” (used since the fourteenth century to denote “prostitute”) but also with “romping girl” and “tomboy.” The linkage between uncontrollable girls and bad women is explicit in a phrase from Tomson’s Calvin’s Sermons (1579): “Women must not be impudent, they must not be tomboyes, to be shorte, they must not be unchast” (OED 211). There is an additional etymological layer to the prefix tom and its relevance to tomboys. The term tomfool, used since the fourteenth century to denote a simpleton or buffoon, introduces the element of liminality to the concept of tomboys. “Liminal” figures elude categorization because they invert conventional identities and relationships. Young girls—tomboys—who possess no social or economic power acquire that power by functioning as disobedient, athletic, heroic, entrepreneurial, eccentric, or masculine “bad girls.” Whether they appear as major or minor characters, tomboy presences are usually marginalized, enabling them to speak the truth about rigid gender-role expectations. Since the term tomboy itself fuses associations with masculinity, promiscuous sexuality, prostitution, and lesbianism, the figure of the tomboy is more complex than is commonly supposed. The physicality of masculine girls links girls’ bodies

Tomboys with physical labor, even when they are engaged in “play.” The class anxieties this suggests are complicated by the darkness of tomboys’ skin, hair, and eyes, typical features of literary tomboys. Fears of racial contamination and miscegenation also sexualize these figures. Tomboy masculinity is characteristic of most stories about tomboys. In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Jo March calls herself a “business man” (51) and despises tears as an “unmanly weakness” (76). In E. D. E. N. Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand (1859), the orphaned Capitola Black cross-dresses as a newsboy to survive, regretting only “what a fool I had been, not to turn to a boy before, when it was so easy!” (47). Hellfire, protagonist of Mark Twain’s short story “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (1897), could swim, skate, fish, boat, hunt, trap, run, and break horses and is described as “the only genuwyne male man in this town” (187). She illustrates the liminality so typical of tomboys: “Hellfire kept the community in an unrestful state; it could settle to no permanent conclusion about her. She was always rousing its resentment by her wild unfeminine ways, and always winning back its forgiveness again by some act or other of an undeniably creditable sort” (196). Hellfire’s behavior causes a female moral guardian, Betsy Davis, to warn Hellfire that this has made her the object of “reports” (presumably, rumors of promiscuity). Gypsy Breynton, another masculine child, receives a similar warning from her mother in Gypsy’s Year at the Golden Crescent by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1867). This female guardian’s rebuke addresses gender transgression and, potentially, lesbianism. Mrs. Breynton disapproves of the influence of Jo Courtis, Gypsy’s cross-dressing friend, and threat-

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ens to send Gypsy to a school “where they will make a boy of you.” When Gypsy expresses horror, her mother replies, “Well then, my dear, don’t try to be a boy. . . . If you decide to be a woman, be a woman” (184). Meg March reproves Jo in the opening pages of Little Women: “You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and behave better, Josephine. It didn’t matter so much when you were a little girl; but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady” (3). Nearly 500 pages later, Jo finally accedes to class and gender conventions. In Susan Warner’s novel The Wide, Wide World (1850), Nancy Vawse receives a more spiritually pointed message from her moral guardian, Ellen Montgomery. Ellen warns Nancy that if she doesn’t read the Bible Ellen has given her, she “may have to go where you never can read it, nor be happy nor good neither” (334). The full punitive force of Christian culture, threatening prison, prostitution, and hell, is all implicit in Ellen’s warning. Tomboys were often orphaned, and the surrogate moral control imposed by older girls and women provided comfortable reassurances of national self-governance and benevolence. Pairings of tomboys with sissies are a frequent occurrence in tomboy stories. These linkages seem designed less to correct gender excess than to demonstrate that it can be corrected. Pairings of Jo March and Laurie Laurence in Little Women, Tommy Shirley and Jay Harper in Willa Cather’s “Tommy, the Unsentimental” (1896), Hellfire Hotchkiss and Thug Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” Georgiana Isham and a French baron in Phyllis Duganne and Harriet Gersman’s story “Tomboy!” (1928), Kerry and Mick

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in Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1950), and Fannie Lou Babcock and Russell in Allyn Allen’s Lone Star Tomboy (1951) illustrate a nearcentury of cross-gendered pairs. Tomboys successfully masculinize sissy girls and prevent them from becoming domestic invalids (Ellen is checked by Nancy in The Wide, Wide World, and Clara Day is checked by Capitola Black in The Hidden Hand), but they are less successful in masculinizing sissy boys. In numerous instances of gender Darwinism, sissy boys simply drop out of their texts. Tomboy stories present girls and young women as capable of challenging the erotic limitations of sisterly love. Studies of romantic love by several feminist historians suggest that sexuality between girls and women may best be viewed as occurring within a “continuum” of nineteenthcentury American homosocial and spiritual cultural relationships (Faderman 1981, Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 75–76). Same-sex desire is unambiguously presented in many texts, however (Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” and “Tommy, the Unsentimental,” for example). Most tomboys are described as dark or strange in some way. Jo March in Little Women is “very tall, thin and brown”; Georgiana Isham in “Tomboy!” has a “brown” face and hands; twenty-year-old Val Wakefield in Wenona Gilman’s Val, the Tomboy (1891) has a “sun-browned face” and “great dark eyes”; Nancy Vawse possesses “bold black eyes”; and Nell Gilbert in Jeannette Gilder’s The Tom-Boy at Work (1904) has “burning black eyes.” Dark or strange girls threaten institutional order with ungovernable play, contempt for authority, workingclass indifference to conduct, and a failure to aspire to motherhood. One of the reasons that the slave child Topsy becomes one of the most memo-

rably individuated figures in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) is that she uses her body radically—not to work but to play—just out of reach of the social, spiritual, and economic systems that govern the St. Clare family and most of their other slaves. Indeed, Topsy’s work is, precisely, to play—to deflect authority by bungling the work that defines her as a slave. In this, she resembles Nancy Vawse and many other literary tomboys who cannot be controlled and whose play threatens the most basic assumptions of adult guardians: that the girls in their charge will want, someday, to become like their adult mentors. At first, Topsy seems an unlikely tomboy. Her body is property, and her gender identity—as girl or as woman—is nullified by that status. But what Topsy and many white tomboys share in common is a capacity to reinvent themselves so that throughout most of their narratives, until the intervention of a sudden transformation, institutions of race, class, or gender cannot quite fix on, identify, and harm or destroy them. An idealized balance between physical and mental exercise proves to be a complex class balancing act, as well, as too little attention to the body can be fatal. Ellen Montgomery’s severe Aunt Fortune in The Wide, Wide World diagnoses Ellen’s mother’s illness as having originated from a class-produced imbalance of physical and mental activity: “If she had been trained to use her hands and do something useful instead of thinking herself above it, maybe she wouldn’t have had to go to sea for her health” (Warner 1850, 140). Activity that exceeds its value as exercise and is therefore willful, however, exceeds class ideals. When Ellen befriends the lawless “bad girl” Nancy Vawse and returns home dirty and

Tomboys wet from a day with Nancy in the fields and a spill in the creek, Ellen’s “exercise” signals intransigence for Aunt Fortune. Stories about tomboys, along with women’s political writing and serialized women’s romances, often debate notions of “true womanhood” and the necessity of preserving rigidly polarized men’s and women’s “spheres.” Much of what is assumed about “domesticity,” that its most essential features are piety, submission, charity, and the like, is belied by many nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s texts, both fictional and nonfictional. They often promote the following principles: athleticism over invalidism (The Hidden Hand) and economic selfsufficiency over reliance upon husbands, fathers, and brothers (Little Women; Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern, pseudonym for Sarah Parton, 1855). The importance of devaluing artificial gender identities when they limit the capabilities of both men and women is emphasized in contemporary treatises (Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics, 1898). Few writers of tomboy fiction are listed in encyclopedias of women’s writing, and the category “tomboy” is usually missing, as well. These exclusions may signal an editorial policy that distinguishes between “adult” and “children’s” literature. In an 1867 article entitled “Books for Young People,” Horace E. Scudder noted that “the ordinary classification of ‘books for young people’ is a very recent one” and that he would “pay no very close attention to the line which divides books written for the young from books written for the old” (quoted in Haviland 1973, 23–24). The line has remained blurred, and tomboy narratives remain unclassified. Some tomboy literature is

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identifiable through titles, as in George Baker’s Running to Waste: The Story of a Tomboy (1875) and Jeannette Gilder’s The Autobiography of a Tomboy (1901), or through categorization as girls’ adventure series literature (Gypsy Breynton, Outdoor Girls, Motor Girls, Girl Flyer, and Nancy Drew, for example). The term tomboy in a title does not, however, guarantee a tomboy in the text. Anne Pence Davis’s Mimi at Camp: The Adventures of a Tomboy (1935) features Mimi Hammond, who, because she experiences no gender cross-identification, engages in no significant challenge to authority, and does not represent a problem that her text needs to resolve, is not a tomboy. More often, tomboys are simply where their readers find them, creating counternarratives as minor characters (usually) within the master narratives that dramatize the coming-of-age stories of other, more spiritualized girls who are closer to becoming “good women.” Thus Topsy counters the story of Eve St. Clare, and Nancy Vawse contests Ellen Montgomery’s story. Tomboys dramatize the artificial necessity of requiring girls who usually behave as “boys” to begin to behave, often reluctantly, as “girls” instead. In the space of a few lines, the tomboy character often sheds masculinity, puts on a dress, becomes a “lady,” finds a mate, and marches to the altar. Her gender, class, and sexual ambiguities are thus resolved within a narrative instant. Jo March in Little Women, America’s bestknown tomboy, is forced to abandon her commercially successful Gothic thrillers to write conventional stories with pathos and “heart” instead and to marry paternalistic Professor Bhaer. Alcott’s readers have loved Jo not because she married a benevolent figure but because during

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Tomboys incompetent sissy Jay Harper and then comments (unconvincingly) of men: “They are awful idiots, half of them, and never think of anything beyond their dinner. But O, how we do like ’em!” (Cather 1994, 242). Topsy drops out of Stowe’s narrative at Eve’s deathbed and only reappears 200 pages later, toward the end of the novel. She is transformed from a child who lies, blackmails, steals, and manipulates to a mature, devout missionary in the space of one paragraph. The category “tomboy” continues to trouble sex, gender, and class equilibrium. Debates over whether tomboys will become lesbians are still featured in women’s magazines, and “makeovers” of masculine girls and women are a staple of television talk shows, demonstrating the continued elusiveness of “true womanhood.” Mary Elliott

Tomboys often cross gender lines in their dress and activities. (Skjold Photographs)

See also Body Image; Lesbians; Play; Sports; Surfer Girls

most of the novel, she was unique, powerful, independent, and fearless. Like Jo, tomboys such as Nancy Vawse in The Wide, Wide World, Capitola Black in The Hidden Hand, Gypsy Breynton in Gypsy’s Year at the Golden Crescent, and Tommy Shirley in “Tommy, the Unsentimental” all learn their lessons by the end. Nancy is subdued with a Bible, and Capitola perfunctorily marries the noble Herbert Greyson at the close of their respective texts. Gypsy follows her mother’s advice to “be a woman,” whereas Tommy forfeits her love Jessica to the

References and Further Reading Alcott, Louisa May. 1868. Little Women. 1989. Reprint, New York: Penguin. Cather, Willa. 1905. “Paul’s Case.” Pp. 149–174 in Willa Cather: Five Stories. 1956. Reprint, New York: Vintage. ———. 1896. “Tommy, the Unsentimental.” Pp. 234–242 in Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Edited by Lillian Faderman. 1994. Reprint, New York: Viking/Penguin. Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow. Gilman, Wenona. 1891. Val, the Tomboy. Cleveland: A. Westbrook. Habegger, Alfred. 1982. “Funny Tomboys.” Pp. 172–183 in Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American

Tomboys Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Harris, Susan K. 1990. NineteenthCentury American Women’s Novels: Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haviland, Virginia. 1973. Children and Literature: Views and Reviews. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman. Koppelman, Susan, ed. 1994. Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. New York: Meridian. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. 1867. Gypsy’s Year at the Golden Crescent. 1897. Reprint, New York: Dodd, Mead. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1985. “The Female World of Love and Ritual:

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Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Pp. 53–76 in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press. Southworth, E. D. E. N. 1859. The Hidden Hand, or, Capitola the Madcap. Edited by Joanne Dobson. 1988. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Twain, Mark. 1897. “Hellfire Hotchkiss.” Pp. 88–133 in Mark Twain’s Satires and Burlesques. Edited by Franklin R. Rogers. 1967. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press. Warner, Susan. 1850. The Wide, Wide World. 1987. Reprint, New York: Feminist Press.

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majority of accused witches were female or why some women became scapegoats and others did not. Early interpretations have been challenged by newer findings. For example, initially scholars believed that mostly poor and needy women were the likeliest targets of witchcraft accusations. But in Salem, only a small number among the accused were poor. Instead, a significant proportion of accused witches actually increased their share of family resources by defying accepted principles of inheritance. Scholars also believed that it was unruly women who became victims of male supremacy. Social deviants offended neighbors angered by abrasive, argumentative, assertive, or aggressive behavior. But only one of the accused in Salem fits this description. In the eyes of her suspicious neighbors, pitiful Sarah Good—pregnant, poor, and homeless— could also be quite difficult. Further research has revealed a complicated picture of the past. For instance, recent findings suggest that those women who became easy targets lacked the protection of a husband—either because he was abusive (as was the case with Bridget Oliver Bishop), dead, or too poor to initiate a legal suit against slander. But not having children or having too few could have similar dire consequences. Because Puritans valued fertility, childless, infertile, and menopausal women were also

On Halloween many girls today dress up as witches or as one of their familiars, though one that is more sweet than satanic, usually the black cat. But during the most extensive witch hunts in America’s past, most notoriously in Salem, colonial girls acted as accusers, not as the accused. Only one little girl, four-year-old Dorcas Good, was ever accused of doing the devil’s work. Adolescent girls, many of whom were among the most powerless in communities in the throes of transformation, attributed their afflictions to the demonic spells of adult women. European folklore and religious beliefs about the supernatural were transported from the old world to the new world by European immigrants. Because colonists lacked the scientific knowledge of later generations, they often attributed strange occurrences to supernatural causes. The sudden death of apparently healthy children or farm animals, an unexplained miscarriage, or other mysterious events could lead one suspicious neighbor to accuse another of witchcraft. Bad luck for some led to rumors that ruined the reputations of others. In seventeenth-century New England, witchcraft accusations and prosecutions—which began in the 1630s—had been sporadic. Historians have not reached a consensus about why the vast

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A bewitched girl in Salem, Massachusetts reveals demonic possession before Puritan ministers and an accused witch. (Hulton Getty/Archive Photos)

suspected of cavorting with the devil. (The vast majority of witches were middle-aged.) Such might have been the case, especially after an inexplicable illness afflicted a child. But even women healers, many of whom used charms, incantations, and herbal potions to cure the sick, were also targeted. Although there is still no uniform profile, all agree that those accused of witchcraft challenged the patriarchal standards of Puritan society in one way or another. Such was the case in early January 1692, when girls between the ages of nine and nineteen became the principal witchcraft accusers in Salem, Massachusetts, an old farming town in the midst of dramatic transformation. In the colonial kitchen, nine-year-old Betty Parris, the

daughter of the minister of Salem Village; her cousin, eleven-year-old Abigail Williams; and their friends used supernatural powers to predict the identity of their future husbands. Their queries about the future occurred against a backdrop of profound political, economic, cultural, and social change in New England. The declining Puritan commonwealth was becoming a royal regime. Salem itself was in the process of transition. Salem Village, where the accusers lived, was inhabited by those ill at ease with the new and nearby commercial and secular culture of Salem Town. This bustling seaport was the home of, but not a haven for, accused witches. Samuel Parris’s daughter Betty spent her time with Tituba, the Parrises’ slave. On occasion

Witchcraft when Parris was away, Tituba taught Betty, Abigail, and other neighborhood girls about divining. She told them African voodoo tales and instructed them in how to bake “witch cakes.” (All that is known about Tituba is that she was married to a Native American, John Indian, and that she was from Barbados, an important sugar-producing region and a central stop on international trade routes.) Not long after their divining activities, however, the girls began to experience nightmares, have violent fits and convulsions, become disoriented, bark, spit, and refuse nourishment. Nor were they alone; other young girls in other towns (as far away as Boston) also revealed strange symptoms and exhibited mysterious behavior in private as well as in public. Gripped by fears of a demonic conspiracy, Samuel Parris and others in Salem suspected the girls of being bewitched. An avalanche of charges led to the jailing of dozens of villagers from twenty-four different towns over the next four months. In court, the girl accusers described their torment at the hands of witches. All but one of the accused maintained their innocence. Tituba vividly described witches’ Sabbaths, spectral yellow birds, and night flights on broomsticks. Indeed, helping the victims required the discovery of the guilty: “Possession by the devil might be cured by a regimen of prayer, fasting, and repentance; victims of bewitchment, however, could not be cured until the guilty were found—and punished or destroyed” (Berkin 1996, 48–49). In all, 156 people were accused; 14 of the 19 hanged on “Witch Hill” were women. Although historians of the “new” women’s history have broken ground in their examination of witches, they have

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overlooked their juvenile accusers. What factors and forces led adolescent girls to challenge their elders? How can the deadly conflict between generations of females be understood? Perhaps no residents of Salem felt greater insecurity about their future than did the female adolescent accusers. The status of women in colonial New England—constricted and constrained—had become even more precarious by the late 1600s. Specters of spinsterhood or widowhood were all around them. Some of the afflicted girls had been recently orphaned in Indian attacks in Maine. Without families to provide for them, they worked as domestic servants in local Salem households. Without dowries, they were less competitive in the marriage market. As orphans, domestic servants, children, and females, they were among the most powerless in Puritan society. Even though the Puritan experiment was reaching an end, the society and culture still placed strict limits on girls’ lives and opportunities for the future. Such was also the case for three of the afflicted girls whose future dowries and inheritances were in the process of litigation. Moreover, there were increasingly fewer eligible or desirable bachelors in Salem because many were migrating to other parts of New England and New York State in search of land; the frequent division of ancestral holdings among Puritans had left them with too little to support a family. Prospects in Salem were even bleaker for vulnerable unmarried girls whose anxious uncertainty was probably a contributing factor to extreme psychological stress (a condition today referred to as “hysterical conversion”). Miriam Forman-Brunell

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See also Puritan Girls References and Further Reading Berkin, Carol. 1996. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, chap. 2. Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. 1974. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993. Salem Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hall, David D. 1991. Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1692. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Kamensky, Jane. 1995. The Colonial Mosaic: American Women 1600–1760. New York: Oxford University Press, chap. 5. Karlsen, Carol. 1987. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: W. W. Norton.

Work Idealized conceptions of girls sheltered from toil and productive economic activity have cloaked the fact that girls in America have always worked. True, much of their labor has been disguised as “chores,” the unremunerated duty of daughters, the economic benefits of which have yet to be calculated. But whether they earned appreciation, a wage, or its equivalent (room and board), girl workers have played an indispensable role in American economic development. For many thousands of years before European settlement, for example, Native American girls worked as agriculturists in a variety of subsistence economies. So did seventeenth-century Anglo-American girls, who worked as indentured servants in the colonial South or as apprenticed or bound servants in the Northeast. Born into a lifetime of service, African

American girls were forced to contribute to the plantation economy by providing day care for white children as well as enslaved ones. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, swarms of farmers’ daughters who worked in the new nation’s textile mills became first proletariat, and working-class girls in the street trades contributed to the development of the urban industrial economy. As scavengers, girls also fueled informal economies, and as thieves and prostitutes, they participated in underground economies. Immigrant Jewish and Italian girls who worked as pieceworkers and factory operatives contributed to the urban industrial economy at the turn of the twentieth century. As babysitters and defense workers during both world wars, girls worked for the good of the country; they grew Victory gardens and recycled scrapped goods that benefited the war industry. The expansion of the service economy since World War II has benefited from girls who have labored often as part-time workers in low-wage, sex-segregated jobs. That girls’ work has continued into the twenty-first century has been fueled by high divorce rates, immigration, the feminization of poverty, second- and third-wave feminism, a consumer culture targeted at teens, and changing ideals about childhood, youth, girlhood, and female adolescence. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we ask girls as if it were entirely up to them. Although women in the twentyfirst century have a far greater range of career choices available to them, what most girls do not realize is that their first job is likely to be a feminized one, dominated by low-paid female workers doing low-status work with little opportunity for upward mobility.

Work Before 1800 Long before Euro-Americans settled in North America, Native American girls and their families inhabited the region. Over 20,000 years, Native American girls helped their families and communities adapt to the seven geographic areas they inhabited in the Southeast, Southwest, the plains, Great Basin and California, Pacific Northwest, Arctic coast, and eastern woodlands. Although the Europeans would regard “Indians” as a single undifferentiated people, there were several hundred distinct groups, each with their own political structure, language, economy, family, kinship styles, and girlhoods. Although little is known about what life was like for girls among most Native American tribes, limited information exists on the role of work in the lives of some. Jesuit priest Gabriel Sagard observed that “whenever they begin to put one foot in front of the other, [they] have a little stick put into their hands to train them and teach them early to pound corn . . . and in the course of these small frolics they are trained to perform trifling and petty household duties” (quoted in Axtell 1981, 34). Other observers noted that Seneca girls began work at eight or nine when their play was modeled after their mothers’ work. Because fathers, brothers, and other male kin were away for months at a time hunting or fighting, it was women and girls who maintained the extensive agricultural economy upon which the tribe depended. Working together in small groups, Seneca girls helped produce corn, beans, squash, and tobacco and gathered nuts, berries, and insects. They were assigned the lighter duties in the longhouse and in the garden plots located around the villages. Similarly, Catawba girls in the Southeast learned by imitating their mothers, who taught

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them how to hoe and plant, butcher and cook, and braid and sew. Pueblo girls who farmed in the Southwest also helped construct adobe houses, make pottery, and weave baskets. In the Great Plains, Omaha girls planted and harvested, dressed skins, and dried meat. Although there were no girls among the newcomers to Jamestown in 1607, they did set sail after settlement became the goal of the Virginia Company in 1618. Believing that family life would bring stability to the region, the company had advertised for “maids.” Although the majority of newcomers continued to be young men, Alice Pindon was not the only teenage girl who left England for Virginia. Approximately one-third of all settlers were young, unmarried girls. Most came by choice, but some were “orphaned apprentices,” kidnapped from the streets of London by profit-seeking “spiriters.” Colonial documents reveal that the Virginia Company regularly requested shiploads of boys and girls ages twelve and up. Those children who resisted faced imprisonment; those who perished were replaced. Because the majority of girls who came voluntarily could not afford the cost of the transatlantic journey, they contracted to serve for between four and seven years as “indentured servants” to tobacco planters. As adolescents and young women, they planted crops, enriched seedbeds, transplanted seedlings, stripped leaves, harvested tobacco, and helped run the domestic economy that enabled the South to eventually prosper. But the difficult and repetitious work, warm weather, poor diet, vitamin-deficient foods, high rates of mortality, and limited sociability on scattered farms in the countryside made many long for home. Daughters and sons of indentured servants born out

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of wedlock in a land unsupervised by male kin were put to work at age three. Until the end of the seventeenth century, however, agues and fever, typhoid, smallpox, and malaria plagued most marriages, leaving widows with daughters and sons to support in the same type of small wooden shacks they had lived in as servants. Young women who survived their “seasoning” (a bout with malaria) and served out their indenture became planters’ wives, eventually replacing themselves and enabling successive generations to expand by reproduction, not immigration. As in England, fears about a poverty-stricken population shaped colonial laws, customs, and practices in which poor children were bound to service. Daughters of widows who had no options or opportunities took their place in the impermanent households made up of “complex families” (successions of stepparents and stepsiblings), where they received erratic supervision and sometimes abuse. The labor of girls was essential to the subsistence economies elsewhere in North America. The utilitarianism of the farm family economy shaped the material culture of Puritan life, where at age six girls donned garments that were miniature versions of their mothers’. The change marked girls’ new relationship to the family and household economy, which depended upon the labor of everyone. In the gendered domains of the colonial New England household, sons took their place next to their fathers in fields, pastures, barns, and workshops. Daughters shared the domestic domain with their mothers, sisters, and other females. The Puritan family household was the main unit of production, where girls were obliged to assist mothers in unceasing routines. Even little ones—such as

five-year-old Eliza and her seven-year-old sister Hannah Sewell—assisted mothers with meals and other household tasks (Fass and Mason 2000, 288). Daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual chores consisted of spinning, carding, sewing, knitting, baking, brewing, planting, hoeing, harvesting, milking, churning, and cooking. In dark and drafty colonial households that were centers of production and reproduction, swaddled infants were also cared for by older siblings and servants. The daughters of Caucasian, Native American, or African American midwives and healers were apprenticed to help their skilled mothers, but it was an opportunity that came to very few. More typically, young workers were exchanged between colonial goodwives who relied heavily on their services. When they reached adolescence, the Sewell sisters were “fostered out” as indentured servants or apprentices, as were others regardless of family wealth and status (Morgan 1944, 77). Under another’s roof, adolescent girls like Sarah Gibbs of Plymouth, Massachusetts, received vocational and religious training and lessons in the dangers of idleness (Morgan 1944, 79). Unlike boys, however, girls learned housekeeping and little else. “Helps” learned as they assisted in the domestic production of candle and soap making, spinning, weaving, gardening, cooking, and preserving. By the eighteenth century, however, girls were no longer fostered out for vocational training. White girls in the eighteenth-century South were drawn into the sex-segregated world of their mothers when they were about six years of age. Girls generally assisted their mothers and other female kin in daily chores on the plantation, where they tended gardens, cared for dairy and poultry yards, cooked, cleaned,

Work spun, sewed, and knitted. Girls of the southern gentry, like Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Maria (a.k.a. Polly), learned how to “manage the kitchen, the dairy, the garden, and other appendages of the hous[e]hold” (Norton 1980, 28). White girls were also taught how to command slaves, including those older than themselves. Eliza Lucas, the teenage daughter of a plantation owner, was fairly unusual among her contemporaries. In her father’s absence, the well-educated adolescent managed his three plantations, where she introduced new crop varieties and invented indigo, the soon-to-be leading southern export (Kamensky 1995, 132). More typically, elite daughters worked on perfecting such feminine skills as modesty, meekness, compassion, affability, piety, and passivity in order to make themselves attractive to suitors and thus secure their financial future. But in the New England farm household where the vast majority of American girls lived, the labor of daughters was critical. Spinning, according to New Jersey Quaker Susanna Dillwyn, was “a very proper accomplishment for a farmer’s daughter” (quoted in Norton 1980, 17). By 1750, the widespread availability of looms enabled many families to acquire one for their daughters’ use. The time-consuming, monotonous task of spinning wool or flax fiber threads was done by young women, who had more time than married ones. But girls as young as six, who stood on footstools in order to reach the great wheel, also spun wool and flax into skeins of yarn. Other primary chores performed by farmers’ daughters included sewing and weaving. Rural daughters’ activities were much like those of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Fuller, who baked pies, made candles, cleaned floors, minced meat, made

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cheese, washed the laundry, and ironed the clothes. Sewing—taught to girls at a young age— was beneficial to the family wardrobe and, in urban areas, the purse. In colonial cities, adolescent girls often contributed to family welfare by working as paid seamstresses. However, city daughters from wealthy families were at the forefront of a leisured lifestyle soon to be idealized by the “new” middle class for their daughters. Girls of well-to-do families often spent their days together making, mending, and altering shirts, aprons, and caps at a relaxed pace. Without the pressing demands shouldered by other girls at the end of the colonial period, the white daughters of the urban elite rose late, spent hours with friends, and read the latest novels. 1800 to 1900 Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, migration, and ideologies of race, class, and gender were among the many factors that transformed the nature of work for girls in the nineteenth-century United States. There was no shortage of work to be done in the four- and five-story Federal-style and elaborate Victorian homes of the “new” middle class, despite the increasing production and consumption of industrialized goods. Though the domestic economy was declining, nativeborn girls found employment as live-in domestics. Many routinely complained about the unrealistic expectations of their mistresses, who scrutinized their efforts and criticized their work, demanded long hours, paid low wages, provided substandard accommodations, treated “their” help with little respect, and gave little “time off.” Some girls went from one household to another in pursuit of a less demeaning, demanding, and degrading position, but many chose to work in fac-

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tories and workshops and to live in boardinghouses with other girls and young women. The commercialization of agriculture that adversely affected family farms led farmers’ daughters as young as ten years of age to take advantage of newly emerging employment opportunities. In 1793, two girls were among the seven children who worked at Samuel Slater’s Rhode Island mill, and they were followed by numerous farmers’ daughters who became bobbindoffers, spinners, and weavers in Lowell or one of the other new mill towns in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In autobiographical works and in literary magazines, mill girls (ages fifteen to twenty-five) described the experiences they shared with other unmarried girls who helped each other adjust to the new economic and social order. Ten-year-old Harriet Hanson Robinson and eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom worked as doffers, fourteen hours every weekday and eight hours on Saturdays, for $1 per week. Relatively well-paid young women who lodged in company-owned and -controlled boardinghouses supervised by widows and other matrons spent their days tending looms and their nights attending lyceums and borrowing books from libraries. Competition led labor and living conditions to deteriorate by the mid-1830s, however. Eleven-year-old Harriet Robinson was among the 2,000 mill girls who went on strike in 1836. Mill girls formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1844 and published their grievances in the Voice of Industry. Despite strikes and state petitions, however, most left the mills and were replaced by desperately poor Irish immigrant women, their daughters, and other family members. Many white, native-born mill girls joined others who became teachers, one of

the better jobs available to middle-class young women, especially the graduates from one of the many female seminaries and academies that flourished in the new nation. These institutions prepared young women to pursue careers as teachers in public schools established during the 1840s. In the Midwest, however, “Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers, because they had no opportunity to learn the language,” according to novelist Willa Cather (1918, 128). But teaching, like all other female employments in the nineteenth century, was shaped by a powerful gender ideology. Teaching was an acceptable occupation for young women only because it was a temporary caregiving activity that prepared its practitioners for marriage and maternity. Though imbued with the confidence and independence that academic training and salaried employment could engender, the vast majority of young women were nevertheless forced to end their teaching careers upon marriage. Middle-class adolescent girls raised in rural areas in the Northeast were expected to sacrifice their own needs for those of others within the family circle. In Brattleboro, Vermont, Mary Palmer Tyler’s daughter spent her days cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and sewing, as had generations of girls before her. But over the course of the nineteenth century, the need for domestic production would be gradually curtailed by the industrial production of consumer goods. In place of the utilitarian fundamentals of housekeeping, daughters of the “new” middle class were urged to master such feminine accomplishments as sewing samplers, painting, and making dolls. These leisure activities were intended to teach daughters middle-class skills and sensibilities, but that is not the way all girls wanted it

Work to be. Catharine Beecher, who was a reluctant pupil, did not admire her mother’s domestic accomplishments as a girl. Beecher recalled “the mournful, despairing hours when I saw the children at their sports, and was confined till I had picked out the bad stitches” (quoted in Sklar 1973, 7). For rebellious girls like Ellen Montgomery, the heroine in Susan Warner’s best-selling “sentimental” novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), domestic labor was as stultifying as it was arduous. The lives of leisure, consumption, and display of the daughters of the well-to-do stood in sharp contrast to their urban neighbors’. Rural migrants and free blacks traveled to major American cities in the Northeast in search of employment. After 1847, they were joined by Irish refugees from the potato famine, many of whom were young women who traveled together and settled in poor, densely populated neighborhoods. Impoverished by persistent unemployment, the inevitable result of financial panics, economic depressions, and epidemic diseases, many families lived in overcrowded tenements and dilapidated shanties. In the 1820s and 1830s leisured, middleclass women with an evangelical mission established urban benevolent associations that provided poor girls and their families with clothing, firewood, food, and a religious tract but little else. Because there was rarely enough cash on hand to acquire anything but immediate necessities, girls “earned their keep” by running errands, scavenging, and laboring. During good times and bad, the daughters of working-class families helped raise siblings, cook meals, and clean. Abandoned, orphaned, and runaway girls were joined by others on street corners, where they sold baked sweet potatoes and pears, tea cakes, fruit,

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candy, and hot corn. Peddling was the most reliable and legitimate form of employment available to working-class girls, whether they offered their wares on street corners or went door-to-door selling household supplies (e.g., scrub brushes, sponges, pins, matchsticks, fruits, and vegetables). Free black girls, who learned how to sew dresses and piece quilts from their wage-earning mothers, also sold the goods they made. Girls relied on the street trades because children were in the process of being displaced by the cash economy. Although boy apprentices had been thrown out of work by the decline of the craft system and the rise of rural factories, they still found employment blacking boots, selling newspapers, and holding horses for people going into stores. Girls not old enough for domestic work typically worked as street sweepers, keeping crosswalks cleared and selling matchsticks on city streets. In Hans Christian Andersen’s legendary tale about working-class life, deeply encoded with bourgeois cultural authority, the delirious “Little Match Girl” yearns for middle-class abundance, leisure, domestic tranquillity, and a feminized hereafter. In the many published works on the plight of street children, reformers often depicted the middle class as saintly and the poor as sinful. Black and white teenage “outworkers” made artificial flowers, fringes, parasols, and other consumer goods in the “learning system.” For pennies a day—or room and board—girls apprenticed to tailors, seamstresses, dressmakers, and milliners, who taught them the rudimentary skills of their trade. Also laboring as subordinates were immigrant and free black girls in their older teens and early twenties, who replaced the native-born girls who had abandoned domestic work by the

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middle of the nineteenth century. Some were graduates of industrial schools shaped by prevailing gender roles that taught girls vocational skills only useful for housekeeping. Yet working in the homes of middling and prosperous tradespeople, craftspeople, merchants, and professionals had its advantages for some. Irish girls from working-class backgrounds were more likely to appreciate the cash remuneration, the room, and also the opportunity to acquire the customs and master the codes of middleclass culture. Though they were not well paid, servant girls who boarded were often able to save money. However, for “bound” servants—provided with only room and board until they reached age eighteen or twenty-one—life could be intolerable. As bound servants, black girls were not only more likely to serve longer terms than white ones, but their status was also more like that of slaves. When they could, free girls preferred to assist their mothers, who often worked as self-employed laundresses. Often girls too young to work as domestic servants scavenged instead. With friends and siblings, they pillaged tea, coffee, flour, and sugar from spilled sacks and overturned barrels. On the streets, at the docks, or at the lumberyards, girls collected coal, cotton, canvas, rags, cogs, rope, metal, bottles, paper, kitchen grease, and bad meat. “Wild ragged little girls” worked as petty thieves and pickpockets, exchanging the umbrellas and hats they acquired for much-needed cash at secondhand junkshops that lined waterfront areas in New York City (quoted in Stansell 1987, 205). Junk dealers, in turn, sold the things girls gathered to artisans and manufacturers. Despite the risks that their six- and seven-year-old daughters faced from the

police, working-class parents throughout the nineteenth century depended upon their scavenging in order to help make ends meet. Scavengers, seamstresses, sweepers, and others occasionally drifted into casual prostitution. In one hour, a girl who sold sex could earn the same shilling a seamstress in 1830 earned in a day. In 1853, a reporter for the New York Herald reported that four teenage girls who were in training in the garment industry prostituted themselves in order to pay the rent and buy clothes and food. Casual prostitution also provided a way to escape an abusive home life; girls suffered from a history of sexual abuse by workingmen, lodgers, grocers, soldiers, and fathers who groped with one hand and offered pennies and candy with the other. Stimulated by the eroticization of working-class girls in bourgeois Victorian culture, merchants, clerks, employees, workers, and sailors sought out girls and young women as prostitutes. More than 100,000 working-class boys and girls from urban areas in the Northeast were transported on the orphan trains by reformers to “virtuous” homes in the rural Midwest between 1845 and 1929. Also on the frontier were other immigrant girls whose families had headed to agricultural areas in the Midwest instead of urban ones in the Northeast. Scandinavian, German, Bohemian, and Dutch families secured farms where girls’ labor was so indispensable to family survival that many were prevented from attending school. On the Illinois prairie, as elsewhere, girls’ full-time household chores included cooking, cleaning, caring for younger siblings, and feeding farmhands. For them and for their mothers, keeping a sod house clean was a challenge without running water

Work and with limited domestic technology. In order to cook and clean, immigrant and native-born daughters in Nebraska and elsewhere in the Midwest hauled water and wood, washed, sewed, and mended the family’s wardrobe. Girls also contributed to the family income by selling pies, chickens, eggs, milk, and butter to neighbors. In male-dominated mining towns in the Northwest, girls earned cash washing clothing, cooking meals, selling pies and vegetables, and running errands for prostitutes. But whether they liked it or not, girls were expected to perform domestic chores by virtue of their sex. One girl recalled: “I was chore girl to help mother with domestic work, which I did not like, and often was slapped by my mother. I much preferred being outdoors, and was very curious, traits that brought much trouble to my relationship with my mother” (quoted in Schlissel, Gibbens, and Hampsten 1989, 218). However, innovations in farm technology that allowed those with less strength to operate heavy machinery would enable girls as young as eight to plow fields. One North Dakota pioneer recalled: “Our clan of growing girls were brought up to strict hard work, especially the oldest, Matilda and Ottilia, who became field workers. They were expected to do as much work as a man . . . hauling hay and pitching bundles for the threshing machine” (quoted in Schlissel, Gibbens, and Hampsten 1989, 218). Fears that farmwork was making Ántonia too rough and manly in Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia (1918), however, led her neighbors to find her a position as a “hired girl” so that she could acquire feminine, middle-class skills and sensibilities. “Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had

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no alternative but to go into service,” Ántonia explained. “The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten. One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmer fathers in our county were the first to become prosperous” (128). The daughters of well-to-do Nebraska families were not unlike the adolescent daughters of wealthy plantation owners to the south. Largely shielded from work, southern girls learned little about how to raise a family and how to run a household. Their job was to absorb prevailing ideologies of race, class, and gender: southern white girls were to be proper, pure, and pious. Most elite white girls spent their adolescence frolicking with friends and flirting with beaus at home or at boarding school. Masking the violence of slavery— the widespread abuse of slave girls and women—was the work of the southern belle, a cultural construction of white supremacy, patriarchy, and gentility. In nearby cabins with dirt floors and few furnishings, underfed and underclothed enslaved African American girls cooked calorie- and vitamin-deficient meals in fireplaces also used for heat and for laundering. From their mothers and other grownups, slave girls also learned domestic skills such as soap, candle, and basket making, as well as farming skills such as plowing fields and driving cattle. Although boys had a greater range of opportunities to acquire specialized skills (and purchase necessities and freedom), midwifery was the only option available to black girls, who apprenticed to their mothers who served both the black and the white plantation community. More typically, girls’ work responsibilities began by age five, when they learned how to fan flies away from

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Young textile workers in North Carolina, photograph by Lewis Hine (Library of Congress, 1909)

whites and haul food and water to slaves in the fields. Girls also fed the chickens, gathered eggs, milked cows, churned butter, gathered wood, swept yards, spun thread, hoed fields, and ran errands. The central task for slave girls and boys, however, was providing day care for slave children whose parents were field or house slaves; they also tended to the daughters and sons of their masters. Those workers perceived as slow, careless, or inattentive were whipped, beaten, and scalded. Adolescent girls joined pregnant women and older slaves on “trash gangs,” where they acquired fieldwork skills from pregnant women and older slaves. From the more experienced workers, girls also learned how to fake illness

or slow the pace of work, as well as other methods aimed at subverting the slave labor system. When they were older, they took their place in the fields along with other men and women, where there were few gender distinctions in regard to work; the ideology of domesticity largely applied to white women. In the decades after the Civil War, hard work continued to dominate the daily lives of the daughters of rural sharecroppers in the war-torn “new South.” During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, African American and white daughters of desperately poor families helped around the one-room shacks they called home. With no running water and limited household equipment, girls

Work washed dishes and clothing in outdoor bins. Eldest daughters assisted their mothers in gathering wood and cooking three meals a day with food they were more likely to have purchased on credit than produced with crops. Girls were also needed in the fields, where they dropped cotton or tobacco seeds and toted water. The unrelenting crop-lien system kept them and their families starved for cash and forever in debt. With access to southern markets, northern manufacturers ushered in a period of unprecedented industrial expansion that doubled the number of girls and young women in the labor force between 1870 and 1890 (Lichtenstein, Strasser, and Rosenzweig 2000, 34). More than onequarter of the employees of southern cotton mills were children of failed white sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and half of them were twelve years old or younger. Girls hired as spinners brushed lint from machines and tied together broken threads twelve hours a day, six days a week. In 1890, 1.5 million girls and boys (ten to fifteen years old) worked for long hours earning pennies a day in dangerous textile mills, canneries, and tobacco-processing plants in the South and in hazardous sweatshops in the North. Many immigrants from Germany, Britain, and, increasingly, the countries in eastern and southern Europe settled in large industrial cities like Chicago and New York with easy access to jobs. Working-class girls and young women entered the workforce there in order to help sustain their families, who were easily impoverished by unemployment, accident, sickness, death, or desertion. By the end of the nineteenth century, “cash girls” who transported money and goods around department stores joined 4 million young, single women who worked for wages as domes-

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tics, white-collar workers (e.g., retail stores and offices), factory workers, and industrial home workers (34). 1900 to the Present Girls and adolescents were among the millions of migrants and “new immigrants” who fled poverty, overpopulation, and persecution on farms and in villages in Europe, the American South, and Mexico around the turn of the twentieth century. They often settled in urban neighborhoods close to sources of income (albeit unstable ones). Although the 1900 census revealed that nearly 2 million girls and boys between ten and sixteen worked for wages, that number did not include those under the age of ten or those who worked illegally (West 1989, 3). In order to shore up the family economy, girls of all ages and from a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds peddled produce and flowers, sold newspapers, sewed goods, scavenged for junk, and bargained with urban storekeepers. Italian daughters from protective, patriarchal, working-class families assisted their mothers in making artificial flowers, sewing clothing, sorting and shelling nuts, and making dolls as industrial home workers. Many young women like Anzia Yezierska would document the trials of their girlhoods in memoirs and autobiographical novels. Daughters, especially the eldest, were often forced to limit their education in order to serve as housekeeping assistants to their mothers, who were burdened with household chores. Although experts at the time recommended that chores assigned to children serve instructional purposes, Chinese American girls from working-class families shopped and cleaned, and others elsewhere in the country also cared for younger siblings.

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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who championed the cause of working girls, inspired Industrial Workers of the World leader Joe Hill to compose “The Rebel Girl” in 1915. (Courtesy Industrial Workers of the World; from the Collection of the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University)

Though they honored cultural traditions about filial duty, Jewish and Italian “little mothers” often resented the burdens that their brothers escaped by virtue of their sex. Some eldest daughters took pride in their maternal responsibilities, but others clearly resented the domestic expectations placed on them but not their siblings, who attended school, held jobs, and had fun. In 1900, 13 percent of all textile workers were under sixteen years of age (Lichtenstein, Strasser, and Rosenzweig 2000, 222). As a girl, Pauline Newman recalled cutting threads from 7:30 in the morning

until 9 at night in the garment factory where she worked. Immigrant Jewish and Italian young women often sewed shirtwaists, the ready-made blouses worn by working- and middle-class women around the turn of the century. Fierce market competition in the industry led to long hours, low wages, sexual harassment, and degraded and dangerous working conditions. Although work-related accidents were widespread, one of the worst industrial disasters occurred on March 25, 1911, when a fire engulfed the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on New York’s Lower East Side. Within half an hour, smoke inhalation and fatal injuries claimed the lives of 146 young women garment workers trapped by locked exits. The disaster galvanized many working girls and adolescents, who joined unions and charted new careers as labor activists. Pauline Newman, an advocate for the Women’s Trade Union League at age thirteen, had been drawn into the urban industrial economy by the expansion of “feminized” jobs that paid little and took a lot. Teenage Jewish girls, who accompanied fathers on the transatlantic journey, often labored in sweatshops and factories as operatives for the highest wage available in order to accumulate enough money to finance the travel of family members back home. Once here, they helped support unemployed or disabled fathers, widowed mothers, and younger siblings. English-speaking girls found jobs as sales clerks, but the hours were long and the wages low. Until they married and left the workforce, teenage Italian girls often worked for relatives and with other girls of the same ethnic background. But the limited range of employment options, periodic unemployment, and economic downturns often drew young women into prostitution; adolescent girls

Work were especially vulnerable to arrest and institutionalization. Chinese girls, sold by their desperately poor parents back home, worked as domestics in the homes of California’s well-to-do Chinese. Many were forced into brothels, where they served a clientele of Chinese males who predominated among immigrants from that country. Missionary women and Chinese social reformers led the crusade to stop the muitsai (“little sister”) tradition. They were among other Progressive urban reformers who hoped to eliminate the pernicious effects of industrial capitalism. Many were middle-class graduates of recently established women’s colleges with high expectations and limited professional opportunities. Politicizing their domestic role, “social housekeepers” aimed to clean up the new industrial order by helping girls and boys for whom they established day nurseries, baby clinics, health classes, and industrial schools. For example, the Little Mothers’ Leagues served a clientele of 20,000 girls each week in 1912. In cities across the United States, Progressive reformers established numerous other organizations, including the Young Women’s Christian Association, National Association of Colored Women, National Consumer’s League, settlement houses, civic clubs, and municipal improvement societies, among many others. In an effort to protect girls from corruption and exploitation, these organizations offered vocational classes in workingclass neighborhoods. But because they were unable to transcend their own backgrounds, reformers provided a curriculum largely limited to domestic science, cooking, child care, and sewing. Elite reformers were influenced by profound fin-de-siècle social, cultural, economic, and political transformations: ris-

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ing income, technological innovation, immigrant labor, and changing attitudes about gender, leisure, family life, and the “value” of children. As Viviana Zelizer has shown in Pricing the Priceless Child (1985), the social value of children among the middle class had changed to economically worthless but emotionally priceless. Reformers aimed to extend these changing ideals to the working class through legislation that mandated compulsory school attendance and prohibited child labor and industrial work at home. Despite their legislative efforts, factory bosses outmaneuvered child labor inspectors. The first federal child labor law was not passed by Congress until 1916 but was then declared unconstitutional by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. By 1920, states enacted legislation that prohibited the employment of children under the age of fourteen, restricted girls and boys under sixteen to an eight-hour day, and mandated compulsory education. In response to fears about the dangerous effects of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization on girls, reformers also established the Girl Scouts (1912), Girl Pioneers (1914), and Camp Fire Girls (1910). Through the official Girl Scout periodical The American Girl and the official Camp Fire Girls publication Everygirls’ Magazine and in their outdoor programs, these girls’ organizations taught the traditional craft skills associated with gender norms along with more feminist notions of womanhood to middle-class, minority, and disabled girls. For example, Girl Scouts were encouraged to contribute to the war effort by selling war bonds and Girl Scout cookies, seeding Victory gardens, and assisting in hospitals. Girls who joined the Junior Red Cross ran farms and “war gardens,” held

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cake sales, and arranged garden parties to benefit European orphans of World War I. In the 1920s, fewer girls worked for wages than in the previous period, but rural families continued to rely on their daughters’ contributions, as they had since the previous century. With no child labor legislation restrictions on farm laborers, girls as young as three years of age helped out. In Texas in 1913, a fouryear-old migrant worker photographed by National Child Labor Committee photojournalist Lewis Hine picked 8 pounds of cotton a day; her five-year-old sister picked 30 pounds. Farm families struggling with rising debts and falling prices relied on their daughters to can and churn, tend livestock, and feed fieldworkers. Their participation in fieldwork, however, depended on the availability of brothers and nonkin males, crop types, and farm technology. Navajo daughters assisted in sheepherding, which was the dominant form of farming among the Navajo. On the West Coast, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Asian Indian daughters picked and canned fruit and provided child care and housekeeping in the laborintensive farms established by their fathers. Punjabi Mexican girls in California worked as migrant workers in vineyards, fields, and orchards. Other rural daughters provided their families with cash by working in canneries, though Americanized daughters of recent Mexican immigrants were more likely to hold on to a portion of their wages. While others during the 1920s had enjoyed prosperity, farm girls and their families were among the first to experience the economic adversity that soon affected the rest of the country. During the Great Depression, adolescent girls responded to the needs of their families by working on farms, in factories, or at

home. But the economic exigencies had forced teens out of the labor force and into high schools, where they could compete with each other and not with older workers. Though child labor diminished significantly in the 1930s, Depression-era girls (especially in immigrant families) nevertheless assumed a greater role in housework and child care, thus reinforcing girls’ sense of responsibility and selfsacrifice. In middle-class families that reduced household expenditures to get through rough times, girls also did what they could to help. They used the wages earned from “minding the children” or from other jobs for personal expenses, school supplies, clothing, and social activities. In families pushed to the margins, girls swept porches and dusted the furniture for pennies, as did Anne Moody, who lived in the rural South. In some families, girls’ wages were vital to basic household expenses, but in others girls took over housekeeping for their wage-earning mothers. Anne Moody was forced to quit her job so that she could babysit for her younger siblings. With the money they earned, many girls went to the movies along with millions of other Americans eager to escape the harsh realities of their lives. There, they became fans of young female movie stars, a very recent profession open to girls and young women. In her numerous movies, Shirley Temple was typically parentless but never powerless. Teenager Judy Garland played an energetic and competent Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), triumphing over cataclysms that were more mythical and metaphorical than the Great Depression, yet just as devastating. Independent and intelligent, strong and skillful, Nancy Drew made her first appearance in books and movies during the Depression as a teenage detec-

Work tive who solved mysteries that puzzled male experts and supervised her motherless household. Conditions changed for daughters of all ages when fathers joined the military, and mothers, inspired by patriotism and the promise of improved economic opportunities, found “man-sized” jobs in the World War II defense industries. That the federal government’s day care appropriation was inadequate for the needs of the vast majority of families meant that many children were left unsupervised. That was not necessarily all bad for one girl, who assumed that if her father had been around, she would “not have been allowed so much personal freedom to roam the library, the city, the fields, neighborhoods, woods, and have a paper route” (Tuttle 1993, 28). Mothers who worked an eight-hour shift were nevertheless faulted for creating unsupervised “latchkey children.” Children were often cared for in parentrun nursery schools or by neighbors and older siblings. Wartime vocational courses in child care and homemaking for preadolescent girls (such as those offered by the Girl Scouts) instructed them in the essentials. Wartime mothers relied heavily upon junior high school children to run the household and feed the family. Relaxed attendance regulations enabled thirteen- and fourteen-year-old youngsters to get jobs. When not in school or at work, girls participated in the patriotic culture of Victory gardens, war bond campaigns, and scrap metal and paper drives. However they participated, many girls longed to play a more substantial role in war-related activities. Some dreamed of serving as uniformed “girl assistants” or soldiers or of joining their older sisters in defense plants. Until 1943, the National Youth Administration provided teenage girls with nontra-

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ditional apprenticeships and alternatives to pink-collar employment. Teenage graduates migrated from rural areas to defense plants, where they worked as defense workers in factories earning high wages. But some girls—such as teenage Mexican American girls—were also discriminated against by employers because of their age, sex, race, and ethnicity. After World War II ended, white girls could ride their bikes to neighborhood parks in the newly available suburban neighborhoods, but wartime work opportunities dwindled with the rise of a new domestic ideal. In order to participate in the new teen culture, adolescent girls used their allowances or their earnings from babysitting (one of the few opportunities available to suburban girls) to purchase clothing, movie tickets, records, and magazines. The traditional sources of employment for younger girls (e.g., errand running) gave way in child-centered and car-dependent neighborhoods. There was also a growing fear of strangers of all kinds, as revealed in the urban legends that began to circulate in the early 1960s. Not all girls in the postwar United States were raised in middle-class prosperity, despite the portrayals of family life in 1950s television sit-coms. In urban ghettos in the North and poor rural areas in the South, black girls attended poor schools and faced limited economic opportunities. In the 1960s, they were joined by Latinas from the Dominican Republic, Central America, and Mexico, especially after the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. In order to help their families survive resettlement, Latina daughters (even as young as age six) spent thirty hours a week babysitting for younger siblings, taking care of ill or infirm kin, keeping house, running errands, and advocating

A National Youth Administration poster promotes educational opportunities for young women seeking training for employment. (Library of Congress, 1937)

Work and translating for Spanish-speaking family members (National Commission on Migrant Education 1992). The economic pressures that Latina adolescents faced, then as now, made them more likely to drop out of school to work. Although some Latina’s families settled in urban areas, others became seasonal migrant workers whose plight first came to national attention in the 1960s. White, black, and Latino migrant farmworkers spent each spring following the ripening crops northward from New York to Michigan to Washington. The approximately 409,000 children who accompanied their fathers, the principal farmworkers in 1989, were likely to shuttle back and forth between a residence in the United States (e.g., California, Texas, or Florida) and another in Mexico. Cynthia, who was born in the United States, along with 65 percent of other daughters of migrant workers, accompanied her father to the asparagus fields in Pasco, Washington, each year (Martin, 1). A smaller percentage of girl migrant workers are currently indigenous Mexicans and Central Americans who speak neither Spanish nor English. In order to work in the fields, girls who are legally required to be sixteen often falsify papers. The wage they earn is often not their own but is turned over to parents whose total annual family earnings can hover around $5,000. Sixteenyear-old Cynthia gives her parents most of what she earns so that they can pay bills or buy necessities. She spends some on clothing for school. Although some girls will leave the field at midday to go to school, others will not attend school at all. The education of girls is often interrupted in order to contend with intermittent work schedules. “What I like least about being a migrant worker,” explained

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teenaged Cynthia, “is to change from school to school in different places. Also when you attend another school you don’t know what’s going on in the classes and you might not pass that class.” When she grows up, Cynthia wants to be a teacher because it will not be as hard as working in the fields. But another migrant daughter, Iselda, recognizes that the obstacles in her path are formidable. She explains, “I have always dreamed of becoming a lawyer but the way things are going it’s going to be a little hard.” Since the expansion of service-sector jobs in the 1970s, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans have joined African Americans, Caucasians, Vietnamese, and Hmong girls in the new teen economy of fast food, convenience, and retail stores. Unfortunately, many working-class immigrant girls reside in economically depressed inner cities, where access to decent schools is as limited as employment opportunities. Because retail and fast-food stores locate in suburban neighborhoods, middle-class girls have had greater access to such employment. In 1996, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that rates of unemployment were the greatest among young African American and Latina women. Other studies have shown that compared to other adolescents in the workforce, Latinas and African American girls earn the least (Dodson 1998). Like other girls, many dream of fame and fortune as performers in the pop music industry, now no longer a male domain. As the numbers of ten- to nineteenyear-old girls rose for the first time in fifteen years in the 1990s, new effort was made to train them to pursue “nontraditional” careers in science, math, and technology. Take Our Daughters to Work Day, created by the Ms. Foundation for Women

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Work Whether your first job is minding children, waiting tables, or selling jeans, you are learning more than you may realize. If you baby-sit, you’re not only perfecting the art of putting on Pampers, you’re learning about responsibility and punctuality and how to negotiate money with parents and bedtime with kids. If you’re waiting tables, you’re sharpening math, memory, and people skills. If you’re selling clothes, you’re mastering presentation, time management, and how to get along with customers and coworkers. You may also be learning that you don’t want to baby-sit or wait on tables or ring up sales forever. (139)

A female carpenter building a gazebo. (Skjold Photographs)

in 1982 and celebrated on the fourth Thursday in April, aims to raise girls’ career ambitions by having them spend the day interning at offices, studios, stations, and agencies. An unprecedented number of handbooks, manuals, and almanacs have similarly aimed to provide girls with advice on everything from eating disorders to employment options. Drawing upon a girl power ethos of “following your dreams,” the self-help works emphasize the importance of persistence, determination, hard work, high standards, ambition, and achievement. In For Girls Only: Wise Words, Good Advice (1998), advice columnist Carol Weston explained to girls ten and older the benefits derived from the only jobs for which they qualify:

With more mothers and fathers in the workplace working longer hours for less money, chores—often tied to allowances or privileges—play a renewed role in the work lives of most American girls. But because they are still seen as housework, girls’ chores have yet to be calculated in the gross national product. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also African American Girls in the Twentieth Century; Asian American Girls; Chicana Girls; Domestic Service; Domesticity; Enslaved Girls of African Descent; Indentured Servants; Latina Girls; Mennonite Girls; Mill Girls; Native American Girls References and Further Reading Ashby, Leroy. 1985. “Partial Promises and Semi-Visible Youths: The Depression and World War II.” Pp. 489–532 in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Atkin, S. Beth. 1993. Voices from the Fields: Children of Migrant Farmworkers Tell Their Stories. Boston: Little, Brown. Axtell, James. 1981. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary

Work History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press. Berrol, Selma Cantor. 1995. Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now. New York: Twayne. Boylan, Anne M. 1985. “Growing Up Female in America.” Pp. 168–171 in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bremner, Robert A., et al., ed. 1970. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1974. Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History. Vols. 2–3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calvert, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Carr, Lois Green, and Lorena S. Walsh. 1977. “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” William and Mary Quarterly 34: 542–571. Cather, Willa. 1918. My Ántonia. 1988. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Clement, Priscilla F. 1997. Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890. New York: Twayne. Demos, John. 1970. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press. Dodson, Lisa. 1998. Don’t Call Us out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America. Boston: Beacon Press. Dublin, Thomas. 1979. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1981. Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters 1830–1860. New York: Columbia University Press. Dudden, Faye. 1983. Serving Women: Household Service in NineteenthCentury America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Earle, Alice Morse. 1899. Child Life in Colonial Days. New York: Macmillan, chap. 15.

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Elder, Glen H. 1974. Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fass, Paula, and Mary Ann Mason. 2000. Childhood in America. New York: New York University Press. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Freedman, Russell. 1994. Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade against Child Labor. New York: Clarion Books. Greenberger, Ellen, and Lawrence Steinberg. 1986. When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment. New York: Basic Books. Hawes, Joseph M. 1997. Children between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920–1940. New York: Twayne. Hine, Thomas. 1999. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. New York: Avon. Hyde, Mary Kendall. 1919. Girls’ Book of the Red Cross. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Jones, Jacqueline. 1986. Labor of Love/Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage. Kamensky, Jane. 1995. The Colonial Mosaic: American Women 1600–1760. New York: Oxford University Press. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1982. Out to Work. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Wilma. 1995. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Larcom, Lucy. 1889. A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory. 1996. Reprint, Boston: Riverside Press. Lichtenstein, Nelson, Susan Strasser, and Roy Rosenzweig. 2000. Who Built America? Vol. 2. New York: Worth. Martin, Philip. Migrant Farm Workers and Their Children. Office of Educational Research and Improvement ED376. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. “Migrant Workers’ Children.” http://www.users.owt.com/rpeto/ migrant/migrant.html.

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Moody, Anne. 1976. Coming of Age in Mississippi. Reprint, New York: Dell. Morgan, Edmund S. 1944. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth Century New England. 1966. Reprint, Harper and Row. Nasaw, David. 1985. Children of the City: At Work and at Play. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. National Commission on Migrant Education (NCME). 1992. “Invisible Children: A Portrait of Migrant Education in the United States.” Washington, DC: NCME (September 23). Norton, Mary Beth. 1980. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Palladino, Grace. 1996. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turnof-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Robinson, Harriet. 1898. Loom and Spindle or Life among the Early Mill Girls. 1976. Reprint, Kailu, HI: Press Pacifica. Rutman, Darrett B., and Anita H. Rutman. 1984. A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750. New York: W. W. Norton. Sallquist, Sylvia Lea. 1984. “The Image of the Hired Girl in Literature: The Great Plains, 1860–WWI.” Great Plains Quarterly 4, no. 3: 166–177. Schlissel, Lillian, Bryd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten. 1989. Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey. New York: Schocken Books. Shaw, Stephanie J. 1997. “Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South.” Pp. 297–318 in Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History. Edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. 1973. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: W. W. Norton, 7. Smith, Abbot Emerson. 2000. “Kidnapping and White Servitude.” Pp. 349–351 in Childhood in America.

Edited by Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason. New York: New York University Press. Stansell, Christine. 1986. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Szasz, Margaret Connell. 1985. “NativeAmerican Children.” Pp. 311–342 in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Edited by Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Tate, Thad W., and David L. Ammerman. 1979. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on AngloAmerican Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Trattner, Walter I. 1970. Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Tuttle, William, Jr. 1993. “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children. New York: Oxford University Press. Weinberg, Sydney Stahl. 1997. “Jewish Mothers and Immigrant Daughters: Positive and Negative Role Models.” P. 335 in Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History. Edited by Rima Apple and Janet Golden. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. West, Elliott. 1989. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1996. Growing Up in TwentiethCentury America: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Weston, Carol. 1998. For Girls Only: Wise Words, Good Advice. New York: Avon. Wilson, Harriet E. 1859. “Our Nig”; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1983. Reprint, New York: Random House. Yezierska, Anzia. 1975. Bread Givers. Reprint, New York: Persea Books. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.

Z Zines

ducers are using computers to create both paper zines and electronic publications known as “e-zines” or “webzines.” Some zinemakers hand-color illustrations and photographic images, whereas others use colored paper or photocopies to enhance their zines’ appeal. As free-form creations, zines typically have no table of contents, departments, or page numbers structuring their material. Because zines are not produced for profit, they carry no paid advertisements, although many promote other zines and alternative products. Many zines exist as “one-offs,” singular creations by individuals who, for whatever reason, do not produce or distribute other issues. Those zinemakers who are more committed to the zine community usually create multiple issues of a zine and develop a subscription list that requires a larger number of reproductions. However, even those zines that are produced by more committed individuals are rarely the same in form and content from issue to issue. They are normally produced at irregular intervals, between which their makers wait for either good copy or, more typically, enough capital to produce the next issue. Since zines are produced for pleasure, not for profit, they usually are printed in limited quantities. Typically, they are sold at alternative venues (such as concerts), traded for other zines or products, or distributed privately

Although quite diverse in form and content, zines can be defined generally as nonprofessional, noncommercial publications that are created, reproduced, and distributed by individuals wanting to create something different from mainstream forms of communication and entertainment. As alternative media, zines function as networking tools among people who otherwise may feel isolated in their homes, schools, jobs, and communities. In turn, zines often provide a considerable amount of information about issues, products, and communities that are ignored by or marginalized in the mass media. Traditionally, zine producers have been middle-class, white males, but in the last decade many females, working-class individuals, and people of color have joined what has become known as the “zine revolution.” Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of girls have created zines in an effort to express themselves and connect with others who share their experiences and visions for the future. Most zines contain handwritten or typewritten text, which often is supplemented with illustrations, clip art, or photographs. This material is arranged (pasted up) on various pages, which are then photocopied and folded or stapled together. With the wide availability of personal computers today, an increasing number of zine pro-

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to subscribers. Some are distributed also by mainstream distributors like book and record stores or by alternative distributors like political collectives. In recent years, several zine directories (e.g., Factsheet Five) have emerged, which have provided zine readers with more knowledge about and better accessibility to these publications. Most often, contemporary zines are traced back only as far as the punk fanzines of the late 1970s, which were created in opposition to the mainstream music industry and in celebration of alternate musical forms and artists. However, zines have a longer and more complex history in a variety of marginal subcultural groups, including science fiction fans of the late 1930s, the Beat poets of the 1950s, and underground presses of the 1960s and 1970s. As with earlier zinemakers, many contemporary zine producers feel alienated from dominant society and corporate culture, and thus advocate a do-it-yourself (DIY) philosophy. In an effort to resist or subvert mainstream culture, many producers rely on illicit means for creating their texts, using office time, equipment, and supplies (including postage) to produce and distribute their zines. In addition, many zinemakers create provocative juxtapositions between images appropriated from the mass media and their own text that critiques such representations. In order to avoid criminal prosecution and censorship for violating copyright laws, many producers do not reveal their real identities. In addition to using nicknames, zinemakers hide their identities and limit unwanted interference by using post office boxes as mailing addresses, changing the titles of their zines, and not accepting checks or credit cards as payment.

The disparate interests of individuals who make and consume zines have resulted in a wide variety of zine genres, including fanzines (created by fans of a particular cultural medium or genre such as music, film, sports); community/“scene” zines (e.g., punk, gays, feminists); topic/issue zines (e.g., work, politics, conspiracy theories); literary zines (e.g., poetry, short fiction, science fiction); and comix (underground comic books). Most girl zines (some of which are referred to as “grrrl zines” to indicate their producers’ identification with feminism, lesbianism, or alternative politics) can be categorized under the genre of personal zines (or “perzines”), zines created by one individual and comprising mainly personal experiences and opinions. Perhaps as a result of the integration of feminist and DIY philosophies in recent years, the number of zines created by female youth has increased phenomenally since the early 1990s. Although contemporary girl zines are associated often with Riot Grrrls, a pro-girl movement that emerged in 1991, many produced by girls are connected to other alternative communities. Most girl zine producers strongly prioritize their female identity and identify their zines as female-produced and female-oriented through titles like Girl Germs, Bamboo Girl, Girlie Jones, and Angry Young Woman. Several, such as I, Amy Carter and Patti Smith, reveal their pro-female stance by noting the producer’s devotion to a specific female celebrity or public persona. Many girl zines are classifiable as perzines because of their individual creators, but some girl zines are produced through the collaborative effort of a community of female youth (e.g., Housewife Turned . . . Assassin).

Zines Viable alternatives to commercial teen magazines that privilege consumerism, appearance improvement, and heterosexual romance over productivity, critical consciousness, and same-sex relationships, girl zines encourage their readers to publicly express their personal and political concerns as well as to develop their creative abilities and self-confidence. Girl zinemakers often focus on their experiences of being female in a misogynist society and counter patriarchy by filling their zines with information about powerful female figures in history and contemporary popular culture. In addition, many girl zines contain quotations from well-known feminist activists and provide lists of texts considered important for the development of girls’ critical consciousness. Although the majority of girl zinemakers are white, several girl zines (e.g., Gunk, Mamasita, Asian Take Over, Bamboo Girl) are produced by nonwhite girls to explore racism in mainstream society as well as youth subcultures like punk. In turn, as adolescent lesbianism has received more public awareness, several girl zines have participated in the legitimation of homosexuality by printing coming-out stories and exploring issues of interest to young lesbians. In the tradition of alternative forms of media, many girl zines disseminate information that is not made available in commercial publications. Female health and gynecology are topics given special attention in many girl zines: readers are provided with information about alternative forms of female hygiene, contraception, and abortion. Many girl zines encourage their readers to respect, value, and celebrate the female body, and a number are dedicated specifically to girls whose bodies do not meet the current

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standard of thinness privileged in mainstream culture. For those readers needing more specific information or assistance, many girl zines provide lists of resources and organizations dedicated to helping female youth. Although girl zinemakers often pride themselves on their ability to create texts that bear no resemblance to commercial publications, many employ the textual and representational styles of teen magazines to disparage those texts and mock the stereotypes of females reproduced in them. For example, some girl zinemakers ridicule the patronizing morality apparent in teen magazines by creating parodic advice columns that include outlandish situations of reader frustration and humorous responses by advice columnists. Many girl zines reprint offensive advertisements from commercial magazines, often with critical comments about such ads’ exploitation of female consumers and their damage to girls’ self-esteem. Some zinemakers have devoted full issues of their publications to critiques of commercial magazines. For example, Ben Is Dead #23 uses Sassy’s layout and writing style in a parody issue that reveals its makers’ conflicted pleasures in reading Sassy as well as their general distaste for mainstream teen magazines. The expansion of personal computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web into many homes, schools, and workplaces during the 1990s has introduced new ways for female youth to express themselves and reach out to others. Moreover, these new media have radically transformed zine culture. An increasing number of girls are becoming involved in the creation of e-zines, websites that combine the serial nature of magazines, the

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networking potential of the Web, and the personalized aspect of homepages (small websites that resemble perzines). Girl e-zines resemble girl-made paper zines in their pro-female stance and inclusion of issues of concern to girls and women. Girls Can Do Anything, Cybergrrl, and NrrdGrrl are some of the many girl e-zines that appear on the Web. In contrast to paper zines, e-zines often follow the layout of commercially produced magazines because indexes and tables of contents allow for easier movement within websites. In addition, most e-zine producers favor the artistic advantages offered by computer technology (i.e., access to millions of colors, photographs, moving images, and sounds) over the amateur, handcrafted style typically associated with paper zines. Although many paper zinemakers are dubious about the political potential of e-zines, these online publications are widely praised for their ability to swiftly communicate with a large number of individuals. For that reason, many zinemakers produce electronic versions of their paper zines. Although several website producers have taken it upon themselves to create directories of e-zines (e.g., E-zine List, Etext Archives), unfortunately, they are often incomplete or out-of-date, and the various e-zines that are included are typically left uncategorized. Moreover, many

of the creators of e-zine directories seem unwilling to include girl-made e-zines and thus reinforce the Web’s stereotype as a male-dominated space. Fortunately, more substantial lists of girls’ e-zines appear on many female-produced websites, such as Femina, Grrrl Xchange, and Yahoo! Grrls Online. Mary Celeste Kearney See also Girl Power; Girls’ Magazines; Riot Grrrls References and Further Reading Carlip, Hillary. 1995. Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out! New York: Warner. Duncombe, Stephen. 1997. Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. New York: Verso. Green, Karen, and Tristan Taormino, eds. 1997. A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kearney, Mary Celeste. 1998. “Girls, Girls, Girls: Gender and Generation in Contemporary Discourses of Female Adolescence and Youth Culture.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California. Richardson, Angela. 1996. “Come on Join the Conversation: ’Zines as a Medium for Feminist Dialogue and Community Building.” Feminist Collections 17, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer): 10–13. Vale, V. 1996–1997. Zines! 2 vols. San Francisco: V/Search Publication. Wertham, Frederic. 1973. The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Index

Abortion, 14, 72, 77, 647, 650 Abstinence, 72, 76, 80, 285–286, 650, 651 Academic achievement, 306–307 Acne, 13, 160 Acquaintance rape, 1–9 drugs and, 3, 615 See also Sexual assault; Sexual harassment Adams, Abigail, 137, 577 Adolescence, as stage, 14, 74, 560, 596, 646 Adolescent health and medicine, 9–15, 701 Adoption, 15–22 history of, 15–17, 647 as Native American retribution, 513 transracial, transnational, 19, 21, 488–489 Adoption law, 17–18 Advertisement. See Consumer culture Advice books and columns, 22–26, 145, 148, 150, 256, 257, 334–335, 336, 499, 593, 696, 701 Aerosol art, 344, 347 African American girls in the twentieth century, 25, 26–34, 117, 196, 553 activities and play of, 25, 67, 229, 287, 289, 318, 509 and beauty standards, 160 and Birmingham church bombing, 31 clubs and sororities of, 29, 30, 287, 289, 318, 597 education of, 27–28, 29–30, 31, 139, 249, 253, 265, 293–295, 597 and Little Rock nine, 31

northward migration of, 28, 29, 685 and school desegregation, 31, 249, 253 self-esteem of, 229, 562 sexual activity of, 77, 285, 646, 649, 650 and sexual harassment, 588 in sports, 607 television portrayals of, 663, 664 work of, 28, 233, 695 See also Enslaved girls of African descent; Free girls of African descent Age-of-consent laws, 73, 74, 283, 646 Agricultural workers African American, 28, 264–265, 636, 688 Asian American, 49, 50 on family farms, 375, 568, 687, 692 4-H youth as, 287–288, 289, 290 migrant, 692, 695 Native American, 680, 681 AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), 186 Alcohol, 6, 117, 178, 181, 599, 611–613, 614 medicinal use of, 612, 615 Alcott, Louisa May, 23, 134, 208, 328, 545 Allowances and spending money, 32–38, 156, 159 Amenorrhea, 447 American Girl, 154, 317, 334, 551 American Girls dolls, 38–42, 136, 231, 332–333, 551 Amphetamines, 615 Anger, 256, 257, 258, 259

761

Animals. See Pets Anorexia, 67, 81, 241, 242, 245, 246–247, 447 Arts and crafts, 42–48 instruction in, 44, 45, 47, 691 See also Samplers Asian American girls, 48–57, 185, 228, 689 and cultural tensions, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 185 media portrayals of, 51, 664 work of, 48, 49, 50, 53, 692 Assertiveness, 523, 560 Athletic participation. See Cheerleaders; Sports Autograph collecting, 134 Autonomy. See Independence Aviation, 641 Babysitting, 59–63 in film, 62, 63, 463 See also Little mothers Backpacks, 359, 361 Ballet, 170, 171 Barbie, 63–68, 157, 231, 232, 442 Baseball, 607 Basketry, 43, 45 Bat Mitzvah, 68–71, 389 Bathing. See Hygiene Beach bunnies, 355–356, 461 Beadwork, 45 Beanie Babies, 136 Beauty, ideal of, 244, 515, 517 Beauty pageants, 66, 104, 161, 543 Bedroom culture, 657 Beecher, Catharine, 17, 23, 167, 225, 237, 252, 362–363, 685 Beepers, 151–152 Behavioral therapies, 123, 247, 523. See also Child guidance; Psychotherapy

762

Index

Biculturalism, 53, 54, 55, 410, 412, 413, 480. See also Multiculturalism Binge eating disorder. See Eating disorders Bipolar illness. See Depression Birth control, 71–80, 285, 286 and age and marital status, 78, 80 contraceptives for, 72, 76, 78, 79, 185, 285, 411, 650 cultural views on, 410 legislation and courts on, 74, 76, 77, 78, 411, 650 See also Abstinence Birth control pills. See Birth control, contraceptives for Bisexual girls, 620 Blue Birds, 87 Bobby-soxers, 459, 509, 653 Body care. See Hygiene Body dysmorphic disorder, 83 Body image, 64, 65, 80–84, 203 and prom preparation, 515–518 Body piercing, 529, 564 Boys’ participation, in girls’ activities, 62, 66, 89–90, 103, 104, 178–179, 336, 366, 434 Brassieres, 66, 371 Break dancing, 172, 343, 348 Bride capture, 5 Brown v. Board of Education, 229 Bubblegum music, 654–655, 657 Bulimia, 81, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246–247 Bullying, 587 Bundling, 183, 281–282 Calling All Girls, 144, 335, 336 Camp Fire Girls, 45, 85–90, 334, 507, 623–624, 691 Camps. See Summer camps Candy. See Girls and sweets Captivity, and Native Americans, 90–95 Career development, 307, 330, 498, 499, 524 Cars, 95–98, 184 Cash girls, 689 Catholic girls, 98–103, 110, 535 Cell 16, 542, 543

Cell phones, 151, 152 Chaperones, 3–4, 184, 602 Character development, 207, 208, 239, 504 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 242, 520 Chat rooms, 152 Cheerleaders, 103–107 Chesapeake Bay colonies, 379–380 Chicana girls, 46, 107–114, 411, 420 coming-of-age ceremony for, 535–539 feminista representations for, 111–113 See also Latina girls Child abuse, 114–119, 311. See also Incest; Sexual abuse Child care, 29, 433, 601, 688, 692, 693. See also Babysitting; Little mothers Child development. See Child guidance Child guidance, 119–126, 520, 523 in juvenile justice system, 120–122 psychoanalytic theory in, 119, 121, 123–124 Child labor, 685, 686, 692 Child labor law, 591 Child, Lydia Maria, 17, 24, 545 Child maltreatment. See Child abuse Child neglect, 115, 116, 117, 118, 459 Child pornography, 116, 285, 593 Child prostitution, 116 Child protection movement, 115 Child savers. See Social reform Childbearing, 72–73, 400, 401, 615–616 Childhood depictions of, 91, 92–93, 426 and sexual identity, 417, 422 Childrearing. See Child guidance Children as property, 114 Chinese Americans, 48, 49, 51, 282, 689, 691 Christian morality, 24–25, 503 Cinderella, 274, 275, 483, 515

Civil rights movement, 30–32, 160, 161, 217, 249, 253, 332, 597 for lesbians and gays, 419 Class, sex as, 541, 542 Cleanliness. See Hygiene Clitoris, 286 Clothing, 37, 43, 87, 126–132, 266 doll-inspired, 39, 66–67 of Mennonites, 445–446 for play, 502, 503, 504 for prom, 516–518 of punk rock, 530, 564 Clothwork, 43, 451–452, 637, 638 Clubs African American, 29, 30, 287, 289, 318 See also Camp Fire Girls; 4H; Girl Scouts; Saturday Evening Girls; Sororities; Young Pioneers Cocaine, 615 Cock rock, 655 Cold War, 148, 355, 556, 557 Collecting, 132–136, 506 of Nancy Drew mysteries, 468, 469–470 College girls, 136–141, 249, 253, 344 female friendships in, 139 and home economics education, 362, 363, 365 and radical feminism, 543–544 See also Cheerleaders; Sports Comadrazgo, 420 Comic books, 141–146, 335, 508 Coming-of-age in Latina literature, 411–413 See also Bat Mitzvah; Kinaaldá; La Quinceañera Communication, 146–153 Communist Party (CP), 552, 554, 555–556, 557 Community self-government, 580 Community service projects, 88, 289, 290, 445 Compadrazgo, 110 Complexion, 13 Computer technology, 643–644 Condoms, 72, 76, 186

Index Connectedness. See Emotions; Relational theory Consciousness raising, radical feminist, 542, 543, 544 Consumer culture, 135–136, 150, 153–158, 314, 325, 508, 509 brand loyalty in, 153–154, 156, 157 and collecting, 41, 64, 65, 135 rebellion against, 157–158, 509 and technological advance, 638–639 See also Allowances and spending money; Girls’ culture Consumer education, 35, 36, 290 Contraception. See Birth control Cooties game, 587 Cosmetics, 158–163, 266, 371 Cotton production, 451, 638, 689 Counterculture, 96, 145, 333, 509, 543, 577, 700, 701 Courtship. See Dating and courtship Crack babies, 616 Crafts. See Arts and crafts Crocheting, 44 Cross-dressing, 671 Cross-gender identification, 281 Crushes, 139, 418 Crying, 259 Cuban Americans, 407, 409, 412–413 Cultural instruction, of Native Americans, 472, 473–474 Cultural tensions, in Asian American families, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 Custody rights, 18 Cybersex, 186 Cyberspace. See Internet Dame schools, 137, 248, 249, 250, 383, 425, 575 Dance classes, 165–174 Dance halls and palaces, 174–176, 177–179 Dance marathons, 176 Dances and dancing, 104, 174–182

African American, 165, 167, 171, 172 ballet, 170, 171 ballroom, 170 Broadway, 170 Charleston, 177 country and western, 182 disco, 180, 181 freestyle, 174, 180, 181, 182 group (line), 180, 181, 182 immigrant, 165, 167, 174 Lindy, jitterbug, 177, 181 minuet, 165, 166(illus.), 167 modern, 170–171 Native American, 168–169, 171–172 pivoting, spieling, 176–177 raves and tripping out, 180, 182 rock and roll, 180 shadow, 176 shimmy, black bottom, 177 statue posing, 168 step, 170, 173 tap, 170 tough, 177 twist, 180 waltz, 177 See also Dance classes; Dance halls and palaces Date rape. See Acquaintance rape Date rape drugs, 3, 615 Dating and courtship, 123, 182–186, 189, 266, 282, 303, 323, 332, 334, 506 and cars, 95–96, 184 Daughters and fathers, 186–194, 602 Daughters and mothers, 17, 124, 195–201, 204, 463 Death and dying, 214 Defiance. See Rebelliousness Dependent children. See Orphans and orphanages Depression, 117, 201–206, 259, 397 and suicidal behavior, 617, 620 types and symptoms of, 201–202 Depression (1929–1939). See Great Depression Diabetes, 13 Diaries, 206–211, 426, 504 Dickens, Charles, 454–455

763

Diets and dieting, 82, 243, 244–245. See also Eating disorders Disabilities. See Girls with disabilities Discotheques, 180–181 Divining games, 502, 679 Divorce, 498–499 DIY (do-it-yourself) ethic in music, 525, 530, 531, 563, 564 in writing, 563, 564–565, 700 Dobbins, Peggy, 543 Dodge, Mary Mapes, 24, 134, 545 Dollhouses, 219–224, 501, 504 Dolls, 64, 224–233, 501, 502–503, 504, 508 black, 226, 227, 229, 231 of frontier girls, 301–302 industry of, 224, 225, 226, 227–229 of Native Americans, 474 paper, 145, 299 in psychotherapy, 523 See also American Girls Series; Barbie Domestic being, 577 Domestic containment, 148 Domestic service, 233–237, 256, 638, 683, 686 of African Americans, 28, 29, 233, 234, 236, 264, 295, 686 of Asian Americans, 49, 50 bound and putting out, 187, 223, 236, 295, 381, 478, 485, 487, 682, 686 of Native Americans, 478 See also Indentured servants Domestic sphere, 148, 150, 188, 237, 354, 356, 363, 473, 600 Domestic violence, 118, 589 Domesticity, 196, 197, 219, 222–223, 237–240, 504 in film and literature, 327, 328, 331, 498–499, 545, 546, 673 reflected in samplers, 576–577 of southern girls, 600–602 See also Communication; Domestic sphere; Home economics education;

764

Index

Homemaking, household economy; Motherhood Dominican Americans, 408, 413 Dressmaking, 43, 296, 637, 638, 685 Dress-up play, 360 Drill teams, 104–105 Drugs. See Substance abuse Dyslexia. See Learning disabilities, reading disorders, and girls Eating disorders, 81, 82, 241–248, 599, 620 biological factors in, 246–247 history of, 242–243 Economic dependence. See Allowances and spending money Education, 248–255, 424–425 of African American girls, 27–28, 29–30, 31, 139, 249, 252, 253, 265, 293–295, 363, 424, 427–428, 597 of Asian American girls, 50, 51, 52 Catholic-run, 98–103, 110, 250, 252–253 of disabled, 212–213, 214, 217 elementary and dame schools in, 137, 248, 249, 250, 383, 425, 435–436, 575–576 female academies and seminaries in, 137, 251, 252, 437–438, 602, 684 frontier, 250, 253, 302–303 gender discrimination in, 24, 435, 438, 442–443, 448–449, 560 of gifted girls, 305–308 in home economics, 362–367, 640 of immigrant girls, 251, 373, 375, 377, 378, 385, 386, 387, 388, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 584 of Jewish girls, 68, 383–391 of Latina girls, 99, 101–102, 110, 112, 408 in mathematics and science, 435–444 on money management, 35, 36

for motherhood, 137, 248, 251, 252, 253 ornamental, 137, 602 of rural girls, 568–569 and school desegregation, 31, 249, 253 secondary, 248, 251, 252, 436–439 teacher training, 251 through specimen collection, 133–134 vocational, 29, 45, 100, 253, 363, 365, 387–388, 427, 440, 582, 640, 641, 691 on women’s issues, 543–544 See also College girls; Literacy; Reading Elders, Native American, 473–474 E-mail, 151, 152 Embroidery, 43, 573, 574–575, 576–577 Emotional abuse, 117 Emotional dysfunction. See Girls with Disabilities Emotional problems. See Adolescent health; Child guidance; Psychotherapy Emotions, 255–261 gender differentiation in, 255–260, 558, 559 Empathy, 200, 559, 560 Employment. See Work Empowerment. See Girl power; Power relations Enslaved girls of African descent, 40, 188–189, 261–267 education of, 252, 427–428 leisure activities of, 43, 165, 326, 505–506 orphaned, 485 protective mask of, 265, 295–296 sexual activity of, 184, 265–266, 282, 420, 646 work of, 233, 236, 256, 264–265, 636, 687–688 Equal Rights Amendment, 319 Eroticism, 285, 352, 353 Estrogen therapy, 12 Etiquette, 22, 23, 149, 150, 256, 257, 602, 633. See also Advice books and columns Eugenics, 77, 214 Everygirls’ Magazine, 87, 88, 154, 333

Exercise, 24 compulsive, 82, 242 See also Physical education; Sports Factory workers. See Mill girls Fairy tales, 269–276 Fan clubs, 66, 148, 276–279, 656, 657 Farm girls. See Agricultural workers; 4-H; Rural girls Fashion. See Clothing; Cosmetics; Hair; Handbags Fasting, 242, 243 Fathers. See Daughters and fathers Feeblemindedness, 77, 122, 214 Female objectification, by males, 559, 561 Female sexual development, 12–13, 284, 286 precocious, 10–11, 448 See also Menstruation; Puberty Female sexuality, 279–287, 518 African American, 77, 184, 265–266, 282, 285, 420, 646, 649, 650 and candy, 324–325 as delinquent, 13, 120, 122, 283–284, 392, 394–395, 411, 458–461 and double standard, 4, 74, 282, 311, 394–395, 615 fantasy, 654, 655, 656, 658 in film and literature, 332, 458, 459–460, 461, 509 Latina, 410–411 Native American, 77, 183, 281 premarital, 71, 72, 76, 95, 284–285, 410 and prior sexual abuse, 117, 394, 395 and procreation, 72, 76, 410 psychoanalytic theories on, 520, 521 and substance use, 612, 613, 615 working-class, 73–74, 179, 184, 282, 283, 284, 646 See also Abstinence; Dating and courtship; Female sexual development; Femininity; Gender identity and role development; Pregnancy,

Index out-of-wedlock; Sexual barter; Teen pregnancy Female socialization. See Gender identity and role development Feminine power and influence. See Power relations Feminine strength, 327, 330–331 Femininity, 155, 157, 224, 503, 515, 576, 683 of Barbie, 64, 65, 66, 67, 157 and prom preparation, 515–519 of radical feminism, 542 and sugar, 320, 322–323 and suicidal behavior, 618, 620 technology of, 641 See also Body image; Domesticity; Gender identity and role development; Girls’ fiction; Motherhood; Southern belles Feminism, feminist movement, 94, 140–141, 161, 344, 365, 469, 700 in advice literature, 25 on birth control, 78 in comics, 144, 146 on delinquency, 396–397 domestic, 317, 363 on father’s role, 193 second/third-wave, 145–146, 541, 557, 564 and girl power, 312–313, 315 in Girl Scouts, 317, 319 on mother’s role, 197, 200 music of, 528, 531 politicos in, 541–542, 556 in psychotherapy, 523 on sexual development, 14, 284, 286 youth movement of, 563–566 See also Girl power; Postfeminism; Radical feminism Fertility rates, 405–406, 601 Fiction. See Girls’ fiction Fieldworkers. See Agricultural workers Figure. See Body image Filipino Americans, 52, 54 Film. See Movies Fitness, 24. See also Physical education; Sports

Flappers, 354, 458, 508, 612 Flirting, 184, 602–603 Folk dancing, 169 Folk music, 527 Foreign student exchanges, 290 Forten, Charlotte, 207, 291, 293, 296 Foster care, 17, 488 4-H, 287–291 Frank, Anne, 209 Free girls of African descent, 167, 291–298 education of, 252, 293–295, 363, 424 protective mask of, 295–296 work of, 43, 295, 433, 685, 686, 688, 695 Free love, 185, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 121, 123, 198, 215, 242, 272, 284, 418–419, 520–521. See also Psychoanalytic theory Friendship, 259 of girl power, 315 romantic same-sex, 139, 282–283, 417–419, 420, 672 See also Emotions; Lesbians; Relational theory Frontier girls, 299–303, 331 education of, 250, 253, 302–303 play of, 226, 301–302, 506 work of, 299, 686–687 Games. See Play Gangs. See Girl gangs Garland, Judy, 459, 692 Garment work. See Sewing; Textile work Gender identity and role development, 197–198, 200, 204, 306, 560–561 adolescence as stage in, 14, 74, 560, 596, 646 and childhood, 417, 422 reactions to, 325–326, 509, 673 samplers reflecting, 576–577 through play, 224, 225, 502–505 See also Communication; Domesticity; Female sexuality; Femininity; Gender relationships; Girls’ culture; Girls’ fiction; Independence;

765

Relational theory; Selfesteem; Selfhood; Separation; Tomboys Gender relationships, 3–5, 203 female objectification in, 559, 561 in graffiti culture, 344–348 radical feminist view of, 541, 542 Gifted girls, 305–308, 442 Girdles, 371, 550 Girl bonding, 315. See also Friendship Girl gangs, 308–312, 461 Girl Pioneers, 45, 507, 691 “Girl poisoning” culture, 509. See also Gender identity and role development; Girl power Girl power, 63, 312–316, 510, 631, 665, 696. See also Power relations Girl Scouts, 45, 316–320, 334, 495, 507, 508, 570, 625, 691 Girl, use of term, 313, 547, 564 Girls and sweets, 320–325 Girls’ culture, 325–327, 509, 547 in film, 458, 459, 463 Girls’ fiction, 327–333, 465–466, 505, 508, 545–550. See also Fairy tales; Literacy; Reading Girls’ magazines, 134, 154, 334–338, 410, 550–551, 656 19th c., 545, 547 See also Advice books and columns; Comic books; Consumer culture; Zines Girls’ rooms, 338–342 Girls with disabilities, 211–218 hearing, 212–213 hidden, 216 vision, 87, 212, 213 Goddess cultures, 200 Godparents, 110 Going steady, 182, 185, 284, 334 Graffiti, 342–350 Grandmothers, 32, 45, 46 Great Depression, 30, 37, 59, 197, 290, 340, 354–355, 459, 692 Great Migration, 29, 30 Grooming. See Hygiene Groupie, 279

766

Index

Grrrl zines. See Zines Grrrls’ comix, 146 Guerrilla theater, 543 Gymnastics, 167. See also Sports Habit training and clinics, 119, 123 Hair, 32, 351–358, 503, 504, 530 Hall, G. Stanley, 121, 135, 227, 284, 339, 622 Hallucinogens, 615 Handbags, 358–361 Handicaps. See Girls with Disabilities Hanging out, 182–183 Hanging together, 185 Haunting, 588 Health care. See Adolescent health Helplessness, 205, 416 Hip-hop culture, 172, 343, 348 Hippies, 96. See also Counterculture Hispanic Americans, 67, 77, 168. See also Chicana girls; Latina girls Hmong Americans, 53 Home economics education, 362–367, 582 Homelessness, 419 Homemaking, household economy, 340 18th–19th c., 22, 23, 42–43, 299, 533 immigrant girls in, 35, 375, 377, 378, 689 Latinas in, 111, 405, 406, 408, 409–410, 695 Native Americans in, 472–473 rural club projects in, 287–291 rural girls in, 567–568, 692 technology affecting, 635–637, 638–639 work of, 451, 681–683, 686–687, 691, 692 working girls in, 37 See also Arts and crafts; Domestic service; Domesticity; Home economics education; Little mothers Homosexuality. See Lesbians Hooking up, 182 Hope chest, 135

Horizon Club, 88 Hormonal change, 245 Hormonal therapy, 12 Horney, Karen, 124, 422, 522 Horses, 495 Hunting, 301 Hygiene, 367–371 menstrual, 447, 449–450 Hymen, 11, 450 Hysteria, 242, 243, 520, 679 Ice cream socials, 39, 42 Identity formation. See Gender identity and role development Illegitimacy, 16, 71. See also Birth control; Pregnancy, out-of-wedlock; Teen pregnancy Immigrant girls, 16, 189, 260, 373–379, 553, 646 Americanization of, 580, 581–582 Asian American, 48–49, 51, 53 dance of, 165, 167, 174 education of, 252, 373, 375, 377, 378, 385, 386, 387, 388, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 584 Italian American, 376–377, 578, 584, 690 Jewish, 377–378, 385, 578, 584, 690 Latina, 405–408, 409, 411–412 leisure activities for, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582–583 work of, 35, 227, 233, 375, 377, 378, 456, 685–686, 689–691, 693–695 See also Migrant workers; Saturday Evening Girls Incest, 117, 192–193 Indentured servants, 379–381, 484, 487, 637, 681–682. See also Domestic service Independence, 120, 123, 124, 208–209, 341–342, 458 film portrayals of, 458, 459, 463, 498 in literature, 327, 328, 329, 333, 550 and selfhood, 198, 246, 558, 559, 561 Individualism, 315, 340, 427, 558, 559, 561 Industrialization, 637–641, 689

Infanticide, 114 Inferiority complex, 12, 13 Information age, 642–644 Inhalants, 615 Inheritance rights, 16, 534 Innocence, 93, 285, 330, 426, 487 Insanity. See Mental illness Instant messaging, 152 Intelligence, abstract, 305, 561 International student exchanges, 290 Internationalism, 317, 318. See also Multiculturalism Internet, 151, 152, 158, 186, 286, 337, 509, 701–702 Interpersonal relationships. See Relational theory Invalids, 214, 329 IQ (intelligence quotient) tests, 305 Iranian Americans, 185 Irish Americans, 100, 233, 456, 686 Italian Americans, 99, 189, 376–377, 578, 584, 690 Jamestown colony, 379, 681–682 Japanese Americans, 49, 51, 52 Jealousy, 257, 258 Jewelry, 324 Jewish girls, 189, 625 bat mitzvah of, 68–71 education of, 383–392 immigrant, 377–378, 385, 578, 584, 690 and political culture, 553, 555 work of, 690 Jordanian Americans, 185 Junior Bazaar, 336 Juvenile delinquents, 392–398 and child abuse, 117, 395, 396 and fathers, 190–192 in gangs, 308–312 and gender differences, 396–397 rehabilitation of, 29, 120–122, 235 self-injurious behavior of, 397 and sexual behavior, 13, 120, 122, 283–284, 392, 394–395, 411, 458–461 and status offenses, 394–396

Index Juvenile justice system, 120–121, 122, 283, 392, 394, 395, 397–398 ethnic minorities in, 411 The Juvenile Miscellany, 24, 545 Kin keeper, 433 Kinaaldá, 399–403 Kindness, 491 Knitting, 44 Korean Americans, 50, 51 Labor. See Work; Working-class girls Labor movement, 455–456, 684, 690, 691 Ladies’ Home Journal, SubDeb column, 334–335, 508 Laotian Americans, 53 Latina girls, 102, 231, 405–414, 693–695 education of, 99, 101–102, 110, 112, 408 immigration of, 405–408, 409, 411–412 work of, 405, 406, 408, 409–410, 695 See also Chicana girls Learning disabilities, reading disorders, and girls, 216, 414–417 Lesbianism, as political, 543 Lesbians, 7, 113, 139, 282, 284, 285, 411, 417–423, 564, 620, 700, 701 protection of, 587 Letter writing, 146–147, 148–150, 426, 428 Library clubs, 578, 579, 582 Literacy, 343, 423–431. See also Girls’ fiction; Reading Little mothers, 431–434 Little Red Riding Hood, 269, 270(illus.), 271–273 Little Rock nine, 31 Little Women (Alcott), 328, 505, 545, 546, 671, 673–674 Lolita (Nabokov), 66, 324 Love and sex, 259 Low, Juliette Gordon, 220, 316, 624 Lowell Offering, 24, 453(illus.), 454–455

LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 613 Mademoiselle, 3 Magazines. See Girls’ magazines Male dominance, 4–5, 6. See also Patriarchy Malnutrition, 241 Manic depression. See Depression Manners. See Etiquette Marijuana, 613 Marriage, 49, 73, 99, 138, 183, 476, 534 father’s role in, 187–188, 189, 534 Masturbation, 24, 284, 285, 320 Maternal kinship, 183, 399 Maternal overprotection, 124, 204 Maternal rejection, 124 Mathematics and science, 306, 307, 435–444 Matriarchal core, 102 Matrophobia, 195, 197 McCarthyism, 556, 557 Media. See Movies; Television Mennonite girls, 444–447 Menstruation, 203, 241, 368, 370–371, 447–451 onset of, 11, 13, 447–448, 449, 474 rite at onset of, 399–403 Mental hygiene movement, 12, 119 Mental illness and impairment, 214, 215, 216, 333. See also Adolescent health; Child guidance; Depression; Psychotherapy Mental retardation, 122, 214 Mentoring, 139, 200 Mexican American girls. See Chicana girls Midwifery, 687 Migrant workers, 691, 692, 693–695 Migration, of African Americans, 28, 29, 685 Mill girls, 451–457, 505, 684 Minute Girl Program, 87, 88 Miss America pageant, 161, 543 Modern dance, 170–171 Momism, 197

767

Money management, 35–38 Monroe, Marilyn, 160 Motherhood, 98, 101–102, 123–124, 198, 259, 363 education for, 137, 248, 251, 252, 253 Latina, 405, 411 republican, 137, 207, 423, 426 See also Single motherhood Mothers. See Daughters and mothers Movies, adolescent girls in, 62–63, 457–464, 470. See also Fan clubs; Pickford, Mary; Pocahontas; Temple, Shirley Movies, drive-in, 96 Ms. magazine, 3 Mui-tsai, 49, 691 Multiculturalism, 40, 41, 290, 318, 332–333. See also Biculturalism Museums, 133–134 Music, 30, 314, 525–532, 563–564, 565. See also Teenybopper Nabokov, Vladimir, 66, 324 Name calling, 587 Nancy Drew mysteries, 330, 465–472, 550, 692 Narcissism, 80–81 Native American girls, 472–482, 501, 636 arts and crafts of, 45–46, 228 cultural revitalization of, 476 dance of, 168–169, 171–172 displacement of, 476–478, 479, 480 education of, 252, 424, 427, 428, 476–477, 478–480 and Euro-Americans, 472, 474–480, 512–514 Latin American, 535–536 play of, 224, 226, 228, 472, 474, 501 sexual activity of, 77, 183, 281 work of, 86–87, 472–473, 475, 680, 681, 692 See also Camp Fire Girls; Captivity; Kinaaldá; Pocahontas Nature study, 133–134, 136. See also Outdoor activity Necking, 12, 96, 284

768

Index

Needlework, 43, 359–360, 577 New woman, 196, 604–605 New York Radical Feminists, 542 Night walking, 502 Norplant, 79, 410 Note-passing, 148, 150, 430 Novels. See Girls’ fiction Nutrition, 11 Nuyorican women, 412 Nymphet, 66 Obesity, 83, 241 Oedipal conflict, 190, 192 Olympic games, 604, 609 Opiates, 615 Orgasm, 285 Orphans and orphanages, 249, 330, 483–489 transports of, 488, 686 Othermothering, 197 Outdoor activity, 44, 45, 316, 622–623, 625 Overactivity disorder, 242 Parent education, 118, 119–120, 122–123, 124, 335, 555–556 Parent-daughter relations. See Daughters and fathers; Daughters and mothers; Parent education Parental consent, for medical procedures, 14 Parenting, shared, 198 Parents’ Magazine, Tricks for Teens column, 335, 336 Patriarchy, 4, 5, 6, 148, 193, 198 of immigrants, 49, 109–110, 189 and political activism, 554, 557 of Puritans, 533, 534 of southern society, 600 Patriotism, 87–88, 100, 101, 148, 149, 207, 290, 317, 426, 692, 693 PCP (phencyclidine), 615 Peddling, 685 Peer pressure, 13, 158, 160, 306, 309, 334 Pelvic examinations, 11, 13 Pen pals, 149 Penmanship, 425–426 Pep clubs, 104, 105

Personality development. See Gender identity and role development Perzines, 700 Pets, 491–496 Petting, 12, 96, 182, 185, 284, 334, 508 Phi Beta Kappa, 595 Photograph collecting, 134 Physical abuse. See Child abuse; Sexual abuse Physical appearance. See Body image Physical deformity, 214 Physical development. See Female sexual development; Puberty Physical education, 139, 449, 604–605, 608. See also Sports Physical fitness, 24. See also Physical education; Sports Pickford, Mary, 457–458, 496–501 Pickups, 284 Pinned, 185 Planned Parenthood, 76 Play, 326, 501–511 conflict in, 560 dress-up, 360 of enslaved girls, 265, 326 of frontier girls, 301–302, 506 history of Euro-American, 501–510 of Native Americans, 472, 474 of rural girls, 570 and technology, 639, 642–643 of working girls, 505, 507 See also Dollhouses; Dolls; Tea parties Play therapy, 522–523 Playing house, 220–221, 228 Pocahontas, 281, 512–514 Poetry, on samplers, 576–577 Political activism, 532, 552–557, 564–566. See also Civil rights movement Poor. See Poverty Pop music, 655, 658 Pornography, 116, 285, 593 Postfeminism, 63, 313, 315 Posttraumatic stress disorder, 7

Pottery works, 579, 580–581, 584 Poverty, 118, 409, 488 and teen pregnancy, 79, 650, 651, 652 Powder puff derbies, 641 Power relations, 4–5, 97, 559, 561, 562, 563, 564 and feminine influence, 328, 330, 545 in sexual harassment, 587, 589 See also Girl power Pregnancy, out-of-wedlock in 17th–19th c., 73, 183, 282, 380, 502, 534, 646 See also Female sexuality, premarital; Sterilization; Teen pregnancy Prejudice. See Racism Premarital sexual activity. See Female sexuality, premarital; Pregnancy, out-of-wedlock Private sphere of women. See Domestic sphere Prohibition, 612, 613 Prom, 514–519 resistance to, 518–519 Promiscuity, 77, 120–122, 283, 285, 410 Property ownership, 346 Prostitution, 49, 160, 282, 283, 394, 475, 612, 691 casual, 686 child, 116 and tomboys, 670 Psychedelics, 613 Psychiatric treatment. See Psychotherapy Psychoanalytic theory, 119, 121, 123–124, 190, 197–198, 201, 520–522. See also Freud, Sigmund Psychological problems. See Adolescent health; Body image; Child abuse; Child guidance; Eating disorders; Emotions; Psychotherapy; Relational theory Psychotherapy, 520–525. See also Psychoanalytic theory Puberty, 10, 195, 203, 245–246 and fear of growing up, 246

Index See also Female sexual development; Menstruation Puberty rites, 399–403, 474 Puerto Rican Americans, 407, 408, 409, 410, 412 Punjabi Mexicans, 50, 52, 692 Punk rock, 337, 525–532, 563, 700 precursors of, 526–528 Puritan girls, 90–92, 186, 187–188, 225, 501–502, 532–534 Purity, 74, 242, 504, 600, 603 and hygiene, 368, 370 and sweets, 320, 324 Purses, 358–361 Queers. See Lesbians Quilting, 43–44, 46 La Quinceañera, 101, 110, 535–539 Racism, 26, 30, 31, 32, 51–52, 293, 295, 467 reactions against, 529, 701 in sexual development, 11, 447–448 Radical feminism, 541–544 Rape, 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 7, 29, 272. See also Acquaintance rape Rapping, 343, 348 Reading, 138, 545–552. See also Girls’ fiction; Literacy Reading disorders. See Learning disabilities, reading disorders, and girls Rebelliousness, 123, 124, 497, 518 19th c., 505–507, 546, 549–550, 602 in music, 526, 529, 563–564 See also Counterculture; Girls’ culture; Graffiti; Slumber parties Red diaper girls, 552–558 Redstockings, 542 Reformers. See Social reform Relational theory, 558–562 and interpersonal relations, 200, 204, 522, 523 See also Friendship Relational therapies, 522

Religious development, 110–111, 133–134, 206–207 Religious groups. See Catholic girls; Jewish girls; Mennonite girls; Puritan girls Religious vocations, 99, 101 Riot grrrls, 313, 337, 531–532, 563–566, 700 Rites of passage. See Comingof-age Rock and roll, 180, 527 Rosie the Riveter, 641 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 225, 502, 503 Running away, 311, 395, 397 Rural girls, 566–571, 692 homemaking clubs for, 287–291 play of, 504, 570, 571 work of, 567–568, 692 See also Frontier girls; Mennonite girls Sadness. See Depression Safe sex, 186, 286 St. Nicholas, 24, 134, 153, 154, 545 Samplers, 43, 573–578 Sassy, 336, 551, 701 Saturday Evening Girls (SEG), 578–585 Scavenging, 686 Schizophrenia, 333 Science. See Mathematics and science Séances, 592 Self-esteem, 7, 101, 620, 658 of African American girls, 229, 562 and family interactions, 204 and objectification of girls, 559, 561 and physical appearance, 13, 82, 203 and schoolwork, 305–306, 441 Selfhood, 198, 246, 558, 559, 561 Separation, 325, 326, 341–342, 552, 558, 559 Separation anxiety, 523 Servants. See Domestic service Service sector employment, 50, 695 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 86

769

Seventeen, 25, 38, 149, 150, 156, 160, 335–336, 550, 587 Sewing, 42–43, 45, 296, 573, 637, 638, 683, 685 Sex crimes. See Acquaintance rape Sex delinquency. See Juvenile delinquents Sex differences, in relational theory, 558–559 Sex education, 8, 24, 79–80, 122 Sexism, reactions to, 529, 542, 543 Sexual abuse, 116–117, 119, 204, 394, 395, 523, 620 known perpetrators of, 283 See also Incest Sexual arousal, 11, 286 Sexual assault, 1, 2, 3, 272 culture of, 4–5, 6, 7, 28–29, 32, 49, 589 prevention of, 3, 5–6, 7 See also Sexual harassment Sexual barter, 179, 283, 615 Sexual delinquency. See Female sexuality, as delinquent Sexual harassment in schools, 585–590, 599 Sexual identity, and childhood, 417, 422. See also Gender identity and role development Sexuality, sexual behavior. See Female sexuality Shacking up, 185 Sibling rivalry, 258 Single motherhood, 32, 650, 651 Sissies and tomboys, 672 16 Magazine, 655 Skin disorders, 13, 160 Slumber parties, 591–594 Sluts, 588 Smashes, 139, 418 Smoking. See Marijuana; Tobacco Smotherhood, 259 Social change, 531, 554, 563 Social reform, 120–121, 239, 392–393, 488, 685, 691 Social welfare, 597 Socialization, gender differences in. See Relational theory

770

Index

Soda fountain, 323 Softball, 607 Song girls, 104 Sororities, 140, 594–600 Southeast Asian Americans, 53 Southern belles, 503, 600–603, 682–683, 687 Spanking, 116 Spending money. See Allowances and spending money Spinning, 43, 44, 451, 637, 683, 688 Spock, Benjamin, 120, 434 Sports, 603–611 community, 604, 605, 606, 607, 609 partnership model of, 610 professional, 607, 609 school-based, 139, 604–605, 607, 608–609 “Squaw” dresses, 86, 131 Starvation, 241, 243 Step-parents, 192 Sterilization, 77, 78, 410 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 23, 93, 226, 237, 239, 252 Street trades, 685 Stress, 204–205 Studs, 588 Substance abuse, 117, 181, 311, 611–616, 620 and crack babies, 616 See also Acquaintance rape; Alcohol Subway painting, 346 Sugar, 320, 322–325 Suicidal behavior in girls, 419, 616–621 crisis services for, 621 Summer camps, 70, 85, 555, 580, 621–627, 625 Sunday schools, 384–385, 386 Supernatural powers, 502, 678, 679 Supreme Court on reproductive autonomy, 650 on sexual harassment, 585, 587 Surfer girls, 627–631 Surrogate motherhood, 21 Sweets. See Girls and sweets Take Our Daughters to Work Day, 193, 696 Talented girls, 305–308 Tampons, 370, 449–450

Tea parties, 39, 42, 633–635 Teaching, as occupation, 252, 303, 378, 383, 388, 389, 684 Teasing, 587 Technology, 635–645 Teen, 25 Teen pregnancy, 4, 77, 78–79, 117, 509, 645–653 of married girls, 648 and poverty, 79, 650, 651, 652 use of term, 645, 649 Teenager, use of term, 159, 645, 649 Teenbeat, 66 Teenybopper, 653–659 Telephone, 148, 150 Television, 5, 82–83, 105, 156, 314, 470, 659–666 Temple, Shirley, 129, 229, 666–669, 692 Test-taking, 307 Textile work, 43, 44, 451–452, 638, 690. See also Mill girls Thinness, 81, 82–83, 244, 245, 614, 615, 701 and fear of growing up, 246 Title IX, 106, 141, 253, 585, 608 Tobacco, 508, 611, 612, 613, 614 Today’s Girl, 89 Tomboys, 329, 669–675 and sissies, 672 Toy (graffiti writer), 344 Toys. See Dollhouses; Dolls; Play Treating, 179, 283 True womanhood, 94, 196, 239 Tuberculosis, 10, 13 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 93, 226, 237, 239, 485, 487, 672 Underground culture. See Counterculture Uterine atrophy, 24 Vamp, virgin portrayals of women, 5 Vietnamese Americans, 53 Violence, 564 and child abuse, 396 in gangs, 308, 310, 311 gender differences in, 396–397, 491, 493

Virgin of Guadalupe, 111 Virgin Mary, as cultural ideal, 98, 110–111 Vomiting, 242, 243 Warner, Susan, 134, 327, 545 Weaving, 43, 44, 637 Websites. See Internet Weight control and loss. See Thinness Weight gain. See Obesity Welfare benefits, 650, 652 Western frontier. See Frontier girls Wheatley, Phillis, 137, 297 The Wide, Wide World (Warner), 134, 327–328, 333, 487, 545, 546, 671, 672, 674 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 148, 331 Willard, Emma, 252, 363, 437 WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), 542, 543 Witchcraft, 677–680 Wizard of Oz, 270, 692 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 74 Women as property, 4–5, 28 Women’s clubs African American, 29 See also Sororities Women’s movement, 140–141, 344, 365, 541, 542, 543, 544. See also Feminism, feminist movement; Radical feminism Womyn, 145 Womyn’s music, 528 Woodworking, 44 Work, 680–698 of African American enslaved girls, 236, 264–265, 636, 687–688 of African American girls in 20th c., 28, 233, 695 of Asian American girls, 48, 50, 53 feminized, 680, 690, 696 of frontier girls, 299, 301 of immigrant girls, 35, 227, 233, 375, 377, 378, 456, 685–686, 689–691, 693–695 of Latina girls, 406, 407, 408, 409

Index of Native American girls, 475 of orphans, 483–486, 487 See also Agricultural workers; Child care; Domestic service; Homemaking, household economy; Indentured servants; Mill girls; Street trades; Working-class girls Working-class girls, 73–74, 122, 497, 664, 685, 689–695 education of, 99, 100, 454–455 and family economy, 35, 37, 196

leisure activities of, 174–176, 178–179, 336, 343, 505, 507, 578–579, 604 political activism of, 378, 555 sexual activity of, 73–74, 179, 184, 282, 283, 284, 646 See also Immigrant girls; Mill girls; Saturday Evening Girls World War I, 87, 289–290, 317, 692 World War II, 52, 197, 229, 290, 317, 340, 354, 508, 641, 693

771

Writing (graffiti art), 343–349 Writing instruction, 425–427. See also Literacy Yearbook signing, 430 Young and Modern (YM), 25, 551 Young Miss, 336, 551 Young Pioneers, 555 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 74, 648 Youth as stage. See Adolescence, as stage Zines, 146, 158, 337, 509, 563, 564–565, 699–702

About the Editor

Miriam Forman-Brunell is associate professor of history and former director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is the author of Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930 and Sitting Pretty: Fears and Fantasies about Adolescent Girls.

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