|
|
|
Review
|
How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American
Girlhood. Jane H. Hunter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2003. 512 pages, $40.00 cloth.
|
|
Mid-nineteenth century Victorian culture labeled girls between the
ages of ten and twenty "young ladies." Social expectations
of propriety and sentimentality shaped powerful norms of behavior.
Louisa May Alcott's feisty heroine Jo was after all a "little
woman" not a girl, and her unconventionality was marked by
her stepping outside the bounds of expected propriety of girls of
her generation. In How Young Ladies Became Girls, the author
of this study bring to life the social history of girls and addresses
the shifting notions of life stages in the United States She has
delved into prescriptive literature, high school newspapers, letter
collections, and over 30 diaries composed by white, middle class
native-born girls in America's urban Northeast during the last decades
of the century to show that a vibrant peer culture developed during
an era of increased high school attendance. A key element in the
changing behavior of girls was the lessening primacy of domestic
chores for those aspiring to middle class status as the use of servants
grew along with the goal that daughters be spared domestic drudgery.
Instead, the work of teenage girls increasingly focused on mastering
literacy. Self-culture became a primary goal of girlhood, and diaries
cite reading and writing as the single most time consuming activity.
Girls read novels, histories, religious texts, poetry, newspapers,
and such youth periodicals as St. Nicholas. Evidence suggests
that girls also read much of the same literature as their brothers,
including adventure tales. But then girls, unlike boys, were encouraged
to write about their reading in diaries. These diaries also provide
a window into their private lives, revealing such details as expressions
of moods ranging from boredom to depression to daydreams. The diaries
also reflect social conventions regarding changing fashion standards
as girls matured, such as when they wore corsets or longer skirts,
and changed the style of their hair.
|
1
|
|
The geography of girlhood transformed
as well. Whereas earlier in the century girls stayed at home, by
the last quarter of the century they studied in boarding schools,
female seminaries, and increasingly in public high schools. Girls
outnumbered boys in schools, representing 57 percent of secondary
students by 1900. Hunter argues that of all the unequal girl/boy
institutions of the time, schools were the least unequal. In schools,
girls mastered academic success, measured by their proportion of
valedictorians and salutatorians. Still, boys dominated class presidencies,
athletics, and debate teams, and school newspapers reveal a culture
of sparring between the sexes. Schools also pulled girls out of
their homes and into the public sphere of the streets, beyond the
watchful eyes of parents and teachers. While strolling, shopping,
visiting soda fountains, and walking to and from school, girls experienced
fun and frivolity in unchaperoned public places.
|
2
|
|
Unlike their brothers, however, girls
were much more likely to remain at home as they matured. By the
ages of 17 in Providence, Rhode Island, for example, 25 percent
of all girls lived at home with their parents, compared to under
3 percent of boys, who most likely were away working. After graduation,
Hunter argues, girls often returned home with a sense of loss for
the freedom and accomplishments they had experienced in school.
Yet it was these educated girls who led the way towards change.
Many became school teachers before they married. And many anticipated
the autonomy and public activity of the New Woman of the early part
of the twentieth century, which resulted, Hunt writes, not so much
from women workers or the tiny number of college graduates, but
from the experiences of the large number of girls attending high
school in the late nineteenth century.
|
3
|
|
This engaging book will be of use
for classes in women's history, the history of childhood and the
family, social history, and, not least, historiography. College
students will find the discussion of life a century ago an accessible
roadmap to issues of gender, class, race, and culture. Jane Hunter
has creatively mined a remarkable body of ephemeral source material
to recreate a rich and poignant history of a generation of young
women long obscured by the heavy-handed prescriptive culture of
Victorianism. By uncovering the voices of young women on the cusp
of adulthood, she not only modifies previous notions of girlhood,
but suggests how the radical transformation of gender roles in the
twentieth century was to some degree rooted in the high school life
of girls in the decades after the Civil War.
|
4
|
| |
|
|
Roosevelt University
|
Lynn Y. Weiner
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|