How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins Of American Girlhood

How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

About the AuthorJane H. Hunter is associate professor of history and director of the program in gender studies at Lewis and Clark College. She is also the author of The Gospel of Gentility, published by Yale University Press.Based on an extraordinary array of diaries and letters, this engaging book explores the shifting experiences of adolescent girls in the late nineteenth century. What emerges is a world on the cusp of change. By convention, middle-class girls stayed at home, where their reading exposed them to powerful images of self-sacrificing women. Yet in reality girls in their teens increasingly attended schools-especially newly opened high schools, where they outnumbered boys. There they competed for grades and honor directly against male classmates. Before and after school they joined a public world beyond adult supervision-strolling city streets, flagging down male friends, visiting soda fountains.Poised between childhood and adulthood, no longer behaving with the reserve of