How Young Ladies Became Girls


Book Description

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 foundations." "Over the long term, their school experiences as "girls" foreshadowed both the turn-of-the-century emergence of the independent "New Women" and the birth of adolescence itself."--BOOK JACKET.




How Young Ladies Became Girls


Book Description

Publisher's description: 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 3young ladies, 4 adolescent females sparred with classmates and ventured new identities. In leaving school, female students left an institution that had treated them more equally than any other they would encounter in the course of their lives. Jane Hunter shows that they often went home in sadness and regret. But over the long term, their school experiences as "girls" foreshadowed both the turn-of-the-century emergence of the independent "New Woman" and the birth of adolescence itself.




Manning Up


Book Description

In Manning Up, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the gains of the feminist revolution have had a dramatic, unanticipated effect on the current generation of young men. Traditional roles of family man and provider have been turned upside down as "pre-adult" men, stuck between adolescence and "real" adulthood, find themselves lost in a world where women make more money, are more educated, and are less likely to want to settle down and build a family. Their old scripts are gone, and young men find themselves adrift. Unlike women, they have no biological clock telling them it's time to grow up. Hymowitz argues that it's time for these young men to "man up."




Girls Who Looked Under Rocks


Book Description

An inspiring famous women book for girls, Girls Who Looked Under Rocks also makes the perfect feminist gift for girls. Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists is for a world no longer confined by gender stereotypes, and a place where science is for girls, too! Parents and children will love this portrayal of six women who grew up playing in the dirt and went on to become award winning scientists and writers. All of these women were discouraged from pursuing careers in science, but they all persisted in their passion. If there is a pre-teen or adolescent in your life, especially a girl, take a look at this empowering, inspiring chapter book. It portrays the youths and careers of six remarkable women whose curiosity about nature fueled a passion to steadfastly overcome obstacles to careers in traditionally men-only occupations. The six-Maria Merian (b.1647), Anna Comstock (b.1854), Frances Hamerstrom (b.1907), Rachel Carson (b.1907), Miriam Rothschild (b.1908), and Jane Goodall (b.1934)—all became renowned scientists, artists and writers. A wonderful resource for young researchers and biographers, these stories can be a starting point for issues of gender, science, and the environment.




Louisiana Women


Book Description

Moving chronologically from the colonial period to the present, this collection of seventeen biographical essays provides a window into the social, cultural, and geographic milieu of women's lives in the state. Within the context of the historical forces that have shaped Louisiana, the contributors look at ways in which the women they profile either abided by prevailing gender norms or negotiated new models of behavior for themselves and other women.Louisiana Womenconcludes with an essay that examines women's active responses to problems that emerged in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The women whose absorbing life stories are collected here include Marie Therese Coincoin, who was born a slave but later became a successful entrepreneur, and Oretha Castle Haley, civil rights activist and leader of the New Orleans chapter of CORE. From such well-known figures as author Kate Chopin and Voudou priestess Marie Laveau, to lesser known women such as Cajun musician Cleoma Breaux Falcon, this volume reveals a compelling cross section of historical figures. The women profiled vary by race, class, political affiliation, and religious persuasion, but they all share an unusual grit and determination that allowed them to turn trying circumstances into opportunity. Lively yet rigorous, these essays introduce readers to the courageous, dedicated, and inventive women who have been an essential part of Louisiana's history. Historical figures included: Marie Th?r?se Coincoin The Baroness Pontalba Marie Laveau Sarah Katherine (Kate) Stone Eliza Jane Nicholson Kate Chopin Grace King Louisa Williams Robinson, Her Daughters, and Her Granddaughters Clementine Hunter Dorothy Dix True Methodist Women Cleoma Breaux Falcon Caroline Dormon Mary Land Rowena Spencer Oretha Castle Haley Louisiana Women and Hurricane Katrina




Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age


Book Description

Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age explores the practices of U.S.-based teenage girls who actively maintain feminist blogs and participate in the feminist blogosphere as readers, writers, and commenters on platforms including Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Drawing on interviews with bloggers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, as well as discursive textual analyses of feminist blogs and social networking postings authored by teenage girls, Keller addresses how these girls use blogging as a practice to articulate contemporary feminisms and craft their own identities as feminists and activists. In this sense, feminist girl bloggers defy hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal girlhood subjectivities, a finding that Keller uses to complicate both academic and popular assertions that suggest teenage girls are uninterested in feminism. Instead, Keller maintains that these young bloggers employ digital media production to educate their peers about feminism, connect with like-minded activists, write feminist history, and make feminism visible within popular culture, practices that build upon and continue a lengthy tradition of American feminism into the twenty-first century. Girls’ Feminist Bloggers in a Postfeminist Age challenges readers to not only reconsider teenage girls’ online practices as politically and culturally significant, but to better understand their crucial role in a thriving contemporary feminism.




College Women In The Nuclear Age


Book Description

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s—the era of the so-called “feminine mystique”—were ultraconservative and passive. College Women in the Nuclear Age takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men. A treasure-trove of original research, the book should stimulate scholarly discussion and captivate any reader interested in the thoughts and lives of American women.




Boardinghouse Women


Book Description

In this innovative and insightful book, Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women's stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.




Diverse Voices in Photographic Albums


Book Description

Through a variety of case studies by global scholars from diverse academic fields, this book explores photographic-album practices of historically marginalized figures from a range of time periods, geographic locations, and socio-cultural contexts. Their albums' stories span various racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identities; nationalities; religions; and dis/abilities. The vernacular albums featured in this volume present narratives that move beyond those reflected in our existing histories. Essays examine the visual, material, and aural strategies that album-makers have used to assert control over the presentation of their histories and identities, and to direct what those narratives have to say, a point of special relevance as these albums move out of private domestic space and into public archives, institutions, and digital formats. This book does not consider photographic albums and scrapbooks as separate genres, but as a continuum of modern creative practices of photographic and mass-print collage aimed at self-expression and narrative-building that co-evolved and were readily accessible. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, visual culture, material culture, media studies, and cultural studies.




Scarlett's Sisters


Book Description

Scarlett's Sisters explores the meaning of nineteenth-century southern womanhood from the vantage point of the celebrated fictional character's flesh-and-blood counterparts: young, elite, white women. Anya Jabour demonstrates that southern girls and young women faced a major turning point when the Civil War forced them to assume new roles and responsibilities as independent women. Examining the lives of more than 300 girls and women between ages fifteen and twenty-five, Jabour traces the socialization of southern white ladies from early adolescence through young adulthood. Amidst the upheaval of the Civil War, Jabour shows, elite young women, once reluctant to challenge white supremacy and male dominance, became more rebellious. They adopted the ideology of Confederate independence in shaping a new model of southern womanhood that eschewed dependence on slave labor and male guidance. By tracing the lives of young white women in a society in flux, Jabour reveals how the South's old social order was maintained and a new one created as southern girls and young women learned, questioned, and ultimately changed what it meant to be a southern lady.