Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age
Notwithstanding theGone with the Windimagery of southern womanhood, Cahn presents a portrait of coming-of-age during the years 1920-60 that was complicated by the social and economic turmoil of those decades. As the South moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy, quiet farm girls were suddenly smoking, buying makeup, and defying social conventions. If they strayed too far from the path, they were rounded up in girls' reformatories, where punishment ranged from beatings to forced sterilization. Cahn traces female adolescence in the South from the flapper era through Elvis Presley and rock and roll and the budding civil rights movement, and she points out the vast differences that race and class made in the judgment and treatment of female adolescent behavior. She examines the particularly volatile mixture of race and class for which the South has become famous, as the society struggled to control girls--black and white--to maintain racial purity and social conventions. This is a fascinating look at how young women fit into and affected southern patriarchy and notions of racial purity.Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved