How Young Ladies Became Girls
Subtitle: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: January 1, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 512
ISBN-13: 9780300092639
Subjects: British & Irish history: c 1700 to c 1900; Social history; Women's studies; c 1800 to c 1900; Social Stratification; Sociology Of Women; Social Science; History - General History; Sociology; British Isles; USA; General; Women's Studies - General; Social Science / Women's Studies; United States - 19th Century; 19th century; Girls; History; Middle class; Northeastern States; Women
Description: "Based on an array of diaries and letters, this 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 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.