How Young Ladies Became Girls

How Young Ladies Became Girls
Author: Jane H. Hunter
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300092636

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

How Young Ladies Became Girls
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2002
Genre: Girls
ISBN: 9780300157284

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.

Scarlett's Sisters

Scarlett's Sisters
Author: Anya Jabour
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2009-11-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807887641

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.

Competing Kingdoms

Competing Kingdoms
Author: Barbara Reeves-Ellington
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2010-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822392593

Competing Kingdoms rethinks the importance of women and religion within U.S. imperial culture from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In an era when the United States was emerging as a world power to challenge the hegemony of European imperial powers, American women missionaries strove to create a new Kingdom of God. They did much to shape a Protestant empire based on American values and institutions. This book examines American women’s activism in a broad transnational context. It offers a complex array of engagements with their efforts to provide rich intercultural histories about the global expansion of American culture and American Protestantism. An international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, the contributors bring under-utilized evidence from U.S. and non-U.S. sources to bear on the study of American women missionaries abroad and at home. Focusing on women from several denominations, they build on the insights of postcolonial scholarship to incorporate the agency of the people among whom missionaries lived. They explore how people in China, the Congo Free State, Egypt, India, Japan, Ndebeleland (colonial Rhodesia), Ottoman Bulgaria, and the Philippines perceived, experienced, and negotiated American cultural expansion. They also consider missionary work among people within the United States who were constructed as foreign, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. By presenting multiple cultural perspectives, this important collection challenges simplistic notions about missionary cultural imperialism, revealing the complexity of American missionary attitudes toward race and the ways that ideas of domesticity were reworked and appropriated in various settings. It expands the field of U.S. women’s history into the international arena, increases understanding of the global spread of American culture, and offers new concepts for analyzing the history of American empire. Contributors: Beth Baron, Betty Bergland, Mary Kupiec Cayton, Derek Chang, Sue Gronewold, Jane Hunter, Sylvia Jacobs, Susan Haskell Khan, Rui Kohiyama, Laura Prieto, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Mary Renda, Connie A. Shemo, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Ian Tyrrell, Wendy Urban-Mead

"Women and Things, 1750?950 "

Author: MaureenDaly Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351536745

In contrast to much current scholarship on women and material culture which focuses primarily on women as consumers, this essay collection provides case studies of women who produced material objects. The essays collected here make an original contribution to material culture studies by focusing on women's social practices in relation to material culture. The essays as a whole are concerned with women's complex and active engagement with material culture in the various stages of the material object's life cycle, from design and production to consumption, use, and redeployment. Also, theorized and described are the ways in which women engaged in meaning making, identity formation, and commemoration through their manipulation of materials and techniques, ranging from taxidermy and shell work to collecting autographs and making scrapbooks. This volume takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised categories of women's decorative and craft activities as sites of important cultural and social work. This volume is interdisciplinary with essays by art historians, social historians, literary critics, rhetoricians, and museum curators. The scope of the volume is international with essays on eighteenth-century German silhouettes, Australian aboriginal ritual practices, Brittany mourning rites, and Soviet-era recipes that provide a comparative framework for the majority of essays which focus on British and North American women who lived and worked in the long nineteenth century. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in women's history, art history, cultural studies, museum studies, anthropology, cultural and social history, literature, rhetoric, and material culture studies.

Listen, World!

Listen, World!
Author: Julia Scheeres
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1541674340

*Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award* The first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you’ve never heard of At thirty-five, Elsie Robinson feared she’d lost it all. Reeling from a scandalous divorce in 1917, she had no means to support herself and her chronically ill son. She dreamed of becoming a writer and was willing to sacrifice everything for this goal, even swinging a pickax in a gold mine to pay the bills. When the mine shut down, she moved to the Bay Area. Armed with moxie and samples of her work, she barged into the offices of the Oakland Tribune and was hired on the spot. She went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist and household name whose column ran for over thirty years and garnered more than twenty million readers. Told in cinematic detail by bestselling author Julia Scheeres and award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert, Listen, World! is the inspiring story of a timeless maverick, capturing what it means to take a gamble on self-fulfillment and find freedom along the way.

College Women In The Nuclear Age

College Women In The Nuclear Age
Author: Babette Faehmel
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2011-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813553199

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.

Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age

Girls' Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age
Author: Jessalynn Keller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1317627768

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.

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920
Author: Melissa R. Klapper
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0814749348

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860—1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published—or even read—to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls’ adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education. Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents of acculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society. While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history. Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.