Publisher description

This book examines the history of female adolescent sexuality in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1960s. The book analyzes both adult perceptions of female adolescent sexuality and the experiences of female adolescents themselves. It examines what girls knew (or thought they knew) about sex at different points in time, girls’ sexual experiences, girls' ideas about love and romance, female adolescent beauty culture, and the influence of popular culture on female adolescent sexuality. It also examines the ways in which adults responded to female adolescent sexuality and the efforts of adults to either control or encourage girls' interest in sexual topics, dating, girls’ participation in beauty culture, and their education on sexual topics. The book describes a trajectory along which female adolescents went from being perceived as inherently innocent and essentially asexual to being regarded (and feared) as primarily sexual in nature.

This work provides scholars, instructors, and students with influential essays that have defined the field of American girls' history and culture. Covering girlhood and the relationships between girls and women, the volume tackles pivotal themes such as education, work, play, sexuality, consumption, and the body.

A Companion to the History of American Science offers a collection of essays that give an authoritative overview of the most recent scholarship on the history of American science. Covers topics including astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, eugenics, Big Science, military technology, and more Features contributions by the most accomplished scholars in the field of science history Covers pivotal events in U.S. history that shaped the development of science and science policy such as WWII, the Cold War, and the Women’s Rights movement

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.

Of the many consequences advanced by the rise of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, North Carolina forcibly sterilized more than 2,000 women and girls in between 1929 and 1950. This extreme measure reflects how pseudoscience justified widespread gender, race, and class discrimination in the Jim Crow South. In Bad Girls at Samarcand Karin L. Zipf dissects a dark episode in North Carolina's eugenics campaign through a detailed study of the State Home and Industrial School in Eagle Springs, referred to as Samarcand Manor, and the school's infamous 1931 arson case. The people and events surrounding both the institution and the court case sparked a public debate about the expectations of white womanhood, the nature of contemporary science and medicine, and the role of the juvenile justice system that resonated throughout the succeeding decades. Designed to reform and educate unwed poor white girls who were suspected of deviant behavior or victims of sexual abuse, Samarcand Manor allowed for strict disciplinary measures -- including corporal punishment -- in an attempt to instill Victorian ideals of female purity. The harsh treatment fostered a hostile environment and tensions boiled over when several girls set Samarcand on fire, destroying two residence halls. Zipf argues that the subsequent arson trial, which carried the possibility of the death penalty, represented an important turning point in the public characterizations of poor white women; aided by the lobbying efforts of eugenics advocates, the trial helped usher in dramatic policy changes, including the forced sterilization of female juvenile delinquents. In addition to the interplay between gender ideals and the eugenics movement, Zipf also investigates the girls who were housed at Samarcand and those specifically charged in the 1931 trial. She explores their negotiation of Jazz Age stereotypes, their strategies of resistance, and their relationship with defense attorney Nell Battle Lewis during the trial. The resultant policy changes -- intelligence testing, sterilization, and parole -- are also explored, providing further insight into why these young women preferred prison to reformatories. A fascinating story that grapples with gender bias, sexuality, science, and the justice system all within the context of the Great Depression--era South, Bad Girls at Samarcand makes a compelling contribution to multiple fields of study.

This book presents an innovative comparative view of how the issue of adolescent sexuality and consent is differently treated in various media. Analyzing teenage sexual encounters with adults across a variety of media, including films, television, novels, and podcasts, the volume takes a positive stance on the expression of teenage sexuality, while remaining sensitive to the power of adults to abuse and manipulate. The anthology treats these representations as negotiations between conflicting forces: desire, sexual self-knowledge, unequal power, and the law, the latter both actual legal statutes and internalized law in the philosophical and psychoanalytic sense. Questions of unequal power inherent in such relations are theorized. The authors examine variations of this configuration of sexual relations between teenagers and adults from different perspectives, to consider how various forms of expression rework it formally. These essays are attuned to both nuances of presentation and contexts of reception, and they consider how aesthetics play a role. Contributing to the general debate about the ways that societies construct and regulate adolescent sexuality, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, film studies, television studies, sociology, and gender studies