Abstracts

The Spaces of the Schoolhouse and City: Gender and Class in Boston Education, 1830–1832

By Rachel Remmel

In 1830, Boston’s school committee reorganized its schools to match its spatial imagination: an idealized spatial model that reflected the lives and social experiences of its elite members. To unify individual schools and regulate student sexuality, the committee created single-sex schools with one male master. To unify the overall system, the committee redistributed students by sex and adopted a hierarchical teaching staff commanded by the committee. However, the committee’s spatial imagination conflicted with physical buildings and geography, with the different spatial imagination of middle-class parents, and with the irreconcilability of individualized buildings and a unified system. The committee backtracked in 1832.

Practical Patriotism: How the Canadian Junior Red Cross and Its Child Members Met the Challenge of the Second World War

By Sarah Glassford

The advent of the Second World War posed certain dilemmas for the previously internationalist and peace-promoting Canadian Junior Red Cross (JRC). This article draws upon institutional sources and secondary literature around coercion and agency in children’s wartime voluntary labor to examine both the adjustments made by the JRC and children’s responses to those changes. Through strategies of avoidance, adaptation and redirection, the Canadian JRC successfully negotiated the wartime challenge to its peacetime agenda. However, although these organizational changes were important, the program’s success ultimately relied upon young Canadians’ own productivity and desire to participate.

Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery’s Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls’ Intellectual Culture

By Jill Anderson

In her Dinny Gordon series (1958–1965), junior novelist Anne Emery’s heroine manifests intellectual desire, a passionate engagement in the life of the mind along with the desire to connect with like-minded others. Within a genre which focused on socialization and dating, in Dinny, Emery normalizes a studious, inner-directed, yet feminine heroine, passionate about ancient history rather than football captains. Emery’s endorsement of the pleasure Dinny takes in intellectual work, and the friends and boyfriends Dinny collects, challenge stereotypes of intellectual girls as dateless isolates while suggesting an alternative model of girlhood operating within apparent conformism to postwar “good girl” standards.

The Experiences and Expectations of Canadian Female University Students at the “Dawn of the Age of Aquarius”

By J. Paul Grayson

Using, among other sources, previously unanalyzed results of student surveys conducted in 1963 and 1967, in this article I examine the experiences and expectations of female students at Glendon College (York University, Toronto). Consistent with some Canadian feminist critiques of the period, students were likely exposed to an androcentric curriculum and had few female instructors. This said, female students were respected by male faculty and students; did well in their studies; were as likely as males to complete their academic programs; went to graduate school in large numbers; and were as satisfied as males with some important aspects of their education.

“Dare to Free Yourself”: The Red Tide, Feminism, and High School Activism in the Early 1970s

By Matthew Ides

In 1971, a group of radical students at University High School in West Los Angeles began publishing the Red Tide newspaper. Using the Tide and oral histories of alumni, this article analyzes the relationship between feminism and youth culture in the early 1970s. It argues that the Tide’s authors successfully tied together strains of women’s liberation, 1960s movement cultures, and the counterculture; through their activities they integrated this synthesis with the youth culture of their community. As explored in this article, a feminist youth culture charted alternatives to the norms of adult authorities, and provided students with peer-driven discussion of sex, sexual orientation, and gender roles.