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290 “Flapper Americana Novissima” G. Stanley Hall R Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924), one of the founding fathers of American psychology, focused his analysis on the lives of children, “primitives,” and women.Along with a belief that acquired characteristics could be inherited, Hall adopted German Darwinian Ernst Haeckle’s famous “recapitulation” argument, in which“every individual organism repeats in its own life history the life history of its race.” For Hall, childhood and adolescence contained the secret ancestry of man. So the tendency of children to clutch men’s beards reflected “the necessity for anthropoids of arboreal habits to cling to the shaggy sides of their parents.” Women likewise represented the continuous elements in the race, especially the emotional warmth of perpetual youth. Because a woman’s heart dominated her head, she must be protected from too vigorous intellectual training and must realize that her true vocation lay in motherhood. In her pursuit of education, modern woman risked undermining that primary maternal function.1 Hall’s“Flapper Americana Novissima”was published in the Atlantic Monthly, which, from its inception in Boston in 1857, was considered the United States’ most distinguished literary magazine. Its founders, however, led by Francis Underwood and including James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, also sought to influence political debates, especially that on abolition.When Ellery Sedgwick became owner and editor of the magazine in 1909, he changed the focus of the magazine, albeit gradually, to reflect his own experience in the competitive world of New York journalism. He included essays on current and controversial economic, social, and political changes affecting Americans. Science and religious topics also became more frequent, and in 1922 the New York Times Book Review reported that the Atlantic Monthly was no Atlantic Monthly, June 1922, 771–780. longer a“staid”magazine,for“it has moved with the times and,finely enough,yet retained that dignified composure that is associated with it.”Under Sedgwick,the Atlantic’s circulation passed 100,000 in 1921, while the annual subscription price remained four dollars.2 I When, years ago, I first heard the picturesque word “Flapper” applied to a girl, I thought of a loose sail flapping in whatever wind may blow, and liable to upset the craft it is meant to impel. There was also in my mind the flitting and yet cruder mental imagery of a wash, just hung out to dry in the light and breeze, before it is starched and ironed for use. I was a little ashamed of this when the dictionary set me right by defining the word as a fledgling, yet in the nest, and vainly attempting to fly while its wings have only pinfeathers; and I recognized that thus the genius of “slanguage”had made the squab the symbol of budding girlhood. This, too, had the advantage of a moral, implying what would happen if the young bird really ventured to trust itself to its pinions prematurely. . . . We must, then, admit at the outset that the world has not yet found the right designation for this unique product of civilization, the girl in the early teens, who is just now undergoing such a marvelous development. But why bother about names? As a lifelong student of human nature, I long ago realized that of all the stages of human life this was terra incognita. We now know much of children, of adults, and of old age, while the pubescent boy has become an open book. So I began months ago to forage in libraries, and was surprised to find how sentimental, imaginative, and altogether unscientific most of the few books, and the scores of articles, about girls in the early teens really were. Very persistent is the tendency to treat this grave and serious theme flippantly—to invoke Puck, Ariel, or Momus as the only muses who can help us in threading the labyrinthine mazes of feminine pubescence. Moreover, since the war, the kind of girl whom most ante-bellum authors depict has become as extinct as the dodo, if indeed she ever existed at all. So we must turn from literature, and come down from the roseate heights, whereon we thought she dwelt, to the street and home, and be as objective and concrete as possible. II First, the street. The other day I found myself walking a few rods behind a girl who must have been approaching sweet sixteen. She held to the middle of the broad...

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