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Foreword
- Rutgers University Press
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xi Foreword miriam forman-brunell The copious collection of girls included in Girlhood: A Global History stirred recollections of my girlhood, especially of the exquisitely dressed costume dolls I collected in the early 1960s. That was long before we understood that the clothing sewn onto the dolls’ bodies signified female identities as immutable, uniform, and uncomplicated by gender, age, race, religion, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, class, power, and the like. The realization that girlhood is a constructed, changing, and contested category of both experience and expectations only became apparent in the late 1980s and early 1990s as scholars began to chart the history of American girls. Since then historians and other scholars studying children and youth have been teaching, researching, writing monographs, editing journals, and compiling anthologies that place girls at the center of scholarly inquiry. The unprecedented scope of Girlhood: A Global History, however, makes it the first work to illuminate how vast, varied, and intricate girlhood is. This essay collection is noteworthy for its infinite variety across all axes from the methodological to the topical, the disciplinary to the definitional. While some scholars use the diaries, memoirs, and semiautobiographical works of women to reconstruct girlhood, others make use of questionnaires and oral histories of girls themselves. Some essays rely on traditional historical evidence (e.g., archival material, interviews, official records) and qualitative research, whereas others “read” the body as a historical text. The volume also includes an enormous variety of girl-centered subjects (e.g., cultures, politics, love, sexuality, education, clothes, music, parties, dances, diary writing, talking, family, friends) and sites of study (e.g., churches, synagogues , mosques, temples, boarding schools, youth meetings, community clubs and centers, the streets, and shopping centers). Vastly expanding the field of study across borders and boundaries, over time, and around the world, this collection, with its broad focus, also challenges standard definitions and traditional assumptions about girlhood as a uniform category of experience and expectation. By examining girls as students , citizens, sexual beings, and workers, and in numerous other social roles, the essays in this pioneering collection are significant for the opportunities they provide for the transnational study of girls. The numerous regional studies of girls from Mexico to Malaysia illuminate not only the multiplicity of girlhoods but their complexity as well. Principally written by the most recent generation of girlhood scholars in the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world, these historical examinations make visible the continuities, changes, and challenges of girlhoods. The contributors analyze varieties of girls’ experiences and the range of girlhood ideals within numerous and new historical contexts. Represented here are many different “dominant” or “mainstream” cultures (“decent culture ”) shaped by racial, national, ethnic, and religious elites with varying cultural ideals, expectations, and hegemonic strategies. Girlhood is also examined within religious (Jewish, Muslim, Catholic), ethnic, class, and political contexts. The use of a girl-focused lens permits examination of varieties of girlhoods under an array of systems from slavery to colonialism and dictatorships to democracies. Moreover, these essays provide opportunities to examine changes in the social construction of girlhood over time and place. For instance, in one essay we learn how the Great War politicized African American workers who became actors on larger political stages and in broader labor conflicts. The Second World War similarly led girls in the United States and the United Kingdom to assume new social roles. A handful of essays focus on the politicization of girlhoods by investigating ordinary girls as well as exceptional ones. One essay examines the gendering of Soviet celebrity gymnasts in a broader international arena. While Soviet gymnasts symbolized the superiority of nationalist ideals, other girls manifested more heterogeneous identities. Shaped by an assortment of racial, religious, class, ethnic, and national influences, many girls laid claim to such complex identities as Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, Surinamese Dutch, French Algerian, and African Caribbean. For many, the intersections and contradictions made girlhood a particularly distinctive as well as disputed category. For Muslim girls such as Assia Djebar, her French colonial education isolated her from her cousins and other female peers with different girlhood principles and practices. Despite the differences among girls, there are striking similarities among those who struggled to construct independent identities. From the Soviet Union to the United States, girls negotiated among conflicting cultural scripts and indigenous codes as they shaped their own identities and collective subcultures. For many, personal empowerment, autonomy, individuality, was frequently achieved through diaries, books, and music often with feminist themes. Unlike mute and immobile costume...