Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930 (review)

The teenage girl has been the subject of inquiry and the object of debate over the last two decades among scholars, practitioners, adults—and even girls—about whether the conflict between feminine acquiescence and adolescent autonomy generates a crisis in female development. Grounding contemporary debates about the nature and origin of teenage girlhood in exegeses of major historical texts, Crista DeLuzio demonstrates that the developmental category of female adolescence is as contested today as it was nearly two hundred years ago, when philosophers, educators, scientists, physicians, reformers, and other intellectuals first began to define, debate, and disseminate scientific and cultural conceptualizations of female adolescence. In this sweeping interdisciplinary history that examines the interrelationship between biological constructs and cultural conceptions of female adolescence, DeLuzio meticulously traces the dense trail of ideas put forth and popularized by scientific and social science experts from the new nation to the new millennium (if one also includes the epilogue).

DeLuzio scrutinizes the intellectual genesis and development of modern female adolescence as a sociocultural construct by examining the authoritative texts produced by a vast group of influential experts from antebellum health reformers and doctors to twentieth-century mental hygiene and mental health professionals. Edward H. Clarke, Mary Putnam Jacobi, G. Stanley Hall, Margaret Mead, and Carol Gilligan are the better known among the numerous "architects of female adolescence" examined in this purposely wide-ranging study. DeLuzio also explores generations of other lesser-known "public" intellectuals' attempts to reconcile overlapping yet contending scientific discourses about femininity and adolescence they sought to describe, explain, and prescribe. She argues that science as well as social science experts both undercut and shored up gendered beliefs they passed along to others who have continued to probe the conceptual problem of the compatibility of adolescence and femininity.

In this big and busy study, DeLuzio examines the personal and professional backgrounds of a broad cast of characters who hailed from different disciplines, centuries, and historical contexts and the impact of major influences on their thinking about girls. In this methodical accounting of their influential texts, she examines theorists' conceptual complexities, contradictions, ambivalences, and ambiguities as well as critics' critiques on major issues and more subtle points of contention. DeLuzio maps out how authorized and revised ideas were "synthesized, interpreted, elaborated on, and applied," though the heavy emphasis on the "multiple permutations" and "contested articulations" often eclipses experts' principal contributions to the constellation of ideas about female adolescence (p. 246). Though of unquestionable value to researchers and instructors for the light this study sheds on the scientific and social dimensions of adolescent girlhood, most undergraduates might find the preponderance of close readings overly challenging.

DeLuzio nevertheless breaks new ground in her assiduous examination of the relationship between science and society by using age and gender as dynamically connected categories of analysis. By applying a history of science approach and traditional intellectual history method to the study of girls, she demonstrates the remarkable centrality of girls in the history of science, medicine, psychology, education, and anthropology. Not only does DeLuzio contribute to the recentering of these established fields of study in which girls are more often found in the margins than the mainstream, she also provides a historical foundation for the relatively new field of "girls' studies" in which the examination of the contemporary teenage girl is a central enterprise. Moreover, a broad cross-section of scholars is likely to find DeLuzio's "essay on sources" particularly valuable for future research.