How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (review)

The story of how "young ladies" became "girls" is, as Jane Hunter tells it in her book of the same title, an important piece of the twin historical forces of modernism and feminism. In this absorbing and nuanced book Hunter situates transformations in girlhood within the larger framework of the mounting rejection of Victorianism at the end of the 19th century. It is a vast and complex undertaking, addressing an impressive range of topics: housework, girls' literature and diary keeping, health and exercise, schooling, illness, graduation exercises, coming of age, and romance.

The chief source for this book is a cache of middle-class girls' diaries. The animated voices of ten or fifteen girls (it is hard to tell exactly how many) weave in and out of the narrative, lending first hand accounts of their experiences with housework, competition in school, attempts at "being good," and the daily fare of walks taken, lines of poetry memorized, and socks darned. The overall effect is to give the reader a truly intimate knowledge of the day to day lives of girls during the mid to late 19th century, a thorough feeling for the routines and cares that defined and ordered their lives.

Adolescent girls, it becomes clear, had a great deal more freedom than has been assumed. Over the course of the 19th century, Hunter writes, "middle- and upper-middle-class daughters of the urban Northeast stopped doing substantial housework" (11). The reasons for this were both demographic and ideological. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s brought an influx of unmarried Irish women into the northeast. By mid-century 70 percent of the domestic servants in Boston were Irish-born. These servants not only replaced native-born "helpers" but also the need for the labor of middle-class daughters. Perhaps more important, the presence of leisured, educated and refined daughters began to serve as new markers of social class for urban families. Victorian decorum required a fair amount personal cultivation. While many girls had a greater amount of free time than they might have had on a farm, the discipline, scholarly and artistic pursuits involved in "self-culture" kept them quite busy.

Girls also lived lives that stretched across both male and female "spheres." On their walks—commonly two hours a day—girls went out alone or in pairs. They were sent on errands and went to school unescorted. Thus they could regularly be seen on the streets and in town squares, freely occupying public space. While not "promenading" they were increasingly attending co-educational institutions. By 1895, 95% of American cities provided public, co-educational schools. Within these schools girls outnumbered boys. Girls made up 53 percent of all students in 1872 and 57 percent in 1900. They were especially overrepresented in public schools, where they made up 60 percent of the students. More girls attended school in the northeast than elsewhere (14 percent for Providence, for example, as compared with 2-3 percent nation-wide). Girls regularly out-performed boys in virtually every subject (including, interestingly enough, math), and were named valedictorians in far greater numbers than boys. In an overtly competitive environment where students' desks were placed according to class rank, taking top honors was, according to Hunter, of public significance. Girls "felt the sweet rewards of victory in conquering rivals, earning respect, and taking as prizes a seat at the front of the room" (201).

Because of the amount of "thick description" and the even-handed tone throughout, it is perhaps easy to miss the significance of Hunter's argument. Hunter is doing nothing less than challenging Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's " Female World of Love and Ritual," which describes the power and salience of inter-generational female relationships in the nineteenth century as almost all-encompassing. Indeed, Hunter asks us to rethink a whole body of scholarship that has viewed the development of female power in the nineteenth century as an extension of...