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

In Female Adolescence, Crista Deluzio gives us the first comprehensive account of the scientific construction of adolescent girlhood. This is a richly detailed story of the antecedents to current debates in psychology about the concept of development and the points at which definitions of adolescence intersect with (and conflict with) constructions of femininity. Deluzio situates herself alongside those who question the universality of a developmental perspective on the life cycle; she argues, as do many writing within the history of science, that scientific ideas are socially constructed and culturally determined. Building on the works of psychologists William Kessen and Sheldon White, anti-developmentalist Valerie Walkerdine, and historians such as Gail Bederman, Deluzio shows that the fashioning of adolescence occurred at a specific time, the late-nineteenth century, and in a particular setting, modernizing Euro-American societies. Views of the developing child, including the new stage of adolescence, served to reinforce race, class, and gender hierarchies, and figured prominently in arguments supporting the benefits of an imperialist foreign policy.

Deluzio’s study, however, moves beyond previous work to problematize a notion commonplace among historians of the child sciences who accept the argument that adolescence was constructed without reference to girls. The qualities that came to mark adolescence during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be understood, she argues, unless we incorporate the biological, medical, and psychological attributes of femininity in general, and the pubescent girl in particular, to the story. The gendering of adolescence was a murky process, with masculinity and femininity at odds in medical and psychological debates about the modern adolescent. Scientists went to great efforts to reconcile age and gender, the adolescent stage of development, and culturally accepted views of femininity. As she highlights the centrality of girlhood to the scientific understanding of development, Deluzio also argues that girls have not been well-served by the developmental perspective on adolescence.

This is not a history of female adolescents. Rather, Deluzio has drawn on the wealth of recent studies about the lived experiences of teenage girls during a century of immense economic, political, and social change. What role, she asks, did science play in fashioning a meaning for these changes? Her answer: health reformers, physicians, child study experts, psychologists, and anthropologists constructed ideas of child development that differentiated the biological and psychological tasks of the adolescent girl from those of her brothers. Over the nineteenth century, these professionals successfully defined separate explanations for adolescent development in boys and girls. In the process, the sciences sometimes privileged girlhood as the essence of adolescence—emotional, volatile, and irrational. More often, however, they set standards for development drawn from a white, middle-class male model of the path from childhood to adulthood. This path led through adolescence to an adulthood of autonomy, rationality, and self-determination. While boys passed through adolescence to reach the next stage of development, girls did not. The female was a perpetual adolescent. This idea was rationalized by the theory of recapitulation, the view that claimed parallel patterns of development in the individual and the “race” and held broad appeal among psychologists and other medical and social scientists. Even in the twentieth century, when psychologists and anthropologists renounced recapitulation and identified a single adolescent developmental path, when married to expectations of domesticity “female adolescence” precluded girls from reaching psychological maturity, or rather allowed them to achieve a “feminine” adulthood. Deluzio thus demonstrates that as scientists gave meaning to the adolescent stage of development, they established limits to the developmental possibilities of girls. These limits, she further suggests, continue to structure debates about adolescent girls and boys.

Deluzio begins with a discussion of the role of early-nineteenth century health reformers, which she describes as a lost opportunity for the female adolescent. A chapter on the debate over co-education offers a new take on Edward Clarke’s infamous Sex in Education, Or a Fair Chance for Girls, situating it within the emerging developmental paradigm. Physicians and educators on both sides of this...