The Cost of Gendered Rebellion

Michelle Ann Abate's new work on tomboys across US history and culture is a thoughtful and broadly applicable contribution to the field of children's literature. Her stated goal of showing how tomboys are "unstable and dynamic . . . changing with the political, social and economic events of [their] historical era" (xii) is pursued with care, revealing a history of gendered rebellion bought at a price that Abate eventually concludes has been too high.

Abate's monograph creates a useful history on which to hang further analyses of girls' culture. Beginning with a reading of E. D. E. N. Southworth's massively popular novel The Hidden Hand (first serialized in 1859) and making stops every decade or two to check in on the changing role of the tomboy, the book effortlessly encompasses the sentimental mother, New Woman, flapper, punk, and other significant female figures who touted a provocatively mixed set of gendered behaviors. Each chapter centers around a particular text or cultural figure (such as Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Carson McCullers, and Willa Cather, whose O Pioneers! and My Ántonia both receive close readings), providing a clear narrative of the back-and-forth arguments about tomboys and what they have represented.

This structure for the book, however, rewards a particular strategy of reading, as chapter after chapter follows the same formula of introduction, analysis of tomboyism within the specified work, and then an analysis of how questions of race were also at stake in tomboys of the period. Because the arc of each chapter is the same, often with similar conclusions about tomboys and their less-than-subversive participation in racist culture, reading the book straight through is not the ideal way to absorb Abate's historical argument. Rather, the chapters—again, because of their repetitive structure—are at their most useful when considered individually. For someone interested in Little Women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or the films of Tatum O'Neal, for example, chapters on those subjects stand easily on their own and can be referenced that way. Considering that virtually no other project deals with the subject with so wide a scope, this structural choice, which makes for occasionally repetitive reading from cover to cover, also renders the book's chapters widely useful to readers seeking information on parts rather than on the whole.

One of the most elegant exercises in this book full of elegant writing is Abate's dovetailing of the subversive and complicit aspects of tomboyism. The former are perhaps obvious and lend to tomboys central roles in progressive readings of girls' fiction and culture: with their transgressive hodgepodge of gendered actions and clothing, tomboys seem to offer an antidote to those cloying visions of girlhood so often produced by and for mass culture. But as Abate celebrates the progressive aspects of tomboyism, she is careful to lay bare the ways in which it is complicit with the very dominant culture it appears to be undermining. In her study, for instance, of the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) and the 1992 film A League of Their Own, Abate locates an early instance of American women in sports that celebrates tomboyism. The film's retelling of the story of the league, Abate says, "represented an ostensible wholesale endorsement of tomboyism. Showing women batting, fielding and even sliding, League seemed to combine the 'We Can Do It' slogan of the 1940s with the 'Girl Power' spirit of the 1990s" (226). However, Abate then goes on to reveal how the film also accurately portrays the lengths to which the league went to present its tomboys as sexually—more accurately, heterosexually—available: encouraged to act like ladies, attend beauty school, and keep their noses from getting shiny, these tomboys were allowed to challenge traditional gender roles only as long as they continued to prop up heteronormative desire. Abate wields examples such as the AAGPBL with skill to support her ongoing argument that tomboyism has never been a perfect model for gender rebellion.

Another central concern of the study is the...