"That I Would Be Good": Laying the Groundwork for the History of American Girlhood

Jane Hunter. HowYoung Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xvi +406 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00.

It has taken a century and a half for the "snakes and snails" of girls rather than the "sugar and spice" to attract attention. Texts such as Rachel Simmon's Odd Girl Out: The Secret Culture of Aggression in Girls (2002) and Sharon Lamb's The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do—Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt (2002) are on the bestseller list. Reactions to the brutal hazing by girls at a Michigan high school recently, and the plethora of horrific girl stories aired on talk shows such as Oprah and Montel demonstrate that debunking the myth of the good girl carries emotional freight even in these jaded times. But that is not all: girls are also presented as exceptionally vulnerable in texts like Mary Pipher's bestselling Reviving Ophelia (1994), or thwarted by social expectations, as in Smart Girls, Gifted Women (1985) by Barbara Kerr. Alongside its famous campaigns to stop drugs and alcohol abuse, the Ad Council has now turned to the business of encouraging Americans to value girls.

For those of us who were girls, have girls, or study girls, it is clear that girlhood as a subject is coming into its own and yet, despite the wealth of recent popular texts on girls in American culture, "girl history" remains relatively unexplored. This is surprising in part because the history of childhood has become such a viable field in the past fifteen years. Yet, historians of childhood have focused more on region, race, and ethnicity than gender. There are a few exceptions, such as Miriam Formanek-Brunell's Made to Play House (1993)and Beverly Lyon Clark's Regendering the School Story (1996). But even as these works take a historical perspective on the intersection of gender, age, and cultural change, one cannot describe them as "histories." They stem from gender studies and are more about cultural analysis than the historical experiences of girls. Such approaches cannot be pulled apart entirely, of course, but that does not mean they are one and the same.

For that reason, among others, Jane Hunter's How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origin of American Girlhood is foundational. Hunter's book investigates how American society came to adopt the concept of girls as innately "good" just as girls themselves began to challenge that image. Using an impressive variety of sources—most importantly diaries from the girls themselves, Hunter clarifies the role of girls in the middle-class family structure, what they did with their days, what they expected of themselves, and how and why their role changed during the last half of the nineteenth-century.

Despite the fact that Jane Hunter is director of the gender studies program at Lewis and Clark College, this text (like her earlier work, Gospel of Gentility [1984]) stems from women's history rather than gender or childhood studies. That is to say, Hunter writes her girl history with one eye to what adult women were also experiencing, and that awareness serves as a visible parallel throughout the book. She is clearly tuned in to gender, but this is a book more about girls than femininity; it does not ignore gender dynamics, but those dynamics are not at the core of the study.

Hunter's central thesis is relatively straightforward: by the turn of the century the "narrow concepts of good girls" was breaking down for the girls themselves due to a variety of factors, but principally coeducation and participation in urban life. Such changes flowed into gender mutations symbolized by the "New Woman" at the turn of the century. The term "girl" is central to the study, and she will greatly complicate the term by...