Delinquents and Debutantes : Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures

by Inness, Sherrie A.

• ISBN13: 9780814737651
• ISBN10: 081473765X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

The contributors, including such leading scholars as Vicki L. Ruiz, Jennifer Scanlon, and Miriam Formanek-Brunell, examine myriad ways in which a variety of discourses and activities from popular girls' magazines and advertisements to babysitting and the Girl Scouts help form girls' experiences of what it means to be a girl, and later a woman, in our society. The essays address such topics as board games and the socialization of adolescent girls, dolls and political ideologies, Nancy Drew and the Filipina American experience, the queering of girls' detective fiction, and female juvenile delinquency to demonstrate how cultural discourses shape both the young and teenage girl in America.Although girls' culture has until now received comparatively little attention from scholars, this work confirms that understanding the culture of girls is essential to understanding how gender works in our society. Making a significant contribution to a long-neglected area of social and cultural inquiry,Delinquents and Debutanteswill be of central interest to those in women's studies, American studies, history, literature, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
Making a Girl into a Scout: Americanizing Scouting for Girls	p. 19
Rate Your Date: Young Women and the Commodification of Depression Era Courtship	p. 40
Truculent and Tractable: The Gendering of Babysitting in Postwar America	p. 61
Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965	p. 83
Little Girls Bound: Costume and Coming of Age in the Sears Catalog 1906-1927	p. 109
"Teena Means Business": Teenage Girls' Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944-1950	p. 134
"Anti-Barbies": The American Girls Collection and Political Ideologies	p. 164
Boys-R-Us: Board Games and the Socialization of Young Adolescent Girls	p. 184
The Flapper and the Chaperone: Cultural Constructions of Identity and Heterosexual Politics among Adolescent Mexican American Women, 1920-1950	p. 199
Fictions of Assimilation: Nancy Drew, Cultural Imperialism, and the Filipina/American Experience	p. 227
"No Place for a Girl Dick": Mabel Maney and the Queering of Girls' Detective Fiction	p. 247
Can Anne Shirley Help "Revive Ophelia"? Listening to Girl Readers	p. 266
Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture	p. 285
Contributors	p. 311
Index	p. 315
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.