Title How young ladies became girls : the Victorian origins of American girlhood / Jane H. Hunter

Published New Haven : Yale University Press, [2002] ©2002

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Description 1 online resource (xvi, 478 pages) : illustrations Contents Daughters' lives and the work of the middle-class home -- Writing and self-culture : the contest over the meaning of literacy -- Reading and the development of taste -- Houses, families, rooms of one's own -- Interiors : bodies, souls, moods -- Competitive practices : sentiment and scholarship in secondary schools -- High school culture : gender and generation -- Friendship, fun, and the city streets -- Commencement : leaving school, going home, growing up -- New girls, new women Summary Publisher's description: Based on an extraordinary array of diaries and letters, this engaging book explores the shifting experiences of adolescent girls in the late nineteenth century. What emerges is a world on the cusp of change. By convention, middle-class girls stayed at home, where their reading exposed them to powerful images of self-sacrificing women. Yet in reality girls in their teens increasingly attended schools--especially newly opened high schools, where they outnumbered boys. There they competed for grades and honor directly against male classmates. Before and after school they joined a public world beyond adult supervision-- strolling city streets, flagging down male friends, visiting soda fountains. Poised between childhood and adulthood, no longer behaving with the reserve of ₃young ladies, ₄ adolescent females sparred with classmates and ventured new identities. In leaving school, female students left an institution that had treated them more equally than any other they would encounter in the course of their lives. Jane Hunter shows that they often went home in sadness and regret. But over the long term, their school experiences as "girls" foreshadowed both the turn-of-the-century emergence of the independent "New Woman" and the birth of adolescence itself Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 463-466) and index Notes Print version record Subject Middle class -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century Women -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century Girls -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century Home economics -- Northeastern States -- History -- 19th century Girls Home economics Middle class Women Mittelstand Soziale Situation Frau Meisjes. Jongeren. Northeastern States USA -- Nordoststaaten Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780300157284 0300157282

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