Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | F | Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources

Girls' Studies and Girls' History: Bridging Disciplinary Divides.

Article Excerpt
Susan K. Cahn, SEXUAL RECKONINGS: SOUTHERN GIRLS IN A TROUBLING AGE. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 384p. notes, index. $29.95, ISBN 978-0674024526.

Susan A. Miller, GROWING GIRLS: THE NATURAL ORIGINS OF GIRLS' ORGANIZATIONS. (Rutgers series in childhood studies.) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 270p. notes, bibl. index. pap., $23.95, ISBN 978-0813540641.

When I embarked upon a dissertation about African-American girls in Great Migration--era Chicago, I was fortunate to discover a framework besides African-American history and women's studies in which to situate my project. Girls' studies gave me and the project a space in which to use age as a category of analysis. It informed how I understood girlhood as both a life stage and a social construction, and I found other scholars interested in taking girls' lives seriously.

Although girls' studies has been an invaluable field and community for my work, the historian in me often wonders: What about girls' history? Can girls' studies help us do girls' history? Popular culture, sociology, psychology, communication studies, and feminist theory are all represented strongly in girls' studies literature, yet girls' history has yet to make as strong an impact in the emerging canon of girls' studies.

Two recent books, though, are making important inroads in girls' studies by providing excellent models for how to chronicle the history of girls and girlhood through interdisciplinary methods and a rigorous use of archives. Susan Cahn's Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age and Susan Miller's Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls' Organizations help to broaden the discussion of girls as historical actors, as well as demonstrating how girlhood is also a political terrain upon which our nation has grappled with social anxieties and changes.

Sexual Reckonings is a superb model for girls' social history. In ten excellently crafted chapters, Cahn brings the tensions and concerns of the New South and its girls to life. The book convincingly demonstrates how Black and White girls grappled with economic, social, and educational changes and disruptions, from the industrializing 1920s to the battle over school integration after 1954's Brown vs. Board of Education decision. For girls' historians, the project is instructive in its use of sources, its emphasis on incorporating girls' voices throughout the text, and its sophisticated attention to how race and class shape girlhood.

Cahn's commitment to interdisciplinarity permeates the book and is visible in her use of literary, historical, and cultural source material to recreate turn-of-the-century Southern society. She uses this model from the start: Her masterful introduction presents the Southern dilemmas surrounding girlhood through...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!