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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Kelly Schrum. Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920–1945. (Girls' History & Culture Book Series.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. Pp. xii, 209. $29.95.
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| Over the past fifteen years or so, scholars in numerous disciplines have begun to combine the interests of women's studies, popular culture, and youth history to form the fledgling field of girls' studies. Kelly Schrum's book joins a growing conversation about the experiences, social roles, and identity formation of American teenage girls by examining their relationships to popular and commercial culture. Focusing on the interwar period of the twentieth century, Schrum draws from a creative array of evidence: institutional sources, such as longitudinal studies conducted by psychologists and industrial or educational surveys of consumer patterns, are augmented with material from popular magazines and newspapers, photographs and illustrations from high school yearbooks, and a handful of girls' diaries preserved in archives. She employs this original evidence to prove that, through their uses of popular culture and their peer rituals, adolescent girls initiated America's understandings of "the teenager" as a distinct social category. In so doing, girls also negotiated the various identity positions—as individuals, peer-group members, and developing adults—with which they struggled in their adolescent years. |
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