| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. By Jane H. Hunter. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. xviii, 478 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-300-09263-6.)

In this richly documented volume, Jane H. Hunter persuasively argues that the closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of expectations for and of middle-class urban females in their teenage years. Formerly tied to older Victorian notions of home, family, and an ethic of self-sacrifice, these young people increasingly asserted a selfhood that presaged and promoted the emergence of the new woman in the early twentieth century. Empowered by school attendance, the development of peer culture, and the rise of consumer culture, teenage females pushed beyond the boundaries of an older model of restrictive female culture that had demanded of them such things as womanliness, virtue, and purity to assert their place as individuals—albeit gendered ones—temporarily released from submissiveness to explore an emergent heterosocial, competitive world of public coeducational high schools.

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