| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. By Susan K. Cahn. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 375 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02452-6.)

Susan K. Cahn's provocative exploration of adolescent female participation in, and creation of, southern culture in the twentieth century crosses race and class boundaries, revealing imaginative insights into the southern experience. In a trajectory that moves from the transgressiveness of the teenaged flapper through the warriors of school desegregation, Cahn interrogates an amazing array of sources to illustrate how teen girls presented both problem and possibility. Her study proceeds chronologically from the 1920s through the 1950s. Some chapters deconstruct the social policies designed to regulate teenage behavior, while other chapters explore the lived experience of both African American and white teens. The overarching theme of her exploration is sexuality: how expressions of teenage sexuality are defined and managed as social problems, how high schools "tamed" sexual desire by redirecting it into romance and marriage, and how fears of interracial sex co-opted much of the discourse of the civil rights movement. By uncovering adolescent voices through institutional intake forms, diaries, notes in high school yearbooks, letters, and oral histories, Cahn moves us beyond the mere social construction of female adolescence (as important as that is) and into the broad impact that teen girls/women had on the culture at large, a culture in which adult expectations and regulations were influenced, even changed, by the agency of the teens.

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