| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930. By Crista DeLuzio. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xii, 330 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8018-8699-7.)

In 1966, the founders of the National Organization of Women defended "the proposition that women, first and foremost, are human beings." Even today, that proposition is not obvious. Decades of successful activism to overcome bias underline how enduring that bias remains. Can women be authentic individuals or credible representatives of universal experiences if they persist as a class defined by gender difference? Crista DeLuzio's book presents scientific debates about adolescence from 1830 to 1930 as significant contests about whether children's development could or should equip them for gender equality and freedom. Through the figure of the female adolescent, new approaches to human development expressed widespread anxieties about the changing lives of girls, boys, men, and women. Although the sensibilities of Victorian and Progressive developmentalists seem antiquated now, according to DeLuzio they "continue to inform both scientific knowledge and broader cultural common sense about the teenage child" (p. 236).

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