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Review
| Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920–1945, by Kelly Schrum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 209 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| When Seventeen magazine debuted in September 1944, it sold 400,000 copies in just six days. Rather than just a case of lucky timing, Seventeen succeeded because the rudiments of a teenage girls' culture which had been slowly if unevenly coalescing over the earlier several decades provided an eager—and large—market for a magazine that was targeted exclusively at high school girls. While the emergence of teenagers as a separate social category is often linked to the 1950s, Kelly Schrum argues in Some Wore Bobby Sox that the period from 1920 to 1945 was crucial to the formation of a teenage girls' culture. In her lively, convincing, and well-documented interpretation, which is part of Palgrave Macmillan's Girls' History and Culture Series, the emergence of a teenage girls' culture represents a continuum crossing the twentieth century rather than a sudden emergence after World War II. |
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One of the greatest strengths of Schrum's book is that she documents the ways in which teenage girls innovatively adapted elements from popular culture and consumer culture to suit the specific needs of an emerging girl culture long before manufacturers, advertisers, and sometimes even parents, realized that a distinct teen market existed. Far from being passive consumers or victims of marketing campaigns, in this account girls actively negotiate areas such as fashion, beauty, music and movies (each the subject of a chapter). Schrum does not deny the limits that popular culture and traditional gender roles placed on the possibilities of girls' lives, but in many ways shows that these teenagers of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had more scope to shape their peer culture than do contemporary teenagers, whose adolescence is now caught in an increasingly commercialized and commodified web at ever younger ages. |
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To make the case for the significance of the period from 1920-1945 for the emergence of girls' culture, Schrum draws on a wealth of historical materials. In addition to national newspaper and magazine sources, she uses corporate and advertising material to trace developments in fields such as the beauty and fashion industries. She also mines scholarly and popular writing on areas of popular culture such as music, radio, dance, and the movies. Whenever possible, she tries to tell the story through the voices of individual girls themselves, using diaries, letters, and high school yearbooks. (The diary entries quoted from Beth Twigger are especially trenchant and often hilarious.) Evidence from several longitudinal studies conducted in Berkeley and Oakland in the 1930s and 1940s also offers an evocative window onto girls' culture. While most of the material treats white, middle-class girls, Schrum also uses African-American high school yearbooks and other sources to widen the racial perspective. She also looks at different regions of the country. By the end of the book, readers should be convinced that "a teenage girl in a remote part of Northern California shared enough with a Jewish girl on Staten Island and a farm girl from Indiana to demonstrate a distinct teenage culture in the making" (p. 10). |
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Some Wore Bobby Sox should have multiple uses in the classroom. While of the text is probably too densely written for high school usage, it could certainly be used in an upperlevel college class. Teachers who actually are teaching teenagers will be able to mine the book for anecdotes and stories to help give their students a sense that being a teenager (especially a female one) has a long and fascinating history. The book is also richly illustrated with photographs, advertisements, excerpts from yearbooks, and pages from diaries. Reproductions of selected sources could provide the basis for an interesting in-class discussion of what is different about being a teenager now compared to the years between 1920 and 1945, as well as how much is the same. |
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As seen by the popularity of books by historians such as Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Miriam Forman-Brunell, and Susan Douglas, among others, as well as the enormously successful American Girl phenomenon, the topic of girls' history and culture is one which reaches a broad audience. By necessity such scholarship is interdisciplinary, which means that in addition to the fields of women's studies and women's history, the recreation of girls' culture tells us much about such significant areas as the growth of consumer culture and the changing impact of popular culture on American life. Kelly Schrum's book can now be placed on the growing bookshelf of titles that treat this significant and wideranging historical topic. |
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| Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University |
Susan Ware |
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