Description
Book SynopsisA pioneering, field-defining collection of essential texts exploring girlhood in the nineteenth century
Trade Review"This sparkling reader defines the field of girls' history and gathers its emerging canon. There are no better scholars than Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris to have a pulse on the scholarship, anticipate its future directions, and provide a model of academic collaboration."--Eileen Boris, coeditor of
The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Dialogues, and Intersections"Some of the finest scholarship in the field. . . . Highly recommended."--
ChoiceTable of ContentsCredits ix Introduction 1
1. The Life Cycle of the Female Slave 15
Deborah Gray White 2. "Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated": Female Education in an Antebellum Southern Family 31
Anya Jabour 3. "Oh I Love Mother, I Love Her Power": Shaker Spirit Possession and the Performance of Desire" 69
Susan McCully 4. Women on the Town: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution 80
Christine Stansell 5. "If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race": Missionary Education of Native American Girls 104
Carol Devens 6. "Rosebloom and Pure White," Or So It Seemed 120
Mary Niall Mitchell 7. The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America 149
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg 8. Psychosomatic Illness in History: The "Green Sickness" among Nineteenth-Century Adolescent Girls 179
Nancy M. Theriot 9. The
Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century 199
Anne Scott MacLeod 10. The Politics of Dollhood in Nineteenth-Century America 222
Miriam Forman-Brunell 11. Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America 242
Jane H. Hunter 12. Reading
Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text 270
Barbara Sicherman Contributors 301
Index 305
