How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

Based on an extraordinary array of diaries and letters, this engaging book explores the shifting experiences of adolescent girls in the late nineteenth century. What emerges is a world on the cusp of change. By convention, middle-class girls stayed at home, where their reading exposed them to powerful images of self-sacrificing women. Yet in reality girls in their teens increasingly attended schools—especially newly opened high schools, where they outnumbered boys. There they competed for g...