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Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930
In this groundbreaking study, Crista DeLuzio asks how scientific experts conceptualized female adolescence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting figures like G. Stanley Hall and Margaret Mead and casting her net across the disciplines of biology, psychology, and anthropology, DeLuzio examines the process by which youthful femininity in America became a contested cultural category.

Challenging accepted views that professionals "invented" adolescence during this period to understand the typical experiences of white middle-class boys, DeLuzio shows how early attempts to reconcile that conceptual category with "femininity" not only shaped the social science of young women but also forced child development experts and others to reconsider the idea of adolescence itself.

DeLuzio’s provocative work permits a fuller understanding of how adolescence emerged as a "crisis" in female development and offers insight into why female adolescence remains a social and cultural preoccupation even today.

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Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930
In this groundbreaking study, Crista DeLuzio asks how scientific experts conceptualized female adolescence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting figures like G. Stanley Hall and Margaret Mead and casting her net across the disciplines of biology, psychology, and anthropology, DeLuzio examines the process by which youthful femininity in America became a contested cultural category.

Challenging accepted views that professionals "invented" adolescence during this period to understand the typical experiences of white middle-class boys, DeLuzio shows how early attempts to reconcile that conceptual category with "femininity" not only shaped the social science of young women but also forced child development experts and others to reconsider the idea of adolescence itself.

DeLuzio’s provocative work permits a fuller understanding of how adolescence emerged as a "crisis" in female development and offers insight into why female adolescence remains a social and cultural preoccupation even today.

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Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930

Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930

by Crista DeLuzio
Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930
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Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930

Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930

by Crista DeLuzio

Overview

In this groundbreaking study, Crista DeLuzio asks how scientific experts conceptualized female adolescence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting figures like G. Stanley Hall and Margaret Mead and casting her net across the disciplines of biology, psychology, and anthropology, DeLuzio examines the process by which youthful femininity in America became a contested cultural category.

Challenging accepted views that professionals "invented" adolescence during this period to understand the typical experiences of white middle-class boys, DeLuzio shows how early attempts to reconcile that conceptual category with "femininity" not only shaped the social science of young women but also forced child development experts and others to reconsider the idea of adolescence itself.

DeLuzio’s provocative work permits a fuller understanding of how adolescence emerged as a "crisis" in female development and offers insight into why female adolescence remains a social and cultural preoccupation even today.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801886997
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 09/23/2007
Series: New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
Pages: 344
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Crista DeLuzio is an assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. ''Laws of Life'': Developing Youth in Antebellum America
2. ''Persistence'' versus ''Periodicity'': From Puberty to Adolescence in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Debate over Coeducation
3. From ''Budding Girl'' to ''Flapper Americana Novissima'': G. Stanley Hall's Psychology of Female Adolescence
4. ''New Girls for Old'': Psychology Constructs the Normal Adolescent Girl
5. Adolescent Girlhood Comes of Age? The Emergence of the Culture Concept in American Anthropology
Epilogue
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

Kriste Lindenmeyer

DeLuzio exhibits a masterful understanding of the range of ideas shaping concepts of female adolescence in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century... The most comprehensive study of the topic to date.

— Kriste Lindenmeyer, President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, author of The Greatest Generation Grows Up: Childhood in 1930s America

James Marten

It is interdisciplinary history at its best and, I might add, 'gendered' history at its finest... It makes an original contribution to the nearly constant struggle by historians (and parents, for that matter) to define, explain, and understand the construction of youth and adolescence in American life.

— James Marten, Marquette University, author of The Children's Civil War

Paula Fass

A thoroughly researched and arresting synthesis of the medico-social views of female adolescence over the crucial period 1830--1930, when American views of adolescence were formulated. DeLuzio's scholarship here is exemplary and she has chosen and assembled the important texts and analyzed them with great insight.

— Paula Fass, University of California, Berkeley, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society

Julia Grant

A major contribution to many overlapping fields of scholarship -- the history of childhood, women, developmental psychology, and education. It displays remarkable erudition and promises to substantially deepen our understanding of the contribution of social scientists in constructing the representation of adolescent girls in the past two centuries.

— Julia Grant, Michigan State University, author of Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Parents

From the Publisher

A major contribution to many overlapping fields of scholarship—the history of childhood, women, developmental psychology, and education. It displays remarkable erudition and promises to substantially deepen our understanding of the contribution of social scientists in constructing the representation of adolescent girls in the past two centuries.
—Julia Grant, Michigan State University, author of Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Parents

It is interdisciplinary history at its best and, I might add, 'gendered' history at its finest . . . It makes an original contribution to the nearly constant struggle by historians (and parents, for that matter) to define, explain, and understand the construction of youth and adolescence in American life.
—James Marten, Marquette University, author of The Children’s Civil War

A thoroughly researched and arresting synthesis of the medico-social views of female adolescence over the crucial period 1830–1930, when American views of adolescence were formulated. DeLuzio's scholarship here is exemplary and she has chosen and assembled the important texts and analyzed them with great insight.
—Paula Fass, University of California, Berkeley, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society

DeLuzio exhibits a masterful understanding of the range of ideas shaping concepts of female adolescence in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century . . . The most comprehensive study of the topic to date.
—Kriste Lindenmeyer, President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, author of The Greatest Generation Grows Up: Childhood in 1930s America

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