Girls' History: History of Girls
Contributing Editors: Miriam Forman-Brunell and Ilana Nash
This column — Girls' History: History of Girls — aims to serve the needs of students and scholars with a special interest in the history of girls, girls' cultures, and girls' studies. We are eager to include information that will be useful to others such as upcoming conferences with panels on girls' topics as well as girls' topics on conference panels. It is our hope that new opportunities will be generated as we share such sources and resources as web links, information about new films and videos, and so forth. We very much look forward to facilitating a broader dialogue about girls and history and promoting the development of a community of students and scholars across disciplines.
Call for Papers
New Publications
Websites
CALL FOR PAPERS
Transforming Spaces: Girlhood, Agency and Power
.....November 21-23, 2003 in Montreal, Quebec....
Proposals due July 30, 2003
Conference on Girls and Girlhoods celebrating the launch of POWER Camp National/Filles d'Action
Hosted by POWER Camp National/Filles d'Action in partnership with Concordia University, McGill University and the Alliance of Five Research Centres on Violence Against Women. The Transforming Spaces conference is funded in part by Status of Women Canada
Participate in a ground-breaking conference event on girls and girlhood that brings together the diverse experiences and vast knowledge of girls and young women, community practitioners, grassroots activists, service providers, academics, educators and policy makers in a space devoted to communication, collaboration and change in the social realm.
The goal of this conference is to integrate a broad range of experiences with and approaches to Transforming Spaces and to address four inter-connected sub-themes: RESISTANCE, VIOLENCE, SEXUALITIES, and IDENTITIES as they relate specifically to young women and girls.
Additional Information about the Conference, Guidelines for Submitting Abstracts, and Registration Information
~ ~ ~ ~
PUBLICATIONS
NEW!!! Girls' History and Culture Book Series (Palgrave/St. Martin’s)
Once perceived by academics as insipid and insignificant, girls were widely judged as undeserving of serious scrutiny, critical analysis, and hence, scholarship. Recent years have seen a rise in scholarly inquiry concerning girls, as the complexity and significance of their social and cultural positions have garnered academic attention. Spurred on by the path-breaking works of feminist scholars, girls’ history and culture has emerged as a dominant conceptual model and cutting-edge field of study. No longer relegated to the margins, Girls Studies is working to bring girls history and girls' culture to the fore.
In its commitment to recognizing and supporting new scholarly fields, Palgrave, the academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press, is pleased to announce a new series: Girls' History and Culture. The series aims to address a broad range of topics relevant to girls' lived experiences as both agents and subjects of their larger society.
The first work to be published in the series is by Kelly Schrum, "Some Wore Bobby Socks: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1950."
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Exploring the ways in which girls are both similar to and distinct from women
Demonstrating the variety of ways in which girls have been significant to American history, culture, and society
Addressing critically the dominant scholarly modes, models, methodologies and widespread assumptions about girls
Complicating girls’ experience through new research on race, class, ethnicity, region, sexual orientation, and age (e.g. preteens and younger girls)
This series is committed to expanding the availability of girl-focused texts for classroom use while also expanding Girls Studies to a more general audience. To this end, manuscripts written for a trade audience will be welcome along with those aimed at an academic audience, particularly undergraduate and graduate students and teachers. Completed manuscripts should be approximately 90,000 words long, and may include between 8-20 black and white illustrations.
Please submit a proposal that includes a detailed description of the project and its intended audience, a table of contents, and a CV to the series editor, Miriam Forman-Brunell, Department of History, University of Missouri, 5100 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64113 (Forman-BrunellM@umkc.edu)
NEW!!! Jane H. Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (Yale University Press, 2002)
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 school, where they competed for grades and honor directly against male classmates. Before and after school they joined a public world beyond adult supervision—strolling city streets, flagging down male friends, visiting, soda fountains. Poised between childhood and adulthood, no longer behaving with the reserve of young ladies, adolescent females sparred with classmates and ventured new identities. In leaving school, female students left an institution that had treated them more equally than any other they would encounter in the course of their lives. Jane Hunter shows that they often went home in sadness and regret. But over the long term, their school experiences as girls foreshadowed both turn-of-the-century emergence of the independent New woman and the birth of adolescence itself.
~ ~ ~ ~
WEBSITE REVIEWS
Our two websites this time both pertain to the Second World War.
Poster Girls of World War II, at http://www.geocities.com/postergirls_of_worldwar2/frame.htm, sounds like a description of a pin-up girls site, but actually the posters displayed are government propaganda – from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, and the Soviet Union – using images of young women or girls. The most extensive collection of images are from the United States, and they come in several categories, including Health (see sample image), Military Service, Homefront, and Employment, among many others. There are a few similar posters on the website of the National Archive and Records Administration (www.nara.gov), but the Poster Girls of World War II has a much more extensive selection.
PBS.org hosts a site for a documentary they once aired, Daring to Resist, about three Jewish teenage girls (from Holland, Hungary, and Poland) who performed acts of resistance against the Nazis. As one of them says, When it was time to be hugging a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle. Although the film can be purchased (PBS provides a link to the film’s distributor, the excellent group Women Make Movies), the pages PBS provides here are sufficiently informative by themselves—a full transcript is included under the link called Teacher’s Guide. Check out the site at: http://www.pbs.org/daringtoresist/synopsis.htm
