This book examines the history of female adolescent sexuality in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the 1960s. The book analyzes both adult perceptions of female adolescent sexuality and the experiences of female adolescents themselves. It examines what girls knew (or thought they knew) about sex at different points in time, girls' sexual experiences, girls' ideas about love and romance, female adolescent beauty culture, and the influence of popular culture on female adolescent sexuality. It also examines the ways in which adults responded to female adolescent sexuality and the efforts of adults to either control or encourage girls' interest in sexual topics, dating, girls' participation in beauty culture, and their education on sexual topics. The book describes a trajectory along which female adolescents went from being perceived as inherently innocent and essentially asexual to being regarded (and feared) as primarily sexual in nature.
Ann Kordas is professor in the Humanities Department at Johnson & Wales University.
Introduction: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience Chapter 1: "Sugar, Molasses...And All Things Sweet": Female Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Chapter 2: Movie Palaces and Chop Suey Places: The Transformation of Female Adolescent Sexuality in Turn of the Century America Chapter 3: When Angelina Bobbed Her Hair: Female Adolescent Sexuality in the 1920s Chapter 4: "God, a Good Job, and Deanna Durbin": Female Adolescent Sexuality During the Great Depression Chapter 5: "He's Cute and He Doesn't Smell": Female Adolescent Romance and Sexuality in World War II and the Postwar Period
In this engaging study, Ann Kordas deftly traces the ways in which meanings and experiences of female adolescent sexuality took shape in relation to larger currents of social, economic, and cultural change from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early 1960s. Kordas establishes that there was no shortage of parental anxiety, expert advice, and cultural fascination regarding girls' sexual behavior during this 100-year period. She also listens intently to the rich and varied voices of girls themselves, offering fresh insight into what girls from diverse backgrounds thought, felt, desired, and experienced when navigating a sexual and romantic terrain marked by ever-shifting measures of pleasure and danger, possibility and constraint. -- Crista DeLuzio, Southern Methodist University In this comprehensive synthesis of adolescent girls' sexuality in the United States, Ann Kordas is especially adept at incorporating experiences of girls of color into an overarching narrative. Drawing on examples from popular culture as well as girls' own actions and writings, this is a must read for historians of girlhood and sexuality. -- Nicholas L. Syrett, author of American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States
