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
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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.
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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, 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
