Female adolescence in American scientific thought, 1830-1930

Author(s)

    • DeLuzio, Crista

Bibliographic Information

Female adolescence in American scientific thought, 1830-1930

Crista DeLuzio

(New studies in American intellectual and cultural history)

Johns Hopkins University Press, c2007

  • : hbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-322) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

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

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