Girls, Tets, and Cultures

Dawn Currie ponders the second-wave feminists’ ambivalence to “femininity.” On one hand, teen magazines only feature photos of attractive young girls, never “real” girls who have acne, bad hair, crooked teeth, and the slightly overweight figures typical of girls who are going through puberty. Kerry Mallon uses the book “Secrets” as an example of girls’ survival, dealing with an abusive stepfather. 

Other contributors to this text discuss 19^th century books for girls, designed to teach them manners and etiquette. The discussion here is not about the effectiveness of the books, but for whose benefit they were. Did girls read them to prepare themselves to please their husbands? Was it to prepare them for a male-dominated economy?

Whatever the girls are reading will reflect the norms and more of the time when they were written. There were times when there weren’t many careers for women, other than teacher, nurse, and secretary. The average “girl” book of the 1970’s probably didn’t encourage them to have serious careers. Others, like Go Ask Alice, considered independent girls to be “bad” and treated the protagonist’s drug use as bad behavior, not a health problem. It was anti-divorce as well.