A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity ed. by Mary O'Dowd, June Purvis

Abstract

Reviewed by: A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity ed. by Mary O'Dowd, June Purvis Kathryn Gleadle A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity. Edited by Mary O'Dowd and June Purvis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xiii + 266 pp. Cloth $99.99, paper $99.99. This wide-ranging collection, which consists of an introduction and twelve further chapters, originated in a panel on girlhood history that took place at the Congress of the International Committee of Historians held in Jinan, China, in 2015. The fourteen contributors have taken diverse approaches to their task. June Purvis, for example, has experimented with an analytical group biography in her discussion of the political socialization of the Pankhurst sisters, while a fascinating essay by Isobelle Barrett Meyering outlines the ways in which the voices of girls themselves constituted a challenge to twentieth-century sex role socialization theory. Two chapters are jointly authored exercises in comparative history, exploring young women's lives in China and Europe. Alison Mackinnon's contribution also has an ambitious range, incorporating data from the Anglophone world as well as Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and China in her exploration of female higher education. Notwithstanding the temporal and geographical breadth of the book, intellectual coherence has been achieved through attention to the themes of education, work, and life cycle. Treatment of these issues varies considerably, as one might expect. Yan Hu's study of the "Biopolitics of Dai Girls" includes a case study exploring "the girls' perspective," which focuses on two individuals aged nineteen years and twenty-four years—ages that might be considered "adulthood" in some contexts. Hu's approach, rooted in oral interviews, could be characterized as "optimistic" in the emphasis she places on young females' ability to make active choices in employment and migration decisions—part of a "globalisation from below" perspective. Sophie Brouquet, another "optimist," [End Page 497] also points to the freedom and greater mobility enjoyed by pre-marriage teenage girls, this time in early medieval Europe. In contrast, Oluwakemi A. Adesina emphasizes the acute vulnerability of migrant girl hawkers in mid-twentieth century Lagos. A number of chapters tease apart the social categorization of "girlhood" itself. Mary O'Dowd uses psychological literature on adolescence, suggesting the utility of a tripartite approach to female youth—distinguishing between the different stages of "preteen" (from age nine or ten to thirteen); "middle teen" (from ages fourteen to seventeen or eighteen); and "early adulthood" (from the late teens to the early twenties). While O'Dowd argues for the benefit in applying these modern theories of adolescence to earlier historical periods, Ann Waltner and Mary Jo Maynes underline the cultural specificity of conceptions of life course development. In early nineteenth-century China they observe how the resilience of household production and the practice of early female marriage brings into question the whole concept of female "youth." It has, they indicate, "no precise counterpart in Chinese history" (78). Two studies contend that government policy and social reform can play a key role in demarcating the stages of "girlhood" and young womanhood. Asha Islam Nayeem concludes that colonial educational policies (especially the introduction of age-stratified education) enabled the category of "girl" in Bengal. Alison Mackinnon points to the significance of female higher education in shifting the boundaries of "girlhood" and "womanhood" through establishing "new transition points into womanhood." However, whereas Georgeta Nazarska's chapter on Bulgarian girls finds that educational outcomes contributed to wider processes of social modernization (a finding that also resonates with Nayeem's argument), Mackinnon cautions that in many contexts, female education is not necessarily accompanied by progressivism in other areas of social reform. Marja van Tilburg strikes a similarly cautious note in her reading of nineteenth-century Dutch advice books. Although only a small number of texts are cited, van Tilburg's thesis, that the advent of the concept of "adolescence" at the end of the nineteenth century actually narrowed the discursive landscape for young females, is thought provoking. The majority of the chapters appear to emerge from an intellectual engagement with women's studies and women's history rather than from childhood scholarship per se. The latter has, in recent years...