American Tomboys, 1850–1915

Abstract

Baseballs, not bows. Dungarees, not dresses. Many women remember their youthful tomboy pleasures but reject the term for implying that such pleasures were not typical of girls or women. Renée M. Sentilles, a self-described tomboy, was not interested in becoming a boy, but she did want to become a girl who was “strong, fearless, [and] undaunted” (p. ix). An associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, Sentilles was raised in central Missouri during the 1970s and 1980s, experiencing both the women's liberation movement and its backlash. She found that she was not alone in wanting liberation from stale gender constructs. Sentilles's American Tomboys examines how the term developed after the Civil War and became a transitional identity for girls and women who did not fit the gender assumptions of the time. The term was then adopted as a positive and important transitional stage for white, middle-class girls on their way to becoming the all-American girl and the New Woman. Developed during the period of American empire and eugenics, American nationalism, and white supremacy, the American tomboy represented the fierce independence and freedom of women in American western mythology. Sentilles argues that the tomboy, once moored to later domestic expectations, came to describe the idealized New Woman of the early twentieth century.