Guest Editor's Introduction: The History of Girlhoods and the Girling of Work, Play, and Performance

Abstract

Guest Editor's IntroductionThe History of Girlhoods and the Girling of Work, Play, and Performance Miriam Forman-Brunell (bio) Girls and young women—whether working on city streets or in houses, fields, or the factories that produce most of the world's consumer goods—constitute a flexible, vulnerable, undervalued, and unseen labor force critical to the global economy in the twenty-first century.1 Also unseen and unheard in most history courses today are the girls of different races, classes, ages, genders, ethnicities, abilities, sexualities, and nationalities who have spent their girlhoods training and toiling the world over during different historical periods. Girls are similarly marginalized in most college-level documentary source collections, history textbooks, and field-defining historiographic anthologies. What accounts for the widespread invisibility of girls in the past? Along with narrow definitions of "work" and "play" are deeply engrained assumptions that "girlhood"—as static, uniform, universal, and transhistorical—is historically irrelevant. Customary beliefs about girlhood have stubbornly persisted despite much evidence to the contrary. Since the coalescence of Girls' Studies in the 1990s, historians as well as literature, communications, education, and other scholars have demonstrated that girlhoods—broadly constituted to include cultural constructions and lived realities—are more accurately understood to be heterogeneous, inclusive, intersectional, discursive, contested, contingent, and very fluid. While groundbreaking research has resulted in more complete understandings of girlhood and girls' socialization, education, sexualities, consumption, activism, representation, and reception, far less attention has been paid to investigating the ways in which girls' production, play, and performances are integral to girlhoods.2 What is distinctive about girls' work, what they do, where they perform it, how, and why? What is specific to girls' training and tools, skills and sensibilities, expectations, aspirations, imaginations, inspirations, insecurities, [End Page 331] and identities? How have expectations of girlhood influenced how girls' work is practiced in play? In what ways have girls' performances of girlhood become a source of financial wealth, and for whom? How have discourses about girlhoods generated obstacles to girls' employment? In what ways have contested girlhood ideals informed girls' workplace resistance? What economic systems have benefited from girlhood and girls' labor? Expanding the scope of girls' work to include girls' play cultures brings into focus a panorama of girlhoods, as detailed in the original articles of this special JHCY issue on the girling of work. The essays, which draw upon a wide range of critically interpreted sources—girls' books, scrapbooks, oral histories and organizational records, smart toys—paint an involute picture of complex interactions among changing, colliding, and contested constructions of girlhoods and girls' everyday lives from the late nineteenth century to the present. Bringing to light the relationship of girls' play to girls' work are the many historical, fictional, artifactual, animated, digital, and aspirational inhabitants of girlhood cultures. Standing at the intersection of different historical subfields—from rural to urban history, colonial to postcolonial, girls' culture to sexuality studies—the articles feature a diversity of American and African girlhoods, as well as those from the former British empire. Together, the essays on girls' household labor, reproductive labor, street work, emotional/care work, aesthetic and immaterial labor, "playbor," and play and performance cultures illuminate some of the major ways in which girlhood and work are fluid historical categories that, by creating and maintaining the other, are mutually constituted. How girlhoods have been lived, imagined, and deployed account for so much of what is distinctive to girls' lives and the "girling" of their work in different periods and places, cultures and continents, as we shall see. MANY GIRLHOODS The seven essays in this issue that cover three continents in as many centuries reveal the varieties of cultural constructions and lived realities that constituted not one girlhood but many—in Africa, America, Great Britain and its colonies, and in girls' cultures. Whether far apart in space and time or existing concurrently, girlhoods that shared similarities also differed in regard to expectations of work girls should and should not do. For example, German, Scandinavian, and Eastern European immigrant families, according to Megan Birk, "were more likely to depend on their daughters and girls to provide labor out on the farm, whereas other groups believed using girls for farm...