The Cost of Gendered Rebellion

Abstract

Michelle Ann Abate’s new work on tomboys across US history and culture is a thoughtful and broadly applicable contribution to the field of children’s literature. Her stated goal of showing how tomboys are “unstable and dynamic . . . changing with the political, social and economic events of [their] historical era” (xii) is pursued with care, revealing a history of gendered rebellion bought at a price that Abate eventually concludes has been too high. Abate’s monograph creates a useful history on which to hang further analyses of girls’ culture. Beginning with a reading of E. D. E. N. Southworth’s massively popular novel The Hidden Hand (first serialized in 1859) and making stops every decade or two to check in on the changing role of the tomboy, the book effortlessly encompasses the sentimental mother, New Woman, flapper, punk, and other significant female figures who touted a provocatively mixed set of gendered behaviors. Each chapter centers around a particular text or cultural figure (such as Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, Carson McCullers, and Willa Cather, whose O Pioneers! and My Antonia both receive close readings), providing a clear narrative of the back-and-forth arguments about tomboys and what they have represented. This structure for the book, however, rewards a particular strategy of reading, as chapter after chapter follows the same formula of introduction, analysis of tomboyism within the specified work, and then an analysis of how questions of race were also at stake in tomboys of the period. Because the arc of each chapter is the same, often with similar conclusions about tomboys and their less-than-subversive participation in racist culture, reading the book straight through is not the ideal way to absorb Abate’s historical argument. Rather, the chapters—again, because of their repetitive structure—are at their most useful when considered individually. For someone interested in Little Women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or the films of Tatum O’Neal, for example, chapters on those subjects stand easily on their own and can be referenced that way. Considering that virtually no other project deals with the subject with so wide a scope, this structural choice, which makes for occasion-