The Tomboy Tradition: Taming Adolescent Ambition from 1869 to 2018

Abstract

This article argues that the "tomboy taming" seen in classic tomboy texts such as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869) and Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (1872) is carried into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through texts including the Walt Disney Company's The Little Mermaid (1989), Mean Girls (2004), and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-10). Each of these stories begins with a tomboy character's enunciation of her wild adolescent dreams and then ends when she gives up those dreams for a more traditionally feminine reality.