Girls' History and Culture Reader

Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor of history at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the author of Babysitter: An American History and other works. Leslie Paris is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia and the author of Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp.

• Credits   ixIntroduction   11. The Life Cycle of the Female Slave   15Deborah Gray White2. "Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated": Female Education in an Antebellum Southern Family   31Anya Jabour3. "Oh I Love Mother, I Love Her Power": Shaker Spirit Possession and the Performance of Desire"   69Susan McCully4. Women on the Town: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution   80Christine Stansell5. "If We Get the Girls, We Get the Race": Missionary Education of Native American Girls   104Carol Devens6. "Rosebloom and Pure White," Or So It Seemed   120Mary Niall Mitchell7. The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America   149Carroll Smith-Rosenberg8. Psychosomatic Illness in History: The "Green Sickness" among Nineteenth-Century Adolescent Girls   179Nancy M. Theriot9. The Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century   199Anne Scott MacLeod10. The Politics of Dollhood in Nineteenth-Century America   222Miriam Forman-Brunell11. Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America   242Jane H. Hunter12. Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text   270Barbara SichermanContributors   301Index   305

"This sparkling reader defines the field of girls' history and gathers its emerging canon. There are no better scholars than Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris to have a pulse on the scholarship, anticipate its future directions, and provide a model of academic collaboration."--Eileen Boris, coeditor of The Practice of U.S. Women's History: Narratives, Dialogues, and Intersections "Some of the finest scholarship in the field. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice