Girls Who Persist and Resist: Resistance in Girlhood Studies and Girls’ Literature

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Notes

¹ In response to Thunberg’s tweet, Tate “tweeted out a pompous video in which he tried to reassert his masculinity and status by blathering on in a dressing gown, with a cigar and a pizza box as props” (Solnit). As a result of the picture of the pizza box, Romanian authorities were able to locate and arrest Tate “in connection with appalling allegations of sex trafficking” (Solnit). His need to assert his masculinity following what Solnit describes as “Thunberg’s takedown” led to his arrest.

² The terms have been used consistently in academia since the mid- to late-1990s.

³ As we explained in the introduction to the previous special issue (52.5), girlhood studies scholars acknowledge that there is no universal experience of girlhood. At the same time, their work also necessarily relies on generalizations of girls and girls’ experiences.

⁴ We refer to Mriza’s book Young, Female, & Black; Walkerdine, Lucy, and Melody’s book Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture; de Finney’s work on Indigenous girls, specifically “Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls’ Presencing as Decolonizing Force”; Bent’s essay “Making it UP: Intergenerational Activism and the Ethics of Empowering Girls”; Wright’s book Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century; Walters’ essay “’This is My Story’: The Reclaiming of Girls’ Education Discourses in Malala Yousafzai’s Autobiography”; and Cottom’s essay “Black Girlhood, Interrupted.”

⁵ We recognize that this short summary of the state of girlhood studies is reductive and potentially misleading. A truly nuanced, encompassing history is beyond the scope of this introduction, and thus our purpose here is to stress the extent to which the manner – and agenda – with which girlhood studies scholars have studied girls’ resistance directly informs and influences scholarly perception of that resistance. For a more complete history of girlhood studies, consult Driscoll’s article, “Girls today: girls, girl culture and girl studies”; Anita Harris’s edited collection, All About the Girl: Culture, Power, and Identity; and Dawn H. Currie et al’s book, “Girl Power”: Girls Reinventing Girlhood.

⁶ Sardella-Ayres and Reese provide a helpful overview of this scholarship in their own essay, “Where to from Here? Emerging Conversations on Girls’ Literature and Girlhood,” and we refer interested readers to their article for a more detailed history.

⁷ The gendering of nonfiction texts somewhat predates that of fiction, and thus conduct books such as Eliza Leslie’s edited The American Girl’s Book (1831) or Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies (1833) – which may also be considered an earlier form of girls’ literature – arise before the mid-nineteenth century surge in gendered realistic fiction for younger readers.

⁸ It is worth noting that the actual readership of these texts did not necessarily match this gendered status; as Wadsworth explains, “the boys’ market was seen as including girls, while the girls’ market apparently excluded boys. In fact, it was a common perception that boys required a separate body of literature” (25).

⁹ We refer to Mary Lennox of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden; Meg Murry of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time; Claudia Kincaid of E.L. Konisburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; Esperanza Ortega of Pam Munoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising; Davey Wexler of Judy Blume’s Tiger Eye; and Enola Holmes of Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes Mystery Series.

¹⁰ Abate defines “tomboy taming” as a “process [that] sought to eradicate – ideally by choice, but if necessary by force – a gender-bending girl’s iconoclastic ways and have her adopt more feminine behaviors” (31). She notes that this process was usually imposed as a girl entered adolescence, and that “Together with signaling the end of tomboyism as a lifelong mode of behavior, taming became the defining feature of literary representations of this code of conduct during the 1860s and 1870s” (31).