Overview

In this groundbreaking study, Crista DeLuzio asks how scientific experts conceptualized female adolescence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting figures like G. Stanley Hall and Margaret Mead and casting her net across the disciplines of biology, psychology, and anthropology, DeLuzio examines the process by which youthful femininity in America became a contested cultural category. Challenging accepted views that professionals ""invented"" adolescence during this period to understand the typical experiences of white middle-class boys, DeLuzio shows how early attempts to reconcile that conceptual category with ""femininity"" not only shaped the social science of young women but also forced child development experts and others to reconsider the idea of adolescence itself. DeLuzio's provocative work permits a fuller understanding of how adolescence emerged as a ""crisis"" in female development and offers insight into why female adolescence remains a social and cultural preoccupation even today.

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9780801886997

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Reviews

DeLuzio... breaks new ground in her assiduous examination of the relationship between science and society by using age and gender as dynamically connected categories of analysis... A broad cross-section of scholars is likely to find DeLuzio's 'essay on sources' particularly valuable for future research. -- Miriam Forman-Brunell Bulletin of the History of Medicine Deluzio skillfully weaves together social history and the intellectual history of science to show how ideas about age, drawn from nineteenth century views of social progress, intertwined with explanations of gender differences to construct the adolescent girl... This complex book will be the standard reference for those who want to know the scientific origins of modern perspectives on adolescent development. -- Kathleen W. Jones Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought addresses historians of childhood, medicine, and human science, but scholars of women and gender will also find it valuable. -- Ellen Herman Journal of American History

A major contribution to many overlapping fields of scholarship - the history of childhood, women, developmental psychology, and education. - Julia Grant, Michigan State University, author of Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Parents A thoroughly researched and arresting synthesis of the medico-social views of female adolescence over the crucial period 1830-1930 when American views of adolescence were formulated. - Paula Fass, University of California, Berkeley, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society DeLuzio exhibits a masterful understanding of the range of ideas shaping concepts of female adolescence in America from the mid-nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. - Kriste Lindenmeyer, President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, author of The Greatest Generation Grows Up: Childhood in 1930s America

Author Information

Crista DeLuzio is an assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University.

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