The school setting embraces, and in fact requires, diverse types of girls who ultimately contribute to the development of the collective female identity. In the United States, for example, stories featuring the experiences of Marjorie Dean and her school mates revealed how groups of girls navigated the treacherous waters of adolescence. The series followed the title character through four years of high school (as well as to college and beyond). It introduced readers to her friends and foes and offered lessons about what behavior was appropriate in the context of the school community. The girls of Sanford High, Marjorie Dean’s school, would have felt quite at home with the Cliff House girls in the British School Friend Annuals. They all seem to spend less time in academic pursuits than in organizing social events, engaging in athletic competition, and managing day to day interpersonal dramas. The homosocial community of the girls’ school allowed for the performance of multiple roles that served as training for women’s place in the adult world.
The genre of schoolgirl fiction has been addressed within literary studies. However, historians of women have paid little attention to these seductive tales of midnight feasts, schoolgirl spats, and jolly hockey sticks. The fictions seemingly bear little resemblance to the education actually experienced by either American or British girls, yet the undoubted popularity of the stories and the way they captured the popular imagination demands further consideration. In embarking upon a transnational comparative analysis our project seeks to move beyond identifying the formulaic nature of these stories. The longevity of a stable feminine ideal, during a period of dramatic social and political challenges in the English speaking world, emerges with closer reading.
This poster introduces some of the key themes of our collaborative research on teenage girls’ fiction published in the US and UK between 1910 and 1960. These under researched yet rich sources provide us with an opportunity to examine the cultural constructions of female identity in popular literature. The transnational nature of the representation of middle-class girlhood across this time period reflects a nostalgic search for stability in an increasingly uncertain and unsettled world. That they were widely read demonstrates the powerful nature of what might otherwise appear to be a somewhat superficial genre.