By the turn of the twentieth century, American youth culture bore little resemblance to the staid rituals of courtship and enclosure, amusement and leisure that had been experienced by people who had undergone their own adolescence during the Victorian age. This left legions of native-born and immigrant parents grappling with how their children were engaging with—and constructing—modernity itself. Many historians of the Progressive Era have ably interrogated how the prominence of unchaperoned boys, the novel presence of young women, and the nascent visibility of queer youth led to reforms of the sort that renegotiated public space, established new norms around proper comportment, and enforced complex networks of surveillance and prohibition in the attempt to curtail a too-exuberant population of teens and young adults. And yet, turn-of-the-century youth culture was not constructed in a vacuum, and young people did not invent modern adolescence as solitary historical subjects. Instead, many young people sought out various routes of informal training within their communities as they fought to gain recognition as political actors, agents of social custom, and participants in the world of consumer capital that gilded the eras before and after the Great War.

Our shared body of research reveals that these new modes of training took an astonishing array of forms: young men who came of age during the Civil War taught one another the art of drag performance and cross-gender play under the guise of philanthropy; young women who were invested in the political fight for suffrage banded together in order to invent new self-defense regimens to protect themselves—and one another—from law enforcement; young women of color who were caught in the cross-hairs of urban vice policing boldly expanded the categories of what was considered decent or acceptable through their cutting-edge sartorial invention; and girlish cinema fans both conformed to industry guidance as to how to enact their passion for film, while simultaneously flexing against convention—and, in so doing, established a formidable bloc of feminine economic power and material consumption.

Though this work focuses on diverse populations and traverses race, gender, and class, the ways that young people sought out and invented new modes of knowledge production grounds our approaches. Informal training networks fomented nodes of culture-change that would reverberate well into the twentieth century—allowing youths to play with the boundaries of model citizenship and forge identities that would have been illegible a generation prior. For the young people blinking out of the Victorian era into the dazzling possibilities of the 20^th century, clever means of seeking out community and educating one another became the key which turned the lock of the modern era— where gender is not always what it seems, and the things we learn from one another within ungovernable webs, create social power.

This panel will be of interest to historians working on the Civil War, the long nineteenth century, queer and gender studies, Progressive Era legal studies, media and film studies, childhood and youth studies, and performance studies.