TY - JOUR TI - Boyhood for girls DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3JH3JZJ PY - 2012 AB - This dissertation argues that tomboys are a crucial link in the relationship between heterosexuality and normative gender expression as they took shape between 1900 and 1940. Tomboys of the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States occupied the frontlines of major transformations in the histories of feminism, youth culture, sexuality, and the body. By 1920, New Women and political radicals had won significant opportunities for boyish girls to continue to be somewhat masculine into adulthood, such as through education, activism, athletics, and work. At the same time, an increasingly autonomous urban working-class youth culture demanded a measure of gender conformity for adolescent girls and boys who wished to be eligible for heterosexual activity. Although historians often view feminism and the growth of youth culture as liberatory, adolescent tomboys knew they were contradictory. Liberal adults, including many feminists, advised them to “be themselves,” but tomboys’ peers ostracized them from the world of dating and popularity when they remained boyish. For many pubescent tomboys, changes in the body accompanied not only demands that they become feminine, but also a realignment of emotional life. Tomboys had to learn to see boys not as trusty comrades but as potential dates, and they had to look to girls, whom they had often scorned, for close friendships. In fact, as children many tomboys had believed that their similarity to boys extended right to their very bodies: they acknowledged that girl bodies and boy bodies were anatomically different, but they detected enough similarities that differences did not matter—a belief that this dissertation calls affinity. In fact, some tomboys only learned to see their bodies as female for the first time at menarche. The history of tomboyism thus coincides with the history of the body and sexuality. By 1940, women who had grown up as tomboys knew that the bargain for the female body’s heterosexual normality depended on relinquishing the pleasures of tomboyism, including the sense that their bodies somehow resembled boys’. The historical tomboy body discloses affective contradictions between the freedoms promised by feminists and sexually adventurous youth alike. KW - History KW - Tomboys--United States--History--20th century KW - Sex role in children--United States LA - eng ER -