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What is an American girl, and how does she develop into an American woman? This course will explore some answers to these questions by examining American ideals for girls and ideologies about them in a range of influential classic American novels written for girls and published between the mid-19th century and the present. The ways in which American culture creates or endorses certain traits in girls, sometimes contradictory ones —from the cult of domesticity with its perfect housewives and submissive mothers to the relative independence of the pioneer woman, from the good girl of the 1950s to the individualistic girl of the 1960s and after, influenced by Second and Third-Wave feminism—have helped the American girl to grow up in unexpected ways. Why she is who she is, how she differs from girls from other nations, is the topic to be investigated in this course. N.B. At least four of these books are very short—an afternoon’s read.
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868-9)
- Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House In The Big Woods (1932) OR Rachel Field, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929). If you choose Hitty, be sure to get the unexpurgated edition (Aladdin paperbacks)
- Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
- Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy (1940)
- Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1943) OR Jessamyn West, Cress Delahanty (1945)
- Beverly Cleary, Beezus and Ramona (1955)
- Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (1964)
- Judy Blume, Forever (1975)
- Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (1999)
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