What is an American girl, and how does she develop into an American woman? This course will explore answers by examining American ideals for girls and ideologies about them in a range of influential classic American novels written for girls. The ways in which American culture creates or endorses certain traits in girls, sometimes contradictory ones, will be examined. 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, the American girl has grown 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. Students should purchase (or, in some cases) find online the following (N.B. Five of these books are very short—an afternoon’s read).
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868-9) AVAILABLE ONLINE
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) Technically, a Canadian author, but very much a part of the world that shaped the U.S.
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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