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This chapter examines mid- to late-nineteenth-century Victorian middle-class concerns with taste—the child’s taste in particular—and how this notion drew on and wrestled with virtually the same constellation of tensions evident in the struggles with depravity and salvation regarding the Protestant child. Ever-present and ever-looming child malleability imperilled social reproduction and implicated mothers as those responsible not only for the material well-being of children but, more importantly, for their appropriate disposition toward things and the world of things. Both cases, in this sense, worked toward fashioning a moral architecture whereby the making of social persons, and of consequent subjectivities, guided the counsel imparted on the pages of periodicals. By examining discourses regarding children and taste—particularly, but not exclusive, girls’ taste—it is argued that taste operated in a pedagogical register thought to educate and direct the child toward proper objects and a proper relationship to objects. In this way, taste emplaced materiality directly into the moral education of bourgeois children and offered another way to theorize or otherwise configure the interiority of the child—i.e., to discern and determine the shape and consequences of their wants and desires.

This chapter explores pornographic constructions of female sexual agency through the character of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. These films use the Alice narrative to play out fantasies of womanly sexual authority through humor and sadomasochism. These films constitute recuperative projects that rescue Alice from her pawn status and position her as object, subject, and author within the pornographic text. I demonstrate the ways in which cultural understandings of the Alice stories are used by pornographic filmmakers to depict Wonderlands as joyful fantasy spaces for re-visionings of the normative and for developing and directing a particular pornographic female sexual subjectivity.

France has recently produced a series of films by female auteurs that offer a close and sympathetic engagement with girls. This chapter concentrates on two films whose titles draw attention to their interest in the feelings and experiences of girlhood: 17 Filles (Delphine and Muriel Coulin, 2011) and Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014). The directors, through location shooting, their local geographical knowledge, and non-professional actors drawn from the area where the films are set, place their explorations of girlhood into highly specific locations. Such geographical specificity produces and evaluates a distinctive approach towards girls and girl culture, which is usually understood in a more homogenous way. Furthermore, this close attention to geography produces a topographical account of girlhood in which verticality and horizontality, and light and shade, shape varied and distinctive experiences of power and agency for girls.

Shifting the focus from zombie epidemics in books to vampire invasions on the small screen, Subramanian and Lagerwey contemplate the “raced and gendered contradictions of postfeminist girl culture” by concentrating on the character development of two of the show’s main characters, Bonnie Bennett and Caroline Forbes. In doing so, Subramanian and Lagerwey consider how The Vampire Diaries employs monstrosity to consider and represent what coming of age means for girls of different racial identities, especially in melodramatic television series targeted toward teen audiences that have been produced in the postfeminist era. Through this, Subramanian and Lagerwey offer new insight into postfeminist horror designed for young viewers, especially the young females who find themselves fans of such shows and films.

The author recalls her girlhood memories in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Being the first-born of the family, she was always reminded to set a good example for her siblings. Her mother was a typical traditional Chinese woman whose life centered on the family. Sir Y. K. Pao, the author's father was a man of vision. His frugality and charity influenced his children. The author's volunteering experience encouraged her to learn more about how to bring changes to society. Due largely to her father's shipping business in Japan, she had a chance to visit the country. Her father's first new ship, the Eastern Sakura, came into existence in 1962, and she was invited to christen it. She later flew to the United States and studied at Purdue University.

Chapter three examines girls’ early childhood experiences in families and at school, and we highlight the pressures that girls uniquely experienced while growing up. We look at how girls’ family responsibilities, dress, demeanor, and their status in families and at school were constrained by numerous gender inequalities – a set of conditions that the girls thought of as inherently unfair and “unjust.” Considering these pressures, some girls spoke and struck out against those who harassed and targeted them, sometimes violently.

We take up the subject of peer and school-based culture for teens in chapter four, where we outline at the femininity norms confronting female teens. In this chapter we note that notions of femininity were complicated and sometimes contradictory. In this way, girls’ violence is viewed against the backdrop of multiple constraints and contradictions.

This chapter addresses the process of educating women to be mothers. It asks whether commentators in these decades, and women themselves, felt that they needed to be taught how to mother or whether they thought it came naturally to them. It then considers the debate about where this instruction should take place, and who should provide it: home, school, or medical professionals. The chapter charts how changing attitudes about the roles women should be performing, both at a governmental and societal level, determined how girl were educated to become adult women. Through an analysis of the oral history interviews the influence of these national debates on individual experiences is shown. Three principal discursive models surrounding education for motherhood are discussed: motherhood as innate, commonsensical, or a skill that needed to be learnt.

This chapter investigates the way the discourse of girlhood produced gendered identities in George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J., Shakespeare’s The First Part of Henry the Sixth and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl. Writers of conduct manuals were acutely aware that female human beings had to be trained to be ‘women,’ and the vast literature attempting to regulate and control female behaviour and sexuality testifies to these concerns. When positioned in relationship to womanhood, girlhood was consistently marked as a time of transgression compared to womanhood, and the word ‘girl’ was subsequently extended to adults who refused to be made into the obedient women idealized in the conduct literature. The description of adult female characters as “girls” in the three texts examined shows that early modern writers turned to the category of the ‘girl’ to account for female characters who were not only sexually, but also more importantly, socially and politically resistant to gender norms.

This chapter offers a literary history of the representation of female children in English Renaissance drama. The subversive potential of girlishness on the early modern stage became neutralised as girlhood became increasingly defined as a time of life rather than a gendered state of being, and this shift can be traced in the gradual decline of dynamic girl characters in morality plays and Tudor interludes to the later public stage genres of comedy, history, and tragedy.

Chapter One spotlights a fundamental, but under-examined, aspect of Harold Gray's popular newspaper strip: Little Orphan Annie as an orphan girl story.When Gray's eleven-year-old moppet made her debut in 1924, many of the most popular novels, poems, and films in the United States featured orphan girls as their protagonists.Given this situation, the comic's original audience would have immediately recognized Annie as participating in this phenomenon.Accordingly, this chapter demonstrates that, far from an incidental detail about the original historical context for Little Orphan Annie, the formula for orphan girl stories serves as both a creative starting point for the comic and its critical end point.Placing Little Orphan Annie back in the context of the orphan girl story-and tracing the way in which this phenomenon operates in Gray's strip-yields new insights about the strip's connection with popular culture, the factors fueling its success, and its primary artistic kinships.

Chapter Five explores the rich and interesting but critically neglected Li'l Tomboy comic book series.Released by Charlton Comics from 1956 through 1960, the series did far more than simply challenge traditional female gender roles in the 1950s; it also challenged the newly established Comics Code.In numerous issues, the title character engages in behaviors that could easily be regarded as delinquent:she commits petty theft, intentionally destroys private property, and sasses adult authority figures, including police officers.Moreover, Li'l Tomboy engages in these activities not simply under the watchful eye of the Comics Code Authority, but, astoundingly, with their official seal of approval.During a time when the censors employed by the Authority office were at their most powerful and restrictive, Li'l Tomboy engaged in antics that far exceeded those that had been forbidden in other publications.Accordingly, this chapter tells the story of how, with the creation of Li'l Tomboy, Charlton Publications demonstrated that postwar gender conformity could be resisted and, even more significantly, so too could the Comics Code.

The Epilogue makes a case that the tradition of Funny Girls calls for a reconsideration of the history of American comics both during the mid-twentieth century and during the opening decades of the new millennium.Remembering and recouping characters like Little Lulu, Nancy, Li'l Tomboy, Little Orphan Annie, and Little Audrey restores the important place and powerful status that young female protagonists had in early American comics.At the same time, an awareness of this cadre of female characters changes our perspective on the growing presence of girls in comics in the present day.Events taking place in American comics from the early twenty-first century can be connected to those from the early twentieth century.Far from embodying a radical shift in US comics, the rise of fun, feisty, and formidable female protagonists represent the continuation of a tradition.Accordingly, the Epilogue reveals that while the names of many of the characters profiled in these chapters include the diminutive "li'l" or "little," their cultural legacy has been big.

This chapter discusses how mythopoeic YA, a speculative, ‘imaginary world’ fiction initially by women and still for adolescent girls, brings new worlds into being to actualize new modes of being. Drawing on the hero stories of traditional mythic narratives, mythopoeic YA engages and complicates the system of binary opposition at the heart of its source material by occupying spaces between oppositions, giving space to female-authors, and by foregrounding female-heroes, non-Western worlds, and relationships thereby offering alternative and inclusive models of being-hero. First emerging in the early-1980’s with the work of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley, Leigh Bardugo’sGrishaverse and Tomi Adeyemi's Orïsha offer excellent, contemporary examples.