What sports did girls play? What books did they read? What was considered appropriate behavior for girls? It was not easy to find information, because the experiences of girls were rarely recorded.
Penny Colman, award-winning nonfiction writer, considered these questions important enough to spend years researching the experiences of girls throughout American history. From the perspective of such girls, she gives us a whole new way of interpreting important American milestones, from the first settlers and the first American baby, Virginia Dare, to Kristen Lem's efforts to ratify the ERA in the 1970s.
GIRLS: A History of Growing Up Female in America is a great addition to any young woman's library; clearly, regardless of the privileges that were or were not available in the lives of these remarkable young women from history, each and every one of them experienced a lot of the same feelings and insecurities as girls do today, but the fabric of their times makes each story a fascinating discovery.
Joanna Draper's life as a slave is a moving and gentle account of a different and difficult time, while Eunice Williams, a Colonial daughter captured during the Revolution and adopted by a family of Roman Catholic-following Iroquois, is a story you won't read anywhere else. Lilac Chen's account of being sold in China when she was six years old is heartrending, while Maria Tomacchio's immigrant life in the spinning room of a mill in Massachusetts points up the dark side of the New World experience. Colman has gone to great lengths to find remarkable stories about real girls whose very growing up casts a new light on everything from the founding of our country to the Civil War to immigration to the sexual revolution.
What better way to show a girl you know that her experiences are valuable, than to show her the myriad of young women before her who have come up through the adolescent ranks and affected deeply the situations of their particular times? This is a great jumping off point for you to help a young woman keep a diary of her own life, which may someday be valuable to teaching the history of this period to a whole new generation of girls. As long as there are girls in America, there will be a need to build on this great foundation of girls' stories and historical perspectives.
Colman's research is thorough and fun --- how many more girls might take an interest in American history if they could see themselves in some of the players of the various eras this book spans? Colman has done all girlhood a great service with these amazing stories. An attractive book with easy-to-read print and lots of amazing pictures, GIRLS: A History of Growing Up Female in America is a truly triumphant work.
-- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
