Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England 1920-1950.

Prescriptive literature offers the social historian a useful source of information about social norms and standards in the past. While sermons, advice manuals, and periodical articles cannot be assumed to reflect actual behavior and experiences, these documents clearly reveal the concerns of their authors and suggest important hypotheses concerning the nature of more widely espoused social and cultural values. Thus periodical articles and advice manuals addressed specifically to women typically articulate conservative male prescriptions for female behavior and do not necessarily represent actual female concerns. A similar disparity often characterizes prescriptive literature directed by middle-class writers toward working-class readers. Yet these publications frequently also reflect authorial/editorial efforts to address the actual interests of their intended audiences, even if only for pragmatic commercial reasons. Penny Tinkler's Constructing Girlhood illustrates the intricacy of this discourse between author and audience through an analysis of fiction and non-fiction published in popular periodicals for "girls" in England from 1920 to 1950.

The number of English magazines directed toward female readers between the ages of 12 and 20 proliferated during the interwar years. These publications consciously addressed specific audiences. Certain magazines targeted elementary or secondary schoolgirls. Others focused on young working women, and an additional category sought an audience of both "women" and "girls." Tinkler argues that the form and content of these periodicals reflect the interests of capital and patriarchy, specifically two sometimes conflicting needs: the need to exploit girls as consumers and the need to socialize them to accept their future subordinate roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. She suggests that between 1920 and 1950, these interests were intersected by the variables of age and social class as well as the necessity to reconcile older, Victorian notions of femininity with the evolving contemporary experiences of "modern" girlhood.

Constructing Girlhood asserts that despite social and economic changes in the years following World War I, girls' experiences of home, family, education, and employment continued to be structured by age, social class, and race as well as gender. These factors shaped the two main transitions that characterized adolescence - the movement from school, either to the labor market or back to the home, and the entrance into heterosexual relationships. Tinkler contends that the same factors also influenced the content and the production of popular magazines for girls during this period.

Key themes addressed in the magazines included school, work, family relationships, female friendships, heterosexual relationships, physical appearance, and sexuality. Tinker maintains that representations of these themes did not directly mirror or explicitly distort lived experience, nor did they simply impose a dominant ideology. Rather they were products of editorial negotiation between publishers' goals and objectives, readers' interests and needs, parent and teacher concerns, and societal interests. Diverse social and cultural factors, such as governmental interests during and following World War II, and the ideologies and requirements of capitalism and patriarchy, were central to the construction of girlhood in these popular periodicals. Form and specific content varied according to the age and social class of the intended reader. Despite this conscious construction of difference, all of the magazines consistently represented English girlhood through white, native-born images. References to members of other races and to "foreigners" were few and typically presented in terms of exotic or negative figures. In this way, the absence of particular images, as well as the inclusion of others, contributed to the definition of girlhood.

Tinkler concludes that the popular periodicals incorporated an updated image of the "modern girl" with more traditional conceptions of femininity and domesticity. She views the promotion of a "domesticated heterosexuality" (p. 187) as central to the social construction of girlhood, and she suggests that the organization and experience of female adolescence between 1920 and 1950 prepared readers to recognize the messages and learn the lessons conveyed by these magazines, although they might subsequently reject them.

Analyses of the social construction of gender play a central role in women's history and in social and cultural history. Penny Tinkler's book addresses this issue as it pertains to the specific context of female adolescence during a period of major social, economic, and cultural change in England. A comprehensive bibliography documents her extensive survey of relevant prescriptive literature, other primary sources, and a variety of secondary sources. Constructing Girlhood examines an interesting and important topic within a sophisticated conceptual framework. Tinkler's findings support those of other social historians who have documented the cultural privileging of heterosexuality during the first half of the twentieth century.

However several flaws detract significantly from the volume's impact. The use of unnecessarily complicated language makes the reader's task more difficult than it should be. Repetitious references to previous points also diminish the clarity of communication. While Tinkler includes some very interesting illustrative data from the magazines she examined, she often does not provide enough of this material to make her generalizations concrete for the reader. For example, she alludes to change over time in the images of girlhood presented by the periodicals, but she does not support this point clearly with direct, explicit, specific evidence. Thus Constructing Girlhood's exploration of the contribution of popular periodicals to the social construction of female adolescence is neither as articulate nor as accessible as it could have been.

Linda W. Rosenzweig Chatham College