Twentieth Century Girl

22 DEcember 1899 Time is marching forward, carrying us over the threshold and pitching us willy nilly, into a new century. The prospect of growing up in that unexplored territory is so thrilling that I fancy, if I close my eyes tight, I can almost see the process taking place! A day slips away like sand in a sand glass and then another day dawns and so we are caught up in this inevitable passage towards 1900. I bought a journal and have begun to transfer all my scribblings of the last few days into it. I shall call it 'Twentieth Century Girl', for that is what I intend to be!

Teenage girls seem to have been discovered by American pop culture in the 1930s. From that time until the present day, they have appeared in books and films, comics and television, as the embodied fantasies and nightmares of youth, women, and sexual maturation. Looking at such figures as Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, Gidget, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Britney Spears, American Sweethearts shows how popular culture has shaped our view of the adolescent girl as an individual who is simultaneously sexualized and infantilized. While young women have received some positive lessons from these cultural icons, the overwhelming message conveyed by the characters and stories they inhabit stresses the dominance of the father and the teenage girl's otherness, subordination, and ineptitude. As sweet as a cherry lollipop and as tangy as a Sweetart, this book is an entertaining yet thoughtful exploration of the image of the American girl.

Women's lives have changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century: reduced fertility and the removal of formal barriers to their participation in education, work and public life are just some examples. At the same time, women are under-represented in many areas, are paid significantly less than men, continue to experience domestic violence and to bear the larger part of the burden in the domestic division of labour. Women in 2000 may have many more choices and opportunities than they had a hundred years ago, but genuine equality between men and women remains elusive. This unique, illustrated history discusses a wide range of topics organised into four parts: the life course - the experience of girlhood, marriage and the ageing process; the nature of women's work, both paid and unpaid; consumption, culture and transgression; and citizenship and the state.

As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

Jin Feng proposes that representation of the "new woman" in Communist Chinese fiction of the earlier twentieth century was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals.

A Woman of the 20th Century is the story of a life in the most advanced century ever, one that offered greater technology and knowledge and freedom, as well as more riches to be able to enjoy it. The big challenge, though, was figuring out how to handle the freedom and use it to have access to all the new wonderful things. The author, Aline, was born into a family whose financial security and class status had been ruined by the sudden unexpected deaths from pneumonia, when her parents were children, of both of her successful grandfathers. Very soon, she began receiving the message that she was somehow supposed to regain what had been lost, since her parents had been trying very hard to do so but somehow not quite succeeding. The road to success turned out to be through new territory and offered important insights about the emotional needs of humans and the good and bad sides of gender expectations for both men and women. Two permanent detours made it end in an entirely different place than it would have if she had listened to her family or traveled in earlier centuries.

Women's lives changed more in the 20th century than in any previous century. It was a period of transformation, not only of the political realm, but also the household, family and workplace. Ranging widely over Europe, this fascinating account is one of the first comprehensive surveys of its kind.