Female Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1850–1965

Ann Kordas is professor in the Humanities Department at Johnson & Wales University.

In this engaging study, Ann Kordas deftly traces the ways in which meanings and experiences of female adolescent sexuality took shape in relation to larger currents of social, economic, and cultural change from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early 1960s. Kordas establishes that there was no shortage of parental anxiety, expert advice, and cultural fascination regarding girls’ sexual behavior during this 100-year period. She also listens intently to the rich and varied voices of girls themselves, offering fresh insight into what girls from diverse backgrounds thought, felt, desired, and experienced when navigating a sexual and romantic terrain marked by ever-shifting measures of pleasure and danger, possibility and constraint.

• Introduction: Songs of Innocence, Songs of ExperienceChapter 1: “Sugar, Molasses…And All Things Sweet”: Female Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Culture in Nineteenth-Century AmericaChapter 2: Movie Palaces and Chop Suey Places: The Transformation of Female Adolescent Sexuality in Turn of the Century AmericaChapter 3: When Angelina Bobbed Her Hair: Female Adolescent Sexuality in the 1920sChapter 4: “God, a Good Job, and Deanna Durbin”: Female Adolescent Sexuality During the Great DepressionChapter 5: “He’s Cute and He Doesn’t Smell”: Female Adolescent Romance and Sexuality in World War II and the Postwar Period