©2012 Allison Miller ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2012 Allison Miller ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BOYHOOD FOR GIRLS: AMERICAN TOMBOYS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF EROTICISM, 1900-1940 by ALLISON MILLER A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History written under the direction of Jackson Lears and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Boyhood for Girls: American Tomboys and the Transformation of Eroticism, 1900-1940 By ALLISON MILLER Dissertation Director: T. J. Jackson Lears This dissertation argues that tomboys are a crucial link in the relationship between heterosexuality and normative gender expression as they took shape between 1900 and 1940. Tomboys of the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States occupied the frontlines of major transformations in the histories of feminism, youth culture, sexuality, and the body. By 1920, New Women and political radicals had won significant opportunities for boyish girls to continue to be somewhat masculine into adulthood, such as through education, activism, athletics, and work. At the same time, an increasingly autonomous urban working-class youth culture demanded a measure of gender conformity for adolescent girls and boys who wished to be eligible for heterosexual activity. Although historians often view feminism and the growth of youth culture as liberatory, adolescent tomboys knew they were contradictory. Liberal adults, including many feminists, advised them to “be themselves,” but tomboys’ peers ostracized them from the world of dating and popularity when they remained boyish. For many pubescent ii tomboys, changes in the body accompanied not only demands that they become feminine, but also a realignment of emotional life. Tomboys had to learn to see boys not as trusty comrades but as potential dates, and they had to look to girls, whom they had often scorned, for close friendships. In fact, as children many tomboys had believed that their similarity to boys extended right to their very bodies: they acknowledged that girl bodies and boy bodies were anatomically different, but they detected enough similarities that differences did not matter—a belief that this dissertation calls affinity. In fact, some tomboys only learned to see their bodies as female for the first time at menarche. The history of tomboyism thus coincides with the history of the body and sexuality. By 1940, women who had grown up as tomboys knew that the bargain for the female body’s heterosexual normality depended on relinquishing the pleasures of tomboyism, including the sense that their bodies somehow resembled boys’. The historical tomboy body discloses affective contradictions between the freedoms promised by feminists and sexually adventurous youth alike. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe my first debt to my dissertation director, Jackson Lears. When I first encountered his work as an undergraduate, I realized there was more to history than I ever thought possible. I still think that. It has been a pleasure to learn from him. For fiery intellectual engagement with my work throughout my graduate career, I thank my committee members: Ann Fabian, Nancy Hewitt, and Seth Koven. My outside reader, Susan Cahn at SUNY-Buffalo, posed dazzling questions of my work, many of which I am still pondering. I owe Dawn Ruskai immense gratitude. I could not have survived more than a day in graduate school without her brilliance, persistence, and patience. In 2009, I was fortunate to win a fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, under the direction of Indrani Chatterjee and Julie Livingston. The seminar pushed me to reimagine everything I thought I knew about gender, psychology, and sexuality. The RCHA is a model of the kind of academic life anyone could hope to find. Members of the Rutgers History of Sexuality Graduate Study Group (including Jesse Bayker, Alix Genter, Bridget Gurtler, Anita Kurimay, Christopher Mitchell, and Svanur Pétursson) read most of this dissertation. Our coffee-fueled morning discussions clarified its arguments and structure. All scholars should have the opportunity to present their work to such a devoted group. Interacting with others, I believe, is the only way to learn. Those who have so generously shared their time include Carol Axel, Eric D. Barry, Agatha Beins, Carolyn A. Brown, Robin Chapdelaine, Stephanie Clare, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Andy Daily, Alice iv Echols, Dina Fainberg, Paula Fass, Janna Ferguson, Anna Fishzon, Leigh-Anne Francis, Vanessa Holden, Alison Isenberg, Yelena Kalinsky, Temma Kaplan, Melanie Kiechle, Laurie Marhoefer, Karen Miller, Rick Perlstein, Vic Tulli, Rebecca Tuuri, and Dora Vargha. For permission to use material from their archival collections, I am grateful to the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, and especially the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. In 2009, the Schlesinger also provided a grant for dissertation research in the Miriam Van Waters Papers. I have been the fortunate recipient of two grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, both of which have given me the time and energy to write to the best of my capabilities. Finally, I must acknowledge my dear family. A lifetime of support is a debt I truly can never repay. v CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1 | Families 45 Chapter 2 | Pals 81 Chapter 3 | Chums 126 Chapter 4 | Crushes 186 Chapter 5 | Bodies 226 Conclusion 275 Appendix | The Interviews 286 Works Cited 306 vi 1 Introduction We think we know them when we see them. Scrapping and capering like boys, ripping ribbons from their hair or insisting on wearing pants, calling themselves by boys’ names, sometimes imagining themselves as boys, tomboys are girls whose unique relationship to boyhood defines them as different. This, however, does not always result in family or community shunning. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, boyish girls in the United States could find themselves celebrated, not despised, for their robust health and independent spirit, no matter how many pairs of stockings they ruined.1 Yet tomboyism supposedly was (and perhaps remains) but a stage of life. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville admired the young, unmarried women of the northeastern United States, whose feistiness mirrored the egalitarian, somewhat crude spirit of the new republic. Upon marriage, these daughters willingly left the households of indulgent fathers to become submissive wives. The first life-phase, Tocqueville thought, laid the groundwork for the second: “It can be said that it is from the enjoyment of her independence that she has drawn the courage to tolerate the sacrifice of it, without 1 Michelle Ann Abate, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), ix-x. 2 struggle or complaint, when the time comes for that to happen.”2 Although Tocqueville was not writing specifically about tomboys, his observation hints that boyhood for girls could be normative, even imperative. Only by drawing upon masculine virtues of willful action, pluck, and noble sacrifice could young women shoulder the inferior status enforced by marital convention. Though this change was sudden, girls handled it as only the confident Americans could. Tocqueville correctly assessed the demanding nature of young women’s coming of age, but he failed to note that not all of them bore this transformation lightly. Just a few years after his visit, eleven-year-old farmer’s daughter Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) went to work in Massachusetts’s Lowell Mills. Adhering to the strictures of femininity was a deep loss. “The transition from childhood to girlhood, when a girl had an almost unlimited freedom of out-of-door life, is practically the toning down of a mild sort of barbarism,” she wrote in 1889. Ironically invoking the language of democratic rights denied to children and women, she explained, “I clung to the child’s inalienable privilege of running half wild, and when I found that I was really growing up, I felt quite rebellious.”3 In the memoirs of white, middle-class women born in the nineteenth century, Anne Scott MacLeod has found that boyhood for girls came to an end, sometimes abruptly. “For some, the doors closed at thirteen[,]” she writes, “for others not until fifteen or even later, but close [they] inevitably did once the claims and constraints of nineteenth-century womanhood were laid upon the growing girl.”4 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 687. 3 Quoted in Anne Scott MacLeod, “American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century: Caddie Woodlawn’s Sisters,” in American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Athens, GA, and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), 12. 4 Ibid. 3 But what of modern tomboys, born between 1900 and 1920 or so, who came of age as self-assured New Women demanded access to political life, higher education, the professions, labor protections, athletics, even military service? Did feminist visions of gender equality affect their upbringing? What were the implications of being a boyish girl as masculine (or “mannish”) women racked up unlikely accomplishments? How did tomboys think, feel, and dream at a time when relations between the sexes were in such flux that their eventual status as women could not be forecast? And, most importantly, did these circumstances have any impact on the pressure to become feminine as childhood faded—did they render Lucy Larcom’s bereavement a thing of the past? In a word, no. Rambling and rounding the bases as vigorously as ever, tomboys who grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century sometimes did sense new possibilities in the air, developing plausible ambitions for work, education, and recreation that would have been dubious a generation earlier.