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Sherrie A. Inness, ed. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures. New York: New York UP, 1998.
Silk Makowski. Serious about Series: Evaluations and Annotations of Teen Fiction in Paperback Series. Ed. Dorothy M. Broderick. Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1998.
Girls' culture is an academic field of growing intensity and complexity, and it is of interest to students of children's literature, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and anyone who works with girls. While not always addressing every member of its broad audience at the same level of sophistication, Sherrie Inness, in her collection "about the different ways that cultural discourse shapes both the young girl and the teenager" (2), does an excellent job of showing how long girls' culture has been shaping the gender of American women and how pervasively it does so.
Divided into three parts ("Law, Discipline, and Socialization," "The Girl Consumer," and "Re-imagining Girlhood"), the examination begins with the largest institutional forces. Laureen Tedesco's article on the actual nature of the conflict among Baden-Powell, Juliet Low, and the Campfire Girls does a good job of familiarizing the reader with previous studies but also reveals the ways in which the Girls Scouts have chosen a "self-history that insists that Girl Scouts are determined and resist the odds" (26). Students in introductory Women's Studies courses would be especially well-served throughout this collection, because, as in this essay, the authors are careful to view their sources critically, not simply accepting even those generalizations that might have seemed more politically acceptable in the early days of Women's Studies. In another example of careful historical work, Mary C. McComb's essay sets advice and marriage manuals of the 1930s and 1940s in the context of the Depression and the increasing joblessness of the male wage earner. Women were encouraged to "rescue emasculated men from their collective crisis and make the world safe for prosperity" (58). Another mark of a wellstructured collection is the inclusion of new material from writers who are known specialists-Miriam Formanek-Brunell, on the cultural history of dolls-but who are entering new fields. Formanek-Brunell contributes a piece on the gendering of babysitting in postwar America, for example. All of the essays dealing with institutional forces are carefully textured and base their conclusions...