Essays on the history of girlhood in modern Europe.

In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

'A brilliant cultural history.' Irish Examiner Girls behave badly. If they're not obscenity-shouting, pint-swigging ladettes, they're narcissistic, living dolls floating around in a cloud of self-obsession, far too busy twerking to care. And this is news. In this witty and wonderful book, Carol Dyhouse shows that where there's a social scandal or a wave of moral outrage, you can bet a girl is to blame. Whether it be stories of 'brazen flappers' staying out and up all night in the 1920s, inappropriate places for Mars bars in the 1960s or Courtney Love's mere existence in the 1990s, bad girls have been a mass-media staple for more than a century. And yet, despite the continued obsession with their perceived faults and blatant disobedience, girls are infinitely better off today than they were a century ago. This is the story of the challenges and opportunities faced by young women growing up in the swirl of the twentieth century, and the pop-hysteria that continues to accompany their progress.

The story of the Polytechnic and of the legacy of Quintin Hogg is the third publication exploring the University of Westminster's long and diverse history. A fitting tribute to the life and legacy of Hogg, his holistic approach to education and the institute he created. This book is richly illustrated with images from the University's Archive.

A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.

This book examines the construction of adolescent girlhood across a range of genres in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It argues that there was a preoccupation with defining, characterising and naming adolescent girlhood at the fin de siècle. These ‘daughters of today’, ‘juvenile spinsters’ and ‘modern girls’, as the press variously termed them, occupying a borderland between childhood and womanhood, were seen to be inextricably connected to late nineteenth-century modernity: they were the products of changes taking place in education and employment and of the challenge to traditional conceptions of femininity presented by the Woman Question. The author argues that the shifting nature of the modern adolescent girl made her a malleable cultural figure, and a meeting point for many of the prevalent debates associated with fin-de-siècle society. By juxtaposing diverse material, from children’s books and girls’ magazines to New Woman novels and psychological studies, the author contextualises adolescent girlhood as a distinct but complex cultural category at the end of the nineteenth century.

This volume examines scouting—the largest voluntary movement for girls—in its first century of existence, seeking to understand how the organization has lasted and how it has changed. Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is the first global history of Girl Scouting and Guiding that addresses the successes and pitfalls of the 100-year-old organization from its beginning in Great Britain through its international expansion. Since 1910, millions of girls worldwide have been exposed to Scouting. While much has changed since 1910, the core values of Scouting/Guiding are still recognizable in today's programs, namely the empowerment of girls through adventure, character-building, home skills, outdoor pursuits, and active learning. But has Scouting's very willingness to change with the times undermined its original ideologies and fundamentally changed the movement? As Girl Scouts and Guides move into their second century, their challenge will be to remain true to their founding values while remaking themselves on a regular basis. Given the changing nature of today's societies and the serious problems girls face on a daily basis, Girl Guides and Girl Scouts will need to be true to their motto, "Be Prepared," in order to march forward successfully into the future.

Sounds French examines the history of popular music in France between the arrival of rock and roll in 1958 and the collapse of the first wave of punk in 1980, and the connections between musical genres and concepts of community in French society. During this period, scholars have tended to view the social upheavals associated with postwar reconstruction as part of debates concerning national identity in French culture and politics, a tendency that developed from political figures' and intellectuals' concerns with French national identity. In this book, author Jonathyne Briggs reorients the scholarship away from an exclusive focus on national identity and instead towards an investigation of other identities that develop as a result of the increased globalization of culture. Popular music, at once individual and communal, fixed and plastic, offers an illuminating window into such transformations in social structures through the ways in which musicians, musical consumers, and critical intermediaries re-imagined themselves as part of novel cultural communities, whether local, national, or supranational in nature. Briggs argues that national identity was but one of a panoply of identities in flux during the postwar period in France, demonstrating that the development of hybridized forms of popular music provided the French with a method for expressing and understanding that flux. Drawing upon an array of printed and aural sources, including music publications, sound recordings, record sleeves, biographies, and cultural criticism, Sounds French is an essential new look at popular music in postwar France.

This book examines the transformations of Egyptian childhoods that occurred across gender, class, and rural/urban divides. It also questions the role of nostalgia and representation of childhood in illuminating key underlying political, social, and cultural developments in Egypt.

In the book architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal.