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Nash, Ilana. "'America's Kid Sister': Teenage Girls in Popular Culture, 1930-1965," Bowling Green State University, December 2002.
Starting in the 1930s, the social category of “the teenage girl” became a widely popular subject of representation in mass-culture narratives. Over the following years, teenage girls appeared in narrative entertainments as a stereotype reflecting the fantasies and nightmares of a patriarchal (father-centered) society about the two identities the teen girl combines: women and youth. This dissertation offers a cultural history the teenage girl as a narrative trope, to reveal how popular texts shaped dominant perceptions of adolescent girlhood as a sexualized and infantilized condition. Films, novels, stage plays, and television series have constructed this category in response to debates about the social roles of women and teenagers in a century marked by anxiety over changing definitions of fatherhood and various “crises” of American masculinity. Narratives about teen girls implicitly and explicitly address these perceived crises. This dissertation explores several “narrative cycles” (my term for cross-media texts about a common protagonist) between 1930 and 1965, when teen girls became codified and disseminated in popular narratives. The characters analyzed include Nancy Drew, Judy Graves, Corliss Archer, and Gidget Lawrence, all of whom were widely visible during these decades. Demonstrating that mass-culture narratives routinely undercut their heroines autonomy and agency, I compare them to texts produced directly for youth (children’s books, early teen magazines) to suggest that texts intended solely for girls provided more active visions of girlhood than those courting a mass audience. The narrative cycles are contextualized within the historical moments of their creation to reveal how contemporary discourses of youth, fatherhood, and femininity combined to present the teenage girl as a figure of social, economic, and sexual disruption to a patriarchal society.
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