Originally published in 1987, this title was first submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Completed just as the years of expansion in higher education were drawing to a close, it reflects the growing doubts of the period as to the ability of formal education provision alone to effect major changes in the distribution of socio-economic privilege at the group level, whether as between the sexes, classes, or ethnic groups. Reforms in women's education had traditionally been dealt with as a small part of the women's emancipation movement. This book approaches the education reforms in a different way and begins with the question of which social groups participated in the movement. Seen from this point of view, a primary interest of the reforms is the function they served in promoting a redefinition of the status and roles of a social elite.

Originally published in 1987, this title was first submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. Completed just as the years of expansion in higher education were drawing to a close, it reflects the growing doubts of the period as to the ability of formal education provision alone to effect major changes in the distribution of socio-economic privilege at the group level, whether as between the sexes, classes, or ethnic groups. Reforms in women's education had traditionally been dealt with as a small part of the women's emancipation movement. This book approaches the education reforms in a different way and begins with the question of which social groups participated in the movement. Seen from this point of view, a primary interest of the reforms is the function they served in promoting a redefinition of the status and roles of a social elite.

The eleven contributors to "The Girl's Own" explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior.
"The Girl's Own" combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.