From white slavery to Bratz dolls: feminism and moral panics.

AuthorNathan, Debbie
PositionGirl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women, by Carol Dyhouse - Book review

Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women, by Carol Dyhouse, Zed Books, 272 pages, $24.95

POOR LADY SYBIL, the Downton Abbey daughter who died in childbirth after flitting on the edges of the movement for a woman's right to vote. Lady Sybil-so beautiful, so sweet, so oddly impassive when it came to feminism. If, instead of flitting, she'd been portrayed as a fully involved suffragette, we might have enjoyed some knock-down-drag-out scenes. Perhaps we could see teenaged Sybil in jail (or gaol, as it's spelled in England), on a hunger strike with force-feeding tubes down her throat. Or maybe we could watch her trembling as she listens to speakers railing against "white slavery": the widespread kidnapping of virgin girls by men who prostituted the young innocents and infected them fatally with syphilis.

It turns out white slavery never existed, though millions during Sybil's time thought it did. As the English social historian Carol Dyhouse explains in Girl Trouble, the white-slavery scare was propelled by two forces. One was angst about women's social and political gains, which were burgeoning as the 19th century turned into the 20th.The other was the tendency of women's activists themselves to promote moral panics in order to achieve their goals in a conservative, male-dominated milieu.

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Girl Trouble begins with the late Victorian era, when doctors and psychologists were fretting about how college for girls made their breasts and ovaries shrink, preventing them from being mothers. Moving through decades of similar rhetoric to today, Dyhouse shows that women's progress has always been met with noisy, obsessive, and in hindsight often nutty fretting about girls' behavior and bodies. Dyhouse writes almost exclusively about Great Britain, but variations on the panics she describes have also emanated from the United States. Comparing notes, Americans will find Dyhouse instructive--not to mention entertaining. If you like Alistair Cooke's Masterpiece Theatre, you'll love Girl Trouble.

Here you can learn new vocabulary, including "French letter" (Brit English for "condom"), "wide boy" (in American, a hustler), and "stroppy" (irritable). Here you will learn that early Girl Scouts in Great Britain at first organized themselves into troops christened Wildcats, Foxes, and Wolverines--until worried scout leaders replaced them with prim, feminine names such as Roses, Cornflowers, and Lilies of the Valley. You'll...

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