Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

• Author: Williams, Marjorie

A media critic thinks so, and her history of girls in pop culture from the fifties, sixties, and seventies nearly proves it

It isn't every writer who can defend her discipline in terms as catchy as those of Susan J. Douglas. "If it was important enough to [the media] to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring us Mr. Ed, Enjolie perfume... and |Dallas'" she writes, "then it's important enough for us to figure out why."

For at least half of this lively book, Douglas, a professor of media studies at Hampshire College and media critic for The Progressive, makes a good case. One of the great undertakings of academic feminism is to reconstruct and dignify the history lived by women in every age, often scantily recorded or, even where preserved in the private writings of women, accorded little significance by chroniclers of traditional history. It may be a stretch to accord the girls who lip-synched to the Supremes in the sixties and ironed their hair in the seventies the same new respect that has lately been accorded the women of, say, the American frontier. But the best parts of Douglas, book manage to make that stretch.

Douglas wryly notes that elements of male teen culture from the fifties on have been elevated to art, while the pop passions of teenage girls are so much flotsam. As a combination of new technologies and boomer self-involvement brings us endless retrospectives, "What gets looked back on and celebrated as pathbreaking--James Dean, Elvis, the Beatles--are the boys," Douglas writes, whereas "what film and TV recorded girls doing during these years--teasing our hair, chasing the Beatles, and doing the watusi in bikinis--was silly, mindless and irrelevant to history.... Girls and women come across as the kitsch of the 1960s--flying nuns, witches, genies, twig-thin models, and go-go boot-clad dancers in cages."

It is the generous mission of Where the Girls Are to consider this trashy history in a kinder light, giving us a detailed, often funny look at exactly what messages were contained in all those now-bizarre bottles, from "The Flying Nun" to "Policewoman," and from Breakfast at Tiffany's to those annoying quizzes in Cosmopolitan.

Douglas claims the bubblegum of her own generation as a culture with a surprisingly nuanced legacy: Despite its ditsy beach bunnies, its ubiquitous douche advertisements, and its micro-mini skirts, it also whispered intermittently of empowerment, of sexual freedom, and of a new future. She makes a...