Girl Trouble

This book about social obsession with the conduct of women and girls from the Victorian era to the present is well written and thoroughly footnoted and indexed. Its main focus is on Britain, but it references similar situations in the US. Some of it was familiar territory (fears that educating girls and young women would flatten their chests and shrivel their ovaries, unfitting them for motherhood–or, if it didn't do that, it would make them so strong minded and unwomanly that no man would want them), but some was new to me.

I didn't know about the Victorian obsession with the idea that pimps and shady characters were waiting in train stations and in doorways to kidnap innocent (white) young women and sell them into slavery. As I read this chapter, I recalled reading Sherlock Holmes stories where things like this happened, and that suddenly made sense. Apparently this fear led to the establishment of bills in Parliament and many societies for the protection of young (again, white) women and their virtue, but evidence suggests that there was no such epidemic of young women being kidnapped and forced into prostitution. As Dyhouse says late in her book, it is sometimes hard to tell at the time what is an issue of real, pressing concern, and what is being blown into a moral panic.

From this retrospective position, many of the worries people had about educating girls alongside boys, allowing them to move out of the family home to live on their own before marriage, opening a more complete range of professions to women,etc. appear completely overblown. Others, no matter how much we might wish they were settled (e.g., access to contraception and abortion), keep coming back as topics of controversy. This book shows us a progression in the state of the public attitude toward women, and chronicles the problems that resulted for society as well as the difficulties encountered by those who tried to change those attitudes.

Very well worth reading.