TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Author
Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor of history, women, and gender at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is co-director of Children and Youth in History, author of Babysitter: An American History, and editor of The Girls' History and Culture Readers, among other works.
Girls’ Labor and Leisure in the Progressive Era
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Ruth. The Girl Problem: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900-1930. New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. A study of immigrant and African American female adolescent working-class delinquents incarcerated in two New York state reformatories.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Kids on Strike!. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Written for middle school students, this well-documented history traces the role of laboring children and youth (especially girls) in 19th- and early 20th-century strikes.
Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. An interdisciplinary study that creatively demonstrates the role of consumer culture in the everyday lives of Progressive-era working girls.
Odem, Mary. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920. Columbia: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. An outstanding study of female reformers’ views on female sexuality and the working-class girls who resisted their coercive reforms.
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. A landmark study of the labor and commercial leisure activities of working-class girls and their resistance to the expectations of parents and reformers.
Rouse, Jorae Wendy. The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. A unique examination that sheds light on the historical agency of Chinese American children—including girls—in Chinatown during the Progressive period.
Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton University Press, 1994. A ground-breaking study that traces the development of the modern child as economically "useless" and emotionally "priceless."