Publisher's Synopsis
In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan made a plea for women to grow up, to become - in her terms - fully developed persons. In doing so she placed the question "What does it mean to grow up as a women?" at the heart of debates about the project of contemporary feminism. Feminist theory in recent years has been concerned to rethink how the experience of growing up and adult womanhood should be defined. In "The Modern Girl" Lesley Johnson looks at the 1950s and early 1960s in Australia as a period in which girlhood and growing up as young women was being transformed in major ways. Through an investigation of such figures as the modern schoolgirl, the adolescent, the juvenile delinquent and the teenage girl of this era, she points to some of the reasons why many women would find Friedan's call so powerful. She uses this analysis to argue that there are dangers in the way contemporary feminism continues to look for satisfactory definitions of adult womanhood.;"The Modern Girl" draws on and makes a valuable contribution to debates within feminist cultural studies about women and modernity, the historically changing nature of female subjectivity and about the project of feminism today.
