Identity construction in the diaries of teenage girls: a study of the history and memory of female adolescence, 1870–1940

Abstract

At the conclusion of the first decade of the twentieth century, 60 percent of high school graduates were women. They were also the first generation of young women to be labeled as “adolescents” by psychologists. By 1950, the word “teenager” had not only been coined; it was part of everyday vernacular. Historians now recognize that adolescence — as a common set of ideas about how young people behave and interact with society — is a cultural construction that has changed over time. Using a combination of scholarly literature on the subject as well as primary sources to demonstrate and interpret the interplay between the exterior forces that shaped the cultural construction of adolescence and the interior forces that shaped young women's identities, this report addresses both how a collective memory of female adolescent identity arose and how individual memory operated in the context of this collective identity. Applying theories of collective memory to the individual diaries of six young women who came of age between 1870 and 1940, this analysis represents a departure from the traditional use of diaries in historical scholarship and provides a fresh approach to the analysis of collective memory.