Abstract
This joke’s presence in a high school yearbook signifies the growing importance of dress in the social world of teenage girls as well as important fashion developments that shaped teen consumer culture in the twentieth century. It demonstrates increased access to fashion as a tool for constructing one’s image as well as consciousness of the power to manipulate social status through appearance. Teenage girls’ emerging group identity and interest in fashion, developments in the fashion world, and the growing interest of manufacturers, advertisers, and retailers in high school girls as consumers nurtured these trends.
Father: Your mother never dressed to catch a husband the way you girls do to-day.
HiS daughters (in unison): NO, but look what she got!
—Joke, 1926 high school yearbook1
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Notes
See Elizabeth Ewing, History of Twentieth-Century Fashion (New York: Costume and Fashion Press: 1992 [1985]), 119
Lynn Schnurnberger, Let There Be Clothes: 40,000 Years of Fashion (New York: Workman, 1991), 357
Sandra Ley, Fashion for Everyone: The Story of Ready-to-Wear (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 104–6
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 51–55
Sylvia Silverman, Clothing and Appearance: Their Psychological Implications for Teen-Age Girls (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1945), 12–13
Mary Mildred Knoebber, The Self-Revelation of the Adolescent Girl: An Analysis of the Attitudes, Ideals, and Problems of the Adolescent Girl from the Viewpoint of the Girl Herself (New York: Bruce Publishing Co., 1937), 129
Lucretia P. Hunter, The Girl Today: The Woman Tomorrow (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1936), 7
F. F. O’Donnell, “The Adolescent and His Clothes,” The Parents’ Magazine (hereafter Parents) 6 (April 1931): 20–21.
Beth Twiggar Goff diary, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Beth Twiggar Goff Papers, 90-M130, 1930 (hereafter Beth Twiggar Goff diary); Adele Siegel Rosenfeld diary, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Adele Siegel Rosenfeld Papers, 90-M109 (hereafter Adele Siegel Rosenfeld diary), January 29, 1931, December 14, 1931; David L. Cohn, The Good Old Days: A History of American Morals and Manners as seen through the Sears Roebuck Catalogs, 1905 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), 285.
Leora M. Blanchard, Teen-Age Tangles: A Teacher’s Experiences with Live Young People (Philadelphia: The Union Press, 1923), 160–65
Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956 [1929]), 159–67
August B. Hollingshead, Elmtowns Youth and Elmtown Revisited (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1975 [1949])
Knoebber, The Self-Revelation of the Adolescent Girl, 122, 128–30. Studies over the next few decades found similar responses. See Mary Shaw Ryan, Clothing: A Study in Human behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966).
Alice Barr Grayson, Do You Know Your Daughter? (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co, 1944), 25
Martha Neall Hogue, “The Scarf,” Saplings (Pittsburgh: Scholastic Publishing Co., 1931), 89.
Fredonia J. Ringo, Girl’s and Juniors Ready-to-Wear (Chicago: A. W Shaw Co., 1924), 33–44.
Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 227–34.
Memo from Arthur Rosenberg Company to Maidenform (December 1930), Maiden-form Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History; Alice Dowd, “Going After New Customers,” Maiden Form Mirror (August 1931): 5; Sears (Spring 1934), 90; Sears (Fall 1934), 98; Sears (Spring 1935), 119, italics in original; Schrum, “‘Teena Means Business,’” 151. See also Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau, Uplift: The Bra in America (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 63
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997)
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© 2004 Kelly Schrum
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Schrum, K. (2004). “Oh the Bliss”. In: Some Wore Bobby Sox. Girls’ History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73134-3_3
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