Abstract
Maureen Daly won first prize with her short story, “Sixteen,” in a Scholastic magazine high school writing contest. In this opening paragraph, Daly identifies her protagonist, a small-town high school student, as a “typical” teenage girl through her knowledge of the latest teen trends in fashion, beauty, music, and movies. The narrator understands her peers as well as the latest news from the New York society pages and Hollywood gossip columns. By 1938, growing awareness of teenage girls as a distinct group allowed Daly’s story of unrequited love and self-awareness to resonate with teenage and adult readers nationally.
Now don’t get me wrong… I get around. I read. I listen to the radio. And I have two older sisters. So you see, I know what the score is. I know it’s smart to wear tweedish skirts and shaggy sweaters with the sleeves pushed up and pearls and ankle-socks and saddle shoes that look as if they’ve seen the world.… I’m not exactly small-town either. I read Winchell’s column—you get to know what New York boy is that way about some pineapple princess on the West Coast, and why someone will eventually play Scarlett O’Hara. It gives you that cosmopolitan feeling. And I know that anyone who orders a strawberry sundae in a drugstore instead of a lemon Coke would probably be dumb enough to wear colored ankle socks with high-heeled pumps or use Evening in Paris with a tweed suit.
—Maureen Daly, “Sixteen” (1938)1
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Notes
Maureen Daly, “Sixteen,” in Saplings (New York: Scholastic, 1938), 1–6.
“A New, $10-Billion Power: The U.S. Teen-Age Consumer,” Life (August 8, 1959): 78, 83–85; “Teenage Consumers,” Consumer Reports (March 1957) in Eugene J. Kelley and William Lazer, eds., Managerial Marketing: Perspectives and Viewpoints (Homewood, IL: Richard Irwin, 1958), 97–101
Louis Kraar, “Teenage Customers: Merchants Seek Teens’ Dollars, Influence Now, Brand Loyalty Later,” Wall Street Journal (December 6, 1956): 1, 11.
Dwight MacDonald, “A Caste, A Culture, and A Market–I,” New Yorker (November 22, 1958): 57; James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 205–10
Eugene Gilbert, Advertising and Marketing to Young People (Pleasantville, NY: Printers’ Ink Books, 1957), 43
Seventeen (March 1947): 2; Estelle Ellis, interview by author, tape recording, New York, NY, November 15, 1994; Estelle Ellis Collection, National Museum of American History, Archives Center; Kelly Schrum, “‘Teena Means Business’: Teenage Girls’ Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944–1950” in Sherrie A. Inness, ed., Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998), 134–63.
Stanley C. Hollander and Richard Germain, Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It?: Youth-Based Segmentation in Marketing (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1992), 13–14
Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996)
“Are You A Buyer for Your Family?” Scholastic (May 27, 1932): 26; Robert F. Allen, “Talking to the 6,000,000 Rulers,” Printers’ Ink (October 26, 1933): 12–13; “30 Million Young, Eager Prospects for Advertisers,” Printers’ Ink (February 16, 1933): 16; Amos Bradbury, “Advertising to Seven Million Young Skeptics,” Printers’ Ink (February 2, 1933): 17–20; Dewey H. Palmer and Frederick J. Schlink, “Education and the Consumer,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 173 (May 1934): 188–96.
For a discussion of the concept of “culture” and its use in historical research, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” and Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 1–61.
Joseph Kett invigorated the study of youth in America in 1977 with Rites of Passage. He used the word “teenager” freely, discussing boys almost exclusively, and located the importance of consumer and popular culture in the period after World War II. Writing in the 1980s, James Gilbert looked at the role of consumer and popular culture in creating a new youth culture after World War II, the period, he argued, when “adolescents gained recognition as a distinct new consumer group.” Grace Palladino opened her book, Teenagers, with high school culture in the 1920s, but argued that the concept of teenagers first became popular around World War II. The rich history before the war has remained largely unexplored. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 3–7
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), xv
Yvonne Blue Skinner diary, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Yvonne Blue Skinner Papers, 85-M195; Arvilla Scholfield diary, Walters Family Papers; Katherine Rosner (pseudonym) diary, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Katherine Rosner Papers, 92-M10; Adele Siegel Rosenfeld diary, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Adele Siegel Rosenfeld Papers, 90-M109. Diaries are a unique primary source, personal records that provide insight into daily lives and friendships and record how societal messages are internalized and personalized. By their nature, diaries are incomplete texts, selectively describing feelings and interpretations. But diaries also serve as an outlet, a place to reflect, vent, and interpret one’s surroundings. For more on diaries as sources, see Margo Culley, ed., A Day at a Time: The Diary literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: The Feminist Press, 1985), 11–23
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).
Mary Cover Jones, et al, eds., The Course of Human Development: Selected Papers from the Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Human Development, The University of California, Berkeley (Waltham, MA: Xerox College Publishing, 1971), 4–15
Carol L. Huffine and Elaine Aerts, “An Introduction to the Intergenerational Studies,” (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Human Development, 1998): 1–6.
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© 2004 Kelly Schrum
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Schrum, K. (2004). Introduction. In: Some Wore Bobby Sox. Girls’ History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73134-3_1
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