Girlhood in Modern European History. Proto- Industrialisation, Consumption, Marriage, and Selfhood, ca. My essay focuses on the roles that girls have played in the history of European modernity. I will by pointing to various ways in which girls—referring very broadly here to unmarried female youth in their teens and twenties—figured in this history: as workers and consumers active in the construction of market capitalism in Europe, as figures in the liberal political economy that enabled its implantation, and as participants at least at the margins of specifically European constructions of modern selfhood.
Pioneering studies of youth history focused on boys and young men. In European languages, young unmarried women have been referred to by evolving but specific terms such as big girls, jeunes femmes, Backfische , and store piger. Historically changing markers of crossing the boundary between childhood and youth for a girl have included leaving elementary school, starting work full time, participating in the formal ceremony of religious confirmation, being presented at a formal ball, or adopting adult dress or coiffure, although none of these markers was universal and no girl experienced them all.
To more modern understandings, biological markers—sexual maturation, for example—might seem more obvious definers of the onset of young womanhood, but focusing on this type of boundary does not reflect changing historical experiences.
First, rooting maturation in sexual development is a particularly modern construction, itself part of the historical transformation of youth. Finally, the age of onset of menses has changed over time. For most young women, as for young men, youth ended at the point of marriage. Yet for the significant minority of women who did not marry, or who married especially late in life, the end of youth might be fuzzy as well, unless marked, for example, by taking the veil or by giving birth outside of marriage.
During the course of the nineteenth century, the parameters defining youth in Europe were becoming much clearer and institutionally defined for both girls and boys. By the end of the nineteenth century, most girls as well as boys attended school at least intermittently until at least age twelve or thirteen. The poor health of young men inducted into the military alarmed state authorities. The violence of street gangs in working-class neighborhoods was increasingly seen as a social problem, as were stress and suicide rates amongst male students.
