Abstract
By the 1880s and 1890s, even as doom-laden commentary about the trials and tribulations of female adolescence continued to flow from the pens of medical authors, a new model of girls’ health began to assert itself in medical and cultural consciousness, reflected in the burgeoning genre of advice literature intended for young women. This new literature on health offered information directly to young women and addressed the question of how girls should approach the expanding opportunities opening up to them in education, the workplace and a variety of cultural, recreational and social arenas, as well as the challenges of adolescence itself. Importantly, it focused less on girls’ biological limitations, highlighting the role of their attitudes and behaviour, and the ways in which a positive state of mind and commitment could support their efforts to strive for improved health. Girls themselves were ascribed a great degree of responsibility in their pursuit of good health and it was also suggested that inappropriate behaviour and neglect of the rules of health put their physical and mental health at risk.
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Notes
Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 36
Maud Curwen and Ethel Herbert, Simple Health Rules and Health Exercises for Busy Women and Girls (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1912), pp. 1–2.
Florence Harvey Richards, Hygiene for Girls: Individual and Community (London: D.C. Health, 1913).
Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 118.
Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 138.
Malcolm Monis (ed.), The Book of Health (London, Paris and New York: Cassell, 1883).
Alfred B. Olsen and M. Ellsworth Olsen (eds), The School of Health: A Guide to Health in the Home (London: International Tract Society, 1906).
Mary Humphreys, Personal Hygiene for Girls (London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Cassell, 1913).
Edward Bruce Kirk, A Talk with Girls about Themselves (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Cov., 1895), p. 47a.
Hint, The Woman Reader, p. 92; Marianne Farningham, Girlhood (London: James Clarke, 1895).
For replies to conespondents, see Roy Hindle, Oh, No Dear! Advice to Girls a Century Ago (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1982).
A.B. Barnard, The Girl’s Book About Herself (London: Cassell, 1912), p. 11.
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© 2013 Hilary Marland
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Marland, H. (2013). Reinventing the Victorian Girl: Health Advice for Girls in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. In: Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328144_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328144_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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