In the late 1920s, middle-class reformers understood that teenage girls were exhausted from long days of factory work, and they aimed to provide “constructive” evening activities that corrected perceived deficits in working-class labor and family life. To club leaders’ frustration, however, girls in urban working-class communities had different ideas about leisure. They devoted their scarce resources to commercial amusements and marshaled their creativity and skills to create, borrow, or save for the dresses and accessories that marked their claim to interwar consumer culture.
In When Girls Come Out to Play, Katharine Milcoy shows how scholars’ misconceptions about gender and class in the early to mid-twentieth century have obscured the historical significance of working-class teen girlhoods. According to Milcoy, historians have wrongly assumed that engagement in commercial leisure required substantial disposable income, which became available to adolescents only in the postwar years and, even then, only to boys. By centering...
