DescriptionThis dissertation argues that tomboys are a crucial link in the relationship between
heterosexuality and normative gender expression as they took shape between 1900 and
1940. Tomboys of the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States occupied
the frontlines of major transformations in the histories of feminism, youth culture,
sexuality, and the body. By 1920, New Women and political radicals had won significant
opportunities for boyish girls to continue to be somewhat masculine into adulthood, such
as through education, activism, athletics, and work. At the same time, an increasingly
autonomous urban working-class youth culture demanded a measure of gender
conformity for adolescent girls and boys who wished to be eligible for heterosexual
activity. Although historians often view feminism and the growth of youth culture as
liberatory, adolescent tomboys knew they were contradictory. Liberal adults, including
many feminists, advised them to “be themselves,” but tomboys’ peers ostracized them
from the world of dating and popularity when they remained boyish. For many pubescent tomboys, changes in the body accompanied not only demands that they become feminine,
but also a realignment of emotional life. Tomboys had to learn to see boys not as trusty
comrades but as potential dates, and they had to look to girls, whom they had often
scorned, for close friendships. In fact, as children many tomboys had believed that their
similarity to boys extended right to their very bodies: they acknowledged that girl bodies
and boy bodies were anatomically different, but they detected enough similarities that
differences did not matter—a belief that this dissertation calls affinity. In fact, some
tomboys only learned to see their bodies as female for the first time at menarche. The
history of tomboyism thus coincides with the history of the body and sexuality. By 1940,
women who had grown up as tomboys knew that the bargain for the female body’s
heterosexual normality depended on relinquishing the pleasures of tomboyism, including
the sense that their bodies somehow resembled boys’. The historical tomboy body
discloses affective contradictions between the freedoms promised by feminists and
sexually adventurous youth alike.