Since the suffrage movement, young women s actions have been analyzed and decried exhaustively by mass media. Each new bad behavior bobbing one s hair, protesting politics, drinking, swearing, or twerking, among other things is held up as yet another example of moral decline in women. Without fail, any departure from the socially dictated persona of the angelic, passive woman gets slapped with the label of bad girl.
Social historian Carol Dyhouse studies this phenomenon in Girl Trouble, an expansive account of its realities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries....