Sexual Reckonings

Sexual Reckonings dramatically illustrates how attempts to regulate girls' sexual behavior were at the heart of power relations in the pre-Civil Rights South. Compelling and original, Cahn's recovery of the dreams, hopes, and heartbreaks of poor white and African-American girls of the mid-20th century South have continued to haunt me, long after finishing this remarkable book. -- Annelise Orleck, author of Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty Sexual Reckonings is a significant analysis of how black and white teenage young women reshaped their world in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Based on extensive and imaginative sources, Cahn's work is nuanced, challenging, and brilliantly argued. -- Pete Daniel, author of Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-world War II South Carefully researched and beautifully written, Sexual Reckonings forges a new path by tying the history of southern adolescence to the South's own coming of age. -- Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill This impressive history of the sexual cultures of southern black and white adolescent girls pays careful attention to social fears of sexual danger, state regulatory policies, and the experience of the young women who reshaped sexual meanings over the first half of the twentieth century. Cahn persuasively argues for the centrality of adolescent female sexuality to southern politics, from the changing racial focus of forced sterilizations to the shifting grounds for white resistance to school desegregation. -- Estelle B. Freedman, author of Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics Sexual Reckonings offers a fascinating analysis of female adolescence in the context of racial, class and cultural upheavals across the twentieth-century South. Cahn transforms our understandings of girlhood and womanhood, sex and society, in the South and the nation, during the critical decades from 1920-1960. -- Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University

Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Cahn reveals how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts, with the modern awareness of female sexuality clashing mightily against the white supremacist and patriarchal legacies of the old South.

Sexual Reckonings is the fascinating tale of adolescent girls coming of age in the South during the most explosive decades for the region. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Susan Cahn reveals how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts. Those years witnessed the birth of a modern awareness of adolescence and female sexuality that clashed mightily with the white supremacist and patriarchal legacies of the old South. As youth staked its claim, the bodies and beliefs of southern girls became the battlefield for a transformed South, which was, like them, experiencing growing pains.

Cahn reveals how young women, both white and black, were seen as the South's greatest hope and its greatest threat. Viewed as critical actors in every regional crisis, from the economic recession and urban migrations of the 1920s to the racial conflicts precipitated by school desegregation in the 1950s, female teenagers became the conspicuous subjects of social policy and regional imagination. All the while, these adolescents pursued their own desires and discovered their own meanings, creating cracks in the twin pillars of the Jim Crow South--"racial purity" and white male dominance--that would soon be toppled by the student-led civil rights movement.

Sexual Reckonings is an amazingly intimate look at a time of deep personal exploration and profound cultural change for southern girls and for the society they inhabited, a powerful account of the clash between a society's fears and the daily lives and aspirations of its most prized, and unpredictable, population.