Abstract: Chapter 4 tells stories of mischievous, naughty and fierce boys and girls, prompting us to rethink gendered moralities and how they are learned in childhood. Systematic behavioral analyses reveal gendered patterns in children’s moral experience, for example, boys initiate physical aggression, dominance and swearing more than girls, but girls assert themselves in more subtle ways, such as through tattling and scolding. I further explore how children’s learning of authority, aggression, boyhood, and violence is shaped by their family life as well as the larger historical trends. The chapter also examines how young girls understand their own situations and defend themselves. Despite the entrenched son-preference in this community, little girls are far from passive or submissive. To honor Arthur Wolf’s legacy on marriage and adoption and offer new insights on young girls’ emotional experience, which was not addressed in Wolf’s previous works, I present the case of an adopted daughter: an “unruly” girl who defies parental commands, asserts her own will, and negotiates love-hate relationships with different family members.

In the past women who were deemed to be ‘difficult’ were called ‘hysterical’ and their ‘odd’ behaviour even exhibited in lecture theatres, for entertainment, to doctors in training. But today, even after decades of feminism, are women still being dismissed as ‘out of our minds’ when we complain? The focus of the last two decades has been on men’s mental health because of their higher suicide rate. However, women are suffering significantly too in many ways and still disproportionately, losing out in mental health care. Gender plays a key role in how we experience our mental health but is paid insufficient attention. What has gone wrong for women and girls? Why are we still ‘out of our minds’ and what can we do about it?

Half of all mental health problems start by the age of 15 and the teenage and young adult years are particularly difficult for girls with high and increasing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm. Many different factors contribute, including social media, peer pressures, focus on appearance, friends, relationships, schoolwork and, as Everyone’s Invited has recently highlighted, personal safety. There is tremendous pressure to conform with the expectations of others. Attitudes to women and girls seem to have gone into reverse during the author’s lifetime. It is too simplistic to view the problems of young women as a simply a ‘lack of self-esteem’. The difficulties they face in society are consistently underestimated and not taken seriously. Fast access to therapy is crucial. Bullying must be addressed effectively. Sexist and mysogynistic attitudes in school must be challenged and, given the easy access now to pornography, the issues of consent should addressed head on by both parents and schools. Using the example of Everyone’s Invited, women and girls need to reach out and support each other. The personal is still political.

This chapter explores the protections afforded under the laws of war to young women and girls who, over the course of a single conflict, may occupy the roles of a child, a civilian, a combatant, a killer, a victim of sexual violence, and/or a mother. But rather than exploring this question into relation to women and girls as a homogenous group, it focuses on one young woman in one conflict, the so-called Second Congo War. Drawing on testimony provided by this witness during the Ntaganda case at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the chapter presents a critical view on the role of law in war. It observes that even with advances in legal protections for women and girls, as demonstrated by this important ICC case, in practical terms these actors often have no one to protect them but themselves.

This chapter presents a self-contained ethnography of twenty-seven girls at a high school in Bolton, in the north-west of England. The setting of the school, Midlan High, is contextualised socially and geographically and the social groups within the school are described. The ethnography identifies four communities of practice in the school and these are described in detail. The communities of practice include the elitist and trendy pro-school Eden Village clique; the sensible, pragmatic and pro-school Geeks; the independent, cool, and somewhat anti-school Populars; and the most rebellious and anti-school group, the Townies. In articulating the process of ethnography, the chapter also reflects upon the fieldwork process, providing a frank and honest account of the intricacies of doing ethnography within an educational context.

A carefully adapted indenture, made for a boy and rewritten for a girl, shows the ambivalence with which young women were bound into London’s Livery Companies, or guilds. Chapter 2 uses new data to estimate for the first time the numbers of London’s female apprentices, which were considerably higher than they appear from the formal record. The complex relationship between women, work and guilds across early-modern Europe often excluded and marginalised women, whilst in some places providing a parallel route to recognition. London’s distinctive customs presented particular opportunities as well as constraints for women. Within the companies, both officially and unofficially, and alongside them, the female apprenticeship sector was growing, prompted in part by economic and social dislocations and by family ambitions. Apprenticeship for girls was coming to be a significant and familiar option through the social spectrum.

This chapter emphasizes actions at the regional scale, specifically the West Coast hip neighborhoods of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The runaway crisis of the late 1960s and the People’s Park standoff in 1969 are the focus of this chapter, which explores the role that “the West” and “nature” each played in the counterculture imagination and in the emergence of the popular ecology movement on the streets of Berkeley. This chapter stresses again the more intimate scale of the body and the influence that mobile, sometimes sick, and recalcitrant youth bodies played in the remaking of public space and ideas of autonomy as youth and their adult allies fought for “the right to the city.” The flood of rootless, placeless teens in public space, parks, and new “youth ghettos” forced local municipal renegotiations of young people’s legal status, contributing to broad national changes to the very meanings of youth, youth public health accommodation, and environmental activism during a decade marked by such contests.

Despite being communities of celibate individuals who had renounced marriage and family, monasteries housed and raised minor children. The definition of childhoodin Egypt of late antiquity varied by gender and status and constituted age ranges rather than a clearly defined beginning and end point. Challenges with the source material include a paucity of references to children, ambiguity in primary sources about age, and the frequent context of trauma.

Critics have tended to dismiss Wharton’s depictions of children as victims of their parents’ misbehavior (Paul Marvell of The Custom of the Country) to optimistic symbols of the future (Nettie Struther’s baby in The House of Mirth), failing to take into account the complexity of children as characters. In fact, Wharton’s novels are populated with children – typically girls – marked by suggestions of gender queerness; transgression, seduction, and aggression; age-impropriety; and ethnic ambiguity. From “The Valley of Childish Things” (1896) to “A Little Girl’s New York” (1938), Wharton emphasizes the absence of childhood innocence and the resistance of children to linear development. Wharton’s children are rarely innocent, frequently knowing, and resistant to narratives of linear development. Concentrating on the novels The Reef (1912) and The Children (1928), and touching on other works by Wharton, I demonstrate how this theme flows throughout the author’s corpus.