In this impressive work of scholarship, the author argues that a study of female adolescence in the US South magnifies issues of “crime, education, sexual pleasure and power, and the well-being of individuals and communities” – societal problems that are often displaced by adults onto a younger generation (15). Cahn's social history of female adolescence indeed illuminates matters of great significance in the South between 1920 and 1960 – programmes of sterilization, school desegregation after the Brown decision – while providing insights into heretofore underexamined aspects of the female adolescent experience – dating rituals, consumption patterns and so on. Cahn thus convincingly maps the intricate relationship between race, sex and class that a focus on the female adolescent experience serves to highlight.

In her Introduction, Cahn sets the parameters of her study, defining for her purposes the limits of the term “adolescence.” Given the South's preoccupation with policing racial boundaries in the period under scrutiny, it is curious that Cahn devotes so little space to G. Stanley Hall's study Adolescence (1904) and, in particular, Gail Bederman's important discussion of Hall. That the first and most influential theorist of adolescence was deeply preoccupied with what Bederman calls the “racially mutable” adolescent is significant because it could be argued, therefore, that from its very origins, the concept of adolescence in the United States has borne with it connotations of racial transformation. Cahn does not observe a strictly chronological structure, though the Brown chapter is, necessarily, the last. Instead, the study is organized thematically, a structural choice that enables her to trace developments across the decades within individual chapters. This does, however, throw up a few anomalies. In particular, Chapter 5, on adolescents' entry into the labour market, does not sit very convincingly with what comes before or after.

Notwithstanding these minor criticisms, Cahn's work is thoroughly compelling. Her meticulous research, which includes case records from southern institutions and sociological studies from the 1930s, is bolstered by her references to fiction, effectively demonstrating that the wider societal preoccupation with southern girlhood also seeped into the literary imagination. She opens the book by comparing versions of female adolescent desire in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She concludes with a discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream (1949). Along the way, there are analyses of fiction by Dubose Heyward, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.