Crista DeLuzio's comprehensive survey of scientific ideas of female adolescence is exactly what I needed to help me make sense of the changing legal treatment of crimes against girls that I analysed in my first book. Detailed discussions exist of only the ideas of G. Stanley Hall, together with briefer, selective surveys, such as the one that I ultimately developed, constructed to provide context for analyses of juvenile delinquency, sex education, youth culture, and sexual violence. DeLuzio's book is far more wide-ranging than that literature. It is a study of “scientific thought” rather than simply psychology that identifies and analyses key thinkers and exemplary texts. DeLuzio examines health reform and the debate on coeducation to provide nineteenth-century precursors to the modern notion of adolescence associated with Hall and elaborated by the mental hygiene movement, and brings endocrinology and anthropology into the frame to broaden the picture of twentieth-century thought. Even her treatment of the more familiar territory of Hall's ideas employs a broader view, most notably turning to British sexologist Havelock Ellis to explicate Hall's thought.

Beyond offering that comprehensive map, DeLuzio's careful, insightful readings make two contributions. She offers a rich picture of the formulation of the developmental paradigm, the underpinning for modern notions of childhood that has become so naturalized that it regularly slips out of focus in historical analyses. DeLuzio also effectively unpicks “the scientific production of adolescence as a ‘universal,’ ‘developmental’ category that privileged maleness, whiteness and middle-class status as normative characteristics” (5), showing how ideas about female development “helped influence and even challenge the modern concept of adolescence” (6).

Taken on its own terms, the only troubling blemish in this study is the absence of homosexuality. There is one brief, unindexed, mention of the notion of a “homosexual stage” in early adolescence advanced by child guidance experts, and of the “homosocial orientation of much of girl culture” that such an idea sought to explain and normalize (172) – hardly an adequate treatment of a controversial feature of the developmental paradigm and a central feature of the experience of adolescence.

My one substantive concern is perhaps an inappropriate one for a book that claims only to be a study of scientific thought: the relative inattention to the role of the behavior of girls in shaping the thinking of experts. To be sure, “the activities of and experiences of girls” (8) are one of the influences that DeLuzio identifies. But discussing, for example, the formulation of Progressive era ideas as part of an effort to solve the problem of juvenile delinquency, the details of that behavior are given little attention, rendering the “problem” a setting for thought rather than an influence on it. Notwithstanding that this book is thus not the whole story of thought about adolescence, it is a by a wide margin the best and richest study we have of the ideas elaborated by American experts.