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Girl studies

Girl studies, also known as girlhood studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field of study that is focused on girlhood and girls’ culture that combines advocacy and the direct perspectives and thoughts of girls themselves. The field officially emerged in the 1990s after decades of falling under the broader field of women’s studies. Scholars within girl studies examine social and cultural elements of girlhood and move away from an adult-centered focus. Those working in the field of girl studies have studied it primarily in relation to other fields that include sociology, psychology, education, history, literary studies, media studies, and communication studies. Girl studies seeks to work directly with girls themselves in order to analyze their lives and understand the large societal forces at play within them. Scholars in girl studies also explore the connection the field has to women's studies, boyhood studies, and masculinity studies.

History and Development

Girl studies officially became a field in the 1990s, after the increase in conversation about getting more girls into science, math, and technology fields in the 1980s, though scholars and researchers were studying girls prior to this decade. In the 1970s, some feminist scholars brought to attention the unbalanced focus of boyhood in comparison to girlhood in youth research. Angela McRobbie, Meda Chesney-Lind, and Christine Griffin were some of the few scholars studying and critiquing the lack of study on girlhood and girl culture in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1990s, the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development conducted a study on the social development of relationships of girls. This study found that when they approach adolescence, girls begin to hide their honest feelings and desires from those they are in close relationships with, making it hard for them to express their feelings later in life. In 1992, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) published How Schools Shortchange Girls, “the first national survey to assert a link between girls’ psychosocial experience and schooling."

Girl studies emerged in the 1990s, a time when there was an increased interest from the media and fashion and beauty industries in young women. Advertisers and retailers marketed towards girls by "promising female youth agency and social value" from purchasing the products. Within the academy, there was an increase in feminist and gender studies scholars focusing on intersectionality and subsequently on girls. In 2008, scholars Claudia Mitchell, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, and Jackie Kirk established and launched Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal after recognizing the emerging interest in the field at the 2001 “A New Girl Order: Young Women and the Future of Feminist Inquiry” conference at King’s College in London.

As girl studies develops, "there has been significant movement away from studying girls as future women and toward analyzing girls as members of a unique demographic group," especially in psychology, history, and sociology. There is also a movement towards focusing more on intersectionality and the experiences of girls across the world.

Criticisms:

As an emerging field, girl studies has faced some criticisms from other scholars. Janie Victoria Wald and Beth Cooper Benjamin have found that connections between “girls’ psychosocial development and persistent issues in adult women’s lives" are not as present in recent scholarship as they were during the advent of the field and believe they should be in order to explore intergenerational relationships. These two scholars also criticize the increased specialization of focus in the field and subsequent disconnect between the subfields. Mary Celeste Kearney, a scholar who does work in girl studies, notices that though there is a focus on intersectionality within the field, “non-white, non-Western girls remain vastly understudied as result of such research being conducted primarily in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Northern Europe, and the United States." Some critics identify problems that they see with the field as a whole, claiming that it is neither a new nor exciting field, as the Girlhood Studies journal states, but rather one that is established and in crisis.