Reading German Girlhood: Louise Tilly and the Agency of Girls in European History

Abstract

Europe for current studies of girls' agency in history. Using my preliminary analysis of a body of German periodicals written for girls during the late Enlightenment, I propose some methodological possibilities for combining cultural histories of reading with social historical approaches to the roles played by girls and women in European social life. Tilly's focus on the life cycle as an organizing principle and the family economy as a key site of history established the importance of such groups to social historical understandings of the past. Though my study incorporates sources outside the usual bounds of social history, it also depends on the analysis and methods of pioneering feminist social historians such as Louise Tilly.Though the cultural approaches that guide my investigation of young women and girls as historical actors may seem distant from the methods of which Louise Tilly was a pioneer, I nevertheless see this research following paths of inquiry opened by social history. My analysis of new Enlightenment periodicals published for German girls aims at understanding the experiences of young readers who would not be considered worthy of historical study were it not for scholarship on women's lives and the history of the family advanced by Louise Tilly and her colleagues in feminist social history. Tilly's contributions are part of my work thematically in this sense, but also directly, through the intergenerational transmission of her scholarship by her student, my mentor, Mary Jo Maynes. Moreover, this special section's consideration of Tilly's legacy in terms of her connections with students also resonates with the questions motivating my research on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century German periodicals for girls. That is, there is a parallel between the generations of scholars represented here and my interest in teaching and learning as historical phenomena. These periodicals provoke questions about class and literacy, reading and agency, didacticism and autonomy, in ways that both depend upon and, I hope, extend earlier scholarship on the social history of women. After a discussion of Tilly's work as it has informed my historical understanding, the second part of this essay elaborates on that influence through the example of my current research into the history of girls' reading.While always acknowledging the parameters of a particular inquiry, Tilly demonstrated a deep conviction in the potential of social history. In a piece on "History as Exploration and Discovery," she writes that history, with its insistence on identifying empirically within the limits of the sources the facts to be explained, its willingness to discuss the "how" of building accounts of For comments on earlier versions of this essay, I thank the Workshop on the Comparative History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Minnesota,