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MEL GIBSON: Girlhood is a social construction, by which I mean it is a perspective and a concept that cultures develop to explain what girlhood might be. It therefore has an impact on the lives of actual girls,

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but is slightly separate from it. Tied into cultural perspectives on what's appropriate for girls at any given moment and in any given place.

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Girlhood changes across time. Historical models are very different from contemporary models, and it changes across location and geography.

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So a rural construction of girlhood may be very different from an urban construction of girlhood. It also varies according to age. So historically, something like the girl's own paper,

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which is in the collection, would address actually girls and women almost as a unified whole. These kind of periodicals had everything from school stories through to things on how to manage a house, how

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to look after cattle, they're lot, craft activities, romances. So it was a sort of world for female-shaped people that also constrained in some ways, those female-shaped people, in terms of what they were offered.

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Because a lot of this is tied to modes of consumption and assumptions about women's and girls' capacity for citizenship as well. So girlhood is political and it's a social construct.

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And in both cases, it has an impact on actual lives. Girlhood is a construct that changes over time. When you begin with the girl's own paper, as I mentioned, it includes women and girls

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and puts all of their interests in together, irrespective of how diverse those interests are, be they schoolgirl stories, be they adult romances, be it things about work, be it things about running a home,

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it's all in there. They also had a kind of proto problem page where people would send in their questions anonymously, and the editors would answer equally anonymously,

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which could be two I think our eyes and ears. So do go and look at them, sometimes quite peculiar and very, very directive. They're very firm about what is appropriate for girlhood

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in the late 19th and early 20th century. At this point, the publications that appear also become intersected with class. So class ties in with history.

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By the 1950s, you've got the idea of periodicals that very firmly target working class girls. This emerged with what were known as working girl papers in the 1920s.

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Titles like Peg's paper appeared. And they addressed what they thought were the concerns of the working class girl, as they did in the 1950s, which reflected changes in the education system of the time

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in Britain, where what was offered to a girl who went to the grammar school and was perceived as middle class was very different in terms of career, in terms of leisure interest, and in terms of consumerism than

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what was offered the peer who happened to be working class. So these are very directive texts in many ways. As I mentioned, girlhood segments and changes a lot over history and according to location.

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The rural girlhood is different from the urban girlhood. The urban girlhood often focuses on the idea of the girl who is going to have a career, be independent, and work alone, or share with peers

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and live with peers. Whereas for the working class girl, for a lot of the 20th century, the trajectory is still, this is a moment of freedom.

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You will work of necessity, but your aim is always going to be marriage. Career is not an option. So it's very directive in terms of expectations,

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which is why it's such a political thing, particularly when you start seeing in some of these periodicals second wave feminism, third wave feminism, post-feminism.

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Because what that starts to say is things can be done differently. Or in post-feminism the battles are won. Let's not worry about that anymore.

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I always think that's interesting, because it means you end up juxtaposing the Spice Girls with the riot girl movement. Spelt girl rather than girl, where the battles are still

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ongoing. So there's a tension there in two ways of even thinking in relation to popular music reflected in the texts that girls are offered

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that show different girlhoods. Again, a most recent development really is the evolution of the notion of the tween having had a teenager evolve towards the 1950s.

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The tween, equally commodified, is a person who is meant to be not quite adolescent yet, inhabiting a space that could be perceived of as innocent. And I use innocent very politically

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there, because the idea of girlhood and innocence have been very intertwined over time. And the idea of protecting girlhood innocence by policing girls behavior or expecting

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them to police themselves through the text that they're offered, is absolutely made clear over and over again, which is one of the reasons why these texts are

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so fascinating to study and analyze. In relation to girlhood, there is a huge amount of intersection with notions of class, ethnicity, and sexuality. In the texts however, what was often seen

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is an emphasis on whiteness and the erasure of difference, or the othering of girls who were perceived as somehow different from an assumed white norm. This, of course, is spurious, but again,

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is an act of policing. It's also an act that enables different groups of girls who may have different concerns to be separated off, segregated as it were, with some labeled

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as more socially dangerous or perhaps angry than others. So whiteness is used as a policing structure within a lot of these periodicals, in ways that serve to ensure a kind of dominant discourse

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about what an approved form of girlhood is. This applies across many countries, applied in different ways, but is always about social engineering and social control, because there

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is a fear reflected in the level of control operating in some of these texts of the girl as an independent, confident being with self-esteem. This collection's analysis of girlhood really ends in the late

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'90s and early aughties. What is happening at this moment is that there has been a recognition of the diversity of girlhood.

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There has been a number of battles fought over representation that change the balance in terms of who gets seen, who gets represented, and representation is important. However, we are often pushed back from those positions.

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So currently in Britain, for instance, in 2025, there is a campaign about protecting our women and girls. Well, that assumes two things. One, it assumes that our is a very specific group.

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It also assumes a vulnerability on the part of those girls that necessitates male hegemonic protection. This means, again, that girlhood and the lives of girls remain extremely political even whilst girls are often

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excluded from the political realm and dismissed as seemingly having or theoretically having frivolous interests around consumption. That's not actually the case, but that assumption

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is used again as a means of control that depoliticizes female struggles within cultures. What's really interesting in terms of contemporary girlhood is the shift beyond the gendered binary,

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the move away from the idea of boyhood and girlhood as the sole categories. Indeed, sometimes there is a suggestion that the notion of gender itself might be violence, particularly

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if enacted in a school context. This, of course, has fed into contemporary culture wars about the position of trans girls in education, and indeed, in terms of the cultural texts that are offered.

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In that, a number of publishers and campaigners feel very strongly that what they'd like to see is a return to a very firmly policed binary that refuses to accept the diversity of girlhood

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that genuinely exist. A key text from the 1990s was by Penny Tinkler called "Constructing Girlhood," that focused on magazines from 1920 to 1950.

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What Tinkler did was close textual analysis of topics around the construction of girlhood in the texts, and thus what it was meant to say around the reader.

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One can choose a theme, any theme. Most recently, as you'll find if you look at the comics video I mentioned cookery in 1950s comics and the way that was a political issue.

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So focusing right down on something that seems as obvious as cookery can actually be used to reveal social change around constructions of girlhood, moving from authoritarian models,

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on the one hand, to peer relation models at the other end of a period, for instance. So you can use these things in all sorts of interesting ways when thinking about girlhood, whether you're

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delving into historical constructions, whether you're looking in how it relates to the construction of women in any given period. So as I mentioned with the girl's own paper,

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it constructs women and girls as one. But by the 1950s, you've got two quite distinctive worlds emerging, a world of girls and a world of women who were offered separate texts.

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So that too is important in terms of ways you can look at how these texts operate. You can look at them in terms of what they don't mention, in terms of ethnicity and sexuality.

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You can look at them in terms of, in what ways do they or don't they engage with political notions like feminism. Are they allowed to or are these beyond the scope of the texts?

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And the question to always as is, if it is beyond the scope of the texts, why? If people aren't represented, why? What is the ideological underlying construction

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that comes through from the periodicals? So you can choose geographically, you can choose over time. You can choose small topic.

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You can choose to think about the way it relates to womanhood. And I'm sure there'll be many other ways that you will creatively engage with this collection.