American sweethearts Book

I'm going to start right off by pointing out that the subtitle (Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture) is a bit of a misnomer. "Teenage Girls From 1930-1965" would be much more accurate, as the first 117 pages were devoted to Nancy Drew and her contemporaries, while the next 100 focused on Gidget, Patty Duke, Shirley Temple's various roles, all of which came out in the 50s or 60s. I was disappointed, as I was looking forward to discussions of, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, My So-Called Life, and Britney Spears. (For the record, Buffy and Britney were mentioned three times each in the epilogue, while Angela Chase was never brought up. More on that in a second.)

I found Nash's writing to be dry and vague, and overly academic - though the book does appear to be aimed at academic circles rather than popular culture. She provided quite a few examples to back up her theory, most of which I was unfamiliar with, seeing as most of them predated my parents' adolescence, much less my own. Her theory was, boiled down to its simplest form, that popular culture is threatened by teenage girls because it doesn't understand them and believes them to be in opposition to the default cultural viewpoint, that of middle-aged white males. Nash theorizes that because the people producing popular entertainment see teenage girls as a threat to the patriarchy and all that it stands for, it marginalizes, ignores, or trivializes them, in large part by making them appear stupid or fetishizing their blooming sexuality - or both.

I can completely get behind her complaint that when books featuring strong, competent, three-dimensional, sympathetic, realistic, female characters are made into movies, they frequently lose all of those characteristics except female. She pointed out the Nancy Drew movies of the 1930s, where Nancy went from unnaturally smart - she knew the answer to everything, after all - to a blithering idiot. The ideas she had in the book were given to her boyfriend or her father, who she was regularly rescued by, in direct contradiction with the original text. More recent examples (both of which I am very fond of) include Anne Hathaway in both Ella Enchanted and The Princess Diaries, where the main female characters are both turned into silly, clumsy girls, obsessed with boys and noticeably less competent than their book counterparts. (Honestly, Anne, must you continue to ruin my favorite young adult novels?)

That said, the early slight of the Anne of Green Gables novels made me cranky. Yes, Ms. Nash, as Anne grew older, she matured. That's actually character development, rather than an anti-feminist message. If she had been as scatterbrained and naive as a mother of 5 as she was as a girl of 11, you would have made a big case about the dumbing down of an adult woman. Back away from my childhood favorite.

Those interested in the subject will find some good points here; those who are looking for a cranky feminist might find that as well. Those looking for some perspective on Buffy and Britney won't find much of anything. What I'd really like to know, though - were they left out because there hasn't been enough time to see what their impact on mainstream culture was? Or because they didn't fit with Nash's theory?