100 Years in the Life of an American Girl: True Stories 1910 – 2010 Suzanne Sherman Author

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In 1911 Florence gets her first car ride in a Model T her dad buys from a door-to-door car salesman. In Montana in 1930, Helen travels to her one-room school on horseback. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Johnny is bussed to integrate a white school, leaving a neighborhood where nobody’s a stranger unless you make them a stranger. In New York, Victoria goes to Woodstock at 12. In the 1980s Nicole plays Ms. Pac Man at a video arcade. On September 11, Aalaa wakes up to a new world in Michigan and resolves to show her Americanism another way. The fascinating story of a century through the eyes of American girls under age 13 in every decade from 1910 to 2010. In over 50 beautifully crafted narratives, women and young girls born between 1907 and 2001 describe the life and times that are new in every decade and vanishing just as fast. The author collected most of the stories by interview and she retains the girls’ voices as they tell about far more than playing with paper dolls and hearing the first radios open the door to the world. They are dancing in the streets at the end of WW I, climbing trees in a skirt and pantaloons, using the first telephone. They lose Japanese American friends to internment camps and undergo nightly blackouts during WW II. One girl escapes Saigon as a 5-year-old at the end of the Vietnam War to grow up in Dad’s rural Georgia. As the 20th century goes on, American Bandstand gives way to MTV and family life includes single moms and weekend dads, stepfamilies and open adoption. Sex education classes amuse, stress is treated with medication, and the entertainments of the digital age compete with TV. By 2010 girls have role models in leadership and contribute to culture like never before. In 1931 a girl’s big achievement was winning at jacks; in 2009 it was coordinating a National Day of Silence at school. Each chapter includes fun pop culture highlights — did you know peppermint Life Savers were inspired by the life saving devices used in the Titanic disaster of 1912? — and a short history of the decade’s events in politics, education, medicine, technology and entertainment. Girls’ culture reflects the bigger picture of change from the 20th to the 21st century. These voices of girlhood from different races and classes show American culture at its truest as they describe life-altering inventions and shifting social codes across ten decades. They reveal what’s universal and what’s unique about social challenges and racial prejudices, desires and disappointments, hopes and losses. It’s history in motion powered by the personal. 100 Years in the Life of an American Girl is an entertaining and eye-opening look at a century of life. Whatever your age or gender, you’ll learn about yourself, your children, your mothers, your grandmothers. You’ll learn about the country in ways that were never taught in school. Free from the influences that shape adulthood, young girls have their fingers on the pulse of culture. In a book group? Discussion questions are featured at the end of the book.

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