No Fun to be a Girl

Kolohe says:

This is interesting because it’s a bit at odds with what I understood to be the cultural norms for the era. Brigg’s youth “skin-nay” cartoons are usually nominally set in small town 1880s Midwest (where he himself grew up.)

My understanding was that first of all, this was still ‘the west’ culturally, so gender ‘norms’ were a bit looser, (compared to say either New England or the South, where there norms, tho different from each other, had more social stricture). And in any case, (but esp in ‘the west’) didn’t really make really strong differentiation until around 11-12 years old.

Even in New England-set “Little Women,” a girl sledding down a hill would have probably been unremarkable. (Though on the other hand, Little Women was set about twenty years earlier than when this comic takes place, so two more decades of creeping Victorianism has happened. And the March’s are super-proggie by the standards of the day is half the point of the books)Report