Teenage girls are typically the least powerful and most underestimated group within Western cultures – where adults are seen as superior to children, and men are privileged above women. Girls can also provoke cultural fears and anxieties because they occupy a transitional space between childhood and adulthood.
How old is a “girl”? The definition has shifted, along with things like the age of consent and marriage. The significance of marriage has tended to mean young women are called “girls” even into their early twenties. While female children are also understood as girls, a distinct girls’ culture begins, it’s generally thought, around the pre-teen years.
The separate stage of life we know as girlhood originated in the second half of the 19th century. It was brought into being by two major transformations: the raise of the age of marriage to the early twenties and girls working outside the home. In Britain and the United States, these changes created a time of independence for young women, between being under the control of parents and the confines of marriage, as literary historian Sally Mitchell has written.
