American Tomboys, 1850-1915

"American Tomboys departs from the trend of focusing on literary fiction by offering a detailed historical account that contrasts the lived experiences of historic tomboys with their imagined lives in fiction. This contrast lies at the heart of this book's originality."—Laura L. Lovett, author of Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938

"American Tomboys is an exciting, interdisciplinary look at the ways in which concepts of gender changed from the eve of the Civil War until the onset of World War I. More capacious and probing than previous studies of gender and cultural expression during this period, Sentilles's focus on the tomboy develops a fresh way to think about the issues such a figure raises."—Joy Kasson, author of Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

"This book effectively charts the rapidly changing boundaries between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood during the same period. Readers will gain a nuanced understanding of the tomboy's origins and her complicated racial history . . . This is an essential title for all libraries and all levels."—Choice

"In addition to examining the era's usual domestic fiction, Sentilles uncovered women's letters, memoirs, and diaries that showed the tomboy as critical to the creation of gender constructs during the building of a new nation . . . American Tomboys is an excellent addition to gender studies and women's studies courses."—Journal of American History

"American Tomboys adds significantly to the budding field of girlhood studies . . . Through Hurricane Nell, Calamity Jane, and the tomboy figures that came both before and after them, Sentilles creatively reveals that girls and girlhood were in fact integral to the formation of white American identity."—Western Historical Quarterly

"American culture continues to grapple with girls who refuse the still-limited terms for gender performance available to them, making it crucial to have histories like American Tomboys to provide a genealogy of such struggles for self-definition and resistance."—Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth

"Sentilles's work presents a beneficial model for anyone thinking at the junctures of artistic representation and sociopolitical action...American Tomboys carefully attends to the links between historical records of lived tomboy experiences and representations of tomboys in nineteenth-century literary texts without reducing the literary to the historical or the historical to the literary."—American Literature

"American Tomboys is a refreshing look at an understudied gender identity . . ."—Legacy

"Sentilles's monograph extends well beyond literary scholarship, providing readers with a comprehensive historical-cultural analysis from the mid-century through the Progressive Era that contrasts fictional tomboys with living ones. The work is expertly written, meticulously researched, and engaging."—American Historical Review