Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence by Julie Pfeiffer (review)

Abstract

the United States. Violence—tear gas, beatings, arrests—and the kidnapping of a law student in 1944 initiated a new phase of “democratic effervescence” (42) that ended with brutal repression in 1948, with the torture of dissidents and the murders of two high-profile student activists. Successive cycles of coalition building, protest, violence, quiescence, and rebuilding through to the book’s temporal close in 1979 reinforced themselves across decades, lending symbolic power to opposition forces through the memory and practice of protest. Across these decades, Rueda is particularly effective in bringing forward the underrepresented contributions of women and families to anti-authoritarian resistance. Key photographs clearly center young women’s leading roles in marches, as well as direct confrontations of soldiers on the streets as early as the 1950s. One particularly evocative example included a student, Vilma Núñez, who persuaded the entire market of León—staffed by women vendors dependent on small profit margins for their family’s subsistence—to shut down for the day and attend a funeral march for students killed in the July 23, 1959, massacre. Elsewhere, Rueda demonstrates the ways in which parents took significant risks to support their children’s revolutionary work, providing space, refuge, resources, and support. Each of these rich social and cultural angles helps to enrich scholars’ views of the networks and coalitions that fomented and bolstered revolution in Nicaragua. Critically for historians of youth and higher education, time and again it was students leading the charge.