Ancient Greek Adolescent Girls at Play [Sculpture]

This small (5.5 inches high) terracotta sculpture was made in Greek southern Italy in the late fourth century BCE. It depicts two adolescent girls playing the game of "knucklebones" (astragaloi in Greek). The game was usually played like the modern game of "jacks": one threw the knucklebones in the air and attempted to catch as many as possible. They were also used like modern "dice." Each of the four long sides of the knucklebone had a value: the convex side was worth 3, the concave 4, and the two flat sides 1 and 6. Most knucklebones were made out of the actual ankle bones of sheep or goats, but fancier ones were made of ivory, bronze, or terracotta. Children of both sexes, adolescent girls, and young women played knucklebones as revealed by statues like this one as well as paintings on vases.

This statue is both a depiction of a game and a representation of gender ideals. Whereas girls in the nearby city-state of Sparta were taught to read and write and engaged in athletic competitions, those in Athens spent their girlhoods largely indoors practicing the domestic arts (e.g., spinning, weaving, cooking, and childcare). Athenian girls typically married at the age of 15 or so and spent the rest of their lives engaged in household activities.

Image courtesy of the British Museum (GR 1867.5-10.1 (Terracotta D 161) <a class="external" href="http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/t/group_of_knucklebone_players.aspx">http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/t/group_of_knucklebone_players.aspx</A> (accessed December 7, 2009). Annotated by Miriam Forman-Brunell and David D. Leitao.

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa [Photograph and Scholarly Text]

In 1928, Martha Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa, an anthropological work based on field work she had conducted on female adolescents in Samoa. In Mead's book that became a best seller and unleashed a storm of controversy, she argued that it was cultural factors rather than biological forces that caused adolescents to experience emotional and psychological stress.

Mead's work had taken shape against a backdrop of broader anxieties about American youth generally and female adolescents specifically who were openly challenging social and sexual mores. Many contemporaries believed that the "storm and stress" of adolescence was biologically determined following a three-volume study of largely male adolescents by American psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1904. Under the direction of her mentor, the anthropologist, Franz Boaz, Margaret Mead sought to study whether adolescence was a "period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girls' body."

In 1925, Mead observed, interviewed, and interacted with 68 girls between the ages of 9 and 20 living in three villages on the island of Ta‘ū in American Samoa. After 9 months of study, Mead concluded that unlike stressed American girls, the well-balanced and carefree nature of sexually-active Samoan girls was due to the cultural stability of their society free of conflicting values, expectations, and shameful taboos. Largely relieved of the baby-tending responsibilities that had burdened them as little girls, Samoan adolescents reveled in their freedom and deferred marriage during this "best period" in their lives.

This is a photograph of Margaret Mead (center) and two Samoan adolescents. Mead donned a Samoan wedding dress woven by Makelita, the last Queen of Manu'a. (Mead's Samoan name was also Makelita). This photograph was one of three included in a letter to Ruth Benedict (dated February 10, 1926) in which she commented about her appearance, "I look very prim and proper and unpolynesian."

Image: "Margaret Mead standing between two Samoan girls," ca. 1926, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (50a) (accessed October 23, 2009). Text: Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (New York: Morrow Quill, 1961), 195–96. Annotated by Miriam Forman-Brunell.

Miriam Forman-Brunell

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