Girlhood (It's complicated)

But what about the archive?” I heard this question, and versions of it, throughout my early career when I shared my research topic with other historians. For my dissertation and my first book, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (2015), I wanted to imagine Chicago's Great Migration era from the perspective of African American girls and teenage women. Although the scholarship on the migration has presented the impact of the growth of Black urbanites on housing, education, politics, the arts, and mass culture, I discovered that few had spent time thinking about how girls fared during this transformative period. Despite my enthusiasm for the topic, the question of archive loomed large as I searched for signs of girls' lives among court records, newspapers, and pamphlets about Chicago and its expanding Black belt between 1917 and 1970. At first glance, the traditional archives of African American history, even the collections devoted to Black women's history, did not yield many stories. If I wanted to write a book about what Black women urban reformers thought about girls or their activities to protect girls from the dangers of city life, the archive was rich with essays, news articles, and announcements about the racial uplift activities that made up middle-class women's activism. Yet, going beyond women's clubs and etiquette guides provided a considerable challenge, and the question of whether Black girls could be found in the archive at all pushed me to reconsider where I was looking for girls, and where girls were hiding in plain sight. Girls have made and continue to make history, and after the publication of my first book, I realized that writing girls' history was not a matter of if there was an archive, but rather if historians desired to sharpen their gaze to notice the places girls appear

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