Where the Girls Were (Going)

In looking at the female rebel it would seem that no two follow the same path to eventual social and cultural acceptance whereas there was a somewhat more formulaic progression that accompanied the male rebel from bad boy to proper cog in the social machine. For the boys, they inevitably seemed to have to trade the switchblade and “chickie run” for the briefcase and morning commute. In addition, the ultimate goal was usually to supplant the domesticated father figure, either within the home, or outside of it in the realm of the peer group. This does not seem to be the case for the female rebel. There is rarely a singular social model that that the newly formed female rebel is marching towards. Medovoi alludes to this by including such varied examples as Silver, Gidget (great name by the way), Sarah Jane, and Tomboy. In many of the boy-centered narratives that he mentions, the audience can essentially swap one main character out for another without much harm done to the overall message. The same cannot be said for the girls.

It may be hard, initially, to draw parallels between many of the characters that Medovoi includes, other than the obvious fact that each enacts a period of rebelliousness, but the fact that they all reach very different destinations is of the greatest value. I feel that it is in this fact that Medovoi is making his larger point. He notes that, “what draws these narratives together, however, is the shared implication that girls need to pass through a wild moment, a phase of intelligible and justifiable rebelliousness, before they can be expected to embrace, in their own way, the domestic values associated with suburban womanhood” (314). It is the mention of the “domestic values” that leaves the reader to take the next step. At this time, what is expected of the female rebel? Where does she end up after she leaves Girls Town or when she steps off of the beach? He goes on to elaborate that, “most of the rebellious girls of the fifties were not definitively feminist figures,” but also that, “a path can thus be clearly traced from the fifties girl rebel to the radical politics of the lesbian and women’s liberation movement” (314). There is confusion here, and it is this uncertainty that runs throughout the discussion of the female rebel.

This becomes clear in looking at the stories of Silver and Tomboy. They begin mostly parallel but diverge drastically by the time they finish. While Silver drives off with Jimmy and Mary Lee as the mother in a constructed nuclear family, Kerry enters into a heteronormative/homoerotic relationship with Lucky that bends every gender role in the book. Both, however, are depicted as having “succeeded” in emerging from their “wild moment.” The confusion that Medovoi seems to be getting at is on display as there are two diametrically opposed solutions being offered for the problem of the female rebel. One ends in the extremely conservative role of domesticity that holds with popular convention and the other begins to lead us down the road to the women’s liberation movement that Medovoi mentions earlier. Kerry is able to retain her strength and power within the Harps without having to relinquish her desire for Lucky, whereas Silver, on the other hand, is last seen headed into the sunset with the asexual Jimmy and her sister/daughter Mary Lee. So where is the female rebel headed, and what role is she expected to fill once she is through sewing her wild oats? By including these varied examples, Medovoi seems to be posing that question to the reader, and possibly implying that the answer rested much more in the hands of the girls themselves than it did for any of the boys.