Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the covers of Stree, a Marathi women's magazine, from 1931 through 1985, centering around the question: what are unmarried girls shown doing? My goal is to explore what representations of adolescent girls tell us about fantasies of childhood across this period. By tracking changes in visual symbols, appearance and activities, I will also comment on shifts in the age boundaries of childhood.

Paper long abstract:

The Marathi magazine Stree was published continuously on a monthly

basis from 1931-1986, and was an iconic publication that influenced

the lifeworlds of several successive generations of middle class

women. It was the first exclusively women's magazine in its region,

and at the peak of its circulation in the 1950s, it had more than

30,000 subscribers and could be found across urban and semi urban

settings. The magazine included reports and opinions on news events,

memoir and travel writing, advice columns and fiction. It clearly

serves as an important archive for anyone interested in 'women?s

culture' (in the sense used by historians) in a non-English,

non-national, semi urban context. My goal in this paper is to ask,

what kind of an archive can Stree serve for understanding the category

of the girl, and specifically, the unmarried adolescent girl? What do

representations of adolescent girls tell us about fantasies of

childhood in this region and for a specific social class? I present an analysis of magazine covers from 1931 through 1985 asking the question, what are unmarried girls shown doing, and what distinguishes their appearance? I focus especially on the visual symbols that mark figures as

unmarried, in order to understand how transitions from childhood to

womanhood were framed.