Events Calendar

Speaker: Sarah J. Eikleberry, Assistant Professor and Assistant Chair, Department of Kinesiology, St. Ambrose University

This presentation explores the ways in which black middle class reformers and professionals in Des Moines, Iowa framed, created, and sustained the construct of late childhood and adolescence during the first half of the twentieth century.  Such work involved many hands and institutions including print and visual culture, separatist organizations, and the purposeful crafting of safe spaces and empowering experiences reserved for girls and teens.  An examination of the ways in which children were covered by the region’s African American-owned press, and the structures specifically available for older girls and teens, reveals a departure from many of the rigid portrayals of respectable girlhood at the turn of the century.  By the mid-1920s, girlhood in Polk County began experiencing a steady makeover.  This new look inflated the flattened paper-doll caricatures of cautionary tales and conduct books, extending the possibilities for competing versions of girlhood.

Dr. Sarah J. Eikleberry is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Kinesiology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA.  She obtained her MA and PhD in Health and Sport Studies at the University of Iowa.  In the past, her research has explored identity politics in professional and intercollegiate sport settings.  Her more recent research interrogates the ways in which women’s social movements use sport and recreation to recruit and reach out to young women and girls.