Read an Excerpt
Sample the voices of ten decades.
The Series
Girlhood in America is the first book in the 100 Years in the Life series. LEARN MORE »
Submit Your Own Story
Your story could be published in the next book in the 100 Years in the Life series. You don’t even need to be a writer.
Over 50 girls tell the stories of a century.
More than 50 women and girls tell about life before age thirteen in every decade of a century. This is cultural history through a rare lens. That lens shows great changes for women and their roles in ways that affect us all to this day.
Stories tell of life from places as different as Maine and Molokai’i. You’ll read about the 1920s in Indiana by a young Russian Jewish immigrant, about the 1960s in Little Rock, Arkansas by an African-American girl whose parents told her “no one’s a stranger unless you make them a stranger.” Terri Ann is the daughter of an American GI and a Vietnamese mother born during the Vietnam War in the 1970s. And there’s so much more.
This is the juicy real-life stuff, from the times before telephones to the days toys turned digital.