Debbie Nathan on Feminism and Moral Panics

Carol Dyhouse's Girl Trouble shows that women's progress has always been met with noisy, obsessive, and in hindsight often nutty fretting about girls' behavior and bodies. Feminists themselves, meanwhile, sometimes promoted moral panics in order to achieve their goals in a conservative, male-dominated milieu. Dyhouse's focus in Great Britain, but as Debbie Nathan notes in her review, variations on the panics she describes have also emanated from the United States.