Seventeenth Summer is an interesting study of the gender roles of the 1940s. The protagonist Angie Morrow spends a lot of time doing domestic chores, thinking about boys, and describing the things that a girl just can’t do – drink beer, go to Willow Road with a boy, and go to McKnight’s without a boy come to mind. I feel comfortable saying that Angie Morrow performs her 1940s gender role admirably. Angie does all of the expected things of a girl her age, like housework and emotional labor, and has all the expected qualities, like heterosexuality, obedience, and preoccupation with her appearance. I cannot think of any instance in the novel where Angie egregiously (or even moderately) violates the gender norms for teenage girls without heavy prompting from another character, and even her transgressions seem quaint in the eyes of modern readers.

In contrast, I think many current YA heroines do not fit mid-century ideals of gender quite so perfectly. For example, all of the girl protagonists in Ellen Hopkins’ books have some sort of problem that would certainly cause 1940s society to reject them, such as drug addiction and/or a child from wedlock. Margo from John Green’s Paper Towns is emotionally unavailable and constantly violates even modern social norms: throwing a fish through someone’s window in order to end a friendship, for instance, or fleeing to another state to spite her parents. How Beautiful The Ordinary, edited by Michael Cart, contains a few short stories about queer young women (including a story explicitly about sex) which someone interested in conforming to dated gender roles would likely describe as vulgar or immoral. There are still books where heroines stick to their prescribed gender roles, but their existence seems confined to a specific set of authors. Expectations of teenage girls have changed a lot in the 75 years since the publication of Seventeenth Summer, and reading it after confronting so many flawed heroines in other novels makes Angie Morrow feel dated and uninspiring to me.