Becoming a ‘Villa Girl’: Youth Culture and the Student Experience at a Single-Sex Private School in Montreal, 1916-1980

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Becoming a ‘Villa Girl’: Youth Culture and the Student Experience at a Single-Sex Private School in Montreal, 1916-1980
Abstract
A microhistorical analysis of the youth culture that thrived at Villa Maria, an all-girls private school in Montreal, between 1916 and 1980. Founded in 1854 by the Congregation of Notre-Dame, a Catholic order of nuns dedicated to the education of young women, Villa Maria taught the children of elite and middle-class English-speaking and French-speaking Catholics. While the private school is acknowledged as a socializing force that influenced students’ development, the author demonstrates that teenage girls during the period under review actively produced meaningful adolescent experiences within an institutional setting. Far from assuming positions of passivity, she argues, students at Villa Maria played an important role in shaping and transforming their school. Her study illustrates the ways in which students borrowed from the normative messages of their superiors, from popular culture, and even from broader social changes occurring within Quebec society during the Quiet Revolution to produce a youth culture that reflected their age-based needs and desires and that often challenged institutional values.
Type
Master's thesis
University
Concordia University
Place
Montreal
Date
2014
# of Pages
iv-140p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Moore, Lisa. “Becoming a ‘Villa Girl’: Youth Culture and the Student Experience at a Single-Sex Private School in Montreal, 1916-1980.” Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 2014. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/979658/1/Moore_MA_S2015.pdf.
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