Photography class photo: November 2013

The Invention of Teenagers: LIFE and the Triumph of Youth Culture •Historians and social critics differ on the specifics of the timeline, but most cultural observers agree that the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager,as we now understand the species, came into being sometime in the early 1940s.•the modern notion of the teen years as a recognized, quantifiable life stage, complete with its own fashions, behavior, vernacular and arcane rituals, simply did not exist until the post-Depression era.•the evolution of LIFE magazine’s and, by extension, America’s view of teenagers through the middle part of the 20th century, LIFE.com presents photos that the inimitable Nina Leen shot for a December 1944 article, “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own.”•Leen focused on a group of 12 girls, from 15 to 17 years old, living in Webster Groves, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. •In its December 1944 feature, LIFE breathlessly discussed the “teen-age” phenomenon in language that, in 2013, somehow feels naive, chauvinistic, celebratory and insightful, all at once. •the LIFE article and Leen’s photographs constitute a fascinating, early look at a segment of the American populace that, over the ensuing decades, for better and for worse, has assumed an increasingly central role in the shaping of Western culture.•some 6,000,000 U.S teen-age girls live in a world all their own, lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny and bissful society almost untouched by the war. it is a world of sweater, skirt and bobby sox and loafer, of hair worn long, of eye glass rim painted red with nail polish, of high school boys no yet gone to war.•it is world still devoted to parents who are pals even if they use telephone too much. •it is a world of slumber parties andthe hit parade, of peanut butter and popcorn and endless collecting of menus and match covers and little stuffed animals.•the movies and the theater make money by turning a sometime superficial and sometimes social-minded eye on teen-agers.•moving throught awkward age, the troubles of growing up, their welter fads and taboos, they eventually become, in judgement of almost every western nation, the most attractive women in the world.