Abigail Jones

Abigail Jones is an American journalist and author who writes on adolescence, sexuality, education, and the social pressures shaping young women's lives. Her best-known work, Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School, co-authored with Marissa Miley and published in 2008, drew on more than a year of reporting inside a private New England boarding school to document the sexual culture, social hierarchies, and emotional realities of female students at an elite American secondary school. The book was widely reviewed and discussed at the time of publication for its frank portrayal of teen sexuality in privileged environments, and was adapted as a Lifetime television film in 2013. It joined a small group of late-2000s long-form journalism books — alongside titles by Caitlin Flanagan, Peggy Orenstein, and others — that pressed mainstream audiences to take seriously the gap between cultural assumptions about teenage girlhood and the realities reported by teenage girls themselves. Jones has continued to write feature journalism on women, religion, education, and culture for outlets including Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Glamour, Marie Claire, and the New York Times. Her reporting often examines institutions — schools, religious communities, families — from the perspective of the young women navigating their unwritten rules. Her work sits at the intersection of psychology, gender studies, and narrative journalism, and is regularly assigned in undergraduate courses on adolescent development, gender, and media studies.