A rebuttal to - or at least an amplification of - the research and
popular writing that shows young teenage girls as tuned-out and
turned-off shadows of their lively, challenging preadolescent
selves. Brown (Education and Human Development/Colby Coll.) was
co-author with Carol Gilligan of the much-discussed Meeting at the
Crossroads (1992), the study of girls' development at an Ohio
school that seemed to reinforce reports that girls on the cusp of
puberty experience plummeting self-esteem. Brown objects that
reports of this research (which made girls appear passive and
victimized) were misleading. She set up another study of white
junior high school girls, differentiated by class (working vs.
middle), in two communities in Maine. Each group of girls met
weekly to discuss gender-related issues and whatever else might
come up. Both groups were angry and frustrated about what they felt
was discrimination in the classroom and pressure for them to
conform to a female ideal. The working-class girls were more likely
to express their anger directly, to feel outrage appropriately, and
to resist more strongly fitting into the good-girl mold. Yet they
saw their futures as "dim" and uncertain and themselves as
"stupid," because they or their families had been unable to move up
the economic ladder. The middle-class girls were more likely to
lead double lives: quiet and conforming in public (e.g., school),
argumentative and defiant at home or among close friends. Their
economic futures were rosier, however, with college and career
virtual givens. Brown explores both groups' awareness of (and
struggles against) cultural expectations of what women should be.
That they seem to be losing the war is sad; that they are fighting
at all is heartening. Appealing subjects mix confusion and protest
about equally; but in this study, the consequences of the economic
gap are more interesting than those of the gender gap. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Two fourteen-year-old girls, fed up with the "Hooters" shirts worn
by their male classmates, design their own rooster logo: "Cocks:
Nothing to crow about." Seventeen-year-old April Schuldt,
unmarried, pregnant, and cheated out of her election as homecoming
queen by squeamish school administrators, disrupts a pep rally with
a protest that engages the whole school. Where are spirited girls
like these in the popular accounts of teenage girlhood, that
supposed wasteland of depression, low self-esteem, and passive
victimhood? This book, filled with the voices of teenage girls,
corrects the misperceptions that have crept into our picture of
female adolescence. Based on the author's yearlong conversation
with white junior-high and middle-school girls--from the working
poor and the middle class--Raising Their Voices allows us to hear
how girls adopt some expectations about gender but strenuously
resist others, how they use traditionally feminine means to
maintain their independence, and how they recognize and resist
pressures to ignore their own needs and wishes. With a
psychologist's sensitivity and an anthropologist's attention to
cultural variations, Lyn Brown makes provocative observations about
individual differences in the girls' experiences and attitudes, and
shows how their voices are shaped and constrained by class--with
working-class girls more willing to be openly angry than their
middle-class peers, and yet more likely to denigrate themselves and
attribute their failures to personal weakness. A compelling and
timely corrective to conventional wisdom, this book attunes our
hearing to the true voices of teenage girls: determined, confused,
amusing, touching, feisty, and clear.
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