Meeting at the Crossroads

Rating:
Summary: Groundbreaking Book Speaks to Girls and Women
Review: For once researchers have actually spent time with girls and listened to them closely. As someone who has worked in schools for years, I found their conclusions believable and important. The pressure on girls to be nice, change their opinion to please people around them, and suppress some of their natural energy can be seen any day in almost any middle school in this country. Gilligan puts it, not in terms of complaining, but rather in terms of making changes that will release girls from some problematic conventions and let them fully participate in life.

Rating:
Summary: Groundbreaking Book Speaks to Girls and Women
Review: For once researchers have actually spent time with girls and listened to them closely. As someone who has worked in schools for years, I found their conclusions believable and important. The pressure on girls to be nice, change their opinion to please people around them, and suppress some of their natural energy can be seen any day in almost any middle school in this country. Gilligan puts it, not in terms of complaining, but rather in terms of making changes that will release girls from some problematic conventions and let them fully participate in life.

Rating:
Summary: Articulate description of girls' journey to adolescence
Review: This book was based on five years of interviews with nearly 100 girls between the ages of seven and eighteen at a private girls' school in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1986 - 1990. The goal of this Harvard project was to explore girls' psychological journey from childhood to adolescence. The researchers began with a more traditional approach, separating the girls into an experimental group (using open-ended, more flexible interviews) and a control group (using more standardized methods). They soon discovered that this strategy was preventing the authentic relationships needed to gather useful information, so the researchers wisely re-evaluated and revised their approach. In this well-written book, the authors clarified the issues faced by the girls studied at three stages of development-childhood, pre-adolescence, and adolescence-primarily by describing the journeys of three individual guides for each stage. For example, the stories of Jessie, Sonia, and Lauren, the three childhood guides, connect the reader to the real-life issues faced by each girl over time. The guides' moving stories clearly documented the challenging journey from being able to speak clearly, directly, and honestly about relationship issues in childhood to often negating real feelings and thoughts through disassociation by adolescence. The researchers highlighted the psychological perils of silencing one's own voice and the potential political risks of not doing so. Given the all-girl setting, one might wonder how different the results would be in a mixed-gender school. There were hopeful signs, too. By the end of the project, the school's adult women realized that they needed to overcome their own self-silencing to provide healthier role models for the girls. Also, by listening to and validating girls' experience, adults, particularly women, can serve as hopeful beacons for change.

Rating:
Summary: Articulate description of girls' journey to adolescence
Review: This book was based on five years of interviews with nearly 100 girls between the ages of seven and eighteen at a private girls' school in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1986 - 1990. The goal of this Harvard project was to explore girls' psychological journey from childhood to adolescence. The researchers began with a more traditional approach, separating the girls into an experimental group (using open-ended, more flexible interviews) and a control group (using more standardized methods). They soon discovered that this strategy was preventing the authentic relationships needed to gather useful information, so the researchers wisely re-evaluated and revised their approach. In this well-written book, the authors clarified the issues faced by the girls studied at three stages of development-childhood, pre-adolescence, and adolescence-primarily by describing the journeys of three individual guides for each stage. For example, the stories of Jessie, Sonia, and Lauren, the three childhood guides, connect the reader to the real-life issues faced by each girl over time. The guides' moving stories clearly documented the challenging journey from being able to speak clearly, directly, and honestly about relationship issues in childhood to often negating real feelings and thoughts through disassociation by adolescence. The researchers highlighted the psychological perils of silencing one's own voice and the potential political risks of not doing so. Given the all-girl setting, one might wonder how different the results would be in a mixed-gender school. There were hopeful signs, too. By the end of the project, the school's adult women realized that they needed to overcome their own self-silencing to provide healthier role models for the girls. Also, by listening to and validating girls' experience, adults, particularly women, can serve as hopeful beacons for change.

Rating:
Summary: The Blame Game
Review: This is essentially Nietzsche in drag. A series of interviews with adolescent girls reveals that women have been victims of "psychological foot-binding" as they are required to silence their own voices to earn relationships with others. Interestingly, in every case, the young girl is portrayed as a victim of oppression, and everyone is to blame: teachers, parents, brothers. All of them prohibit a girls' free self-expression. None of the girls is ever to blame--they are never overly-assertive, cranky, or difficult. They are always the innocent bearers of feelings that are squelched in a patriarchal society.
This is simply feminist propoganda in the guise of sociology.