Description:
One of the glib new "facts of life" is the conviction that American girls founder badly in adolescence, their confidence and I.Q. points plummeting as they wriggle into the restrictive pop culture roles assigned to their gender. This loss of self is well supported by research, true, but parents and educators who've heard this often enough must long to scream at the professional handwringers, "So fix it!" Girls Seen and Heard is a sincere, often artful attempt to do just that. The brainchild of activists at the Ms. Foundation for Women, the book sets out collaborative assignments for mothers, godmothers, grandmothers, aunts, and daughters that encourage girls to believe in themselves, explore their options, and learn to command respect. Happily, it pointedly puts to rest the myth that helping girls has to mean hurting boys. For older women, each of the 52 life lessons is a chance to recall gifts, setbacks, and growing pains and truthfully share these with the next generation. A lesson in resilience, for example, admits that every life has dead ends and explores why some people are able to turn their anger toward transforming stressful situations. The activity suggested is to divide a list of personal and global injustices into those that can't be changed (a girl's height, the amount of rain forest already destroyed) and those that can be affected by well-aimed efforts. Though the ambitious scope of the book is sometimes daunting, its abundant, imaginative object lessons would also work beautifully if read and used piecemeal. --Francesca Coltrera
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