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Overview
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.
Synopsis
How do teenage girls react in today's society when they are insulted, dismissed, or mistreated? In her provocative new book, Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger, author Lyn Mikel Brown explores the differences in individual girls' experiences and attitudes.
Publishers Weekly
Adolescent girls resist encouragement to be passive, quiet and "good," finds Brown, an associate professor of education and human development at Colby College and coauthor of Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development. The girls in her study readily identify the sources of their anger when it is aroused, but sometimes have difficulty expressing it directly, often navigating daily between what is expected of them and what they expect of themselves. They relentlessly try to make sense of the world and their place in it, refusing any attempt to pacify or silence them when conflicted. Although Brown acknowledges that her research is limited by her choice of subjects--only white, lower- and middle-class girls, aged 11 to 14, in two Maine towns--her admission isn't enough to cover the lack of comparison regionally and racially. Once one has made allowance for this small sample, however, Brown's observations about class differences and emotional expression should prove intriguing for those trying to explore the valleys and peaks of an adolescent mind. Unfortunately, Brown isn't content simply to let the girls speak for themselves, but reinterprets their verbal play, labors over points that are already self-evident and dissects their every childish giggle. Although her writing is graceful and sometimes even beautiful, Brown fights too hard for a group that obviously can fight for itself, given the girls' fiery speeches. (Oct.)
Editorials
Journal of Moral Education
Brown's elegant style of writing, along with her sensitivity and perspicacity to the resistant voices of young adolescent girls, creates a compelling book. It is clear from the onset that Brown is gifted in her ability to listen intently to what the young girls have to say. Clearly, Brown's intention was to enlighten and instigate action among those who are in some way touched by or connected to early adolescent girls, and I believe she achieved this goal.
— Dr. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl
New York Times Book Review
It has been seven years since a much-discussed study by the American Association of University Women identified the phenomenon of girls' diminishing sense of self-worth as they approach adolescence. Since then, [several] books have further lamented the evaporation of young girls' feistiness into hesitancy and self-doubt. Lyn Mikel Brown takes a different tack. In Raising Their Voices, she argues that the popular reception of such books has all but ignored an equally significant phenomenon—girls who 'actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity'...This book is an attempt to provide an alternative prophecy, with the hope that it...will be fulfilled...Brown's thesis that working-class girls are better equipped to avoid the epidemics of American adolescence is provocative.
— Rebecca Mead
Readings
In Raising Their Voices, [Lyn Brown] shows us the ways in which girls adopt some forms of the culture's notions of idealized femininity but resist others. And she seeks to broaden our understanding of girlhood in the '90s by explaining how cultural fictions about femininity differentially oppress middle-class and working-class girls...It's not just that [this book reports] the results of research that makes [it] so much more interesting than the girl-victim books front and center in bookstores today; it's the care [Brown takes] to use working-class girls as subjects, to understand them, to get under their skin and see the world from their perspective. This stance precludes the stereotypical victim perspective, if only because of the feisty, hard-nosed talk and relationships of these girls...Brown's writing is beautiful as she lovingly recounts the girls' interactions with each other and with the leaders of the discussion groups.
— Sharon Lamb