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CHAPTER 1
Lessons We Learned in Childhood
Among all the forms of truly absurd courage, the recklessness of young girls is outstanding.
— COLETTE
When I was eight years old I tried to suffocate my best friend, Crispin, with an afghan. She had beaten me at Monopoly — creamed me in fact — and I wanted revenge. Crispin, loaded with older brothers and sisters, fought back. We tussled on the bed until we wore ourselves out. Then we went for a snack. Soon afterward, I chased Crispin down the soccer field — angry that she had stolen the ball and jealous that she was faster — illegally slide-tackled her from behind, and bloodied both her knees so badly it left permanent scars. Several years before, as she and I knelt in her upstairs hallway peering through the banister at our mothers gossiping down below, she turned around and bit my finger. Hard. I still have no idea why.
These were not harmless girlish hijinks. They were aggressive acts. Crispin and I tucked into each other because we were mad, jealous, frustrated, or just seized with a strong emotion we didn't know how to manage. We were what I venture most girls are — what little girls of nursery rhymes are not supposed to be — greedy, ruthless, wild, and pleased as punch to let each other know about it. Our relationship was as honest as they come.
During the past thirty years, a formidable body of research has been amassed on the development of girls in our society. Though I will not rehash this material in its entirety, there are patterns that have come to light, messages girls receive about conflict and competition that lay the groundwork for our personal and professional relationships later on.
The first and strongest female bond most girls experience is with their mother. This one is inevitably loaded. The basic model of early psychological development — Freud's oedipal complex — is predicated on competition, a triangle erected between mother, father, and child. The male child competes against his father for the attention of the mother. For girls, the setup is just the opposite, a rivalry with her mother for the attention of the man. Psychologist Nancy Chodorow has pointed out that a child's eventual split from the nurturing parent, almost always the mother in our society, in order to establish his or her individual identity is critically different for girls than it is for boys. Since gender is one of the key ways in which humans define themselves, total separation is complicated for a girl by the fact that her mother is actually a version of herself. She is splitting off from her primary model of what she will someday become.
As they maneuver through this separation process, girls need to establish ways in which they are not like their mothers. For some future career women, this means rejecting the housewife model. But many girls, especially those raised in the past thirty years, have had mothers who worked outside the home in traditionally male professions like medicine, law, and finance. Even when such mothers serve as role models of ambitious and successful career women, girls will intentionally seek out goals that run counter to their mother's choices. They promise themselves they will find a more fulfilling career, forge a more equal marriage, and spend more or less time with their children. As each young woman struggles to stay connected to her mother without becoming her, a tangled web of emotions arises. From the outset, female conflict is accompanied by a strong chaser of guilt.
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On a peer level, our earliest and strongest friendships tend to be with members of the same sex. By age five or six, girls are already operating in sex-segregated groups, making a point to identify themselves as girls as opposed to just kids. Such girlhood friendships — like mine and Crispin's — can prove passionate and volatile. Nursery rhyme wisdom notwithstanding, they are rarely sweet and conflict-free.
For many years, social scientists presumed that since girls were less physically confrontational than boys they were also less aggressive. However, recent research on aggression in very young children has revealed no significant distinction between the sexes before the age of three. When it comes to confrontational behavior, everybody, male and female, arrives in the world similarly equipped — grabbing toys, pulling hair, screaming bloody murder when we have been done wrong.
As children grow older, key developmental differences evolve that affect girls' relationships to aggression and to one another. Girls tend to acquire verbal fluency more quickly and at an earlier age than boys do. This, coupled with the fact that our society discourages physical aggression in girls, makes the drop-off rate for direct forms of attack much sharper among the female sex. But those aggressive impulses don't just disappear. While boys are still busy hitting and kicking, girls increasingly use words and social manipulation to communicate negative feelings to their peers.
The prevalence of relational aggression among girls — including acts that harm others "through damage (or threat of damage) to relationships or feelings of acceptance, friendships, or group inclusion" — was first recognized by a group of scientists headed by Finnish researcher Dr. Kaj Bjorkqvist in 1992. Upending the "girls are just nicer" theory, Bjorkqvist's study revealed that when cultural pressures discourage open aggression in girls, they simply learn to strike out in less overt but equally damaging ways. Instead of fists, they turn to the subtler arts of language and relational manipulation.
By middle childhood, ages eight to eleven, girls are developing relationships that are distinctly different from those between boys. Boys typically gather in loose groups of friends, whereas girls form tighter "cliques." Girls tend to focus less on physical dominance and ego display, more upon verbal and relational strategies to get what they want from their friends — and to punish their enemies. At the same time, girls are already absorbing societal messages about how they should relate to each other, about the importance of avoiding the sort of open conflict that flowed between Crispin and me. A fissure opens up between the negative emotions they feel — anger, aggression, jealousy — and the emotions they are allowed to express openly in their relationships with other girls.
The Games Girls Play
Much debate about women and competition has swirled around the premise that girls just never learn how to compete. Boys play competitive games and girls play relational ones — dodgeball versus dollhouses. In the 1930s, renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget cited girls' distaste for rule-based games as evidence of their lack of moral development. Forty years later, in the early seventies, Janet Lever's research on children's play showed girls more likely to engage in noncompetitive pursuits like jump rope and hopscotch in which arguments rarely developed and nobody won or lost. The conclusions were obvious. Men get a grounding in competition and women in intimate relationships, an imbalance that can seriously hurt us once we enter the workplace. For women raised before the 1970s, this skewed competitive education may remain a major stumbling block. Given limited chances to compete with their peers as children, they can feel intimidated by challenging others, both men and women, on the job.
Thanks to the passage of Title IX — the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs — this theory becomes suspect when applied to younger women. Title IX meant public education institutions from elementary schools to universities had to provide equal opportunities for students in every field, including athletics. As a girl born in 1970, I grew up steeped in competitive play. I took mandatory PE classes from kindergarten through high school. I played soccer, basketball, and tennis, swam, skied, ran track, did gymnastics, occasionally in coed settings but for the most part competing solely against other girls. And my experience is far from unique. In the past thirty years, competition has shifted from something pursued by only the most inveterate girl athlete to a core element of our collective education.
In 1972 only 7 percent of high school and 15 percent of college athletes were women. By 2002 that number had skyrocketed to 41 percent of high school and 42 percent of college athletes. Among the women I interviewed — women of all ages — 72 percent reported playing sports of some kind growing up. Of those who did not, a number mentioned participating in activities like music or theater in which teamwork and competition played a significant role. Few girls grow up these days unfamiliar with what it is like to be in an openly competitive situation with other girls. If access to sports was the sole obstacle, then competition between post–Title IX working women should be direct and healthy as it gets. So why isn't this the case?
Exposure to competitive games has provided modern girls with some valuable tools. They have learned to stand head to head with other girls in certain ways, in certain places. For them, the missing messages do not focus so much on how to compete with other girls as on how to distinguish between competition and conflict in the classroom or on the playing field — where rules are clear cut and officially sanctioned — and the competition we encounter in the more ambiguous context of our broader lives. On a social level, girls are still acculturated away from competition. They learn that their relationships with other girls are supposed to be nurturing and free of conflict. It isn't that they are not primed to aspire to greatness, but that they are simultaneously encouraged to be supportive and generous toward one another at all costs.
"I feel like as girls we were weaned on the idea of limitless potential, but without the sense of personal entitlement, that right to take up time and space, that's passed on to boys," Rosie, a thirty-year-old actress, told me. "We're supposed to look out for number one and take care of everybody else at the same time. It's confusing."
It is confusing. Pre–Title IX women face the contradiction of having been schooled to be unobtrusive and now finding themselves in a working world that demands that women stand up for themselves and compete. Girls raised since the 1970s face the contradictions embodied by female action heroes like Charlie's Angels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who rule the world without losing their femininity, freedom fighters with hair and makeup perfectly intact.
Adolescence, Self-Confidence, and Relational Aggression
I have another story. This one happened in the seventh grade, when the girl who had grown up next door to me, a friend since kindergarten, joined my middle school class. That fall, she threw a big Halloween party — the talk of the lunchroom for weeks preceding. She invited a clutch of popular girls, plus most of my friends. She did not invite me.
The night of the party I sat alone in my bedroom and listened to my parents downstairs answering the doorbell and handing out candy to the parade of ghosts and pirates and princesses. Late in the evening, I heard familiar voices traveling up our front walk. My classmate and her entire party had decided to come trick-or-treating to our front door. I raced upstairs so I could watch them through a tiny fan-shaped window in our attic, the one spot from which I could see them but knew they could not see me. I sat there until long after they had gone, flooded with shame. I didn't know how I would look any of those girls in the face again.
I never mentioned the party to anyone who attended, never broached it with my parents, never told a soul until years later when I was out of college and had shed the illusion that my classmate's rejection marked me a social pariah. Looking back, I can trace some of the psychological underpinnings of her inclusion-exclusion game. I can guess how intensely she wanted to fit in with the more popular girls and how she feared that maintaining ties to someone like me, who was not a member of that in-crowd, might work to her disadvantage. I can guess that I was threatening, because I had known her too well for too long, known her when she wasn't smooth or well-dressed or cool. She used her party to send me the message that she was no longer interested in maintaining our friendship, because she didn't know how to send such a message in any other way. I see all this now. At the time, it was simply devastating.
In the written survey I sent to the women I interviewed, the final question asked "While growing up, what messages did you absorb about competition and conflict with other girls or women?" Judging from some of the comments I received — "girlfriends will hurt you for no reason," "no matter how much I hate to admit it, girls can be incredibly cruel to each other," "I learned early on that girls can be wonderful, but they can also be manipulative and ruthless. I was on the giving and receiving end of both" — and the recent popularity of books exploring girl aggression, it is clear that I am not the only one to emerge from adolescence knowing the heartbreak of having been betrayed by another girl.
Adolescence is a pivotal time in identity shaping, a period during which both boys and girls feel at their most awkward and insecure. In the transition from child to adult, girls in particular often lose something they never quite get back. In 1990, the American Association of University Women published a report entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, based on the widest ever national survey of gender and self-esteem. The study finally put numbers to what numerous women had experienced firsthand: When girls hit adolescence, their self-confidence tends to plummet.
This drop in self-esteem stems, at least in part, from a disconnect that forms between adolescent girls and their feelings, a pervading sense of having to compromise their identities in order to win approval from their peers and from society in general. According to child psychologist Mary Pipher, adolescence is a time "when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts."
Girls at this age are hit with heavy messages about what our culture desires in a woman, a value system that hinges on prettiness, kindness, and restraint, on not asserting oneself too boldly or wanting too much. In the effort to gain acceptance, many of those bolder girlhood traits — like relational honesty and open competition — move underground. In any number of ways, our society contributes to this division of self. Confrontation and acting out are expected and even encouraged in boys, but girls tend to be judged and made to feel unfeminine for such behavior. Adolescence ushers in a new level of anxiety over things like weight, clothes, and sexuality, so that even as they're chasing unconditional approval, girls must grapple with an increase in competitive feelings toward their friends. The emotional land mines multiply with no ready outlet for defusing them.
Alongside this plunge in self-confidence, adolescent girls undergo a second, equally telling psychological leap. Relational aggression between girls spikes dramatically between ages eleven and fifteen. Those tight peer relationships are often turned into weapons. Punishment is delivered by excluding another girl socially — the way my classmate did to me — or by means of gossip, rumor spreading, playing favorites, and exploiting emotional ties or personal knowledge to hurt someone close.
Heating up this mix is the fact that acceptance among adolescent girls is frequently determined by popularity rather than more measurable merits like brains, creative talents, or athletic prowess. This road to social success can feel tenuous and subjective, creating fertile soil for jealousy and manipulation. As a result, girls often grow extremely wary about openly making trouble. The fierce social pressure to belong means it makes sense to attack circuitously in order to avoid both counterattack and blame. Girls can be so eager to mend rifts when they do occur, so quick to apologize for hurt feelings, that the roots of problems wind up frosted over and never truly addressed. When relational aggression becomes the paradigm, girls grow uncertain about what it means to be kind and considerate, since even actions perpetrated by our "best friends" may prove hurtful. It gets harder and harder to trust what we feel or where we stand with our female peers.
Girls from diverse ethnic or economic backgrounds often face pressure to cleave to different female expectations than their mainstream white counterparts, many of which prove equally damaging to self-confidence. Cultures that value female submissiveness can push girls even harder in the "good girl" direction, a dynamic illustrated in the 2003 movie Bend It Like Beckham, which is about a teenage girl's struggle to hide her modern, athletic, sexually curious self from her traditional Indian parents. For those from cultural backgrounds that encourage outward aggression, voicing anger, or getting into fights, the confusion can run even deeper. A girl's family and immediate community may reward such direct outpourings even as mainstream society and authority figures — like teachers or school principals — reject them. As we grow older, both the workplace and popular culture continue to reflect the values of middle-class white America. Even if we are not directly party to these values, chances are they will play a role in our lives.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Can't Believe She Did That!"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Nan Mooney.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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