Abstracts

Angela Hubler
Kansas State University

Female Adolescence and its Discontents (according to Carol Gilligan, the American Association of University Women, and Mary Pipher)

This paper will focus on the way in which "the crisis" of female
adolescence had been defined and diagnosed in three sources: Carol Gilligan's research on female adolescence, which emerges from her extremely influential IN A DIFFERENT VOICE, Mary Pipher's best-selling REVIVING OPHELIA: SAVING THE SELVES OF ADOLESCENT GIRLS, and an American Association of University Women study which found that girls suffer a drop in self-esteem around adolescence. In each, I argue that the analysis is provocative but incomplete because the sexism that girls encounter in schools, relationships, etc. isn't linked to a structural account of inequality between men and women in society as a whole. Thus, while retaining "a different voice" at adolescence is preferable to becoming a silent, "perfect" girl, it does not eliminate sexism. Like Gilligan and the AAUW report, Pipher alerts readers to a range of problems experienced by adolescent girls: eating disorders, self-mutilation, depression, sexual harassment and rape. Pipher understands these problems as symptomatic of a culture that teaches girls that their value lies in their appearance and sexuality rather than in their authentic, whole selves. Pipher engages in consciousness raising with the girls she sees in therapy, teaching them to critically evaluate the media's representation of women, and to develop sources of self-esteem and meaning in their lives other than their looks.

These are important coping skills for troubled girls. However, the
sexualization and devaluation of girls and women cannot be isolated from the sexual division of labor and the economic subordination of women to men. By failing to link their discussions to this aspect of social reality, the writers under discussion present an incomplete, idealist analysis.