Customer Reviews

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls

5 star:		(191)
4 star:		(76)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

I read this book two years ago, but I feel I can still add to this debate. I encourage the teenage girls who read this book and were offended by the not-so-pretty picture it paints to go back in a few years and read it again. When I was 15 and 16, I also had no doubt that I was absolutely in control of my life. I could not see the larger forces at work, influencing the way I interacted with my friends, my parents, my boyfriend and the unrealistic demands I placed on myself. When you drive yourself to be perfect, you set yourself up to fall. By the time I read Reviving Ophelia my junior year in college, I was coping with anorexia, depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and sexual promiscuity. Ophelia showed me how my experiences in junior high and high school had left scars on my soul that manifested themselves when I was 21. I dealt with it. Girls, examine your lives and your motives. Learn from your past. Love yourself. And to those who bemoan Pipher's lack of neat little answers: Life is not a 30-minute sitcom. There are no hard and fast answers to problems as complex as these. Awareness is the first step, and that's what Pipher was trying to do in this book, not solve a centuries-old problem in a few pages. And if you think this book was repetitious, then you weren't paying attention.

A recent college graduate, I am not so far away from adolescence as I would like to think! I was motivated to read this book after writing an extensive journal entry on my standard-yet-traumatic adolescence (a time which I have worked to forget!).

I now understand my own adolescence more than I ever did before. I have come to terms with issues in my own life, as well as recognizing the phenomenal job my parents did in raising me. I have identified potential areas to watch for in my own (future) daughters. I have been instilled with the desire to positively impact adolescent girls in any way I can now -- whether that be through babysitting, teaching, or just treating them with respect when they show up at the store in which I work.

I am grateful to Pipher for her interest in this subject, and the sensitivity which she exhibited in dealing with the clients who illuminate the pages of the book. I was moved to anger for the injustices our daughters are forced to endure, and fought back tears at the lack of love that many of them experience.

I was made aware of situations that I was not previously aware of: persistent yet quiet misogyny in the classroom, the self-detachment many girls undergo in order to be socially acceptable, and the simple persistence of terrible attitudes regarding sex & sexuality in our junior highs (and I was IN junior high in the early nineties!). I was reminded of cultural situations which HAVE bothered me: lookism, sexism, physical/emotional/sexual abuse.

Mostly, I have been moved from a state of defeated, dispassionate indifference to an inferno of anger against society's "junk values".

Please, if you deal with adolescent girls, read this book. It may save their lives.

Revivng Ophelia, a book written by Mary Pipher, presents an honest and open look at adolescence. For the first time young girls' voices are allowed to be heard, unmuted, --the front lines of adolescence. She presents each girl's story in a strikingly candid way that inspires the reader. Throughout her book, Pipher often discusses the effects of the silent war that is raging in America. She believes that every day young girls are forced to fight to maintain their true selves in the face of societal pressures. Pipher offers herself up as an example of what may happen if one loses this daily battle. This brings a feeling of maturity and empathy to the information and guidance that she imparts in her book. The book's limited view-point on issues can be viewed as its flaw. Pipher's book presents clearly the negative issues teenage girls are forced to deal with, yet it leaves out the many positive aspects of an adolescent girl's life. This makes the book difficult to read because of the depressing and other painfully honest flow the book assumes. Mary Pipher has a point to make and she does it very well. She brings to the attention of a nation the burden of injustice and violence that its young women bear. I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to sit down and read a good book, full of insights and advice. This book is among my favorites because it helps me find different ways to view the world around me.

Reviving Ophelia is an excellent introduction to the victims that our children (all of our children, not just girls) have become to the consumer culture. Ms. Pipher shares case studies of young female therapy clients, whose problems range from suicide attempts, to eating disorders, abuse homes/boyfriends, pregnancy and STDs, even self-mutilation. She discusses how different parenting styles (both in terms of home situation ie.single parent, blended home, married parents and level of 'strictness') SEEM to help/hinder girls' development without making broad generalizations. Also included is a very important discussion of how the mass culture affects these girls (waif models, older men and younger women pairings in movies, etc.). Truly, it is a very eye-opening book for many people. There are many issues raised that all parents need to understand. I highly recommend that all parents of children read this book.

That being said, I think that there are some caveats.

1.The author is very obviously a liberal feminist. Mostly, this is not a problem. The exception comes from her discussion of how parents should teach their daughters about their sexuality and the amount of freedom that their daughters should have to explore and experiment. Some parents will find this offensive. I suggest that the rest of the book is good enough to ignore this.

2.While the author does a good job at raising the awareness of parents to these issues, she does nothing to help point parents in the direction of what to do. Some readers who are used to being told what to do by 'experts' will have a problem with this. Personally, I find it refreshing.

I want to suggest that the reason that many of us look to experts for what to do, is that we have been socialized to look, even in adulthood, for an outside locus of control. Most of us are afraid to think for ourselves and are convinced that we need someone to tell us how to do everything. If you want proof of this just look at the number of parenting books on the market. I'm sure that most of our grandmothers could not have conceived of needing a parenting book, let alone understood the number currently being published. All of this because we have been trained to look outside of ourselves for both value and guidance.

It is unfortunate, that the author seemed to miss this point. Our girls are indeed in what she calls a girl-poisoning culture. However, if we could shift where we as adults look for guidance to ourselves and then teach our children to do the same, nothing in the mass media/culture could touch them at all.

If you are interested in books that will raise your awareness about how deceived we are into "needing" so-called 'expert' help with things look up the books of John Holt or John Taylor Gatto. Also, feel free to browse my wish list, which you can get from clicking on my nickname above. I dare you to become an independant thinker!

despite being a bright girl who read extensively, when i was in middle school i felt dead inside like would never be happy again. i wanted to know what was wrong with me but there was no name for what i was feeling. i felt misrable, i felt ugly, i felt unworthy of anyone's attention, i felt crazy and out of control.
thankfully i could write it out. i showed some of my work to my english teacher (whose is male by the way) and he told me to read this book. finally it all made sense, me and my friends and everyone around me (church, parents, school ETC.) was buying into the feminie myth which was only perpetuated byt the intense media with junk values.
i started wotking on myself slowly. everday i would focus on a piece of me and try to accept that piece of myself. EX: one day i would focus on accepting my hair, then the next day i would focus on my eyes, then my ears, and so on. as i began to accept the outside I grew and could accept the inside. i went from a weak girl who was eager to please and trying to be perfect to a secure young woman who could express myself in "un lady like" ways. basically i gave larger society the finger and found myself.
I WAS OPHELIA! i see them everday in school even though i'm a sophmore now. This book is truth plain and simple. It should be required reading for all adolescent girls.

As the father of two girls, I am very concerned about what they face as they approach middle school. I saw this in a local store and flipped through it for a few minutes and decided it was worth the (money) on the off chance it contained a few worthwhile nuggets that might be helpful.

It turns out that this is a very good depiction of the pressures my kids will face in the coming years. It does not offer a cookbook-style solution to the issues. Instead, it points out how some people have been able to meet the challenges and others have failed. The reader is left to simply consider the issues and draw some conclusions about how they can help their girls cope.

Having read the book, I must say that I am even more concerned about what my girls face in middle school. However, I think that at least I have some insight as to what goes on there and how the social cliques tear girls down and try to reduce the bright ones to the level of the least common denominator. My girls are very bright and I do not want to see them play stupid to gain fleeting popularity. I also want very badly to have them avoid date rape, drug abuse, eating disorders and other horrors.

I read with dismay that several reviewers have given this book one star and have decided that this is the spouting of a man-hating, communist "femi-Nazi." I am fairly certain that these people spend their days listening to Rush Limbaugh and not to their daughters. If they choose to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that none of what Ms. Pipher writes about in this book is relevant to their daughters' lives, I pity the girls. Stupidity is its own reward but it's sad when the children have to suffer too.

Grab a copy and read it. Filter what doesn't make sense in your life but at least you will learn a few things about how bad things really are in the middle schools of America.

Having raised three daughters from childhood to adulthood, I can honestly say that being both a counsellor and mother at times caused some confusion. When my daughters were quite small, they seemed to think I had some magical power to see inside their little heads and watch the wheels tuning. At the age of five, one of my daughters asked me what a psychologist was. When I explained, she said, "You're just like Santa, you know what we're thinking all the time!" Well, not quite, but it did work for awhile. Until they reached that adolescent age, they were careful to think only "good thoughts" for fear "Santa" would know the difference.

I wish this book had been available during those years. No psychology in the world prepares you for when the bedroom door slams shut, and with raging hormones in overload, your teenaged daughter proclaims, "but all the other kids can stay out as late as they want, and they never have to do their homework!" There is only one thought worse than that, and that is knowing that if you do actually knock on the door and gently ask to speak with her, the only way you will ever clear a path through the monsterous array of clothes, CD's and empty potato chip bags is with a bucket loader and swat team!

I was looking for just the right book to recommend to parents who are enjoying all the pain and joy of those adolescent years, as well as one that might also help their teenaged daughters understand why they feel they way they do. The book is well researched, informative and the author has a unique and interesting style. As you read through the pages, it is important to remember adolescent years do not last forever...they just seem like they do.

I am a female high school student who would fall into the range Mary Pipher has coined, in this book, as "intelligent girls." Until I read her book I was confused as to why I felt so insecure and lacked a sense of belonging in social circles, although I have been active in everything I can possibly manage in and out of school. Reading this literature not only helped me look within myself for answers, but it showed me a vivid contrast to other girls' situations through the accounts of numerous girls Ms. Pipher wrote about. I have begun to understand what I, and other young women, go through in the process of growing up, and I am thankful to have had the privelage of reading this book because I can now work on preserving my sense of self and I may hold myself accountable for contiuing to grow in confidence and morals dispite a society ravaged by pressure to be "perfect."

In Reviving Ophelia, Dr. Mary Pipher (1994), clinical psychologist, presents problems faced by American adolescent females in the 1990's. Rather than blaming the malfunctions of adolescents on the institution of the family, Pipher suggests that these problems are manifestations of growing up in a culture that sends mixed messages to its children. Pipher presents a variety of case examples which include substance addictions, abuse, divorce, and peer pressure; however, the basis of her ideas infer that the most prominent issue adolescent girls must confront is the competition between the authentic self and the self which she feels impelled to generate in order to fit into what the Western culture anticipates. Pipher's observations suggest that it is difficult for an adolescent girl to be true to herself while, at the same time, feminizing herself to fit into larger cultural expectations. While this rejection of the self and false feminization is a problem for these young women, they are often unable, or even unwilling, to identify it as a source for their troubles.
According to Pipher (1994, p. 41), most adolescent girls will state that they are not feminists if they are directly asked. Pipher concludes that, to these young women, "feminism" is a negative term-a term that may be compared to "communism" or "fascism" in their minds. However, if these same young women are asked whether or not they believe that women should have equal rights to men, they will inevitably concede that they certainly should. Pipher continues her explanation by pointing out that sexual harassment and sexual biases occur in educational facilities. The same young women who agree that women and men should have equal rights do not take note of these fallacies. Unfortunately, adolescent girls do not see this problem because they have become socialized to it. These wrongdoings are an every-day occurrence in their lives.
Though Pipher (1994, pp. 74-100) indicates that the culture is the most problematic cause of malfunctions in the adolescent female population, she does note the importance of the family as well. For example, she mentions the double standard of parenting prominent in Western civilization. Pipher discusses the comparison of how a teenage girl's relationship with her father and with her mother is viewed by society. An adolescent girl's relationship with her father is viewed as productive and growth-oriented, while a relationship with her mother is viewed as barren and growth-stunting. Fathers are commended for their involvement with their children while mothers are admonished for being overprotective. In all reality, an adolescent girl needs a close relationship with one or both of her parents. This stage of development may be one of the most awkward and difficult stages to conquer.
Pipher (1994, p. 80) is careful to note that the "traditional family" is not in existence. In fact, family types are as diverse as Western civilization itself. It is important to identify the structure of the family because it has a profound affect on the individual. Furthermore, relationships within the family will vary according to its structure. For example, a girl who grows up in a single-parent family will most likely assign her parent with roles that are common to both the mother and the father. Because of this, stereotypes of mother-daughter and father-daughter relationships may no longer be viewed the same. In this regard, divorce and the deterioration of the "traditional family" may actually help to produce a generation of young women who do not abide by the "rules" that guide maternal and paternal relationships with their adolescents.
Reviving Ophelia provides an image of our culture and how it affects the lives of our adolescents. Dr. Pipher's work also accosts the many problems within our society that need to be remedied. It is certainly recommended that parents of teenage daughters read and understand Dr. Pipher's ideas; however, because adolescents' lives affect what our society is and what it will become, the comprehension of her work is necessary for all.

I'm sure every woman can relate to this book in some way, perhaps not as a candidate for a case study, but in some tiny way. I remember feeling the "trapped" sensation as a young adult, when my impression of the life I was "told" to lead by friends and society collided with the reality I "knew" existed. Anyone struggling with an identity crisis may find some answers in this book. This is ideal for young adults and adolesents, but the content is important and should be understood by mothers and fathers alike: don't let your little girl slip into societal obscurity. This book is about breaking a stereotype...the stereotype that has left women crippled in American culture for hundreds of years.