Customer Reviews

Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

To read Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls is to take a journey into a world 1) that any man with a conscience is ashamed to remember ( because of the way boys treated girls ) and 2) that for high school girls and women to remember, is to recall the pain of being punished, physically abused, humiliated and emotionally beaten down for simply being born female. But before going into the book in depth, one important point must be made: While Orenstein's portrayal of girls and boys is accurate, it should not be taken as a message that all middle school girls are good but get shortchanged, or that all boys engage in destructive behavior when it comes to girls. There are wonderful adolescent boys and nightmarish middle school girls. And some girls do have a very positive experience. Unfortunately, Orenstein's portrayal is the norm and it is accurate. What Orenstein did was to go into two vastly different schools, one in a solidly white middle class community and the other located in an urban black and Hispanic neighborhood. Both schools were located in Northern California. She observed and interviewed the girls ( as she gained their trust ) for an academic school year to see what they were experiencing with regard to their academic, home and social lives. Although the cultural environments were vastly different, the dynamics of both groups' experiences turned out to be strikingly similar in many respects. I remember all too well what went on in junior high school in the 60s. I was not aware that while the same basic social structures exist today, the pressures and dangers are much greater than they were 30 years ago: Sixth grade boys pressuring their pubescent female peers into intercourse and the girls feeling trapped between fear of rejection and being labeled a slut; boys who treat girls' bodies like it is public property to be pinched pulled and fondled in public; boys' totally dominating the classroom to the point where girls give up, lose interest and start failing classes that they could easily have gotten As in; constantly bombarding girls with the thought that they are bad at sports. But even more incredible are the administrators who can effect change. Teachers and counselors work hard to enforce newly created sexual harassment laws only to have the administrators nix the effort out of laziness or personal sexist beliefs -- " If he grabbed you like that you must have asked for it . " This is not a fun exciting read. But as someone who coaches teenage girls in basketball and is very dedicated to changing their lives for the better, I feel that this book ( although at times depressing ) has helped me to understand, better than ever before, what it is like to be a teenage female at the turn of the millennium. Don't read this book if you are searching for justification for adolescent boys. But by all means, do read this book if you really want to know how middle school girls are abused and shortchanged in America.

This is an expose of a "hidden curriculum" in our schools. It explores the effect it has on our children as schools help reinforce stereotypical gender roles, whether they intend to or not. The book is based on a study that suggests that as they reach adolescence, a girl's self-esteem drops and performance in school is compromised. Girls and boys adopt the traditional gender stereotypes with assertiveness being seen as masculine and restraint and compliance seen as feminine. Because Peggy Ornestein is not a trained adolescent psychologist, her conclusions may be suspect, but through anecdotal stories and interviews Ornestein adds a human dimension to survey data. She brings the problem to life and makes it difficult to ignore. Ornestein gives the reader reason to care about what happens to April and Lisa, two of the girls she profiles in the book. Pervasive gender inequity in teaching is one of many difficulties facing educators, students and families attempting to improve today's education system. The observations in this book can go a long way toward understanding the complexities of adolescence and toward improving the learning environment.

I've read SchoolGirls several times and bought countless copies for friends. It's a fantastic read, one that in moments had me trembling, recalling some of my own experiences and feelings during those middle school years. I applaud Orenstein for undertaking a large-scale piece of writing and reporting. I disagree entirely with those who are calling for more on boys: good books are by necessity specific.

Because there's been a recent spate of books oriented toward boys' experiences at the same age, it seems both cheap and easy for new readers of SchoolGirls to question why boys aren't covered more thoroughly here. The book was written in response to a study whose results revealed startling statistics about girls. As a 32-year-old woman and a young mother, I find Orenstein's reporting and synthesis among the most powerful and helpful of tools given to me. I recommend this book heartily to those concerned about children of both genders.

It's heartbreaking to read this book and realise that things haven't much changed in the decade since it's been published, and how too many young women in America act, think, and believe, not because it's their integral nature but rather because they've been pushed to it by messages from the media, Hollywood, teachers, parents, male classmates. The girls Ms. Orenstein interviewed are all around my age (I was also in seventh grade during the 1992-93 schoolyear), so it was easy to relate to them and what they were going through, what things were like when they were in junior high and sixth grade. The girls at Weston, the largely white school, had problems with teachers calling on boys who hogged and demanded attention, to the exclusion of girls in the class, body image, sexual harassment, teachers who had a double standard when it came to boys and girls (boys who call out answers before being called on or who loudly whine to be called on are rewarded with attention, while girls are ridiculed if they have a wrong answer or not called on at all; there was also the teacher who called a boy disruptive, with a friendly laugh, while making the same remark to a female student in a very cold negative disparaging voice), parents who reinforce this double standard, the sexual double standard, and messages that you have to fit in and be perfect. These girls even pretended to be afraid of spiders so that boys would think they were feminine and desirable as girlfriends, not pariahs who wouldn't run screaming from a spider but instead act like a boy and ask to hold it because it looks so neat. It's sad to read that in this day and age many young women think that a woman isn't allowed to be assertive, pushy, or aggressive, or that a girl can't be a lawyer because she's too "cute." The girls at Audobon, the mostly urban minority school, also had those problems, but they were submerged by more pressing problems of poverty, gangs, street violence, drugs, falling-apart families, crime, and teachers who were past the point of caring or treating students with respect. The book wraps up with a look into a gender-fair class back at Weston, where the tables are turned and both sexes learn about women and other minorities, where boys sometimes have to make speeches from the pov of famous women, the type of class there would be everywhere if women were the gender that had traditionally held power in America.

Apparently some people didn't like this book because it brings to light what goes on at many schools, how boys treat girls and misuse power, how they get away with a lot of bad things. It's the same reason why a lot of the boys in the gender-fair classroom initially didn't like the class, because they felt excluded and discriminated against. It must hurt them to have their traditional position of male authority challenged and exposed for what it really is. These boys had no problem with being in classrooms that taught mostly about famous men, yet when they had to learn about more women than men, they took it personally and got offended. Presenting a fact, even if it's a negative unflattering fact, is not the same as "bashing."

This book is well-written and important for parents and teachers. Orenstein focus on girls at 2 middle schools. She does not attempt to claim that their experience speaks for all American schoolgirls, but rather to illuminate SOME of the problems that they face and to point out that there is much evidence to suggest that many other girls may face similiar obstacles in school. Orenstein does discuss and describe at length some pretty awful behavior on the part of schoolBOYS towards schoolgirls. In describing this behavior, she does not put forth the idea that school is easier for boys or that they are villians to the core. She is simply describing the behavior of specific boys at specific schools. Having been a schoolgirl myself, I can attest to the veracity of her report. School is not easy for any child. But it would be ridiculous to ignore some of the specific ways that boys treat girls just because we are afraid of maligning boys. If the shoe fits... Also, there are plenty of books out there that address the problems boys face in school. Two good ones are LOST BOYS and REAL BOYS. And I don't see reviews of those books that accuse them of "leaving out" girls! Why are we so adverse to talking about what is really happening to our girls in school?

While I could not personally relate to most of the experiences of the girls interviewed for this book I was not surprised that this kind of gender discrimination exists in our nation's learning institutions. Peggy Orenstein does a wonderful job illustrating the social anxieties and educational challenges facing middle-school girls from two racially and economically divergent schools in Northern California. It angered and saddened me to read about what these girls went through while trying to get an education. Hopefully this book will open the eyes of educators nationwide so that some serious social changes can be implemented to better improve the way our children learn.

It would be interesting to see a follow-up of "Schoolgirls" and see what eventually became of these kids. After reading through these reviews, I was shocked to see how many unidentified "readers" gave the book one star because they felt that the boys were the ones being mistreated in this book. Come on people...the book is called "SchoolGIRLS" not "SchoolBOYS".

In 1990, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a report entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America. For this report, "three thousand boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen were polled on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends." (xix) According to Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,
The results [of the AAUW report] confirmed something that many women already knew too well. For a girl, the passage into adolescence is not just marked by menarche or a few new curves. It is marked by a loss of confidence in herself and her abilities, especially in math and science. It is marked by a scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy. (xx)
In this quote lays the essential premise of Orenstein's book. Taking her cues from the AAUW report, Orenstein embedded herself in two California middle schools for a year to observe eighth grade women in their classrooms. These observations eventually blossomed into extraordinarily candid interviews not only with the young women in their school and home environments, but also interviews with families, friends, and teachers of the young women. Combined, these interviews, bolstered by numerous studies and statistics, paint a compelling picture of the social, physical, and psychological obstacles facing young American women.
The first school Orenstein visits is Weston Middle School, in Weston, California, a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. The school itself is sociologically, though not racially, diverse:
The bumper stickers on the cars dropping off the children reflect the mix: Toyota vans advertising the local NPR affiliate pull up behind rusty pickups that proclaim: "My wife said if I buy another gun she'll divorce me; God, I'll miss her! (4)
Weston is a "California Distinguished School," an honor earned "by the students' estimable standardized test scores as well as the staff's exemplary
performance." (4) Although Orenstein's interviews elicited numerous widely varied responses, one of her most compelling observations of gender inequity within the school was a frightening pattern of preferential treatment towards males. Orenstein referred to this pattern throughout her book as "the hidden curriculum." This "hidden curriculum" is observed frequently and in many distinct situations while Orenstein is at Weston, from the lack of female role models in history and science classes to the approach of the administration towards sexual harassment. One of the most insidious incarnations of "the hidden curriculum" rears its head in the guise of "the perfect girl." Orenstein quotes an interviewee: "`teachers like us because we're nicer, quieter, and better behaved'" (35). This desire to be perfectly behaved to the point of being deferential often works to the disadvantage of the young women in the hyper-competative classroom setting. Boys, bolstered by years of both overt and covert training to be aggressive, are much more likely to both call out answers or accentuate their raised hand by shouting at the teacher when prompted to answer a question. Girls' seeming passivity in these situations often leaves them passed over, neglected, and possibly without a full understanding of the lesson. As Orenstein puts it, "by adolescence, girls have learned to get along, while boys have learned to get ahead." (36)
While the confidence of young women is undermined by this extremely subtle "hidden curriculum" within the educational forum, Orenstein also portrays the complexities of the burgeoning eighth grade social life as extremely detrimental to the women's esteem. Orenstein's subjects constantly discuss their body image, both with their peers and with Orenstein. These young women, the majority of whom are intelligent and from "good American families," talk about food, their weight, and their relative attractiveness to the point of obsession. In fact, four of the five eighth grade women extensively interviewed by Orenstein suffered from (or had experimented with) an eating disorder. All four had at least tried both anorexia and bulimia to counter their pubescent emergence and to keep their weight "low." One, Lisa, the only young lady in the book that Orenstein characterizes as a "fat girl" (102) has an extreme eating disorder, binge eating.
Psychologist Susie Orbach has pointed out that, as with girls who are severely underweight, "big girls' " body size places them outside the bounds of acceptable femininity, and beyond its attendant expectations. In that respect, Lisa's body, like that of the anorexic, becomes a vehicle for protest, a challenge to the customary invisibility of the female self. But instead of embracing denial and wasting away, Lisa expresses her needs by gorging on them. With potato chips, ice cream, and burritos, she creates an armor of flesh that both flaunts her powerlessness and gives her an excuse for it-as well as for her failure at school, and the scorn she's been subjected to among her peers and at home. (102)
This feeling of scorn eventually leads Lisa into the wrong crowd. She not only turns to drugs as a means of escapism, but as she realizes the "armor of flesh" she has built up is a shoddy defense for the criticisms she receives about it, begins to use self-mutilation to express her angst.
"I don't know why I do it," she says, gazing at the anarchy symbol she's carved on her leg. "Sometimes you're bored, I guess. And I know this sounds weird, but it feels kind of good. It feels like . . . it doesn't hurt, it's just . . . feeling the razor cut your skin feels good. And sometimes ... sometimes you like the pain, you like how it hurts." (108)
And it is with this shocking declaration that Orenstein moves past the body image issues, and into her final excerpt in her voyage at Weston.
The last chapter in the Weston portion of Schoolgirls deals with sexual harassment. In 1991, as Schoolgirls was being written, the state of California passed a law giving state schools unprecedented prosecutorial freedom in their quest to deal with the perpetrators of sexual harassment. In Weston, sexual harassment occurred in various forms ranging from frequently uttered obscenities and lewd remarks to occasional unwelcome molestation. Weston's principal decided to tackle the topic head-on, and began a series of suspensions and expulsions of the most frequent or overt perpetrators. After being told by the district superintendent that her methods of discipline might stigmatize the boys in question, the principal feels "burned" and "gun-shy." (130) Ultimately, the entire system of penalization is tossed aside, and even a girls' support group is disbanded. Orenstein concludes that this is yet another example of the "hidden curriculum" within our educational system: rules that are not enforced, or rules that are unenforceable have a tendency to not only demean the young women and essentially cause them to become uncomfortable in their own skin, but simultaneously empower the boys and keep the gender gap intact.
The second school that Orenstein visits is the John J. Audubon Middle School in northern California. "Only about 10 percent of the students, most of whom are unhappily bused in from a nearby military base, are white. The rest are African-American, Latino, Asian, or Filipino." (p. 136) At the outset of this section of the book, Orenstein describes a school that starkly contrasts her experience at Weston. She describes two teachers that are both wildly ineffective and completely dismissive of the students, an administration that struggles just to keep their kids in control, and a guidance counselor that has no time or desire to extend actual guidance to any of his supposed students. Once again, the group of girls who are interviewed extensively in this segment vary widely, yet this time eating disorders are never even mentioned. The environment is completely different in Audubon, a school where the greatest desire of the majority of the girls is to "graduate onstage" from 8th grade. Unfortunately for many of the girls, life simply "gets in the way."
Orenstein chronicles girls from troubled pasts, one who goes through a significant, life-altering decision to improve her performance in school and graduates with honors despite her crack-addicted prostitute mother, and another who all but drops out of school a month before she walks across the stage at graduation because she feels compelled to stay at home and care for her five younger siblings while her 26 year old mother works all day. Orenstein interviews a young Latina who comes from a hard-working blue-collar family whose strict disciplinary patriarch leads to the rebellion in his daughter that eventually leads her to explore the gang scene, a scene in which girls often have to be brutally gang-raped as an initiation. The common thread for these girls is one of desperation: the women at Weston had the ability, through wealth, to worry about comparatively trivial issues such as weight, the girls at Audubon worry about their survival.
Sexual harassment is a similarly heightened issue at Audubon, with frequent occurrences of overt groping, and even a few instances of actual rape. The only thing close to a solution to this problem came in the guise of Jessica Diaz, a "student of health sciences at a nearby branch of the state university." (214) Diaz sets up a group of young Latinas to discuss such topical issues as gangs and sexuality. Unfortunately, Diaz is afforded very little time and no resources; her room is an unused broom closet off of the gym. Yet what she tells the Audubon girls is an absolute necessity; her desire to work with these girls is made even more imperative when Orenstein consistently quotes a statistic placing young Latinas as the as the group with the highest potential to suffer a crippling confidence gap after 7th grade. Of course, it's all too little, too late for Marta, who has already decided which gang she wants to join.
In her final chapter, Orenstein visits Judy Logan's class at "San Francisco's Everett Middle School where she [coordinated] the Gifted and Talented Educational Program (GATE)." (246) Ms. Logan's class in question is the women's history class, and Ms. Logan employs quite a few amazing tactics to battle the gender gap. In her class, both boys and girls present two five minute question and answer sessions in which they pose as an historical figure. One of these sessions is to be presented in the voice of a man, one is to be presented in the voice of a woman. In this, Logan places as much historical significance on the accomplishments of women as men, which certainly does not diminish men while it encourages her students to seek positive female role models. This last chapter, in Ms. Logan's class, is as close as Orenstein comes in her book to providing a model for change in the quest to diminish gender inequity in school.
Orenstein never confronts the subject of an all-girls or all-boys school, nor is she very heavy-handed in of her approach to posing potential changes within the system. However her collection of interviews and data lends a compelling voice for a group who, in their collective quest to become "the perfect girl," has lost its own voice and become neglected. Schoolgirls contains profound insight while maintaining a seemingly impartial voice. Ultimately Orenstein presents merely a lesson, a lesson that society must take to heart if there is to be any change at all in the status quo.

Very easy to read. Well-written. Disturbing. If you have kids in school, or if you work with kids, the book is all the more important. Sheds light on topics that are rarely given the light of day: how girls are essentially shortchanged in many ways in our school system. Getting information like this is the beginning of change. The issues in this book affect all of us. Buy it. Read it. Share it. A very, very important topic, and a book that does it justice.

This book is still useful to young women today,e ven after so many other girl books have been published. My students, smart undergrads, fell in love with the book and talked about the lives of the girls in it for weeks after. At first I hesitated to use the book because it was written by a journalist rather than a psychologist, and yet in reading it, I found this author to be extremely well read, theoretical, and thoughtful. I'll continue to use the book.

I found out about this book because it was required reading for my teaching credential program. It is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. Peggy Orenstein chronicles one academic year in the lives of several eighth grade girls in two Bay Area middle schools, with a focus on the ways in which they are discriminated against by each other, their male peers, and (worst of all) their school systems.

To say the least, this book is an eye-opener. Unless, of course, you are a woman. I've loaned my copy to a select few of my female high school students who I think can handle the advanced academic language, and their reaction has been the same in each case: "This book is very true; you need to teach it to your classes, Mr. S." Recently, my older sister read it and told me that it brought back lots of nasty memories about what it was like for her in school.

This book was written more than a decade ago, but it's no less relevant now. If you are a parent or a teacher especially, you need to know what's going on. The womenfolk will nod knowingly, and the menfolk will be shellshocked to experience one year in the life of these girls. Either way, read it.