The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt [Hardcover]

Sharon Lamb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 2002

From playground games of "chase and kiss" to rough-and-tumble soccer games, from slumber party stripteases to romantic fantasies behind closed doors, author Sharon Lamb coaxes out girls' true stories with uncommon sensitivity and focus. The result of more than 125 fascinating interviews with pre-teens, teenagers, and adult women, "The Secret Lives of Girls" reveals the ways that girls use their minds and bodies for private sexual play, mischief, and hidden aggression.

To truly understand what little girls are made of, Lamb suggests, we must listen not only to what they say to us but also to what they don't say, taking into account their hidden selves and the lives that we adults don't see. Yes, girls are known to be "good," but they manage to act out in decidedly ungirlish ways and, despite many parents' fears, be the better for it. What's most remarkable about Lamb's conclusions is that we needn't join the chorus of voices deploring a "girl-poisoning" culture for damaging our daughters. Instead, Lamb finds reason to celebrate girls' resilience in the face of pressures to conform -- and she does it by listening to them and to the women they have become. "The Secret Lives of Girls" explores such in-depth key issues as:

Using aggression wisely -- when girls need to walk away or to settle verbally, and when to fight. Girls needn't grow up afraid of their own toughness and power. Building self-esteem, self-respect, and the ambition to achieve -- anger and aggressive feelings can be the impetus for creative and productive work. Eighty percent of female executives of Fortune 500 companies identify as having been tomboys. Participating in highly physical sports -- karate orboxing, or team sports like soccer -- teaches girls to feel that their bodies are competent, and that they deserve to take up space. Recognizing daughters as sexual beings -- their love of sexy dress-up, their yearning to understand their bodies and their sensual desires. Accepting some kinds of sexual play -- teaching the difference between fun and bullying; setting a positive and supportive tone from birth through the grade school years.

From tomboys like "Julia," who runs with the boys in the streets of New York to "Abby," who led a "naked parade," the girls who share their stories here describe a hidden but fascinating world made up of more than girlish innocence. "The Secret Lives of Girls" is a welcome and much-needed addition to the literature on girls' lives and culture. It celebrates girls' hidden strengths, play, and needs, and opens a door for parents that can teach them how to understand their daughters better and help them grow.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Let girls be girls, counsels psychologist Sharon Lamb in her provocative book The Secret Lives of Girls. "I want to be able to free girls and women to take off the shimmering costume of a femininity that equals goodness--to acknowledge all aspects of being human," she writes.

Reporting on 125 interviews with girls and women, Lamb details and normalizes the sexual play and anger expressed in the privacy of girls' bedrooms and playhouses. The result is a groundbreaking and guilt-free guide for parents and teachers to assist girls in accepting their sexual and aggressive feelings. Her portraits of girls' exuberant sexuality ("practice kissing," "I'll show you mine") and spontaneous anger (not-so-dear diary, pranks, and "cutting down") are fresh and fascinating. One particularly memorable chapter describes games of "naked Barbie" and applauds the lessons learned about becoming a sexual person rather than just a desired object.

Lamb's observations are so sharp that readers may wish the chapters offering her smart suggestions for change were longer. Some readers may be surprised and others unsettled by the vivid scenarios Lamb portrays. Still, by listening to girls and telling their stories without judgment, Lamb invites them to stop living a double life that ignores their anger and sexual feelings. She provides parents and teachers with a powerful and practical model of how to understand and nurture the hidden and genuine strengths of every girl. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly

Sexual play and acts of aggression are common for girls, according to Lamb, a psychology professor at St. Michael's College, but they are conducted in secrecy and often burden the participants with lifelong guilt. Based on interviews with 122 women and girls from a fairly wide range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds (29 were African-American and 22 Latina), this accessible and engaging study reveals that most girls experience sexual and aggressive feelings that fall outside cultural notions of the "good girl." Lamb examines different ways girls express their ambivalence about their sexuality and aggressiveness: keeping their play and their anger secret from adults, sexually torturing their Barbie dolls and pretending to be victims or "playing dead" so that they can experience sensual pleasure without being full participants. She draws a clear line between sexual play and coercion, but at the same time finds examples of behavior that could be considered coercive by adults but was experienced by the girls as positive and pleasurable. Advocating a broader definition of "good girl," Lamb argues that the current emphasis on caring and sensitivity strips girls of a complete self-image, one where their sexual and aggressive "impulses exist alongside their sweetness, competence, and ability to love and care for others." Allowing girls "to practice these feelings and emotions in spaces where adults acknowledge them and help shape their development" is essential to helping them realize their full human potential, says the author. Agent, Carol Mann. (Mar. 5)Forecast: Parents seeking to understand how to talk to their daughters about sexuality, power or ways to deal with anger will learn much here.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (February 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743201078
• ISBN-13: 978-0743201070
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #920,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!, February 28, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt (Hardcover)

What a liberating book. The author of the book writes about the secret play and games of girls in childhood (and secret aggression) and makes us all feel that what we did wasn't so unusual, wasn't so bad, was ok. As a mother of a daughter, I think I'll think about my own daughter a little differently now, and with a little more acceptance and happiness about her developing sexuality. I think it would be so fun to read this book in a book group and talk about what we all did as children. The book was easy to read and the stories from the adult women looking back were really really interesting, especially the ones in the chapter called "Playing Dead but Feeling Tingly." Great book.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing; Completely readable; Intelligent, April 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt (Hardcover)

After the many popular books on the psychology of boys that appeared in the 90's, it is good to now see more books on girls. Of the ones that I have read, Sharon Lamb's "The Secret Lives of Girls" achieves the most. Lamb interviewed over 100 women and girls asking them to speak about the "hidden" experiences of their childhoods -- experiences of sexuality and aggression -- and to talk about their feelings (often guilty) about them. The sample of interviewees includes women of diverse backgrounds so Lamb's research provides a good perspective on girls' "secret lives" across contemporary American culture.

The women speak openly and eloquently. Many of them report life-long guilt over what seem to be mild and harmless childhood experiences with sexual play and feelings of anger. If there was ever any doubt, "The Secret Lives of Girls" confirms that a prudish, Victorian view of how girls are supposed to act and feel is firmly in place in American society. (And with current rends toward political conservatism and religious fundamentalism, I fear it may be growing even more widespread.)

It is refreshing to see an academic such as as Sharon Lamb who is also a practicing child psychologist produce a book that is completely readable for anyone interested in the subject, free of academic jargon, yet never "dumbed down" in its approach. Her Introduction, Conclusion and commentaries throughout provide a perceptive discussion of the contents of the interviews that make up the bulk of the book.

The book will be very valuable not only to students of psychology and women's studies, but more importantly to parents, teachers and anyone interested in a look at REAL girls' lives and attitudes.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Groundbreaking and Enlightening, February 27, 2002

By 

Diane Anstadt (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do--Sex Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt (Hardcover)

Dr. Lamb has opened the doors to a secret world, that surely almost every female has entered into at one time or another, during those so-called "latency years." Lamb's vignettes from her many interviews are engaging, enlightening, and most definitely liberating. Acknowledging little girls as sexual beings, even from the start, and exposing sexual play and experimentation as a normal, functional part of female development, helps to unburden feelings of guilt, and to confirm what many women have known or wanted to know on some level, all along.
As a clinical social worker, working with children, I have always believed in the normalcy and universality of sexual play among children, but never had this confirmed so definitively until I read Sharon Lamb's book. In spite of my beliefs, my training has taught me to look for warning signs, to look for the abnormal, to suspect sexual abuse, each and every time a child draws sexual pictures, or plays provocatively or sexually with dolls in my office. Though I still believe I will continue to be cautiously aware, always cognizant of the subtle ways that children reveal the important parts of their world to us, I now feel that I am better able to incorporate this healthy perspective of sexuality into my diagnostic impressions, and in my work with children.
I highly recommend this book to clinicians, to parents of daughters, and to every woman. It is my impression, that almost every female can relate to one story or another that is told here, whether it is the naked Barbies, or stories of their own unique sexual or aggressive feelings or encounters in childhood. I believe that Sharon Lamb offers an enlightening, liberating perspective on female sexuality, and she paves the way for many more stories to be told.