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Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Paperback – February 14, 1995
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Here, for the first time, are girls' unmuted voices from the front lines of adolescence, personal and painfully honest. By laying bare their harsh day-to-day reality, Reviving Ophelia issues a call to arms and offers parents compassion, strength, and strategies with which to revive these Ophelias' lost sense of self.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateFebruary 14, 1995
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100345392825
- ISBN-13978-0345392824
- Lexile measure900L
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Editorial Reviews
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–Los Angeles Times
“A vibrant and insightful account . . . The loss of the spirit which Dr. Pipher so brilliantly portrays is the loss of the American spirit.”
–DR. NATALIE PORTER
Former president, Division of the Psychology of Women,
American Psychological Association
From the Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
Here, for the first time, are girls' unmuted voices from the front lines of adolescence, personal and painfully honest. By laying bare their harsh day-to-day reality, Reviving Ophelia issues a call to arms and offers parents compassion, strength, and strategies with which to revive these Ophelias' lost sense of self.
From the Back Cover
–Los Angeles Times
“A vibrant and insightful account . . . The loss of the spirit which Dr. Pipher so brilliantly portrays is the loss of the American spirit.”
–DR. NATALIE PORTER
Former president, Division of the Psychology of Women,
American Psychological Association
From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
As I talked to these girls, I became aware of how little I really understood the world of adolescent girls today. It didn't work to use my own adolescent experience from the early 1960s to make generalizations. Girls were living in a whole new world....
Even in our small city with its mostly middle-class population, girls often experienced trauma. How could we help girls heal from that trauma? And what could we do to prevent it?
This last year I have struggled to make sense of this. Why are girls having more trouble now than my friends and I had when we were adolescents? Many of us hated our adolescent years, yet for the most part we weren't suicidal and we didn't develop eating disorders, cut ourselves, or run away from home....
But girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized, and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual. As they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected.
As I looked at the culture that girls enter as they come of age, I was struck by what a girl-poisoning culture it was. The more I looked around, the more I listened to today's music, watched television and movies and looked at sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that we are on the wrong path with our daughters. America today limits girls' development, truncates their wholeness, and leaves many of them traumatized....
What can we do to help them? We can strengthen girls so that they will be ready. We can encourage emotional toughness and self-protection. We can support and guide them. But most important, we can change our culture. We can work together to build a culture that is less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing. Our daughters deserve a society in which all their gifts can be developed and appreciated. I hope this book fosters a debate on how we can build that society for them.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (February 14, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345392825
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345392824
- Lexile measure : 900L
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,628,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #665 in Popular Adolescent Psychology
- #1,813 in Parenting Girls
- #1,870 in Parenting Teenagers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Mary Pipher, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding our Families and Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of our Elders. Awarded the American Psychological Association's Presidential Citation, Pipher speaks across the country to families, mental health professionals, and educators, and has appeared on Today, 20/20, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio's Fresh Air.
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Any female can tell you that she would never go back to adolescence. It was awful! Imagine how much harder it has gotten.
Our daughters are bombarded by messages that tell them that their entire purpose in life is to be a skinny, attractive, sex object.
Mary Pipher will open your eyes to the subliminal messages all around us, the ones that are damaging our daughters. Then she gives us ideas on how to combat these ideas, how to make our daughters realize where these thoughts of worthlessness are coming from, then how to overcome them through real purpose.
This really is I e if my favorite books. In high school, my English teacher suggested I read it. I didn't back then. Once I had my own daughters, I bough it for my kindle and have read it several times.
Whether we want to admit it or not, our society is hard on women. Look at magazine covers. Women can't have wrinkles, grey hair or cellulite. Men on magazines can have all of these things, because we look at their character. Women's magazines tell us we first and foremost must look good to have any value, then they tell us how to work full time, have a gorgeous house, balance career and family, lose the baby weight like celebrities and be flawless in general. Expectations we will never look up to. Men's magazines have articles on improving sex, meeting women, sports are awesome, bosses suck and more about improving sex.
While we can not fix our broken and biased society, we can arm our daughters with the knowledge that this is out there and then teach them that these messages are wrong.
Interestingly, this book really does withstand the test of time, in that all the nonsense our adolescent girls had to navigate in the1990s is still pervasive today. I especially appreciated the advice to parents in the last chapter. A must read for parents of adolescent girls. This book can help a diligent parent navigate the tumult of female adolescence. I particularly liked the addressing of lookism. Thank you, Dr. Prophet, for writing this.







