It`s in their voices. Frustration. Squelched honesty. The cover up. They begin practicing as girls, and perfect their techniques into adulthood.
But by careful listening to the duality of feeling pre-adolescent girls manifest in speaking about relationships, adults can help them to express their true feelings rather than denying them to achieve what they see as social success.
This was the point emphasized by Carol Gilligan, professor of human development and psychology at the Harvard University of Graduate School of Education, during a recent daylong seminar on psychological development of girls and women at the Marriott Oakbrook Hotel. Gilligan is well known for her research on this subject.
She and four colleagues in what is known as the Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls at Harvard performed skits to demonstrate adolescents` changes in perception and relationships that so profoundly affect girls` psychological development that they carry the effects into womanhood. And because these changes can cause internal conflicts, they often carry those effects into a need for therapy.
Conditioning girls to adjust to a world in which they seek acceptance involves a certain ear and voice training, Gilligan said. In watching a group of girls over time, she and her co-researchers concluded that girls eventually are trained to refrain from saying what they really see and feel. As Gilligan described it, they learn ”what voices people like to listen to in girls and what girls can say without being called `stupid` or `rude.`
”`Cover up,` girls are told daily in innumerable ways. `Cover your body, feelings, relationships, voice, your knowing, and perhaps above all, cover desire.”`
Girls try to comply and keep memory from seeping through the coverings.
”Yet, by closing the door on these ordinary elements of childhood, girls are in danger of knocking out their seemingly effortless ability to tune in to the relational world,” Gilligan said.
Girls of 8, 9 and 10 see people, the world and relationships quite clearly, and they freely name what they see, she said. At that age, for example, if three girls were together and one felt left out, she would feel free to say so, and the others would feel free to tell her to go home, if she didn`t like what was happening. But around age 11, girls begin to hedge on that directness. Whereas boys` socialization allows them more freedom to fight, girls are made aware of what`s considered ”nice,” and they are rewarded for behaving nicely, which can involve suppressing their honest feelings.
Nine years ago, the group began its work by listening to women. They discovered that women`s voices-tenor, volume and word choice-convey experiences that are far different from those of traditional theories based on male psychological models. In the past, a woman who didn`t fit the theories was told she had ”a problem.”
At that time, Gilligan wondered whether the problem might be with the theory. So she and her colleagues chose to ”stay with women and listen to them as authorities on their own experiences.”
From that point, the group moved backward chronologically, finally settling on pre-adolescent girls, just before they ”go underground” or
”cover up,” while their views and voices are still in sync.
They conducted a five-year study of 100 girls 6 to 18, in a private school in Cleveland, and a three-year study of 18 girls 9 to 12 in the Boston area.
By age 11, they found, girls have so successfully ”covered” themselves, they`re often confused about their feelings and thoughts.
Family, friends, teachers and society press girls to be ”perfect,” be nice and harbor no bad thoughts or feelings, said Gilligan`s co-researcher and former student, Lyn Mikel Brown, assistant professor of education at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
But girls get caught between the pressure to be perfect and the impossibility of doing so.
”At this age,” Brown said, ”they put out strong feelings, then retract them. They learn to track the world double,” seeing and speaking two ways:
honest and often ugly on the secret underside, nice and acceptable on the surface.
For a female facing adolescence herself or that of a loved one, the key is listening, according to the group. Some girls readily mimic the light, breathy speech of women, said Annie G. Rogers, a clinical psychologist and faculty lecturer on human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Women and girls ”tend to speak in such a constricted range, it masks the subtleties of thoughts and feelings,” she said.
So anyone listening for a girl`s true voice must listen carefully. In their interviews with the girls, the researchers try to follow verbs and ”the active I.”
Women can help girls by ”sticking with them,” and by talking about girls` adolescence with other women, the researchers said. ”If a girl says she`s angry,” Brown said, ”begin with the feelings and thoughts as they`re stated rather than jumping to judgments.
In turn, by truly listening to girls, women can rediscover the girl within themselves. It`s often hard and humbling to do so, Rogers said, but it`s important and rewarding too. She recalled a session with a group of girls 8 through 10 who wanted the three researchers to play a game of ”Agony Tag”- one of their games-essentially tag but a tagged player must roll around on the floor and yell before `dying.`
”For three women to play that game in a (grade) school setting was a real act of courage,” Rogers said. ”But physically, it was very freeing. I felt very grounded in my body and really alive. I recalled times from childhood.”
Memories of her own childhood experiences, in fact, prompted Gilligan into this branch of research nearly 30 years ago. While teaching psychology at Harvard, she said, ”I heard this difference between women`s voices and theory used in women`s development.”
So in 1975 she wrote an essay on women`s conceptions of self and reality, ”In a Different Voice.”
”I wrote it for myself,” Gilligan said, ”to try to make sense of my own experience.” The essay circulated among her students, and one of them showed it to the editor of the Harvard Education Review, which published it-with the author`s permission-in 1977.
Gilligan was a bit embarrassed. ”It was such a personal thing,” she said. ”It was an attempt to give words to something I felt and saw in the women I worked with that was in fact true of many other people as well. I didn`t know that when I wrote the piece.”
By 1982, the essay`s popularity prompted the Harvard University Press to publish 3,000 copies in book form. Since then, more than 500,000 copies have been sold and the book has been translated into nine languages.
Tapes of the Harvard Project Group`s presentation in Oak Brook are available through the Illinois Psychological Association, which sponsored the gathering. Call 312-372-7610.
