Consider, if you can bear it, lunch period for a north suburban girl in 8th grade. It was, in her mother’s words, “one step above hell.”
That was when the girl–call her Sara–encountered another girl whom Sara’s mother calls “a little dictator.”
From her throne at her lunchroom table, she picked out unfortunate girls to be teased and established a strict pecking order of popularity.
“She not only designated who sat next to her, she designated the entire table seating,” Sara’s mother said. “Those that were either next to her or across from her were the `in’ people. The farther you were from her, the more you were approaching Siberia.”
Sara was in Siberia, and in agony.
At home, she cried and told her parents she didn’t want to go to school. But she finally requested a meeting with the dictator and a school counselor. She told the girl that she was through with the bullying and was moving to another table. And the principal exiled the ringleader and her top minions to separate tables at the corners of the lunchroom.
The situation was defused. But the incident poses an unpleasant question. Never mind the sugar and spice and everything nice. What are girls really made of?
Manipulation, cattiness and backstabbing maybe?
Because that seems to be a painful part of the way girls treat each other, particularly in early adolescence, when the shifting alliances are so convoluted that Machiavelli would probably flee in terror from a 7th-grade girls’ sleepover.
“Girls just get mean,” said Elizabeth Ruggirello, a Glenview mother of three girls. “Boys take out their frustrations by being a little more physical. Girls get more verbal, and I think that’s where the nastiness comes out. They start being very catty. I wish it were different.”
So do plenty of girls, to judge by the devastating assessment a girl gave Beth Cooper Benjamin when she was conducting a study of girls’ popularity for her college thesis.
“In 7th grade, all girls are mean to all other girls,” she told Benjamin, who reported on her study in New Moon, a magazine for girls.
And the finger-pointing can start early. Consider the case of a young north suburban girl who tried to get into a clique of girls by bringing them pencils, erasers or drawings she had made.
“One of the girls would be furious if someone else got a picture that she deemed better artwork, so my child would have to run home and draw another,” her mother said.
“And if she didn’t have a picture for them when she got on the bus, they didn’t let her sit with them. They would look at each other and either nod their heads to each other or put their thumbs down and send her to the back of the bus to sit by herself.
“She was crushed. It was really wicked.”
The girl was 5. Her tormenters were fellow kindergartners.
In girls’ defense, some experts say girls have no monopoly on childhood cruelty.
“I’ve seen boys do stuff that is as bad as girls,” said Patti Adler, a sociologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who with her husband, sociologist Peter Adler, conducted a study of cliques among 200 high school students.
“They’re not necessarily as verbally adroit, but they’re as exclusive and manipulative.”
“I think girls have a bad rap on this. I don’t think girls hurt each other more or less than boys do,” said Vivian Paley, the retired University of Chicago Laboratory Schools kindergarten teacher and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner. The title of her book “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play” (Harvard University Press, $10.95) summed up her rule on cliques.
“There is nothing kinder about being cut from the game out on the playground than from a private conversation that some girls are having walking around the edge of the playground.”
And in both cases, she said, children’s instinctive kindness is smothered by adult behavior.
“People start judging children . . . as to how fast they are, how attractive they are, how quickly they learn,” she said. Children pick up on that, she said, and start putting other children down.
Adler sees two powerful motivations for trying to get into cliques. “It’s more fun to be in the more popular group. The popular group is bigger and more social,” she said. “The negative side is fear. Kids are afraid to buck the peers, or they’ll get picked on.”
There is plenty of cause for fear. Leora Tanenbaum was devastated when she was branded a “slut” at her private New York high school by another girl who was angry at her for making out with a boy she liked.
The entire school turned against her, whispering in the hallways, leaving lunch tables when she sat down and sniggering about her early-maturing body.
“I was severely depressed,” said Tanenbaum, now 29 and a demure, married freelance writer. “I would cry in the middle of class. I contemplated suicide.”
“What hurt me most is that girls were the first ones to point a finger at me,” she wrote in her book on the experience, “SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation” (Seven Stories Press, $23.95).
Whether or not girls are crueler than boys, their social interactions are vastly different, as girls themselves attest.
“The boys all get along,” said Amanda Seguin, 10, a student at Owen Academy, a Chicago public school on the Southwest Side. “They’ll get mad and they sometimes have a fight and then they’ll say, `Oh, I’m sorry I said that.’ “
“For us, it takes a week to say, `I’m sorry,’ ” said her schoolmate, Jennifer Carroll, 12.
“Boys are more open. If you’re nice, then you’re cool,” said Lindsay Boehm, 15, a freshman at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview. “But girls — they want more support. They have to find the right person to support them.”
Girls’ social relationships are an intricate web of alliances that can shift in a heartbeat.
“They can be the best of friends one day, and hate each other the next. And it can go hour by hour, not just day by day,” said William Ristow, principal of Caruso Junior High School in Deerfield and the principal who resolved Sara’s lunchroom torment when he was at a different school.
And they operate in a roiling sea of emotions that get whipped into a hormonal frenzy at puberty.
“Sometimes I see these girls and they’re crying and hugging, and I think, `What can possibly be that dramatic in their lives at 6th grade that they’re hugging and making up?’ ” said Jonathan Levin, social worker at the Collins School in Schaumburg.
For drama, nothing beats the birthday sleep-over attended recently by Lisa Britton and Amanda Hanson, 6th graders at the Aldrin School in Schaumburg.
One girl overheard another girl utter her name. Assuming that the girl was speaking ill of her, the first girl gathered a group of other girls and in revenge started saying nasty things about the other group.
The rival groups decamped to different floors of the house, and tried to draw Lisa and Amanda into the fray.
“The girls were saying, `She talks about you — be on our side!” Amanda said. She and Lisa ran from floor to floor trying to make peace, but the party dissolved into a weep-fest. A month later, there are still hard feelings.
And the remark that started it all?
“They were saying that it was nice of her to let us use her makeup,” Amanda said. The fight, Lisa said, was sparked by a misunderstood compliment.
That kind of intensity is rooted in the enormous importance of friendship for girls.
“Boys break into friendship groups based on who likes baseball, who likes chess, who likes math,” said Roberta Paikoff, a University of Illinois at Chicago psychologist who has studied girls’ dominance behavior.
But for girls, she said, choosing friends is a matter of trying to find out who they are and where they fit into the world.
“They’re working out their understanding of social situations. They’re really looking for, `Who’s like me, and who’s different than me, and who can I talk with about these things that seem so important to me right now?’ “
And once they make friends, they guard them as jealously as boyfriends.
“If a girl ditches one group to go out with another on a Friday night, they’re like, `How could you do that? We’re a group of friends, we need each other.’ They want to be with you 24/7,” Lindsay Boehm said.
When girls are cruel, said her schoolmate Courtney Zueck, 16, they have a simple motivation: “They like having that power over people.”
Leora Tanenbaum blames girls’ cruelty to each other on the world’s cruelty to girls.
“Girls realize that they are judged by how they look, and boys are judged by what they do,” she said. “They pick up on that inequality, and they’re frustrated. One way to let out that frustration is by picking on other girls.”
But to Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, women’s cliquishness is based on anthropology and biology.
Women and girls are driven by hormones, she said, to associate in what she calls “flat packs,” relatively egalitarian small groups that form the basis of female society among humans and several primates.
Girls’ intense concern with making friends peaks in puberty, then plummets in women after menopause. “I suspect that estrogen is associated with this intense drive to be liked,” said Fisher, author of the new book “The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World” (Random House, $25.95)
And women’s practice of forming groups of close friends has been rewarded by evolution, she said. Prehistoric women who formed these packs had more help in raising children, who in turn were more likely to survive and pass on that genetic trait.
“The propensity to constantly network probably evolved before mankind came down from the trees,” she said.
And women’s propensity to hold grudges?
Remembering personal slights helped ancestral women judge people’s character and protect their children from harm, Fisher said.
Backstabbing? A natural weapon for women whose social style is based on consensus, she said. Girls talk behind someone’s back not to be mean, but to avoid being confrontational.
And as painful as gossiping and revealing secrets is to girls, Benjamin said, it is rooted not in cruelty but in girls’ urgent need to find out about the world.
“I want to know what’s happening in other people’s lives so I can compare what’s happening in my life and see where I stand,” confirmed Kamela Houston, a 7th grader at the Robert A. Black Magnet School on the South Side.
For all the angst girls suffer in dealing with each other, Jonathan Levin thinks that their social skills make them the lucky ones.
“It catches up to boys later on in life,” he said. “In the late years of high school and in college, I think boys pay for all the non-coping they do in elementary school.”
Nonetheless, there are those who think, particularly in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings, that adults have been remiss in not trying to quash cliques and childhood nastiness.
“I think that everyone, parents and teachers alike, probably agrees that we really don’t pay enough consistent attention to it,” Paley said.
Adults should take girls’ verbal cruelty as seriously as boys’ fighting, suggested Mary Dudek, assistant principal at Aldrin School.
“Words, I think, hurt much more than anything physical,” she said. “We have to pay more attention to what is said and how much it hurts. It doesn’t go away for that child for a long time.”
GIRLS TELL IT LIKE IT IS
Want a glimpse into girls’ lives? These 5th and 6th graders at Aldrin School in Schaumburg explain it all to you.
What are girls like with one another?
Ashley Johns, 12: A lot of girls are jealous. If they want a friend that you have, they don’t want you to be friends with them.
Sandy Gonzalez, 11: You become friends with other people, and they get jealous.
Lisa Britton, 12: Some people that aren’t as popular, they’re scared to ask.
Ashley: They want to hang out with them, but they’re afraid they might tell them no, or talk about them behind their backs.
Sandy: The real popular girls have an attitude.
Alissa Wodek, 11: Sometimes people make fun of you about your looks.
Lisa: Or if you go to a different store.
Ashley: Like some people are into platform shoes and Skechers. If you don’t wear them, they don’t really like you.
Alissa: They don’t like you being different.
Ashley: They think those styles are so cool, everyone should wear them.
How do girls spend their time with their friends?
Lisa: Talk.
Sandy: Gossip, rumors.
Ashley: This boy in my class, every time the girls get into a disagreement, he says, `Oh, you girls are going to get into one of your catfights.’ Boys just accept each other. They don’t even disagree with each other.
What do girls disagree about?
All: Boys!!!!
Ashley: Who’s cute, who’s dumb.
How do cliques start?
Ashley: Sometimes it starts after school. They went to someone’s house after school and you couldn’t go and then later you find out that they made up a code and you say, `What’s that?’ and they say, `Oh, you weren’t there, never mind,’ and you start feeling real left out, like an outcast.
Is it true that girls are mean?
Ashley: Sorry. That’s how we are.
