Schoolgirls Read online

  PEGGY ORENSTEIN

  Schoolgirls

  Peggy Orenstein is the author of Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World. An award-winning writer and speaker on issues affecting girls and women, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Vogue, Glamour, Mirabella, Details, Elle, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and other publications. Additionally, she has served as an editor at Esquire, Manhattan inc., 7 Days, and Mother Jones magazines.

  ANCHOR BOOK EDITIONS, 1995, 2000

  Copyright © 1994 by Peggy Orenstein and the American Association of University Women

  Preface copyright © 2000 by Peggy Orenstein

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1994, and in a previous Anchor Books softcover edition in 1995 in slightly different form.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows: Orenstein, Peggy.

  Schoolgirls : young women, self-esteem, and the confidence gap / by Peggy Orenstein in association with the American Association of University Women.

  —1st ed. in the United States of America.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Teenage girls—United States—Psychology. 2. Self-esteem in adolescence—United States. 3. Self-perception in adolescence—United States. I. American Association of University Women. II. Title.

  HQ798.O74 1994

  305.23′5—dc20 94-9883

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83311-2

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  To Steven

  Acknowledgments

  For me, the writing process has always involved many people: people who gave me opportunity, who broadened my thinking, people who critiqued my manuscript, who offered sustenance and love and, sometimes, told me to stop whining and get back to work. Without them—without my colleagues, friends, and family—this book could never be.

  I owe great debts to my agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and to Sheila Buckmaster, formerly of the AAUW, who saw the potential of this project and forged our alliance; to Doubleday’s Wendy Goldman; and to Ashley Craddock, Heidi Frieze, and Tina Plaza, who offered invaluable research and translation assistance.

  My friends have chewed over my ideas with me endlessly, commented on drafts, and provided more moral support than I could ever repay. In particular, I’d like to thank Eva Eilenberg, Ruth Halpern, Peg-bo Edersheim, David Fallek, Neal Karlen, Connie Matthiessen, Sarah Weir, Dvora Honigstein, Catherine Taylor, and Barbara Swaiman (who has been my friend since we were “schoolgirls”). And, of course, thank you to Beatsy, Mel, Leslie, David, Debbie, and John Orenstein for their love and faith.

  In a book such as this, I believe it is especially important to acknowledge a group of people who may or may not remember me: the teachers who made a lasting impact on my life. Thank you to Susan Hanson, the late Betty Ann Long, Richard Rosch, Miriam Kagol, and Oberlin’s Katherine Linnehan. And to Carrie Jensen, my eighth-grade English teacher at Westwood Junior High, who once told me to send her an autographed copy of my first book—it’s waiting for you.

  Finally, there are three people for whom I reserve special gratitude. My editor, Deb Futter, has given freely of her time, her editorial wisdom, and her friendship. Doug Foster read every word of every draft; his insight and guidance permeate this and all my work. Steven Okazaki has not only been a fine editor, but has endured my tears, shared my triumphs, fed, loved, and even married me during the time I worked on this project. One could not ask for a truer soul mate. This book is dedicated to him, and the standard of equity to which he holds me.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Introduction: The Bad News about Good Girls

  Part I Weston Middle School

  1 Learning Silence: Scenes from the Class Struggle

  2 Toeing the Line: Schoolgirls

  3 Fear of Falling: Sluts

  4 Confronting Vulnerability: The Sensitive Girl

  5 Bodily Harm: Purging, Gorging, and “Delicate Self-Cutting”

  6 Striking Back: Sexual Harassment at Weston

  Part II Audubon Middle School

  7 “You People Are Animals”: Life in the Urban School

  8 Split Loyalties: Homegirl vs. Schoolgirl

  9 “I Choose Not to Go down That Path”: Unteachable Girls

  10 Slipping Away: Lost Girls

  11 Rising Above: I Like Myself

  Part III Through the Looking Glass

  12 Anita Hill Is a Boy: Tales from a Gender-Fair Classroom

  Afterword by the American Association of University Women

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  A few years after Schoolgirls was first published, a girl who identified herself only as “Fish” contacted me via email. Over the next few months we corresponded about her life. She was sixteen and lived in Atlanta, where she went to public school. She hoped some day to become a journalist. She wrote to me about her dreams, her plans, her friends, and her parents. She was pretty confident herself, she told me, but she worried about some of her girlfriends. One hardly ate and kept complaining that she was fat. Another, afraid that she would lose her boyfriend, had begun having sex with him even though she didn’t want to and didn’t enjoy it. A third who was bright and talented insisted she was stupid. Sometimes, Fish wrote me, she felt like she was living in a chapter of Schoolgirls.

  Much has changed in the years since I wrote this book. There’s a whole new section in local bookstores filled with straight-talking guides for teenage girls on how to stay true to themselves as they navigate adolescence. Programs like Girls Incorporated and Girl Scouts foster girls’ adventurous spirit and intellectual curiosity. The Women’s National Soccer Team and the WNBA basketball league have offered an alternative vision of the female body, one that’s grounded in strength and utility rather than decoration. At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that girls are no longer at risk. Like Fish’s friends, they continue to face significant, gender-related hurdles as they make the transition to womanhood.

  The confidence gap in education hasn’t disappeared since I first visited classrooms, but it has changed. With the help of grass roots programs, and federal attention, the difference between boys’ and girls’ test scores in math and science has narrowed. But a new trend has emerged: few girls are taking computer courses, and those who do tend to enroll in data entry (the millennial version of typing) classes, while boys take advanced programming. What is it about the way we teach computer science that is discouraging girls? It’s an urgent question: in today’s technology-driven ecomony, a digital divide could have a disastrous effect on girls’ futures.

  As I’ve criss-crossed the country, speaking to parents, teachers, college students, and young girls, I’ve become more convinced than ever that girls’ bodies have become the battleground for their conflicts. Hating one’s body, sometimes to the point of starvation, remains a tragic rite of passage for young women: among white girls in particular, appearance remains the most important determinant of teenage girls’ self-worth. Meanwhile, girls are under tremendous pressure to become sexual at an inappropriately young age. How do we teach them that they have the right to say no? How do we teach them that when they say yes, it should be on their own terms—not to please someone else or to keep him from walking out the door?

  Sexual harassment continues to be a complex issue in schools, both pervasive and misunderstood. A few years back, the media had a field day with a story about a first grade boy in North Carolina who was suspended for kissing a girl on the playground. Clearly, pundits sputtered, things had gone too far. Obviously, the suspension was absurd, but I wondered: surveys have shown that sexual bullying affects nearly 80 percent of middle and high school girls, and nearly 10 percent have been forced to perform sexual acts in school other than kissing. More often than not, their harassers still go unpunished. Why was there so much coverage of that goofy incident in North Carolina and so little on the real, day-to-day humiliation so many girls endure?

  Sometimes, during my travels, critics would enumerate to me the difficulties boys face as they reach adolescence. I would always agree, but remind them that this did not cancel out the trials of young girls. Raising our children is not a “boys against the girls” proposition. Nor should teaching mutual respect—in the classroom, in the home, in the workplace—be just a women’s issue.

  Still, after nearly a decade of reporting on teenage girls, I feel tremendous hope. Progress, while sometimes slower than I would have liked, has been made. Things are moving in the right direction. Girls more often believe that someone cares. Over the years, I’ve often been asked how I “get” girls to talk to me so candidly. What are my reporter’s tricks? The truth is, I have none. I just ask a lot of questions. One of the most enduring lessons I learned while writing Schoolgirls is that young women truly want to tell us about their lives. Five years later, I still believe that as
adults, taking the time to ask—and taking the time to listen—is the single most important thing we can do for our girls.

  Peggy Orenstein

  February, 2000

  Introduction:

  The Bad News about Good Girls

  The bell rings, as it always does, at 8:30 sharp. Twenty-eight sixth graders file into their classroom at Everett Middle School in San Francisco, straggling a bit since this is the first warm day in months—warm enough for shorts and cutoffs, warm enough for Stüssy T-shirts.

  The students take their seats. Heidi, who wears bright green Converse sneakers and a matching cap, pulls off her backpack and shouts, “Did everyone bring their permission slips? You have to bring them so we can have the pizza party.”

  “Pizza,” moans Carrie, who has brown bangs and a permanently bored expression. “That has milk. I’m allergic to milk.”

  Heidi looks stunned. “You can’t eat pizza?”

  The drama is interrupted as Judy Logan, a comfortably built woman with gray-flecked hair and oversized glasses, steps to the front of the classroom. She tapes two four-foot lengths of butcher paper to the chalkboard. Across the top of one she writes: “MALES,” across the other: “FEMALES.”

  Ms. Logan is about to begin the lesson from which her entire middle school curriculum flows, the exercise that explains why she makes her students bother to learn about women, why the bookshelves in her room are brimful with women’s biographies, why her walls are covered with posters that tout women’s achievements and draped with quilts that depict women through history and women in the students’ own lives.

  It’s time for the gender journey.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ms. Logan says, turning toward the children and clasping her hands. “I’d like you to put your heads down and close your eyes. We’re going to take a journey back in time.”

  Ms. Logan’s already soothing voice turns soft and dreamy. “Go back,” she tells her students. “Forget about everything around you and go back to fifth grade. Imagine yourself in your classroom, at your desk, sitting in your chair. Notice who your teacher is, what you have on, who’s sitting around you, who your friends are.

  “Continue your journey backward in time to third grade. Picture your third-grade teacher, your place in class. Imagine yourself in your room at home. What do you like to do when you have free time? What kind of toys do you play with? What books are you reading?”

  The children go further back, to the first magical day of kindergarten, then further still, remembering preschool, remembering their discovery of language, remembering their first toddling steps. Then Ms. Logan asks her students to recall the moment of their birth, to imagine the excitement of their parents. And then, when the great moment arrives …

  They are each born the opposite sex.

  The class gasps.

  “Gross,” offers Jonathan with great enthusiasm.

  “Yuck,” adds Carrie. “That’s worse than being allergic to milk.”

  “You are born the opposite sex,” Ms. Logan repeats firmly, and then asks her students to imagine moving forward through their lives again, exactly as they were and are, except for that one crucial detail.

  Again they imagine themselves walking on tiny, uncertain feet. Again they imagine speaking, entering kindergarten. Again they envision their clothes as third graders, their toys, their books, their friends.

  “I can’t do this,” says Jonathan, who has braces and short blond hair. “I just picture myself like I am now except in a pink dress.”

  “This is stupid,” agrees Carrie. “It’s too hard.”

  “Just try,” says Ms. Logan. “Try to imagine yourself in fourth grade, in fifth grade.” By the time thirty minutes have elapsed, the students are back in their classroom, safe and sound and relieved to find their own personal anatomies intact.

  “Without talking,” Ms. Logan says, “I’d like you to make a list, your own personal list, not to turn in, of everything that would be different if you were the opposite sex.”

  The students write eagerly, with only occasional giggles. When there is more horseplay than wordplay, Ms. Logan asks them to share items from their lists with the class. The offerings go up on the butcher paper.

  “I wouldn’t play baseball because I’d worry about breaking a nail,” says Mark, who wears a San Jose Sharks jersey.

  “My father would feel more responsibility for me, he’d be more in my life,” says Dayna, a soft-spoken African American girl.

  Luke virtually spits his idea. “My room would be pink and I’d think everything would be cute.”

  “I’d have my own room,” says a girl.

  “I wouldn’t care how I look or if my clothes matched,” offers another.

  “I’d have to spend lots of time in the bathroom on my hair and stuff,” says a boy whose own hair is conspicuously mussed. The other boys groan in agreement.

  “I could stay out later,” ventures a girl.

  “I’d have to help my mom cook,” says a boy.

  “I’d get to play a lot more sports,” says Annie, a freckled, red-haired girl who looks uncomfortable with the entire proposition. Many of the students are, in fact, unsettled by this exercise. Nearly a third opt to pass when their turns come, keeping their lists to themselves.

  “I’d have to stand around at recess instead of getting to play basketball,” says George, sneering. “And I’d worry about getting pregnant.”

  Raoul offers the final, if most obvious comment, which cracks up the crowd. “I’d have to sit down to go to the bathroom.”

  At this point the bell rings, although it is not the end of the lesson. The students will return after a short break to assess the accuracy of their images of one another. But while they’re gone, I scrutinize the two butcher paper lists. Almost all of the boys’ observations about gender swapping involve disparaging “have to”s, whereas the girls seem wistful with longing. By sixth grade, it is clear that both girls and boys have learned to equate maleness with opportunity and femininity with constraint.

  It was a pattern I’d see again and again as I undertook my own gender journey, spending a year observing eighth-grade girls in two other Northern California middle schools. The girls I spoke with were from vastly different family structures and economic classes, and they had achieved varying degrees of academic success. Yet all of them, even those enjoying every conceivable advantage, saw their gender as a liability.

  Sitting with groups of five or six girls, I’d ask a variation on Ms. Logan’s theme: what did they think was lucky about being a girl? The question was invariably followed by a pause, a silence. Then answers such as “Nothing, really. All kinds of bad things happen to girls, like getting your period. Or getting pregnant.”

  Marta, a fourteen-year-old Latina girl, was blunt. “There’s nothing lucky about being a girl,” she told me one afternoon in her school’s cafeteria. “I wish I was a boy.”

  Shortchanging Girls:

  What the AAUW Survey Reveals

  Like many people, I first saw the results of the American Association of University Women’s report Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America in my daily newspaper. The headline unfurled across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner: “Girls’ Low Self-Esteem Slows Their Progress,” and the New York Times proclaimed: “Girls’ Self-Esteem Is Lost on the Way to Adolescence.”1 And, like many people, as I read further, I felt my stomach sink.

  This was the most extensive national survey on gender and self-esteem ever conducted, the articles said: three thousand boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen were polled on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends. As part of the project the students were asked to respond to multiple-choice questions, provide comments, and in some cases, were interviewed in focus groups. The results 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.