Chapter Four

Building Voice

             Some boys had asked to join the group.  

            It was Laura who'd announced it, squeezing herself into the last space at the table, while the other girls chortled in disbelief. No one could remember when the boys had wanted to join in anything the girls were doing. But the idea had unsettled them a little, sent ripples of nervous giggles around the table as they tugged sandwiches from brown bags, and Laura laid out wedges of apple in a tidy row. This was a sixth-grade girls’ group (except for me). We'd just started to feel comfortable with each other after a few weeks of meetings, the girls sipping fruit juice and listening to my stories of women in history, such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Amelia Earhart, then talking among themselves of women in their own lives – grandmothers, sisters, mothers, friends.

              Now, some boys had asked to join. Carol, their sixth-grade teacher, sat across from me, nibbling at a poppyseed bagel. She looked my way, arched an eyebrow, looked right at Laura.

             "Well. What do you think?"

             "Boys? I dunno."

             This launched a thirty-minute discussion while the girls wrestled with the notion, pulled between their genuine desire to include boys and the certain knowledge that everything would be different if they did.

             Finally, Cheryl said it, what was on everyone's mind. “I’d like the boys to be here," she explained in a measured, almost solemn tone. "But if they are, I know I won't speak up."  

            I hadn't said anything, trying to remain neutral. But I found her words troubling. "Why not?” I blurted.  

Cheryl's shoulders slumped and she sighed a little. "I don't know." She was right, of course, and I suppose I knew it. But I desperately wanted to prove her wrong, wanted to shout her into a brave little persona who would stand up – boys or no boys – and boldly speak her mind. But her chilling clarity, and what I knew about girls' silencing, reined me in. Cheryl was right out of the books I’d been reading. Most of the other girls eventually acknowledged that they too felt reluctant to speak up when boys were around.

             But not Anny. "Look," she said with a surprising candor, "you're going to have to stand up for yourselves sometime or other. Might as well be now."

             “Right!” half-a-dozen girls shot back. “You don’t care what anyone thinks.”

             Anny shrugged. Too brash and outspoken for these middle-of-the-roaders, she was used to being kept at a distance. Anny too, was right out of the books – the  resister.  

            The girls never fully resolved their dilemma. I explained to them that, by law, we had to include boys in the group if they wanted to participate, but that once they knew what we were really doing – talking about historical women, sharing stories of grandmothers and mothers – they’d probably lose interest (they did).  

            But that night – that week – I couldn't get Cheryl or Anny out of my mind. Cheryl's self-imposed gag order, and Anny’s candor, had spelled out in extremes the choices girls face as they are pressed to conform to ever-narrowing prescriptions for feminine behavior. Girls must either let go of their audacious, plainspoken younger selves in order to fit in – or, like Anny, fight the pressure to conform, and face the consequences.  

The Sounds of Silence

             It was while studying the language patterns of girls between the second and tenth grades during their five-year Laurel school study that Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan first documented the sound of “loss and displacement,” that accompanies a girl’s conflicted entry into the idealized feminine world of Western culture. [1] According to Gilligan and Brown, these were sounds not heard before –  certainly not mapped scientifically – since prior studies of child development had all used the male developmental cycle as the psychological norm. [2] It was the first time scientists of their stature had listened with enough interest and attention to young girls to detect their faint but unmistakable cries of alarm. Listening to the girls speak at length about their lives, Gilligan and Brown heard their anguish as they struggled to hold on to the clarity and courage  they had possessed as nine- and ten-year-olds.  

They weren’t easy to hear. Young adolescent girls talk as though everything is fine, and they are so good at it that the Harvard research team had to strain to detect signs of trouble beneath the cheery surface patter of the girls’ conversation. The two researchers and their colleagues replayed their interview tapes, read and reread the transcripts of their conversations, and mapped the variant voices they heard in each girl’s speech patterns – the way she spoke of herself, and the way she spoke in honest, “authentic” relationship with other girls. And they listened for sounds of inauthenticity, making note of cultural injunctions that gradually infect a girl’s speech as she becomes more conscious of feminine conventions.  

            Like archaeologists poring over pottery fragments, Brown and Gilligan laid the bold speech patterns they’d heard in the nine-year-olds alongside their voices at twelve and thirteen, marking down the differences. They were deeply dismayed by what they found. Underneath the carefully formulated cheeriness, they heard the sounds of an “inner girl fighting to remain conscious.”

             For the very boldness for which they were applauded as nine-year-olds becomes problematic as girls near adolescence. They are cautioned away from extremes of candor and authenticity – “smart, yes, but not too smart – forceful, but not loud.” Again and again, Gilligan and Brown heard the voices of the “golden girls” at Laurel School alter and grow dim under increasing pressure to “fit in.” Even some of their most robust whistle- blowers learned to mask their innermost feelings, hide their differences, rein in their more combustible selves, and to voice only those thoughts and feelings deemed appropriate within the feminine stereotype. In the space of two or three years, Gilligan and Brown repeatedly heard once vibrant, truth-telling voices driven underground and, in some cases,  obliterated.  

            For instance: the phrase “I don't know" is rarely heard before the age of eleven, according to Gilligan and Brown, "then it begins to creep in, like an infection or virus." They began to hear it as a warning signal that a girl was losing her early clarity and confidence and beginning to doubt her own mind. More darkly, it marked a disconnection with the self-possessed, confident child she might have been just a year or two before. The once self-assured, captain of her soul, begins "to unknow what she knows” – that she is capable and courageous, and that “it's O.K. to be that way." For, as we’ve seen, as a girl nears the wall, she becomes instructed by the culture in a thousand hidden ways that “this is not O.K.” Defined as distinctly female she is given to understand – by teachers and parents, even friends – that her candor and self-possession are not valued feminine properties. She must give up the more robust qualities of independence and self-expression that she was momentarily allowed, for they belong more properly to the domain of boys and men.  

Self-silencing

             You won't find signs ordering girls to be silent. No direct command is issued for a girl's compliance to ladylike behavior. Like background white noise, cultural injunctions surround and instruct girls in the norms of feminine propriety, assigning them a place in the world that is smaller and far more prescribed than that of their male classmates, and markedly less empowering. Girls get the point. They internalize the messages that come from friends and adults alike, urging them towards the culture’s idealized young lady, the nice girl that everybody loves.

            No signs are needed. Orders to rein themselves in are effectively delivered by friends (“You don’t care what anyone thinks!”) and are policed by the girls themselves. Brown and Gilligan watched the Laurel School girls learn how to censor themselves, and monitor each other with adult prescriptions for "good-girl behavior." What passed before as natural curiosity or exploratory behavior, now becomes labeled bad or dangerous. The self-possession and clarity of the eight-year-old Jesse, for instance, whose capacity for righteous indignation propelled her out of the home of her misbehaving friends – “This makes me mad! I’m going home.” – has become so compromised at the age of twelve that she finally confides to her interviewer, "I don't say what I want to say. It's like I'm not really there." [4]

            It is not that girls stop talking, obviously. But they no longer feel permitted to speak from their own experience, and out of their deepest feelings.  Candor is seen as treacherous, truth-telling a combustible unknown that can detonate friendships. Their real feelings are no longer suitable coin in the realm of everyday relationships, and in fact can get them in trouble with friends. So the truth-tellers and the whistle-blowers learn to curb their real feelings and adopt a more politic persona – one that, though ill-fitting, gets them quietly through the treacherous waters they now find themselves in. Neeti, for instance, the self-assured eight-year-old who once freely told a friend that she was not being very kind, has been reined in by early adolescence. "I just didn't want to cause anyone any trouble," she explains at age fourteen, using the acquired language of accommodation and caution. "You know how hard it is to keep friends . . . . I knew if I said something they wouldn't talk to me again."  

            As decorum replaces candor, and caution overruns their early boldness, girls lose their early clarity, and finally come to doubt what they know. At age fifteen, Neeti is able to articulate what she rightly senses is a momentous loss:

             "The voice that stands up for what I believe in, has been buried deep inside me."  

Struggle and Resistance  

            The conflict is deep and far-reaching, according to Brown and Gilligan, and it looses within girls an inner struggle between the autonomous, competent, vibrant self of their childhood  years, and the role now being assigned them of the "diminished women approved of by our culture." Recall that it is at just this time in their development that girls are hitting the wall, and having to struggle with the cultural message of their secondary status. As the former “whistle-blowers” at Laurel School neared this critical threshold, Brown and Gilligan heard them "struggling over speaking and not speaking, knowing and not knowing, feeling and not feeling." As a result, girls at Laurel School who had done well during their elementary school years began to get into trouble as they moved into middle school, alarming their friends, and disturbing their parents and teachers as Julie and Sally so effectively disturbed me.

             But eventually the girls who were getting into trouble at Laurel School finally gave in and accommodated themselves to the roles expected of them. They “adjusted,” presumably, as did the girls in my own program who shut off the inner alarms they might have been hearing and conformed themselves to what I expected of them – or, as with my “MIAs,” simply dropped out of sight. At Laurel School the once-troubled girls returned to being good students and good daughters and got  along with their friends again. Everyone breathed easier – teachers, parents, even the friends who were beginning to have their doubts. All was well once more. . . .

Cover Girls  

            Or seemed to be. For what begins as a social accommodation, a simple effort to be valued and accepted, can become for adolescent girls something more sinister. Dr. Annie Rogers of the Harvard Project describes three stages of psychological accommodation and displacement that girls pass through as they enter adolescence. [6]   In the first, young adolescent girls learn to stop saying what they really think as they begin to feel no longer welcomed “as themselves in their relationships, with all their love, anger, and authenticity intact.” They disguise their real feelings when they speak, adopting the language and conventions of feminine goodness, rather than stand out by speaking too forcibly, as did Anny (“You’re going to have to stand up for yourself sometime!”). To fit in and have friends, girls invent what Rogers calls a cover girl – “the girl who has no bad thoughts or feelings, who is always nice and kind.” The deception is not the real self, but a disguise, a helpful persona that gets them by.  

            Stage one is a strategy of “self-protection.” But in the second stage, a disconnection can occur with her earlier self, so that a girl may unconsciously slip so easily into her disguise that she becomes the “cover girl” she’s invented. In time, a girl may lose conscious connection with the authentic self she once was, even finding her early boldness and candor an embarrassment. Adolescent girls often characterize their younger outspokenness as rude, inappropriate, or even disturbed: trading in their early candor for more feminine decorum, their nine-year-old mettle – “I’m going home!” – now looks "stupid" or even "mean."

             The final stage in this self-silencing may bring obliteration of their early self. Adolescent girls simply stop speaking from their own experience, and embrace their new personae so fully that they forget what they once knew. “Not speaking turns into not-knowing.” Rogers describes this final act as a kind of "psychic amnesia" that overtakes a girl and erases her memory of the struggle she’s fought for her authentic voice. All is forgotten: a properly assimilated and fully acculturated young woman emerges, leaving her bolder, authentic, and noncompliant younger self far behind.  

 §

             "I'd like the boys to be here.  But if they are, I know I won't speak up.” Cheryl’s grim pronouncement that day, and the other girls’ general agreement with it, left me reeling with the premonition that they had abandoned something more fundamental than public speech. And in fact, silencing places far more at stake than speech itself. It is not so much the speaking voice that is abandoned when a young girl silences herself, but what it speaks for, the very self of the resilient, courageous girl-child who was once brave and honest enough to speak her mind, regardless of the costs. [8] Identity itself is at stake here, a "root identity that  gets cut off in the process of growing up female.” [9]  

            To be "silenced," then, is to render one's innermost self not just mute, but invisible.  Cheryl's strategy not to speak out when boys are around is not simply a self-imposed gag order, but an act of self-suffocation that strikes at the heart of character and self-worth, and erodes the simple ordinary courage to be oneself.    

The Continuum of Silence  

            Cultural silencing is not restricted to girls. Boys are silenced as well, much earlier in their development, and in different ways. When a kindergartner skins his knee and is told not to cry, he is being silenced. When he is advised not to show his fear or reveal his affection too openly because this is not “manly,” parts of him are effectively shut off – and often so thoroughly that even conscious, adult pro-feminist males find it difficult to recall the more sensitive parts of their natures later in life. For girls, though, the silencing of voice occurs on the edge of adolescence, when they are their most psychologically vulnerable.  

            Not all girls find themselves at the extremes represented by Cheryl and Anny, "collaborator" and "resister." Most girls fall somewhere in between these two, along a continuum of constraints and pressures that force them to construct personae more acceptable to an unfriendly culture. One Laurel School student described the dilemma she faced by speaking her mind: “No one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud.” Hearing herself speak, this young adolescent added with some poignancy, “But you have to have relationships.”        

            If many girls experience losses as they pass along this continuum, it is because they are forced into a struggle that few of them can win. Still, we know that young women do succeed in emerging from adolescence with their self-confidence intact. And we know that their success is closely related to their sense of being heard, the degree to which they feel “connected” and competent. The next three chapters speak directly to these qualities, and offer a number of strategies for bolstering girls’ connection and competence. Since each of these requires that girls possess the courage to speak honestly and to take appropriate risks, the final chapter of this section shows how to help them find the three kinds of courage they will need to prosper. But first, we will look at “voice,” which seems to stand at the center of the psychological development of girls growing up within a culture that still remains far too male-centered and  male-voiced.   

Building Voice  

            “Voice” is an expression of self, a measure of the relative health and robustness of a girl’s sense of herself. How parents “hear” their daughter and attend to her budding voice can bolster her voice and self-confidence as she navigates the whitewater of adolescence. I have worked with the parents of daughters for some years now, especially with mothers. Combining their experience with my own work with girls, and filtering it all through the lens of numerous experts and scholars in the field of girls’ development, I’ve developed a number of strategies and practices for parents to help them nourish and sustain their daughter’s voice and buffer her from the cultural silencing I just described. These fall into two useful working categories: validating and empowering:  

             Both of these strategies assume different meanings as girls pass through the developmental stages between early childhood and adolescence, so I will discuss them at each major developmental stage: girls, three-to-five years old, preadolescents, six-to-ten years old, and adolescents, eleven-to-sixteen  years.    

Validating Young Girls’ Voices  

            To validate a young girl’s voice, it is essential that we make the act of listening to her a conscious, significant act. How we listen and attend to her will help shape her own sense of her significance.  

° Voice does not occur in a vacuum. It requires a listener.  A sturdy, confident voice is one that, above all else, believes that it will be heard. Parents need to use their authority and skill to persuade their daughters that their feelings and understandings of life are valid and significant.  

° Listen closely to your young daughter's words. The mere act of riveted, serious attention validates her importance as a person. Hearing begins with listening. So the single most effective tool you have to develop voice in your daughter may be your listening skills.  

° It’s hard to  fool children. Children know when you are present and when you are simply giving them a quarter of your mind while constructing the dinner menu with the remaining three-quarters. Give her your full attention. Put down the newspaper. Stop washing the dishes. Turn off (or at least turn down) the radio, make full eye contact. Now you are ready to listen.

° When you can’t give her your attention, tell her so. “I cannot give you my attention right now because I have work to finish. Your needs are too important for me to give you only half my attention. But we can talk in twenty minutes. Or: “I can only give you a minute now, but you can be assured that I’ll be fully there for you.”  

            I’ve done this with students for twenty years. On the first day of classes, I explain that with so many girls and boys needing my attention, I have to ration it. Since I can give each of them only a brief period of time, I guarantee that I will give all of my attention when I am with them. That seems to make the difference. When a child knows that she will get your undivided attention, reinforced with the full force of your adult eye contact, she won’t require as much of it. Children want quality time, your full presence.  

Authenticating Young Girls’ Voices  

            To authenticate a girl’s voice is to make it clear by your words and responses that she has your permission to say what she honestly feels, sees and experiences.  

° Let her know that she does not need to hide her feelings when talking with you. Even very young girls will mask their real feelings if they fear that their words will hurt you. Encourage her to tell you exactly how she feels, and not to fear your disapproval.  This is not always easy. Since young girls are liable to say almost anything, be sure that you don’t unconsciously recoil if her honesty hurts you.  

° When your daughter does speak openly, call attention to it. Commend her for having the courage to open her heart.  “I’m glad that you told me you were angry with me. That was a brave thing to say.”  

° Demonstrate that you fully respect her feelings. Give her visible evidence that you fully respect the ways she views her world, even though you may not agree with her.

             Validating girls’ voices will become more of an issue as your daughter nears adolescence. But by attending fully to your daughter from her earliest days you will have conveyed an unmistakable message that her voice and experience are significant and real, and provide her with a powerful buffer against the culture’s attempts to persuade her otherwise.

 Hearing Strong Voices  

            Once upon a time, there lived a powerful, bold, adventurous girl . . . .

             Every girl should carry within her a reservoir of sounds and images of powerful women. As soon as she can sit still enough to listen for a few minutes, start embedding these images in her psyche by telling her stories. You can’t start too young! Until just a short while ago, people passed on their cultural wisdom through story and song. Something very ancient within us awakens to the spoken voice when it reaches us unmediated by print or electronic media.  

            I learned this during my substitute teaching days when I started telling stories as a means to hold students’ interest, and found that the storytelling created an immediate and powerful bond between me and students. I combed libraries and used bookstores for story collections, culling dozens of legends, folk tales, epics, and sagas from a wide variety of traditions, such as Native American tales, Norse myths, Hindu epics, and Burmese legends. I plumbed my memory for the tales I’d inherited growing up, and was delighted to find far more there than I was aware of.  

            I used them wherever I taught, in classes ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade, and with equally powerful results. And I still remember the imploring look on the face of an eleventh grade girl with spikes in her hair who stopped me as I walked into school and asked if I would finish the Siberian folk tale I’d begun the day before in her auto shop.  

            I was even more delighted when my own child reached the tellable age (three? two?) and I discovered that I had a trove of stories at my command. Every night from the time he was two-and-a-half, he listened to Irish sagas and German folk tales and eventually my own version of The Lord of the Rings (which included a character very much like him). In fact, I made it a point to slip him into the stories when I could, just thinly disguised, so that they became something of his own hero’s tale, where he too did battle with the dragons. I asked him the other day if he remembered the legend of St. Michael crossing the Irish sea with a glowing sword in his hand to show the way. I had made him his own paper sword to hold while I told it: he was five at the time, he’s seventeen now. “Sure. Hey, whatever happened to that paper sword?”

 The Sounds of Voice  

            Try your hand at telling stories to your preschool daughter. It’s a wonderfully rich way to share her childhood while you lay the groundwork for her own sturdy voice. Start with Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters, published by Norton. It contains the broadest collection of female hero stories I’ve come across – 100 folktales from around the world of courageous mothers, clever girls and warrior women gathered from a wide variety of cultures. (For an annotated list of more resources to help get you started, see “Books With Strong Female Characters” in Sources and Resources.)  

° Fill her with the sounds and images of powerful girls and women from every land and time. Describe bold and confident women who go forth in their womanly ways. Give them words to say that you want your daughter to hear. Develop the archetypes of womanly strength, imagination, wit, and courage that you want your daughter to imbibe and identify with. Instill within her a sense of the wide scale of female voice, with stories that are told and retold, spoken and heard until the sounds of these powerful, courageous, clever and commanding women feel as familiar to her as the tip-tap of the cat’s paw across her bedroom floor. “And the young princess held the gauntlet high over the assembly . . .”.

 ° Told images and sounds go deep. They enter a girl’s consciousness below the surface level, sending off echoes within her. By the time a girl is seven or eight, her subconscious can have been so flooded with images and sounds of voiced, strong women, that they can help form a ground of reality and possibility that can inform her as she grows up and must confront the culture’s diminished sense of the feminine. When she later encounters womanless history texts at school (see Chapter Eleven), she will have her own storehouse of contrary sounds and images of powerful women against which she can refute the historical message of their invisibility, and understand the historical devaluing of the feminine as an aberration, not as a gender deficiency. (See “250 Notable Women” beginning on page 172.)

 ° Use storytelling to help validate your daughter’s voice. Portray charismatic heroines who speak the truth, and use their voice to describe what they know to be their experience of the world, and even fight off those who would silence them.

 ° Stories are everywhere, including your own storehouse of memory. It is not that difficult to tell stories, since the power is not in your telling, but in the archetypes and story lines that have been passed along, in some cases, for centuries. You can practice by simply reading a storybook to yourself first, then telling it. Use familiar stories as your starting point, and adapt them as you wish.  

° Have your daughter retell her favorite part of a story from the night before. It may be a simple episode, or the entire story line, or just a line or an image she wants to describe. Her telling re-embeds the images and sounds, especially if you have created a significant line or two that you want her to speak.

 ° Don’t feel bound to traditional tellings. Many otherwise powerful traditional tales contain sexist images and language or depict women in subservient roles. Change them. The oral tradition has always been a fluid one, and storytellers from the time of Homer traditionally have adapted their tales to suit their needs. There are dozens of variant tellings of the Cinderella tale, for instance, and you have every right to make the telling your own. You enter an ancient and formidable tradition with which you can powerfully shape your daughter’s sense of herself and her possibilities.

Hearing Her Own Voice

             When your daughter reaches three or four, tape-record your stories as you tell them. You can eventually give her lines to speak herself within the story, and involve her increasingly in it. In time, these can become radio-style dramas. I especially recommend audio-taping rather than video-taping so that her voice remains the focus of the story, rather than her appearance. I still have a shoebox full of audio-tapes I made with my young son more than a decade ago, starring him, naturally. Taped radio plays that you can make up as you go along are low-cost, low-tech productions and a terrific vehicle for enabling a child to explore the full range of her voice: heroic, tragic, comic, playful, spectacular, nurturant, dazzling. A cassette recorder, a box full of odd assorted items to make sound effects, a couple of movie videotapes on hand to provide realistic sound tracks, and you can create radio plays that provide enrichment and entertainment for a long time. And each time you “tune in” she can hear herself delivering powerful lines, saving the dolphins, reshaping the world . . .

             One old favorite of mine is a rocket-to-the-moon tape we made along with one of my son’s girl playmates when they were about six. She was the older of the two and got to be the ship’s captain, initiating the countdown, ordering the crew to strap himself in, then lifting us into space, adroitly avoiding catastrophe when it passed through the asteroid belt: (“Oh my God, it’s going to hit us!”).  

            You can also interview your daughter on tape. Let her hear her voice speaking from a technical source (seems to lend it significance). And let her see you listening to her voice with her. Or read a picture book aloud, taping the story and inviting her commentary as you go along. (“Why do you think the bunny wants the tractor?”) I’ve got another boxful of such tapes I made with my young son, him commenting on pictures in favorite story books, tapes we listened to again and again, as he grew older, his sturdy, high- pitched voice filling up a good deal of the air time we spent together.

 Countering Stereotypes  

            Even during the preschool years, your daughter will be exposed to stereotyped  attitudes and images from the culture around her, particularly if you let her watch TV.  

° Be ready to counter stereotyped language and images. Television executives are well aware that girls will watch boys’ programming, while boys won’t watch programs aimed at girls. Simple economics dictates that the Saturday morning staple of children’s programs will be heavily weighted towards boys, using a preponderance of male characters in action-style stories that boys prefer. If you do let her watch TV, sit with her and be ready to counter any stereotypes or sexist images she may be exposed to. Look at my suggestions in Chapter Nine for teaching her to become a critical viewer of TV.  

° Listen to what she brings home from preschool.  Be alert for subtle overtones of sexism, like  “The boys always get to play with the blocks.” Be ready to interrupt her own unchallenged acceptance of this as a truism. Let your daughter know, even at this early age, that she has the right to equal access to every item and activity in her preschool. If necessary, talk  to her preschool teacher. Don’t expect her teachers to be aware of gender issues.

 Validating Voice in Preadolescent Girls

             As your daughter moves into her preadolescent years, it remains important that you make listening to her a conscious, significant act, using the force of your attention and interest as a strong signal that her experience and knowledge matter. But the act of listening becomes more complex and more subtle.  

            As your daughter matures, you will hear her expressing a wider range of feelings, interests, ideas and opinions. Try to set aside your preconceptions now and hear her through the filter of her own increasingly complex hopes, interests, anxieties, predispositions and even her illusions. Try simply to listen, without judgment. And you need to be alert to the possibility that she is beginning to feel conflicted about her place in the world as a girl, giving up parts of her authentic voice in order to keep her friends or to please you. Listening to a preadolescent girl is an art form, and a challenging one. Here are some tips:  

° Don’t rush in to fix things for her. Don’t intervene prematurely when she is voicing a problem, describing a dispute with a friend, say, or trying to convey sensitive information to you. Listening without speaking, other than an occasional “Uh, huh” to acknowledge your attention, is a formidable way to encourage her voice. Your desire to ease her discomfort or pain by reassuring her that what she is feeling is not so bad, may short-circuit her full resolution of her feelings. Girls have a fairly accurate sense of when they have spoken their minds. Wait for her signal to step in, or prompt her: “Anything else?”  

° Listen between the words. Be alert to the gaps and spaces for evidence of cover-up. Is she starting to use the phrase “I don’t know” frequently, or other phrases which imply that she is beginning to doubt her own ability to know and speak the truth? And listen to hear if she is ending her sentences with an interrogative, as though she feels uncertain of her opinion.

 ° Allow for silences. Let her find the right words. Let her know by your willingness to wait, that you value her considered opinion. Silence is an integral part of conversation. I’ve learned that if girls (and boys) truly believe that you’ll wait for them if they stop and think about what they are saying, then, (surprise!) they will often stop and think about what they are saying. (Teachers have to be especially alert. The average “wait time” that we allow a student to answer a question is less than two seconds!)  

° Watch your verbal responses.  Guide your daughter in exploring how she feels, rather than making pronouncements – “You’ll understand when you’re older!” – which may cut off her inquiry. Girls, even very young ones, can understand the relational and feeling worlds with remarkable nuance. Carol Gilligan points out that girls watch what’s going on around them like some people watch the weather.  

° Listen for a range of voice. Encourage your daughter’s explorations of voice across the emotional register: heroic, childish, commanding, comic, tough. Being permitted to explore and express a full range of emotion and feeling, a girl’s sense of possibilities widens, and she learns to lay claim to voice beyond the limitations of her gender. (I can often identify the daughters of feminist parents by a quiet sense of command they carry in their voice. They expect to be heard.)

 Authorizing Preadolescent Girls

             It’s during these years that girls may experience their first conscious brushes with sexism by noticing that their softball team plays on a less attractive field than the boys, or in overt taunts directed at them for simply being girls. These experiences can be wounding and confusing, and your support at this critical juncture is extremely important.

             Another way of authenticating a girl’s sense of self and her experience is to lend your own weight and support to her at critical junctures. It could mean taking a daughter’s side against a friend who has unfairly judged her. Or supporting her view of a contentious relationship: “Yes, Danielle is being unfair, and if you’d like, I will speak to her mother about it.” Such support lends weight to her perceptions and feelings as being grounded in reality.

             Susan, a friend, told me about an incident with her nine-year-old daughter that happened recently. Some boys made an obscene comment to Anna and her girlfriends, and when Anna complained about it, a somewhat older friend sighed: “Boys will be boys. They didn’t mean anything by it.” Anna complained to Susan who supported her interpretation of the experience: that it was indeed serious and not simply a casual matter of “boys being boys.” Susan later told her husband, Mark, who immediately spoke to Anna, reinforcing her response by telling her that she had every reason to feel as she did. It was not right and she did not have to “get used to it.” And, he added, he would talk to the boys’ parents.  

            Within a fairly brief conversation, Mark and Anna had thrown considerable emotional support to their daughter while validating her initial reading of her experience. And in that instance they helped buffer Anna against the loss of confidence in her feelings and her perceptions of the world, a common experience for young adolescent girls as they encounter a male-centered culture which routinely devalues their relational perspective while sanitizing offensive sexist behavior by placing it under the culturally acceptable rubric of boys being boys.  

            Fathers should recognize here how important Mark’s support was at this juncture, for both Anna and Susan. “I was so thrilled to hear him say that,” Susan told me. As long as patriarchy so thoroughly shapes our culture, the male voice will continue to exert a disproportionate weight and influence. Though they cannot change this overnight, fathers and husbands can use their unwarranted advantage in the cause of supporting girls and women, and, hopefully, in time, do away with their advantage altogether.

 Seeing and Hearing Strong Women  

            During the golden days of her early school years, when all seems possible, your job as a parent will be to make sure that your daughter encounters a wide range of images and sounds portraying what women have been and done before, and can do in today’s world. Don’t rely on the media or her school to provide these. Schools are at best inconsistent in their portrayal of women, past and present. (Last week, I was in the science room at a local middle school and the wonderfully competent female science teacher just didn’t notice that the time line along the upper wall included twenty one male scientists and two females. It wouldn’t have been that difficult to add a few pictures of her own to fill in the gaps. As it was, though entirely unintended, she might as well have pinned above the timeline, “Science is a Man’s Job.”)

 Seeing Strong Female Images

             Let your daughter see and hear women who demonstrate competence in their work, and speak with the voice of assurance that success can bring. Some simple ways to do this:  

° Watch women on television with her. Make a point of looking in the TV listings for opportunities of watching women leaders. Invite your daughter to watch some of it. Provide a few refreshments to make it a special occasion. Watch news broadcasts with her that include women anchors, or female sports commentators. Watch the women’s basketball league that’s gaining popularity. Surround her with a variety of powerful female images – athletic women, professionals, homemakers. Place them before your daughter in such profusion that the images of compelling women, working at home and in the workplace, become routine. Make the publicly authorized feminine voice such a routine experience of hers that it becomes normal, a staple of her daily landscape.  

° Keep a tape ready in your VCR. When you see a compelling woman on the late night news, say, or giving a lecture on C-Span, have a tape ready and record some of it to replay with your daughter later. She doesn’t have to watch a lot of it. But give her the opportunity to become as familiar with Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Barbara Boxer, as most girls are with Cindy Crawford.

 Storytelling (Continued)

             As your daughter moves into her early school years, keep up the storytelling until she lets you know that she’s outgrown it. It remains a powerful form of connection for both mothers and fathers, as well as giving her lustrous images of remarkable women to hold deep within her.  

The Saga  

            As you gain confidence in your storytelling, you can alternate the telling of traditional stories with making up your own “saga” with a cast of characters that include your daughter as the heroine, thinly veiled, and including some of her friends, real or imaginary. Sagas can be drawn from your (and her) favorite stories, combined and regenerated, borrowing and editing material from any imaginable source.

 ° One example:  I told an ongoing weekly saga to a group of four girls and one boy, aged seven to ten. I disguised them just enough to allow them to become epic heroines and heroes, and sent them up to the woods at the top of our property, from where it took two or three years of weekly stories for them to make it back. I wove stories from everything I could think of, placing them at the center of them all, and allowing each in turn to be the featured star. These kids are in their thirties now, and they still bring up the story when we get together.

 ° Combine the heroic (achievement) with the supportive (connective). It’s not that difficult when you bear in mind that any kind of collaborative effort – a sports team, a scientific expedition, a group of lost kids wandering through a forest – requires both the cooperative skills of teamwork, interdependence, nurturing and communication as well as skills to get the job done or win the day. Make sure that your daughter hears about both sets of qualities and skills, in roughly equal measure. Try to create a natural equilibrium between the claims of connection and the claims of achievement, so that your scenarios do not become too weighted in one direction or the other.

 In my community saga, without realizing it at the time, I had the kids taking care of each other at critical moments, saving one another from unmentionable fates, resolving crises, helping out the unfortunate, in an unconscious alternating between the heroic and the supportive.  

Hearing the Voices of Other Girls

             There are new, bolder, girls’ voices available now if we know where to look: –lively, empowered, “girlspeak” in print and on the Worldwide Web, where girls feel emboldened to speak their minds in public spaces. Start exploring these with your daughter as soon as she shows interest.

 A Magazine For Preadolescent Girls  

            A good place to begin, as early as eight or nine-years-old is with New Moon Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, a magazine edited by girls and aimed at girls aged nine-to-fourteen.  It’s entirely noncommercial, and, according to its own description, “aims at bringing before girls a wide range of girls’ and women’s stories and voices, while encouraging them to make their own contributions.” A quick sketch of some of the contents of the latest issue gives a fair picture:  

°  “Making Tracks,”an interview with Diane Boyd who researches wolves in Montana.

 °  “My Voice in Action,” an article about the Great Lakes Student Summit on the environment.  

° “Girls Talk  TV,” a section where girls evaluate the content of television from a girl’s perspective: “Television programs show most girls and women in unrealistic roles. Only one in five Saturday morning TV characters is female . . . . Most girls on TV are interested in two things: boys and clothes. Let the networks know what you think!” It concludes with the addresses of the presidents of the four major networks.

 ° “Ask A Girl,” is an advice column “for you and by you.” Erica’s comment about not knowing what to do when boys “yell dumb things,” is answered by Page, 11, who points out that this is actually a form of sexual harassment and is against the law. She suggests that Erica, “Tell people. . . . Bring some buddies. Have them back you up if those boys mess with you.” Evelyn, 11, writes that she is scared of getting her period, but not sure why. Tracy, 12, answers, “There is really nothing to be afraid of . . . .”

 °  “How Aggravating” is a section for blowing off steam like this “Barbie attack” from Nicole, 12, “I think Barbie is the most sexist doll on the market! No woman looks like that. . . .”  

            Equally significant is what is not included in New Moon: nothing in it about girls’ dieting, make-up, attracting boys, or hair care. A section on clothing does offer a survey of the readers’ tastes, showing two of them modeling their favorite outfits with their commentary: “I like to think of clothing as something fun. There are so-o-o many different types.” And it includes even this bit of dissent from Emily, 11, of Omaha: “It makes me really mad when girls ask New Moon to have a clothes column . . . . This is a magazine for girls and their dreams, not girls and their dream clothes!” (New Moon Publishing, PO Box 3587, Duluth, MN, 55803-9908. 800/ 381-4743.)  

Girls’ Voices on the Web

             The Internet has launched an entirely new world of possibilities for girls, providing a profusion of fresh voices and opportunities to connect with other girls who share their interests and concerns. New Moon has a wonderful website with links to a number of other sites for girls. The website of “Girls Games Inc.” (www.girlsgamesinc.com) is a good example of a site developed for preadolescent girls. It encourages them to explore the cutting edge of technology and includes a monthly on-line newsletter, “Girls InterWire” (www.planetgirl.com), which begins a recent issue with:  “Welcome summer! School’s out. More time for fun, for hanging out, and for Interwire. We’ve got the dirt on the cyberpet revolution, a look at some nasty advertising campaigns that may be targeting YOU, and oh-so-much more!”

             This represents a level of language and voice largely unavailable to girls until recently. A nine- or ten-year old could find much in the way of entertainment, along with frequent demystification of girl stereotypes. A recent Girls InterWire issue included the following: 

  A “Super Sleuth”