Chapter One

Captain of Her Soul  

   “Hi. I am known as Kelsium, Kelseyville, or Pretzel-in-a-Telephone- Booth  but I prefer plain old Kelsey. I’m nine-and-a-half years old. I love cooked carrots and I could live on them. . .”.  

            I am watching videotaped speeches of some of my fourth-grade students from a couple of years ago and remembering something. The round-faced girl with the long auburn hair and contagious smile is speaking from behind a music stand we’ve set up as a makeshift podium. She glances at her notes, then up at me behind the video camera. Behind her on the blackboard she has written in bold letters, “All About Me.” Kelsey is introducing herself to the class as part of a public speaking unit we’re doing, and she’s certainly got our attention. [1]  

   “My mom’s name is Becky and she is a really good cook. She makes the best broccoli-chicken casserole which is one of my personal favorites. I have two fish, Wilma Flintstone and Bart Simpson, and a dog named Merlin.”  

            Listening to Kelsey speak now on the videotape, two years after the fact, I recall that a scheduling glitch had left her the only fourth-grader in a class of fifth- and sixth- graders, and that half the class had already given their introductions by the time she spoke. I’m remembering how struck I was by the contrast of Kelsey’s transparent self-promotion, the wild nonsequitors, the sheer nerve of her opening gambit, to the more elegant and coherent, but more buttoned-down speeches of the older kids. They feel it too. They’ve stopped fiddling with their fingernails and tuned in to the dizzying profusion of tastes and interests that tumble forth:  

     “I have many hobbies: reading, rollerblading, backpacking, dancing, playing all musical instruments and playing all sports. My favorite subjects in school are art and writing. ‘Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman’ is my favorite TV show. The best book I’ve ever read was Snowbound. Three things I like about myself  are, I am happy, helpful, and hilarious. . .”

             Kelsey was bright and athletic, but she hadn’t given any indication of such chutzpah until I gave her license to walk up to the makeshift podium and crow a little. If anything, as the only fourth-grader in the room, Kelsey had been a little reserved. None of us had expected a tour de force.

            She keeps speaking, telling us about her brother Jacob (“We know him as Dennis the Menace, Junior”) and her father, Kirby, (“He’s really funny”) and glides into her conclusion without a misstep:  

   “When I grow up I want to be a journalist, a teacher or a dance teacher. Other important facts about me, are I love to eat, I love to learn, and I am shy. Which one do you think is untrue?” [2]

             Loud applause, and a whoop or two. Kelsey’s won the day. I remember being left with the feeling that the most striking feature of the performance wasn’t her verbal alacrity – most of these kids were talented, and none of them was shy.  There was an authority on display here, something more fundamental than virtuosity. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that I figured out what it was, and decided I’d check my own archives for confirmation, which is why I am visiting the VCR.  I fast-forward the videotape,  looking for other fourth- grade girls, stopping and viewing when one of their faces lights up the screen. [3] The girls differ in their verbal gifts, but they share Kelsey’s special transparency and boldness. Here’s Betsy:  

     “Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to introduce you to the greatest, the one, the only -- me! or, Betsy P! I live at 210,  La Tercera Court , and if you look,  it is the only mansion there. You can see it from Fresno ! OK, I admit, I am a billionaire, that’s why I eat only ice cream and pizza. The way I got my mansion is I put my hobbies, my creativity, and my imagination to build it . . .” .  

And Anne Marie:  

     “Hi. I’ve known somebody for almost ten years. She is a very good student, she is a nice person, and she has a lot of friends. I’m introducing me!  My name is Anne Marie. I am a good student, I have gotten good grades all my life, and I am a good dancer. . . . Someday I am going to go around the world. . .”.  

And so it goes. Plainspoken. Unapologetic. These girls are all nine-year-olds, they all feel good about themselves, and they’ve no compunction about telling us about it in unvarnished language. They are not being exceptional or even gifted when they do it, I nowunderstand. They’re just being nine.

 Whistle-Blowers  

            It took the research of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan to help me understand the special light I had been sensing all these years in the fourth-grade girls who came into my program. In Meeting at the Crossroads, Gilligan and coinvestigator Lyn Mikel Brown describe a study in which they interviewed 100 “girl-subjects” between the ages of seven and eighteen over a five-year period at the Laurel School for girls in Cleveland , Ohio , and compared the changes they heard in girls’ voices as they moved from childhood into adolescence. Gilligan and Brown were surprised by the boldness they heard in the voices of the youngest girls, the seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds. Their candor stood out in especially marked contrast to the diminished, mannered voices of the adult women that Gilligan had written about in her landmark book, In a Different Voice. [4] There she described educated and successful women who spoke as though something were missing from their voices. They sounded “muted” to Gilligan, even fraudulent. These women spoke of themselves “as living in connection with others,” but had consistently suppressed their authentic feelings, choosing “to give up their voices” in order to hold on to relationship.  

            This was deeply troubling to Gilligan since she had argued that “connectedness” and relationship stood at the center of women’s identity. [5] Taking their real voices out of relationship in order to have relationships seemed paradoxical to Gilligan and left her with a deep sense of unease about the psychological health of women. She initiated the Laurel School study to locate and understand better the origins of this “silencing,” and was both surprised and delighted to hear such unrestrained boldness in the conversations of the youngest girls. These voices were decidedly not muted. They were “clear, vibrant, powerful.” Unrepentantly brash. “I have to yell,” eight-year-old Tracy explains in one interview with the Harvard team, describing how she manages to secure her mother’s attention. “Then she gets to hear me. . . . I wouldn’t have yelled . . .if she had listened.”  

            Gilligan and Brown describe eight-year-old Diana, who brought a whistle to the dinner table one night because her siblings wouldn’t let her get a word in. The first time she got cut off, Diana blew the whistle, loudly. Mother, brother, sister stopped eating. They stared. “That’s much nicer,” Diana said, and finished her sentence.

Taking their cue from this eight-year-old, the authors call the plainspoken younger girls of the study the “whistle-blowers” of the “relational world.” Girls this age believe that what they know, and what they have to say, is important – certainly both Kelsey and Betsy come to mind – and may even challenge others’ attempts to silence them. "They have a healthy resistance to falseness," Gilligan says. "They say what they think." [7]  

            Young girls are “truth-tellers.” They will not allow feminine conventions to edit out their real feelings from their voices, simply to get along. And they are perfectly willing to cause a commotion if they have to. “This makes me mad,” eight-year-old Jessie tells her two friends when they have a disagreement. “I’m going home.”  

Girls this age are surprisingly astute about what is going on around them in the relational world of friends. Friends can disagree and still be friends, since, the authors observe, "Disagreement does not have to jeopardize relationships for these girls.”  Friends can even have different opinions about each other, and about each others’ friends. Eight-year-old Lilly:  

     "There's some girls that I don't like, and my friends like that girl . . . but it doesn't mean that the other person can't be friends with her.  . . you know, different people have different feelings."  

            Realistic and plainspoken, they will act on their observations and will, if they have to, name names. "I just didn't see any problem with arguing with her," one nine-year-old explains, describing an argument she’d had with a friend. "I mean  . . .what's the problem?" She doesn't hesitate to speak her mind, when the occasion calls for it, nor do other youngsters in the study who speak about turbulent feelings they have towards friends and even towards the adults in their lives. Eight-year-old Karen became so upset one day when her teacher didn’t call on her that she got up and walked out of the classroom.  “I wanted her to have chosen me for a problem that was really hard,” she explains. “So I guess that’s why I left . . . I think I should have my chance to do. . . a hard problem.” Young girls are unafraid to "interrupt the surface calm and quiet of daily life,” the authors observe. And they are willing to pay the price for it.  

            Brown and Gilligan repeatedly found evidence of a candor and commitment to honesty in the youngest girls at Laurel School that they simply had not heard in older women. They are "remarkably astute and outspoken, frank and fearless," Gilligan observes. [8] Their capacity to express their more combustible feelings in relationships, and to stand by their opinions, even to place their relationships at risk for the sake of authenticity, are a sign of psychological health. And they gave the youngest girls in the school, paradoxically, “an air of unedited authority and authenticity.”  

Like Betsy P. from my GATE class:  

     “To build my mansion, since I’m so strong, I carried 539 big walls all the way to the same spot. Then I painted them in bright neon colors. Then I put them up. Then I built the inside softball field. Then, for the last thing, musical wallpaper. Took a smart person like me to build a castle like that. I have a lot of friends too. Well, see you next time on the Betsy P. show!”  

Nine Years Old Forever

             Nine-years-old. The ninth year marks a watershed in the lives of many women, a time they may recollect as one of unlimited prowess and expectancy. Psychologist Emily Hancock studied adult women for her doctoral dissertation at Harvard and found that each of the women in her study unconsciously looked back upon her nine-year-old self as a touchstone to her adult identity, an inner girl that had somehow got lost. [9]  

            The women unconsciously unearthed the memory of a self-possessed, radiant girl that she had once been, and had drawn strength from that memory to sustain her through her crisis. Hancock calls her, “the girl within” and describes her work in a book of the same name. Megan, for instance, was a recently divorced mother in the study. “At nine,” she reports:  

“I remember having a real sense of joy, of confidence about negotiating the world on my own. The image I have is of a child with a long string to hold on to, one she can move freely around.”  

            As a single mother, Megan was able to recapture the sense of purpose she’d embodied as a nine-year-old girl, “recovering in her the forgotten autonomy and initiative she needed for adult independence.” [10]

What is it about nine-year-olds? Why such strength and resilience, and why around the age of nine? Hancock reasons that the age of nine represents a period of unparalleled freedom for girls growing up in a male-centered culture. Such a culture permits girls between eight and ten a respite from its “construction of the feminine.” The nine-year-old is no longer the dependent child of five and six, nor is she yet a budding adolescent held accountable to “ladylike” proprieties. She  hangs suspended between childhood and young adulthood, between independence and dependence, femininity and masculinity, between work and play. She’s neither a child nor an adult, not a “woman” yet: just a person, herself.

 All is Permitted  

            The nine-year-old sees herself as competent, and realizes that she is valued for her competence. She runs fast, she leaps high, and she’s applauded for it. Others take note. Being a fine athlete, or a competent artist, or the fourth-grade authority on arachnids is regarded as more important to her, and to the people around her, than is being a girl.  She can be wildly bold, adventurous, and curious (qualities that will eventually attach themselves to maleness), because all is permitted her now. She can scoop up a snake and wrap it round her arm, play dress-up, color rainbows or set off rockets, hang out in a tree house, bake brownies, shoot lay-ups, wear dirty jeans or lounge about in crinoline – chortle, hoot, even whistle – and it is all right. Girls of this age are marked by self-possession and often display, according to Gilligan, a “startling lucidity” and an “uncommon clarity:” Witness the élan of a Kelsey or Betsy from my class, or the frank truthtelling of Gilligan and Brown’s whistle-blowers. Her parents support her independence and encourage her in her pursuits. She is given wide latitude to imagine herself without constraint: “Junior astronomer and rancher,” Hancock writes, “she will tend the flock by day and watch the stars by night.” I want to be a journalist, a teacher or a dance teacher. . . .The nine-year-old “enjoys a wholeness of self,” Hancock concludes,  

a unity with the cosmos, a natural radiance – the radiance and unity of the golden ball that appears in so many fairy tales. . . in step with family, friends, and schoolmates, she is master of her destiny, captain of her soul. [12]               

            No wonder then, that many adult women look longingly back at their nine-year-old selves, at the “spirited, playful, self-contained child, the independent, competent, purposeful girl that a woman carries with her in memory. . .” [13] This period represents for many women a brief, glowing time, when, according to writer Jane O’Reilly,  “we were brave and eager,” the “last time we felt truly ourselves.” [14] Dr. Annie Rogers of the Harvard Project describes in a poem her own memory of her nine-year-old self:

 I am going back for her the way I remember herstanding on a rock in the rain, her head tilted backrain pouring into her wide open mouth, running down her upturned face. [15]  

            It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that girls around the age of nine routinely outscore boys in achievement tests across the curriculum, except in science, where boys hold a small advantage. Nor should we be surprised to find them holding their own in self-esteem surveys. And they are unusually emotionally stable. “Girls between seven and eleven rarely come to therapy,” psychologist Mary Pipher notes in Reviving Ophelia, “They don’t need it. I can count on my fingers the girls this age whom I have seen. . . .” [16]   These girls feel competent, healthy, alive and they like themselves that way. [17]  

            With their confidence, vitality, and self-possession, their winning candor, their easy competence valued by friends and teachers, there is every reason to assume that these golden girls are poised to set out mightily into the world of adolescence and beyond, swept along by at least as much vigor and self-assurance as their male classmates, leaving manifold traces of their prowess and mastery wherever they go –and to no one’s surprise, least of all to the nine-year-old herself, the tiny captain of her own shining vessel.  

                        “. . . the greatest, the one, the only – me!”  

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