Tuesday, February 25, 2003 PEGGY ORENSTEIN, Author "School Girls" and "Flux", "The Messages We
Send Girls"
MS. ORENSTEIN: I really don't feel like I should say anything after that. What can I possibly say? Thank
you, Anne.
You know, since I am a woman who's trying to do too much, I just started my fifth month of pregnancy, and
I'm sort of hoping that I won't throw up or faint. Yeah, you can laugh. And I filed the AMA story and zipped
across the country to do this talk, and I had a deadline yesterday, so I spent the whole day in my room writing
a piece about breast cancer.
And then I looked at the program last night and thought, oh, I thought I was talking about Schoolgirls and
apparently, I wasn't. So I think that's the peril of being a woman who does too much, and the part that you
learn very quickly about it is that you just have to be flexible. I feel a little bit like I have just had that
nightmare where you realize that you're speaking in front of 400 people in your underwear.
But I am going to go with it, and I will say that what I have been thinking about a lot lately and been kind of
working on in my head about the two books that I have written is that they explore this gap that I have been
thinking a lot about, which is with the message, the difference between a message that we give to girls and
the message that we give to adult women. When we're talking to girls, we give this very encouraging warm
message and we say, "You know, honey, you can do anything."
And then 20 years later we turn around to the same girl, who's now a woman, with this very kind of punitive
voice and say, "You can't have it all."
And you know, it's this contradiction. So I have been thinking in my work a lot lately both about how I have
fed into that contradiction myself, how I live that contradiction, and what it means, and what's so interesting
in that space.
So we can talk about that as we go along. But what I wanted to do today, as Anne mentioned, is to talk to you
more about the work that I have done with girls themselves, and how I came to do it, and some of the things
that I discovered both in the schools and in the broader culture.
I initially became interested in girls after reading just a lot of research that indicated that while all kids take a
self-esteem hit at adolescence -- and I'm sure you have all seen that and probably remember it from your own
youth -- that girls' self-esteem falls further than boys', and it wasn't catching up, and that girls were leaving
high school with a reduced sense of their potential, with less of a sense of competence than their male peers,
less trust in their innate sense of themselves as individuals, and less of a belief that they could achieve their
dreams.
And reading through all this, I have to tell you, I felt kind of kicked in the teeth by it. And I thought, how can
this be? How can it be that all these years, after I was the age of the girls in the studies, that girls were still
falling into this traditional pattern of self-censorship and self-doubt, and that they were still receiving mixed - and frankly sometimes not so mixed -- messages about their status in the classroom, about the importance of
intelligence versus appearance, about their sexuality? Messages that cling to girls and encourage them to shut
down and take an accommodating status and stick with us, as some of us know, as we become adult women.
So as a feminist, I felt outraged by the work that I was reading. And as a journalist, I felt like I wanted to
know more. So I began to interview girls all over northern California, which is where I live, and I eventually
talked to about 150 girls to try to get a sense of the underlying themes and issues that were affecting women's
lives. Ultimately, I decided to settle into two communities, one I called Weston, and it was a suburban
community, about 90 percent white, though it spanned a fairly broad class range, and it had a school system
that had won numerous statewide awards for its excellence.
And the other school I called Audubon, and that was an urban, low-income community that was the flip,
about 90 percent people of color. And I guess on a good day I'd call the school "chaotic," I think would be a
good word for it.
So I spent the next year as a fly on the wall of the lives of the eighth-grade girls in those two communities,
and I spent time in their classrooms, I spent time in the schoolyard, ate school lunches, so you know I was
very dedicated.
I went home with them. I talked to parents, teachers, but mostly I spent an enormous time talking to and I
think, more to the point, listening to the girls to try to get a sense of what it looked like and sounded like and
felt like to be a girl growing up in America today.
Of course, there have been an enormous number of positive changes for girls. I think much more than
previous generations, girls expect to go out and do something. They expect to be women who are doing too
much when they grow up. They expect to do things in the world.
And I think one of the great triumphs of Title IX, which I'm sure, as you know, has been threatened lately, is
that so many more girls are active in sports. Their numbers have skyrocketed. Sports are critical for girls for
their self-esteem, for their body image, sense of competence.
And yet, despite all the progress that's been made, old attitudes die hard and sometimes they become more
entrenched in the face of change. So in the classrooms, I began being engaged in looking at what's called the
hidden curriculum.
The hidden curriculum is the unstated message that kids learn in school about their place in the social
hierarchy, messages about class, about race, about gender. And that's the part of the research that's gotten
most publicity. And if you like, afterwards I'd be happy to spout my theories on why I think that is.
But it shows that teachers are less likely to call on girls than boys, that girls are less likely to have their
answers accepted and amplified on. That girls receive less praise, less help, less of all the intense instruction
that makes for academic confidence and success.
Boys are also more likely to be rewarded for more aggressive behavior, for shouting out answers,
interrupting, dominating class proceedings; while girls who engage in the same behavior are more likely to be
punished.
And the way I sum it up is that, in short -- and this tends to be particularly true for math, science, and
technology classes -- girls learn to get along in school and boys learn to get ahead. And I could give you a lot
of examples about how that played out in the classrooms when I was watching, but really the most evocative
example is not inequality but what happened when the teachers that I was looking at tried to balance the
scales, because this research was out there when I was doing the book, and a lot of teachers were concerned
about it, working with it.
So in one of the classrooms that I visited, one of the teachers tried to remedy the problem by deciding that she
was going to hold her attendance roster, and she was going to call on the kids exactly equally, and boy, girl,
boy, girl, boy, girl. So she did this. And after about three days the boys in the class revolted, and they said,
"This is totally not fair. You're calling on the girls way more, and we're not going to stand for it."
And she was really confused for a while, because she knew she wasn't. And she thought about it and she said
something to me that really stuck with me, really in both my books. What she said was, "You know, I
realized something. I think equality feels like a loss for them."
And I don't think that's just true in middle school. But I recently looked at a study of NYU law school
students that sort of echoed what I was finding, that a male teacher was finding the same thing in law school,
where at this point it's at least 50 percent women, and he was also finding that there was a sort of imbalance
in dominance.
So he also started to really focus on trying to create more equity in the classroom, and when he got his
teacher evaluations back at the end of the semester, a number of the men in the class had written that they felt
that he was a good professor but he favored the women too much and he needed to address that inequality.
I guess none of you are lawyers, so I don't know if you can tell me what happens, how that plays out in the
courtroom or in law firms. But back in the eighth grade, what happens is that a confidence gap begins to open
up between boys and girls, and the research shows that girls begin to silence themselves and to lose their
voice and to fear taking the necessary risks. I think more concretely, they begin to pursue their abilities
differently, so that particularly in math and science and technology, girls have a tendency to attribute success
to something outside of themselves. They tend to say, "Anybody could have gotten an A on that test," or,
"The teachers just grade easy," or, "It was just that one test." Not to studying, not to talent, not to the things
that are the building blocks of future success.
But when the girls fail, that failure is all their own. You know, the response is, "I'm just bad at math." And
even girls who get good grades tend to rate themselves lower in math skills than similar boys, and are less
likely to believe they can go on and pursue careers relating to it.
So what you see is that a drop in competence follows the drop in confidence. This has a lot of ramifications.
Right now the SATs are in big dispute. UC Berkeley has actually dropped the main SAT as a requirement to
get in, and there has been a lot of discussion about gender and race bias.
But one study in the late 1990s found that a third of the difference in math scores between boys and girls was
attributable to girls' lower self-confidence when they took the test and their belief that they couldn't do it.
When I have girls in the room -- and you guys can take this with you, if you like, back to your students -- I
like to put in my math plug at this point, which is to show that this drop in confidence has economic
consequences for girls.
There was a study of high school valedictorians and it looked at what they were doing 20 years out, and it
found that girls who had taken two or more math classes in college were the only women who had achieved
pay equity of men.
So I don't know if that has to do with the fact that math opens doors for women, or that the kind of women
who pursue math are more confident, or what it means exactly, but it is a clear correlation.
So when your students whine about, "Why do I have to take algebra and what possible real-world application
does this have," you know, this is why they're taking algebra. So feel free to take that nugget with you.
Since equity in education is a common issue of national concern and debate, more girls are taking higherlevel math and science, but instead, the confidence gap is taking kind of a new twist and the area that girls are
faltering in is technology. And my suspicion is that, just as math was a gatekeeper for economic success for
previous generations, a higher level of understanding technology will be for this generation, despite what's
happened in Silicon Valley. So it's imperative that we not let girls get by with saying that they're good at
computers or not good at technology.
Now, one of the things that is very interesting is that gifted girls, very bright girls, take the mixed messages
of female adolescents the hardest, and I think that's because they tend to be very perceptive and can see our
cultural ambivalence about smart and strong women, and they also feel acutely that conflict between
assertiveness and silence, standing up and shining bright, and being sweet and deferential, and these girls
were most likely to be haunted by the specter of what Carol Gilligan calls the perfect girl.
And I just wanted to share that I personally believe that the words "perfect" and "nice" should never actually
be used in a sentence with the word "girl" again. It would be better for all of us. But the perfect girl, who
frankly sounds really icky, is the girl who has no bad thoughts or feelings, and she represses her anger so she
won't make other people feel bad. She's perfectly nice, she's perfectly smart, and she's perfectly thin.
That perfectly thin part is really important because the more I live with this work with girls -- and I have been
doing it for quite a long time with girls -- the more I realize that girls' bodies have really become the
battleground for their conflict in the larger culture. Just as they can be silent in the classroom or their
families, they're silenced in a variety of ways in their bodies.
What I'm talking about here is issues of body image, issues of sexuality, and issues of sexual harassment.
Where body image is concerned, girls -- and this is especially true for white middle-class and Asian girls, but
increasingly it's also been true for African-American and Latina girls -- girls see thinness as success, as
perfection, as control.
When I first started talking about these issues and I would talk to a group where there were a lot of adult
women, I would say, "Does anybody here know somebody with a negative body image?"
And now I have changed that question. When I talk to parents or when I talk to kids, too, I say, "Does
anybody here not know any girl with a negative body image? Every single girl that you know has a positive
and healthy body image? Feel free to raise your hand and be the one person who responds to that."
And they don't. And I think that's what's very scary about it, is the idea that girls go through this period,
perhaps through their lifetime, where they develop this hatred of their body, is a normal thing.
At Weston, which was the middle-class school that I was in, I was surprised by how much thinness pervaded
the girls' conversation on the schoolyard.
One day I was standing with a group of them at lunchtime, which was a meal that most of them did not eat,
and there was a potato chip wrapper on the ground next to one of the girls I was spending time with.
Back up. I don't know about girls where you live, but northern California girls are very environmentally
conscious. And so another girl walked by and said, "You know, Bekka, you littered."
And Bekka said, "No, I didn't. I didn't litter. I don't eat."
And the other girl said, "You don't eat? I don't eat either."
And they gave each other the high-five sign. And I would see that that was sort of a regular occurrence, that
sort of distorted behavior among the girls. And when I looked into the research, I found that this problem
with body image among girls is not going away. It's something that's getting worse and something that's
getting younger.
In one recent California study, half of nine-year-old girls surveyed were already dieting, and in a recent
Canadian study, girls of seven who were a normal weight already were saying that they were too fat. At
seven.
So by middle school, how they look is the most important determinant of a white middle-class girl's sense of
self-worth, and clearly that's way off. In the book The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg
compares girls' diary entries from a century ago to now, to show how good body has replaced good character
as a measure of a girl's self worth and the fulcrum of their self-esteem. Joan is actually a great speaker. I'll put
in a plug for her.
But I wanted to read you two little pieces of her book because I thought it was so illustrative of how girls'
perceptions had changed in the last hundred years. This first little section is written by a girl on New Year's
Eve in the 1890s, so roughly 100 years ago. She says, "Resolved: To think before speaking. To work
seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified.
Interest myself more in others."
The second set of resolutions was written by a girl on New Year's Eve about 100 years later, so a
contemporary teenage girl. "Resolved: I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. I will lose
weight, get new lenses. Already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories."
So you can see a real shift over time in how girls view what it means to be getting better or what selfimprovement means. And you know, we talk a lot about the media when we talk about this, and I do feel the
media deserves its fair share of blame. I'm part of the media. I'm very critical of the media. But whenever I
talk in a room where there are a lot of adult women like this -- and men, too -- I like to say, "You know, if
your jeans are too tight when you wake up one morning, just keep it to yourself. And if your thighs are too
big, you know, just keep it to yourself."
Because I have seen this with teachers and administrators and parents, the way they talk to girls. But girls get
so many messages from them every day, messages of inadequacy that reduce them to their bodies. It's really
important that women who love them and who are role-modeling for them don't add to that.
But I will tell you, you know, it's a real challenge and this always freaks people out when I talk about this
because they're afraid afterwards to compliment me on my hair or something, but feel free. But it's really
unnatural not to talk to girls about the way they look, because it's really a currency of exchange with girls.
I was going back and forth between these two schools, and I noticed my tendency, when I hadn't seen the
girls for a while, was to connect with them by saying something like, "Oh, cute earrings," or, "Look at the
green nail polish you're wearing," or something like that, and I tried not to do it.
I tried instead to start talking about their soccer game or math class or irritating brother or whatever I knew
about them, and it really felt peculiar not to comment on their looks.
And so I challenge you as an experiment to give that a try for a while with the girls in your life. Again, you
don't have to flip out about it, but I feel that overall, even if we could just cut down those comments to girls
by a half or by a third, emphasizing their appearance so much, we'd be doing them a huge service, and this
message, of course, generalizes to the men in the room, as well.
Helping girls develop a healthy body image is difficult. Helping them navigate to a healthy sense of sexuality
in a world that encourages them to be inappropriately sexual at an ever earlier age. In the last ten years or so,
when people say what's the difference between the way we were raised and the way girls are raised now, I
think a huge difference is the earlier and earlier sexualization of girls. You see it with Britney in the little
school-girl outfits saying, "Oops, I did it again," or Abercrombie & Fitch trying to sell thong underwear to
five-year-olds. I don't even know why 35-year-olds wear them, frankly. But it's just relentless.
So on one hand, girls are being inappropriately sexualized, and on the other hand, the culture demonizes them
if they are sexual, and denies them information.
The way that we treat sex for boys and girls is still very different. The double standard or what I like to call
the politics of slut and stud were firmly in place among the girls that I met. And the politics of slut and stud
blame girls for their sexual behavior and they require no responsibility of boys. It's the old double standard.
The girls that I met were under intense pressure to become sexually active, yet they were not encouraged to
understand their own sexuality. And the trouble with the politics of slut and stud with a double standard is
that girls who believe it become sexually active at the same rate as other girls, but they're less likely to protect
themselves against disease or pregnancy. That's because if they did, then they would be slut, if they prepare
themselves.
And I have to say that the place that I saw this politics of slut and stud most firmly in place happened to have
been the sex education classroom at Weston, and this was one of those things that was a really interesting
thing to watch play out. It was a kind of silent pantomime.
The teacher was doing a lesson on sexually transmitted diseases. They weren't allowed to say in that school
how to prevent them, just how they were communicated. So she said, "There's a woman who has a sexually
transmitted disease." And she turned around and drew a woman sign on the blackboard. And several of the
boys in the class, while her back was turned, mouthed to one another, "What a slut."
And then she turned back around and said, "She slept with two men and they each got the disease."
And she turned around and drew that, turned back. Had slept with three men. At that point the boys turned
around and said, "What an absolute slut."
Then she turned around and said, "The first guy slept with two women and passed the disease on to them."
And she turned around to draw that and the same boys pointed to themselves and said, mouthed, "Me, me."
And the teacher turns back around and she says, "The second man was really active. He slept with four
women, and gave this disease to them."
And she turned around to draw four women signs and it gave the boys time to stand up and take a little bow.
And you know this. You can imagine you're a teacher in a room, your back is turned, and the journalist is
standing there writing it down.
We talked a lot about it afterwards. And this was really more about the kids.
So she turns back around and she says, "Okay, now this third guy was really good. He didn't sleep with
anybody."
And she turns around and she draws a zero, and while she's turned around, the boys point at one another and
mouth, "You, you, you, you."
And during all this time the girls were silent. They sat with their arms crossed, and they kind of rolled their
eyes, but didn't say anything. And a few minutes later, the bell rang and the kids jumped up and ran out, and I
sat there for a moment and I thought, you know, I don't think those kids actually learned that much about
sexually transmitted diseases in that period, but they did learn a very powerful lesson about sexual
entitlement and learned a very powerful lesson about the politics of slut and stud.
So the questions that I ask are, how do we teach girls to say no and have the right to that? How do we teach
them to say that when they say yes, it should be on their own terms, not to please somebody else or to keep
them from walking out the door? And how do we protect them from the very real dangers that they can
encounter?
There has been a lot of controversy about date rape over the last few years and some authors have been pretty
successful in perpetuating the idea that it's a myth. I was really stunned last summer when two studies came
out, one that was from Harvard and one from the University of Minnesota Medical School. The Harvard
study showed that one in five female middle and high school students reported being physically and/or
sexually abused by a dating partner. One in five. And the Minnesota study showed that one in ten reported
being raped.
Now, those risks increased when alcohol was involved, or when a girl was in an apartment with a guy she
didn't know well. But I was fascinated to see that dating violence also was higher among girls who dieted a
lot and among girls who scored low on measures of general confidence, which suggests that male approval
was so important to those girls that they would go against their instincts and put themselves at greater risk in
its pursuit.
But I also thought, girls who diet a lot? Girls who scored low? That's a lot. That describes an awful lot of
girls, as does this.
The other thing that correlated with the increased risk of violence was when the boy initiated the date, when
he drove, and when he paid. To me, that sounded like a date. And it made me question, first of all, how are
we talking to boys about girls and sex? There's something clearly off there.
But also it made me question how we're talking to girls about romance, how we're talking to them about
being swept off their feet, and the expectation that men will take control.
I started thinking maybe as parents and educators we should think about what it would mean to shift more
control on a date, more control in discussions of romance onto girls. Maybe it's better for girls to drive.
Maybe it's better for girls to pay. Maybe it's better for girls to ask boys out than boys to ask girls out.
You know, I think it's another one of those things that's a little difficult. And I know it's hard for me to kind
of cast a cool eye on something like romance, because romance is fun. But it's clearly not working a good
deal of the time in girls' best interests, because I keep going back to that statistic and thinking, one in five.
You know, that is an awful lot of girls. That's a girl that you know. That's a girl that's in your school. So I
think this is really a present issue for young women and young men right now.
And all of this discussion, for me, is about entitlement and disentitlement. It's about centrality and
rationalization. And for me, a lot of that came together in what I was seeing with sexual harassment in the
schools. I want to be clear that by sexual harassment I do not mean a seven-year-old boy kissing a sevenyear-old girl on the schoolyard.
It's interesting that that kind of story gets such big hype, but I think what happens there is that those stories
mask the real truth that I was seeing in girls' lives every day. What I was seeing was pinching and lots of
grabbing of your ends and breasts and really the aggressive explicit talk that I wrote about in detail. I won't
say it, but I'm sure that you have all heard it.
And I'll share something with you. I was writing this book in the abstract, and since writing it, two of my
nieces have gone through this and experienced this, and one of them was only seven years old. It's confusing
to her to use the phrase "sexual harassment" which we think about as something that applies to adults, and I
think something easier to understanding is "sexual bullying." But I think that's what you have to call it when a
boy repeatedly grabs a seven-year-old girl's genitals on the school bus. And it was really heart-breaking to
watch this little girl, who had really loved school and was really excited about learning, shut off and start
saying she was sick and she didn't want to go to school and to fuss, and to watch very little being done about
it. I can't really blame her for stopping wanting to go to school.
So it was an interesting time back when I was doing Schoolgirls, because halfway through that year was
when a law came into effect in California that unfortunately, I think, in many ways became the model for
sexual harassment legislation across the country and has what led to that much publicized incident with the
seven-year-old.
It said that administrators can suspend or expel students as young as nine who were found to be chronic
harassers, and it applied to girls as well as boys. But the problem with the law and the reason I say it's
somewhat unfortunate is that it didn't offer any guidance or any suggestion of mediation or any kind of
curriculum to help students -- let alone administrators, teachers, and staff -- understand the issue.
It was a purely punitive kind of measure, missing the educational component entirely. Because of that, I think
the schools kind of flounder and a lot of what happened for a long time was a mess.
In the schools that I was in, there were very different responses to this new legislation. At Audubon, which
was the lower-income school, I was just told, "Look, you know we've got poverty. We have hunger. We do
not have time for this other problem."
And there was part of me that thought, fair enough. Nonetheless, one day I walked into the office and there
was a girl sitting there who had a big mark on her face, and I said, "Liza, what happened to you?"
And she said, "Oh, you know, this boy."
And I said, "What happened?"
And she said, "Well, he was always grabbing my butt."
And I said, "Did you tell the teachers about it?"
And she said, "Yeah, they said, 'Whatever,'" which I think probably wasn't verbatim.
And then on this particular day she had gotten tired of it, and she had turned around and told him what she
thought about him, and he had hit her across the face. That's when the school realized that they perhaps had to
deal with this issue among the kids and in the classrooms.
In Weston, things were treated much differently. The principal was very excited about this new possibility
and so shortly after the law was enacted when a parent called to say that her daughter was being harassed in
gym class, that she was being taunted for the size of her breasts, and grabbed and stigmatized, she decided to
use this as an example, hoping to change what she saw as a pervasive atmosphere of harassment on campus.
The results were a real mixed bag, and it was really one of the most interesting and sobering parts of my
research to watch this well-meaning attempt fall apart. Again, I think we need to look at not just having a
law, but how you carry that out in an educational system. There's a great curriculum called Flirting, Not
Hurting, Nan Sjostrum, and she does a lot of work distinguishing between sexual harassment and "raunchy
behavior."
What that allowed me to do -- and it's one of the neat things about following people and doing the kind of
work I was doing -- was to get down in the trenches and help parents and teachers and administrators
understand what's complicated about this, to go through it with the principals, with the boys, with the girls
and the parents, and see the challenge of making a change and why it requires strong support and vision from
all components of the equation.
I want to shift gears a bit here and talk a little bit about one of the more intriguing findings in the research on
girls, and that's the importance of self-concept, the differences in self-concept by ethnicity. Over and over
again what the research shows is that African-American girls, in particular, report the strongest sense of self
of any other group of girls, but it tends to be focused in the personal arena, so that black girls report feeling
more effective in their families than other girls, more effective in their communities, and they tend to have a
more positive body image than other girls.
Yet in the public arena, in school, which for the kids that I met was often their first consistent encounter with
the white dominant culture, black girls reported the most disappointment, more than any other group, in their
teachers, their work, and their performance.
So somehow while black girls often have a voice, no one seems to be listening to them. It's not getting
channeled in a way that works for them.
And I thought about this one day when I sat with a group of girls at Weston. I was sitting with a group of
three white girls and one African-American girl named Sandy and we were talking about why there had never
been a woman president. One of the girls said, well, actually she didn't think it was legal for a woman to be
president. Perhaps that school has more work to do. And another girl said, "That's ridiculous; of course it's
legal. I think a woman would be a good president, but they would get too emotional if there was a war or
something, and they wouldn't be able to deal with that."
And then the third girl said, "No, no, I think it's because guys wouldn't vote for a woman president, so we
can't get one elected."
And Sandy said, "Well, I'm going to be the first woman president and the first black president."
And I thought, okay. And she had this big smile on her face, and with the same big smile on her face she said,
"Yeah, and I'm going to get assassinated."
That's my reaction. And she said, "Yeah, you think they would let a black woman be president? They would
kill me for sure. But what a way to go."
And I thought that anecdote encapsulated so much about what this girl believed about her abilities and her
power and about how she thought that power was going to be met in the world around her.
Most of the students of color that I spent time with were over at Audubon. At the beginning of this talk I
mentioned that school was chaotic, and I know that you all work in private schools, but I think it's really
important to understand this, so I want to tell you what that meant in this context. I don't know why there's
not a Nobel Prize for teaching. I think that is a real oversight on the Nobel committee. Some of these teachers
were so phenomenal and amazing, and some of them should have been shipped out of there a long time ago,
and there was really nobody in between. No mediocrity. I don't think the mediocrity would stay there. You
either were great or you didn't care at all.
And when I say that these teachers are at the bottom end of that spectrum, I don't know if they would do in
this in front of a principal, but they sure would do it in front of a reporter, which maybe is worse.
I was sitting in an English classroom one day, and the teacher passed out a short story by Maya Angelou, and
I thought, oh, this will be interesting, to see how kids of color react to the story by Maya Angelou. And one
of the girls raised her hand and said, "Excuse me. We read this yesterday."
And the teacher said, "You did?"
And the kids said, "Yeah, we read this yesterday."
And he said, "Oh, damn. I forgot."
And he asked a few questions, like, "What's that squiggly type?" you know, italics. And after a while he just
let it go. And the kids were running around the classroom and a girl threw somebody's binder across the
room, a bunch of boys were trying to push each other into the closet. It was just kind of nutty. The teacher
was in the front trying on a girl's earring, and two girls that were sitting in the back turned to me and said,
"Excuse me. Aren't you writing a book?"
And I said, "Yeah."
And they said, "Well, we hope you put this in it. Look at this. We're going to be behind when we get to high
school. What are we going to do?"
And you know, they were going to be behind. They were going to be behind for the rest of their lives. And all
I could do was promise them that I would put this in the book, and that I would, when I went out and spoke
about my work, remember to talk about this classroom, and talk about how behind some kids get through no
fault of their own before they lives even begin.
So sitting in that atmosphere, thinking about who gets called on -- forget about it. So instead, I became
engaged in looking at the differences between what kept girls versus boys in school and the different reasons
why they left.
I watched the girls, in particular, if they were older siblings, take on a junior mother role in the family, which
is not to say they had their own children, but that for a variety of reasons they were mothering their younger
siblings. They often derived a great sense of competence from that role, from being in charge, from the sense
of responsibility, and particularly if they didn't feel rewarded in school, it was a combination that made it
seem like a natural next step for them to have children, for some of them to have children of their own and
leave.
Now, the good news is that the adolescent pregnancy rate, as I'm sure you know, has dropped in the last few
years. But we still have 890,000 births to teenagers in this country, and we have the highest rate of teen birth
in the world. I hope that it's a sign of new optimism that the numbers are dropping, because I really believe
what Marian Wright Edelman has said, which is that if you want to keep this trend going and if you want to
stop births to teenage girls, you have to give them something else to live for, because hope is really the best
contraceptive. Although I wouldn't advise using it in a sexual encounter.
I saw some things at Audubon that were really devastating. But I also saw some things that gave me great
hope. In particular, there was a program for Latina girls. Anne was talking earlier about Latina girls in her
school who read Schoolgirls, and one of the things I talked about in the book is that Latina girls report the
biggest self-esteem plunge of any other group of girls. They are marginalized by class, gender, language, by
culture, and often by the assumption that they will get pregnant and drop out, and the dropout rate for Latina
girls is extraordinary. In some areas it's around 30 percent.
So there is a real crisis in education of Latina girls. I'm sure you have seen the reports about middle school
being a really critical intervention point, and a significant number of Latina girls do leave school right in that
window between middle school and high school.
So knowing that, the school invited a young Latina college student who worked at the local YWCA to come
in and do an intervention group. It was an interesting group because any girl could go. It wasn't just geared
toward the highest-risk girls. It met every week, and she would begin the group by a check-in, and the girls
could talk about whatever they wanted to, about family life, school, gangs, whatever their issue was. Then
she would have an educational component.
At first, in the first weeks, the girls really were like this. Their heads were down and their arms were crossed,
and when she'd ask them to check in, they would say, "No se." In Spanish, "I don't know."
Week after week, though, as the group continued, the girls began to lift their heads and uncross their arms,
and they began to talk.
By the end, the check-in was taking so much time that she was having trouble fitting anything else in, and it
really illustrated so boldly to me something that I think transcends any particular ethnic group, and that's how
much girls need to be heard, how important it is to them to have that adult acknowledgment and how much
we can do for them if we choose to.
So I'm happy to talk about anything you want to in the break discussion, but I want to end this talk. My
middle school English teacher, whom I revere to this day, always taught me to show and not tell when I
wrote.
So I want to end my talk not by giving a little list of things we need to do, but by taking you into a classroom
that was challenging, where the teacher was overtly challenging some of these hidden and not so hidden
issues. At this point, I always have this little battle with myself in my head between two anecdotes I want to
tell, so if you want to ask me the other afterwards, I can.
One of the lessons that Judy Logan, this teacher in San Francisco, did that I think really showed what can be
done was what she did for African-American History Month. What I like about it was that it wasn't didactic.
It wasn't this sort of big thing. It was just like a little tweak, really, that she did that changed the entire way
that the kids perceived the curriculum.
Every year she had the kids do dramatic monologues, so they would research, write, and perform as an
African-American in history. What she noticed after a time was that the girls would do the dramatic
monologue either as women or men, but the boys all chose men. She was kind of bothered by this.
So again, she made this little tiny adjustment. She said, "Everybody this year is going to do two dramatic
monologues, one of them from the perspective of an African-American man in history and one from the
perspective of an African-American woman in history."
So that meant that every boy in that class -- and God help her, there were 40 children in that class -- had to
for three minutes of their lives become not only female, but black and female.
So we were visited by a little boy who was Wilma Rudolph and a little boy who was Ida B. Wells, and one
day we were visited by a little boy who was Anita Hill. That was interesting because to these kids, that was
more recent history. They knew who she was and they kind of perked up.
Anita got up and told her story, and she got really excited and she said, "You know, I had to speak out about
sexual harassment so women all over the world would speak out, too, and they would know that they could
be strong."
And Anita blushed to the roots of her red hair and she was all excited, and the teacher said, "Give her a hand,
everybody."
And none of the kids laughed. None of them said, "Oh, he's a boy and she called him a girl."
It was a really great moment. It was actually kind of a revelation, because I think it's really rare to ask boys to
see a female experience as being as universal as theirs, as important as theirs, and equal to theirs, whether
you're talking about history or the home or the classroom or the workplace.
I think that exercise taught girls power, but it also taught boys respect. My work is about girls and it's about
the importance of supporting and encouraging them, but I don't think that in this equation we can forget about
boys' roles, because as long as the worst thing a boy can call another boy on the schoolyard is "girl" or "fag,"
which is basically the equivalent, you know, connoting weak, kind of feminine, as long as they don't have to
see girls as equals, we're going to have a pretty hard time convincing girls that they're equal, as well.
So I ended Schoolgirls thinking a lot not only about how we create a more healthy path to womanhood, but
what it means to be a man and how we talk about that with boys, as well.
I hope that that's part of what we can think about and talk about, is the inspiration to create equal opportunity
and mutual respect and the greatest possibility for achieving the potential on the part of all kids. So on that
note, it wasn't really women who were doing too much, but I hope it was okay.
Do we have time for questions?
MS. ABBOTT: Thank you, Peggy. I'm going to take you back to the women. Could you talk a little bit about
how, in your own thinking, in your research, you moved from the girls to the women?
MS. ORENSTEIN: Yes. Did I plant you? Yes, it's really interesting. I had written Schoolgirls and was going
around the country talking about it like this, talking about the work. Inevitably, the women who were taking
me around or with whom I would have dinner would talk to me about their lives. I was thinking a lot about
the conflicts that they faced, the pressures that they faced.
At the same time -- I was 34 or 35 then -- I was trying to make the decision about having kids and thinking
about what that would mean and how you make work work and all these things. And I thought, gee, you
know, how can we be talking to girls about all this opportunity and equality when we haven't worked things
out for ourselves?
So I wanted to go back and look at women. I was looking at women in their twenties, thirties, and forties
because that was about ten years younger than me and ten years older than me, and looking at what the
possibilities were and what the barriers were to leading a fully satisfying life.
Through that book, then, by the end, what I noticed was that there was very little intergenerational discussion
about our experience and, in fact, very little honest discussion between any group.
Women have this reputation for talking, talking, talking, but the fact is, working moms are very ginger of
stay-at-home moms, and vice versa. And married women and single women. And older women and younger
women. And women of color and white women. And we're all very careful with one another when we're
outside our groups of like people.
What I wanted in Flux was for the book to act as both a window and a mirror, so that women could look into
it and see their own experience reflected but also look at the lives of other women and think about that in a
place that was safe and not threatening.
What I hoped by the end was that there would be some breakout of those barriers and opportunity,
particularly for women who had the opportunity to be in a lot of contact with younger women, to talk about
their experiences in the home and in the workplace and in other areas of their lives, and talk more honestly,
and perhaps through doing that help create some more opportunity.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: What's the other anecdote?
MS. ORENSTEIN: That was an anecdote about sexual harassment and it was really interesting. This was in
Judy's class. She had an elective that was on American women making history, and the first thing that was
interesting about that class was that it was 50 percent boys, and these kids were in eighth grade. By the time
the kids had gone through middle school, in this program, there was no "women's history" or "women in" or
"women on" as something that girls need, but it's really something that boys need, too.
So it was really wonderful to see in this curriculum that the boys eventually lost that block to seeing women's
experience. It starts very young, when they're watching TV and the television network programmers know
that boys don't see female experiences as universal. So that's why there are so many male lead characters in
TV shows and in cartoons.
So these boys in the class were talking about American women making history, and somehow -- I can't
remember exactly how -- the subject got into sexual harassment, and they developed a real intense
conversation. They worked through this topic that we adults are working on and working on in about 45
minutes, but they were really engaged by it and honest. The boys were struggling and saying, "You know, I
see like MTV Spring Break and I see these women with the bouncing breasts, and I think that's what I should
be going for. It's confusing." to
And they decided after a while to do a project. They were going poll the school and see what other kids were
experiencing in the hallways and then talk about it and think about how they would address it through the
school and what kind of process would be used to address it. It was a huge project which, for a time, took
them off of the topic, which was American women making history.
I asked Judy about that, and she said there's a Peggy McIntosh, who is a great speaker on these issues. She
said that if you're studying the Civil War and you start with President Lincoln you are never going to get to
the Diary of a Slave Girl. If you start with Diary of a Slave Girl, you eventually get to President Lincoln. If
you start with Susan B. Anthony and American women making history, you might never get to the issues in
their own lives. But if we start at sexual harassment, it's going to make Susan B. Anthony make a lot more
sense to them.
So they went through this whole thing. And the other thing about it that was really great was that one day I
came into the classroom and the girls were kind of on one side, and one of the boys, who had admitted that he
had been the kind of boy who said stuff to girls and grabs them and stuff, came up to me and said, "Would
you please apologize to the girls for me?"
And I said, "No, but what happened?"
And he said, "Well, I said something to one of them at lunch, and now they're all mad at me and won't talk to
me."
And so I went over to the girls and said, "What's the deal here?"
And they said, "You know what? We decided that if he says something to one of us, it's like he said it to all
of us. And none of us are going to talk to him until he changes his ways."
That was a tremendous thing, because that was very different than anything they'd seen anywhere else, where
the girls felt very isolated in their experience and not connected to other girls, and very stigmatized. So that's
the other anecdote.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Can you speak about the body image issues as an American thing, as
opposed to other countries and cultures?
MS. ORENSTEIN: It's not just an American thing. Brazil has horrifying body image issues. The plastic
surgery rates there are way higher than here. The pressure on women there -- you have seen those girls, the
pictures of the women on the beach. The pressure to look like Rio is incredibly intense.
And in Japan, too, there's a lot of intensity on body image. So it is country by country. We do produce the
world's popular culture, and that creates a kind of special atmosphere, I think, a special kind of petri dish for a
lot of girls to feel bombarded on all sides. I think it would be a really interesting larger study because I know
about Japan and Brazil, but I don't know a lot about, say, England. I don't know if it's an issue in England the
way it is in America. It's a great question.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Can you say something about your research on Asian-American women
that we heard about at the beginning, and the production?
MS. ORENSTEIN: Yes. My husband is Asian. And so despite the fact that there are Asian girls in
Schoolgirls, it's been an ongoing issue, the research on Asian girls is almost nonexistent. It's starting to grow
a little bit, but there needs to be work.
What made me write this, this is an editorial piece in the LA Times that I mentioned will be published next
Sunday. Of course, I have been married for almost 11 years. I have five nieces who are half-Asian, and now
I'm going to have a half-Asian daughter.
I have been thinking a lot over the years about these issues, and I had picked up a book that I'm sure a lot of
you have seen called The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants, the book of the moment for young teenage girls. It's
a novel, and it's very empowering and all of that. I was going to buy it for some of my nieces in LA, my
Asian nieces, and I opened it up and I read the first page, and the second paragraph ended with this joke that
was about how Koreans eat dogs, and I just thought, jeez, in this book that's supposed to be about sisterhood
they make this nasty cultural stereotyping joke that alienates and treats this one group of girls like savages.
I showed it to my husband and said, "Am I being too sensitive about this?"
And he said, "I don't want you to buy this book for my nieces."
And I started thinking about all the things that we were constantly encountering in a day-to-day way that
either treated Asians in general and from the perspective of kids growing up as invisible or refused to see
them as American, treated them as foreigners, alienated them.
In fact, when I called the writer of this book and asked her about it, she said, "I really don't think of Asians as
a minority, I guess."
And I thought, well, you know, that's not good enough. So I wrote this article talking about that recent
incident with Shaquille O'Neal. The new phenomenon in basketball is Yao Ming. He's Chinese. He is in
Houston. And Shaquille O'Neal was asked how he felt about Yao Ming, and he said, "You tell Yao Ming I
said, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh."'
And there was a big debate in the sports community about whether this was racist, and the answer from the
white sportscaster was that, no, it wasn't racist, it was just a joke.
I thought, yeah, easy for you to say when nobody is pulling their eyes up at your kids and saying, "Ching
chang Chinaman" on the playground. So I felt that there was something that needs to be addressed about the
invisibility of racism to Asians and about the invisibility of Asians in general.
I was having lunch with a group of girls, one of whom was an Asian girl, and I noticed she wasn't saying very
much. I was trying to encourage her to talk more, and one of the white girls interceded and said, "Oh, don't
ask. Don't do that. She's Chinese and she really doesn't like to talk a lot. Doesn't like to talk about her
feelings. So don't make her talk."
And the girl sort of startled, like she was going to say something and then she just didn't, kind of went back
into herself. So it was sort of a well-meaning cultural stereotype, but served to push her down.
So I think issues of perfectionism are very profound for Asian girls, not being able to speak out, not feeling
entitled to anger sometimes, similar cultural conflicts. It's something I'm just bouncing around a lot, because
it's something that I'm scraping the surface of now, and that I think really needs to be talked about a lot more.
MS. LEE: It's wonderful to have a speaker like Peggy to remind us how important the work we're doing is,
and that our work really is mission-driven. It couldn't help but be. So thank you, Peggy. Thank you for
coming, and thank you for reminding us all of why we do what we do.
Please don't forget to fill out your evaluation forms before you leave. I know that from now on, groups of you
will begin to go. Please fill out your evaluation forms and leave them on the desk here, or give them to Carol
or me or Jessie-Lea. Thank you very much.
Please be back here at 11:00. Thank you.