All-Girls Education:
A Personal Perspective
Critical Narratives of Gender
11 March 2009
Honors in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ayu Saraswati
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I was one of 523 students at St. Teresa’s Academy, an all-girls, Catholic, collegepreparatory high school. For four years I was a member of this intensely feminist community in
which I was driven to not only learn about the forebearers of the women’s movement, but to
become one of those women myself. From my freshman days, skeptical of the whole “no boys”
thing to my present-day feminism, I was undeniably changed by this community.
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the problem
In recent years, an overwhelming majority of research into the attitudes of developing
boys and girls points toward both a disparity in self-perception and a disparity in treatment in the
classroom from both teachers and peers. In the American Association of University Women’s
report Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,
both boys and girls believed that teachers encouraged more assertive behavior in boys,
and that, overall, boys receive the majority of their teachers’ attention. The result is that
boys will speak out in class more readily, and are more willing to ‘argue with my
teachers when I think I’m right’ (qtd. in Orenstein xvi-vii).
Because of this and other differences, whether they are inherent or socially constructed, boys and
girls have both different social and classroom experiences in schools, and consequently have
different social and academic needs. In light of this information, the idea of single-sex
education, particularly all-girls education, presents an interesting and viable alternative for girls
to the social minefield of co-ed high school and the so-called “hidden curriculum” of gender bias
in schools.
inside the classroom
My English class senior year, a class in college composition, might more appropriately
have been called a Survey of Feminist Literature in the 19th Century, or as my friends often
referred to it, A Study of the “Fallen Woman.” From Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to
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Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, we read a total of 15 books, only 3 of which
had male protagonists. (photo II: in the classroom)
From the content in the curriculum to the allotment of athletic funding, the presence of
vast and deep gender inequalities can be seen in today’s schools. Many classes, particularly
history and English, focus a great deal on the contributions of men to society. Study of war and
politics, two spheres of society that for much of history excluded women, dominates the
traditional high school curriculum. In a similar vein, the study of male authors and of male
protagonists fills the English classrooms in many schools. The freshman English curriculum of
Grand Canyon High School includes the study of seven out of eleven books with dominant male
protagonists and only two of eleven with female protagonists (“Course”). And although Title IX
has provided for far greater equality in athletics in schools, prejudice has simply been relegated
to more subtle frontiers, with girls teams receiving the most inconvenient practice and game
times and, more socially than institutionally, a far smaller dearth of fans.
My senior year, for the Varsity Volleyball game against Notre Dame de Sion, the rival
all-girls school in Kansas City, we decided to dress as Spartans from the movie 300. Clad in
war gear, many of us painted or smeared with mud, more than half of the students arrived for the
game. Yelling ourselves hoarse, valuing not just the competition on the court but also the
competition with the equally excited and rambunctious Sion girls on the other side of the gym,
we cheered our players to victory. (photo I: on the field)
With a greater focus on women’s sports in all-girls schools, by virtue of the fact that they
are the only sports, comes a greater opportunity for leadership in athletics, and in confluence
with this an expansion of leadership and extra-curricular activities for females across the board.
As Cornelius Riordan, a professor of sociology at Providence College notes, “no girl in a single-
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sex school is able to say, ‘I can’t do it because no girl can do it’—because there is some girl who
is doing it” (Jost 574).
For me this meant an opportunity to be the manager of the cross-country team, the vice
president of the student council, and the two-year editor-in-chief of the yearbook, all of which
were incalculably rewarding experiences. I found a challenge in being the editor-in-chief of
yearbook that forced me to learn to work with other people and to not only become an infinitely
better leader, but to redefine my concept of leadership.
According to the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools survey of all-girls school alumnae,
in comparison to their observation of female college peers who attended coed high schools, 84%
of alumnae agreed that girls’ schools provide more leadership opportunities and 60% felt more
prepared to take on leadership roles in college, while 36% felt equally prepared (Goodman).
This fact becomes especially important in light of the fact that
both girls and boys believe that girls will have a more difficult time achieving their
aspirations than will boys, and adolescent girls report higher levels of stress and
depression and lower levels of confidence. Females exhibit lower self-esteem than do
males during secondary and higher education (Sadker 79).
It becomes clear, however, that this is not the case in all-girls schools. Ninety-five percent (95%)
of respondents to the NCRS survey said that having a career and profession were very or
extremely important to them, and According to the Women’s College Coalition, “Women’s
college graduates are twice as likely as their counterparts in coeducational universities to receive
doctoral degrees or to enter medical school,” (McGuire 26) a fact not directly related to all-girls
high school education, but tied to the idea of women’s education in general.
One day senior year my writing group, perennially off-topic, veered away from
discussing poetic philosophy and began to talk about our futures and each girl’s contempt at the
idea that they should marry before establishing their own career. We scoffed together at the
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thought of marrying before the age of 30, much less having children, bolstered and re-affirmed
by the supportive environment around us.
outside of class
What may be the most important benefit of all-girls education, however, is its effect on
girls’ personal development because,
in spite of the changes in women’s roles in society, in spite of the changes in their own
mothers’ lives, many of today’s girls fall into traditional patterns of low self-image, selfdoubt, and self-censorship of their creative and intellectual potential (Orenstein xvi).
Girls feel pressure to be popular and to be liked by both girls and boys, but particularly by boys.
Smart girls will sometimes “dumb themselves down” in the presence of male classmates in order
to appear “cooler.” Recent research indicates that in 6th and 7th grades, girls rate popularity as
more important than academic competence or independence (Sadker 79), and according to
Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, “Girls’ evaluation of their own abilities drops
sharply in adolescence: the young women surveyed were about half as likely as boys to cite their
talents as ‘the thing I like most about myself,’ while they were twice as likely as boys to cite
their appearance” (qtd. in Orenstein 63). Influenced enormously by the mass media and wrapped
up in the social world of co-ed high school, it often seems that girls lose their personal identity,
and even the desire for the search for identity, in the struggle to be what the world is telling them
to be.
“Recent work in the field of psychology has widely documented the dip in self-esteem
among young women as they reach early adolescence. There seems to be an increased
social pressure on girls to be something that they do not think they are. There are social
expectations to be beautiful, smart, strong, and confident” (Reznicek 19).
According to Peggy Orenstein, author of School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and
the Confidence Gap, girls with a healthy sense of self-esteem have “an appropriate sense of their
potential, their competence, and their innate value as individuals. They feel a sense of
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entitlement: a license to take up space in the world, a right to be hear and express a full spectrum
of emotions” (xix). However, Orenstein points out, in study after study women are less likely to
feel those things than men and boys because
we live in a culture that is ambivalent toward female achievement, proficiency,
independence, and right to a full and equal life. Our culture devalues both women and
the qualities it projects onto us…It has taught us to devalue ourselves. Too often…we
don’t feel we have a right to our dreams, or, if we achieve them, we feel undeserving.
We learn to look outward for markers of acceptability…believing that only someone
else’s approval can confer worth (xix-xx).
In contrast to this, the NCGS alumnae survey indicated that 82% of responding alumnae were
very or extremely satisfied with their schools’ fostering of self-confidence. According to Myra
and David Sadker, “Alumnae from all-girls schools feel that their school helped them develop
self-confidence, assertiveness, and a strong sense of identity” (qtd. in Reznicek 20). This notion
of identity is overwhelmingly prevalent in research about all-girls education, noted extensively in
the Harvard Study on Single-Sex Schools, which indicated that girls in single sex schools had “a
greater locus of control between sophomore and senior years, compared with a decrease among
girls in coed schools” (qtd. in Reznick 22). Anita Reznicek, a teacher at St. Teresa’s Academy
and co-author of Educating Our Daughters interprets this to mean that, “these girls have a strong
sense of themselves” because “a high internal locus of control indicates autonomy, self-direction,
and self-reliance.” They are guided by their own ideas and less likely to need affirmation from
others. Girls in the study reported awareness of their own internal motivations and said that they
felt able to act consistently with the way they know best and were less inclined to be persuaded
against what they know internally. In her essay about her experience at St. Teresa’s Academy,
former student Claire Hickey exemplifies this notion of self-esteem and identity:
STA has given me a voice; a voice to speak up and be confident. I remember walking
through the halls as a shadow beside my freshman guide, watching each student pass by
with confidence in their step and joy in their conversation. I wanted to be an STA girl. I
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wanted to be a leader like the freshman leading me to each of her classes, and like each
girl that walked past. Now as a senior, I have found my voice as a leader in this
community. The teachers and students here have given me the confidence to speak up in
class and proudly stand behind my questions or opinions. I have found my voice; a voice
to shout with joy at volleyball and basketball games, a voice to laugh with endless bliss.
I have found a voice that I will carry with me as I go from this place. (photo IV: in
person)
beyond the facts
It seems, from personal experience and from a wide range of research, that all-girls
education confers undeniable benefits to its students: not only a more fair and balanced
curriculum and more equal opportunity, but a constructive social environment in a world where
society is so often destructive to girls. Through the lens of women and gender studies, however,
this idea is complicated by the fact that the gender disparities upon which this argument is based
also carry with them an assumption of heterosexual normativity. It can be argued that the idea of
splitting girls and boys into separate schools only reinforces the idea of gender differences,
forcing children further and more concretely into gender roles. But Leonard Sax, a family
physician and psychologist in Poolsville, Md. and founder of the National Association for the
Advancement of Single-Sex Public Education, says, “When you put boys and girls together, you
intensify the gender roles. The boys do things that are thought of as typical for boys, and girls do
things that are thought of as typical for girls” (qtd. in Jost 575). Boys and girls who are raised
with a strong sense of gender differences choose to act these out to a greater extent when their
actions are put in contrast with those of the other gender, whereas, when left to develop personal
identity without the notion of disparity between genders as a factor, girls more readily develop a
less-gendered identity. Meg Milne Moulton of the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools says that,
in all-girls schools, “Girls are judged in their own right, not in relation to each other or in relation
to the other gender. It’s a lot easier for a girl to be a girl in a single-gender setting.”
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***
For my part, in my all-girls education, I studied the history of the women’s movement,
with my AP history teacher’s assurance that women would never get “the short end of the stick”
in his class. I wrote about how the resolutions of the Seneca Falls convention are relevant to me
in the present day, impassionedly arguing that I do not need to marry or have children to be
deemed successful. My senior English teacher lectured about the weakness of Tess of the
D’Urbervilles and Jane Eyre’s comparative strength. I listened to countless women stand at the
front of the auditorium and speak about their success, encouraging me to achieve my dreams. I
watched the scared girls around me mature into smart, funny, articulate and independent
women.
This empowering environment made me the strong, confident, independent woman that I
am. It gave me the assurance that I can go out into the world and achieve whatever I want: that
I need not give credence to stereotypes or to the closed-minded. I walked away from that place a
more complete person, armed with the knowledge of where we as women have been and our
ability, from there, to go anywhere that we want.
***
Plastered around St. Teresa’s are posters with a quote from St. Teresa of Avila, “In this house all
must be friends, all must be loved, all must be held dear, all must be helped” (photo V) and for
me this idea of friendship, love and closeness was not only real, but an invaluable experience that
was truly formative in making me the person that I am.
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Works Cited
"Course Description." Grand Canyon Unified School District. 8 Mar. 2009
<http://www.grandcanyonschool.org/HiScCurriculum.htm>.
Goodman Research Group, Inc. The Girls' School Experience: A Survey of Young Alumnae of
Single-Sex Schools. Rep. Concord: The National Coalition of Girls' Schools, 2005.
Hickey, Claire. "The Anatomy of STA." Academy Woman Assembly. St. Teresa's Academy,
Kansas City. 22 Apr. 2008.
Jost, Kenneth. "Single-Sex Education: Do all-boy and all-girl schools enhance learning?" CQ
Researcher 12 July 2002: 570-90.
McGuire, Patricia. "Three cheers for a school of their own." US Catholic Sept. 2003: 24-28.
Orenstein, Peggy. School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap. New
York: Doubleday, 1994.
Reznicek, Anita M., and Faith P. Wilson. Educating Our Daughters: 15 Considerations in
Selecting the Best School Environment. Kansas City: St. Teresa's Press, 2003.
Sadker, David. "An Educator's Primer on the Gender War." Women: Images and Realities. 4th
ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 75-81.