Conference turris::womannotes-v3

552.0. "The Girl Within" by AV8OR::TATISTCHEFF (tim approves, too) Sat Nov 24 1990 14:53

    Comments?
    
    From today's Boston Globe, Bruce McCabe
    
    "The girl within us is a touchstone for us"
    
    Are a woman's best years over by the time she reaches the age of 11 or
    12?
    
    Psychologist Emily Hancock raises the provacative question in her book
    "The Girl Within."
    
    Hancock, who interviewed 20 women working at Harvard University while
    researching her doctorate in human development there, puts the turning
    point in a woman's life between the ages of 8 and 10, when she is a
    playful, purposeful, independent individual with a clear sense of self.
    
    She says a 9-year-old girl crystallizes a distinct and vital sense of
    self that she then proceeds to lose in the process of growing up
    female.
    
    "The 9-year-old girl and the woman are so different," Hancock said the
    other day in Boston.  "Their patterns are so different.  The 9-year-old
    has such a sense of self-possession that it's almost magical.
    
    "It all changes when the girl gets to be 11 or 12 and becomes
    sexualized.  She sees the world run by men, newspapers, colleges,
    corporate boards, the president, airlines, everything.  A girl realizes
    she doesn't count.  She puts herself second, pushes herself into the
    background.
    
    "We now see that the earlier age is a respite from that, a time when
    parents don't interfere with their kids.  The girl within us is a
    touchstone for us.  She's the truth about us."
    
    Hancock says girls grow up differently from boys and that their putting
    aside of their identities in childhood and reclaiming them as adults
    differs from the male-formulated view of the maturation process that
    has dominated development theory from Freud's work to the present.
    
    One of her admirers is Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, the child development
    authority who is professor of pediatrics at Harvard University.  He
    points out that Hancock's work follows that of Carol Gilligan, the
    best-known proponent of the theory that girls grow up differently from
    boys.  Hancock studied with Gilligan and Jean Baker Miller, authors of
    landmark books on women's psychology.
    
    "Emily's ideas are exciting, thoughtful and perceptive," Brazelton said
    in a telephone interview.  "They're at the opposite end of the spectrum
    from penis envy, castration complexes and all that kind of thing."
    
    Professor Janet Zollinger Giele, director of the Family and Children's
    Policy Center of the Heller School at Brandeis University, likes
    Hancock's "valuable insights" into acheivement for women but, as a
    sociologist studying women's changing life patterns, questions whether
    all women need to return to the age of 9 to rediscover identity.
    
    "I wonder how different it might be for different women who might have
    had unhappiness in childhoos,  Different women have different ways. 
    For instance, when I start wondering about myself, I go back to eighth
    grade when I was the highest-ranked girl.  I was in adolescence and
    doing better than the boys."
    
    Hancock developed her theory after analyzing the responses of the 20
    women at Harvard whom she interviewed three or four times each over a
    period of time.
    
    The women ranged in age from 30 to 75 and came from varying walks of
    life.  Some were gay.
    
    "I wanted to do my bit for these women, have them talk about their own
    experiences in their own idiom without mouthing the words of the
    patriarchy," Hancock said.  She's a member of the faculty of the Center
    for Psychological Studies in Albany, Calif., and has a private practice
    in Berkeley.
    
    Hancock says she developed her theory after asking her subjects one key
    question: "if we were writing your autobiography, how would you
    describe your adult life?"
    
    "Out of the responses to this question came their descriptions of
    crises they had faced in adult life.  And their realization that they
    had to reach back to 8 or 9 years old to find themselves when they were
    intact, to rediscover what their true identity was, the one that was
    authentic, real and true."
    
    That true self gets "buried" beneath the "feminine facade" she begins
    to adopt as early as 11 or 12 years of age, she says.
    
    Hancock says that the women she interviewed did not recall "the
    forgotten girl" until confronted with a crisis in adult life.
    
    She says that one of her subjects, a 31-year-old divorced woman whom
    she identifies as "Megan," may have been the most emblematic example of
    a woman who had "forgotten" her girlhood.
    
    Hancock says Megan described her "single, most important experience" as
    occurring in her mid-20s when she was "emotionally jolted" by her
    husband's confession that he had had an affair shortly after the birth
    of their child.
    
    "She realized she had depended on marriage for an identity.... She had
    to build her identity from the ground up besides being a wife and
    mother," Hancock said.
    
    Megan went back to a time when she had asserted her identity, all the
    way back to the age of 9.
    
    When she was 9, her family had moved, threatening her confirmation in
    the church school she was attending.  She really wanted to be confirmed
    there, and so she pushed for it, getting the nuns to send her homework
    assignments and completing them and returning them by mail.  She did
    get confirmed in that church, which was very important to her.
    
    The act of independence stayed with Megan, who recalled that at 9 she
    felt she had a sense that "I can get by in the world, even if it means
    that I am alone.  There's a way for me to negotiate it.  I can do it."
    
    Hancock suggests that women can rediscover their true identities in
    similar fashion, bringing back her ability to "order and direct her
    life."
    
    "For this short period, the culture permits her respite from its
    construction of the female," Hancock said.  "Temporarily leaving her to
    her own devices, it provides her a brief hiatus between the ruffled
    panties and Mary Janes of her earlier years and the comely decorum it
    will demand as she grows older.
    
    "At the center of a universe in perfect harmony, in step with family,
    friends and schoolmates, she is master of her destiny, captain of her
    soul.  She is, in short, the subject of her own experience."
    
    Hancock says her theory applies to her own development as well.  She
    says that she was adopted by her parents, was married and divorced and
    had to struggle for economic survival with a son who underwent a
    serious illness.
    
    "I found I had to go back to my own girl within," she said.
    
    Hancock says the significance of the age of 9 didn't dawn of her until
    three years after she had finished her doctorate, when she was looking
    for a theme for a speech she was making to a women's conference.
    
    After she described Megan's experience to the women, one after another
    in the audience recalled their own lives at that age.  "One and another
    spoke of their girlhood ventures, remembering the shiny blue bike she'd
    been given for Christmas, the little plaid suitcase she would take to
    school when she was spending the night with a friend, the secret code
    developed with a buddy in fourth grade, a librarian who opened the door
    of undreamed-of worlds, a piano teacher who encouraged her progress,"
    Hancock said.
    
    Hancock says she agrees that loss of identity can be a male problem,
    that, as she puts it, "Sure, boys lose important parts of themselves.
    
    "Men often lack access to meaningful work and I wouldn't want to
    trivialize the damage that results.  Cultural dichotomies turn men away
    from vulnerability, feeling, natural dependence, and attachment. 
    What's more, they are forced into roles that limit self-expression and
    self-knowledge.
    
    "The breadwinner role, for instance, has been thrust on men and taken
    to such an extreme that the culture holds a man responsible for his
    family's financial well-being even after his death."
    
    She says that "males are far more vulnerable than females," because
    they are "out of touch with their own feelings.
    
    "This is an idiotic culture with its ethic of separation and
    independence from the mother," she said.  "Too many people think the
    answer to the search for identity lies `out there.'  The answers aren't
    out there.  They're inner answers.  Looking for this girl, the
    touchstone, within is the answer.  She's the touchstone for women's
    truth."

    
    i believe there was an article about this in the sunday new york
    times magazine a couple of months ago. i think it's a very profound
    insight.
    

    Interesting idea, but I am skeptical.  I am certain that it is not
    universlly true, even within our own culture.
    
    I was not a secure, independent happy and centered individual at 9.  At
    9 I was miserably unhappy...I transfered schools and moved accross the
    country because i was convinced that my problems were because of my
    situation, not because of me.  I looked to the outside of me for
    solutions because I had no faith in my ability to succeed at anything. 
    I had no friends and no self-esteem.
    
    It was until my late teenage years that I learned to look within myself
    to change they way things were, and thus achieve the personal
    independence that she thinks I had at age 9.
    
    I wonder if her theories would hold true for, say, children who were
    abused?
    
    D!

    There was an article in the NY times magazine called something like
    "secure at 11, unsure at 16", about Carol Gilligan (author of "In a
    Different Voice", about the new psychology of women), and her studies
    of young girls and how their perceptions about themselves change
    between those critical years....
    
    -Jody
    

    
    re:.3
    yes, that was the article of which i was thinking
    
    re:.2
    i suspect that you are quite right in supposing that her observations
    might not apply equally to all parts of the socio-economic spectrum.
    still, for a certain real group of women it seems to be meaningful.
    

    Nathaniel Branden, in "How to Raise Your Self-Esteem", has some
    excellent techniques for getting in touch with ones' 'child self',
    'teenage self', etc.

    	When I saw this note (and it zeroed in on the age of 9,) it really
    	struck a chord in me.  Here's something that happened to me at
    	that very age:

    	Earlier in the year, I'd had a very lengthy stay in a Children's
    	Hospital - well, only 3 and 1/2 months, actually, which wasn't
    	that long compared to most of the children I knew there.  Most
    	of the kids were having orthopedic surgeries due to various
    	leg, foot, arm, hand or back problems.  My ward was all girls.

    	The girls were all under 16, and we were all like miniature medical
    	students - we knew the ins and outs of surgery, therapy, hospitals,
    	doctors and orthopedic ailments better than anyone who hasn't
    	actually been to medical school.  When a new girl would come in,
    	all the others would gather around to hear the history and would
    	speculate on treatment and prognosis with the new young patient.

    	In the checkups after I went home from the hospital, the doctors
    	would talk around me (telling my parents this and that while they
    	poked and prodded all over me.)  They would smile at me, but their
    	words went to my folks.

    	They were *very* nice doctors - don't get me wrong - but what
    	doctor is going to discuss the results of a medical exam with a
    	9 year old?

    	Well, one day, in the middle of a long exam - while the doctor was
    	telling my parents about my progress - I stopped the conversation.
    	I said, "You know, this is about me, and I'm the one who is going
    	to have to deal with this for the rest of my life.  So if you have
    	anything to say about it, I think you should be telling me."

    	The room was dead silent.

    	Then I said, "My parents can listen to it, too."

    	The doctors looked at my parents.  My parents looked at each other.
    	Everyone looked at me.  Then my parents said something along the
    	lines of, "She has a good point there."

    	From that moment forward, all the doctors gave their results
    	directly to me.  My parents listened.  The doctors didn't talk down
    	to me (although I would imagine it must have been tempting when speaking
    	to a 9 year old) - but they were very professional.  They discussed
    	the treatment and prognosis with me, responding to all my questions
    	in a very straight-forward manner.  (I'm not sure they'd previously
    	realized how much their young patients knew about such things, but
    	they found me far more knowledgeable about it than my parents.)

    	This continued as long as I was affiliated with this hospital (until
    	I was about 16 years old.)  

    	One interesting conversation I had with a doctor (also at the age
    	of 9 years old) - I asked, "How long will all these operations last
    	me?  Will I be able to walk all the way through my adult life?"

    	The doctor said, "Ordinarily, I would tell someone in your situation
    	not to expect to be walking very far past the age of 40.  But in your
    	case, as determined as you are - I'd be willing to bet you're the
    	one who could keep walking to a very old age.  You're far too
    	ornery to keep down."  (We both chuckled.)

    	He was right - I was diagnosed with arthritis in both feet 4 years
    	ago (in my mid-30's.)  But I'm willing to bet he's also right about
    	being one who will keep walking as long as I live.  I'm definitely
    	ornery enough now to match when he knew me.  ;^)

>      ...But I'm willing to bet he's also right about
>      being one who will keep walking as long as I live.  

Yes! I'll bet you dance, too!  :)

Meigs

    I read this book this fall, and while it's interesting it kind of
    came across as "Life was all right before sexual maturity came
    along and spoiled everything."  But I think that by reminding you
    that you can get in touch with and accomplish your old goals and
    dreams might be useful to women who abandoned less conventional
    goals to live a more traditional lifestyle.  
    
    Anybody who'd like to borrow my copy is welcome to.  If a few more
    people read it, we can have a discussion about whether we feel
    that we abandoned our goals and lost touch with the core of
    ourselves, and whether it's different for women and men.  
    
    For myself, I don't feel like the girl I was at 9 was much of a
    prize.  I think I kept some of the best of her and built on it,
    but I really wouldn't want to go back to the child I was then.
    
    --bonnie