Vocab quiz (10 min)
Individual conferences: (all throughout class)
I will meet with everyone to go over what you are missing and give some feedback on your class performance so far. This is informal and meant to get you caught up as we approach the end of the first marking period.
Catch-up work:
If you are missing work, you may use this class period to catch up. Anything turned in after class on Monday will be accepted for a maximum of 50 points.
Bonus work:
For everyone who is already caught up, I will hand out a bonus activity, due Monday for 5 extra points on your essay. This activity focuses on Ophelia and how she relates to modern girls and women, examined from the Feminist perspective.
Handout in class:
Part
I: Creative
activity:
Choose 1 option:
1.
Draw Ophelia: What do you think she looks like?
Why?
2.
Describe Ophelia: What do you think she looks like?
Why?
*Hint: If
you’re having trouble, imagine someone you know who is similar to Ophelia. What
is that person like?
· Make sure to
include: clothing, facial expression, setting, and any other descriptive
characteristics that are specific to Ophelia.
· There is no right
or wrong answer – this is your interpretation based on your life experiences!
Part II: The
Feminist perspective and critical reading skills:
The Feminist perspective is
not just about “girl power,” and feminism does not equate to “man-hating.” The Feminist perspective “analyzes the
status of women and men in society with the purpose of using that knowledge to
better women's lives. Feminist theorists also question the differences
between women, including how race, class, ethnicity, sexuality,
nationality, and age intersect with gender.” – Ashley Crossman (website
below)
A good resource to get more info: http://sociology.about.com/od/Sociological-Theory/a/Feminist-Theory.htm
When you analyze
something critically, important questions to ask are:
·
Who is this text written by? (Author’s race,
gender, class, background)
·
Who is this text written for? (Who does it benefit,
and who is left out? See categories above)
·
What does this text tell us about the world around
us? (Social and political forces in our society, norms, “ways of being” in the
world)
Part III: Read an
excerpt from Reviving Ophelia:
Background info: Published in
1994. Written by Mary Pipher, an American clinical psychologist born in 1947.
Mary
Pipher's best-selling book, Reviving Ophelia, provides an in-depth
look at the complex nature of adolescent girls. Her work as a therapist with
teenagers is regarded as a revolutionary contribution to modern psychology.
Chapter
1
SAPLINGS IN
THE STORM
When my cousin
Polly was a girl, she was energy in motion. She danced, did cartwheels and
splits, played football, basketball and baseball with the neighborhood boys,
wrestled with my brothers, biked, climbed trees and rode horses. She was as
lithe and as resilient as a willow branch and as unrestrained as a lion cub.
Polly talked as much as she moved. She yelled out orders and advice, shrieked
for joy when she won a bet or heard a good joke, laughed with her mouth wide
open, argued with kids and grown-ups and insulted her foes in the language of a
construction worker.
We formed the Marauders,
a secret club that met over her garage. Polly was the Tom Sawyer of the club.
She planned the initiations, led the spying expeditions and hikes to haunted
houses. She showed us the rituals to become blood "brothers" and
taught us card tricks and how to smoke.
Then Polly had
her first period and started junior high. She tried to keep up her old ways,
but she was called a tomboy and chided for not acting more ladylike. She was
excluded by her boy pals and by the girls, who were moving into makeup and
romances.
This left Polly
confused and shaky. She had temper tantrums and withdrew from both the boys'
and girls' groups. Later she quieted down and reentered as Becky Thatcher. She
wore stylish clothes and watched from the sidelines as the boys acted and
spoke. Once again she was accepted and popular. She glided smoothly through our
small society. No one spoke of the changes or mourned the loss of our town's
most dynamic citizen. I was the only one who felt that a tragedy had
transpired.
Girls in what
Freud called the latency period, roughly age six or seven through puberty, are
anything but latent. I think of my daughter Sara during those years-performing
chemistry experiments and magic tricks, playing her violin, starring in her own
plays, rescuing wild animals and biking all over town. I think of her friend
Tamara, who wrote a 300-page novel the summer of her sixth-grade year. I
remember myself, reading every children's book in the library of my town. One
week I planned to be a great doctor like Albert Schweitzer. The next week I
wanted to write like Louisa May Alcott or dance in Paris like Isadora Duncan. I
have never since had as much confidence or ambition.
Most
preadolescent girls are marvelous company because they are interested in
everything-sports, nature, people, music and books. Almost all the heroines of
girls' literature come from this age group--Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Pippi
Longstocking and Caddie Woodlawn. Girls this age bake pies, solve mysteries and
go on quests. They can take care of themselves and are not yet burdened with
caring for others. They have a brief respite from the female role and can be
tomboys, a word that conveys courage, competency and irreverence.
They can be
androgynous, having the ability to act adaptively in any situation regardless
of gender role constraints. An androgynous person can comfort a baby or change
a tire, cook a meal or chair a meeting. Research has shown that, since they are
free to act without worrying if their behavior is feminine or masculine,
androgynous adults are the most well adjusted.
Girls between
seven and eleven rarely come to therapy. They don't need it. I can count on my
fingers the girls this age whom I have seen: Coreen, who was physically abused;
Anna, whose parents were divorcing; and Brenda, whose father killed himself.
These girls were courageous and resilient. Brenda said, "If my father
didn't want to stick around, that's his loss." Coreen and Anna were angry,
not at themselves, but rather at the grown-ups, who they felt were making
mistakes. It's amazing how little help these girls needed from me to heal and
move on.
A horticulturist
told me a revealing story. She led a tour of juniorhigh girls who were
attending a math and science fair on her campus. She showed them side oats
grama, bluestem, Indian grass and trees redbud, maple, walnut and willow. The
younger girls interrupted each other with their questions and tumbled forward
to see, touch and smell everything. The older girls, the ninth-graders, were
different. They hung back. They didn't touch plants or shout out questions.
They stood primly to the side, looking bored and even a little disgusted by the
enthusiasm of their younger classmates. My friend asked herself, What's
happened to these girls? What's gone wrong? She told me, "I wanted to
shake them, to say, 'Wake up, come back. Is anybody home at your house?' "
Recently I sat
sunning on a bench outside my favorite ice-cream store. A mother and her
teenage daughter stopped in front of me and waited for the light to change. I
heard the mother say, "You have got to stop blackmailing your father and
me. Every time you don't get what you want, you tell us that you want to run
away from home or kill yourself. What's happened to you? You used to be able to
handle not getting your way."
The daughter
stared straight ahead, barely acknowledging her mother's words. The light
changed. I licked my ice-cream cone. Another mother approached the same light
with her preadolescent daughter in tow. They were holding hands. The daughter
said to her mother, "This is fun. Let's do this all afternoon."
Something
dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships
disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go
down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda
Triangle. In early adolescence, studies show that girls' IQ scores drop and
their math and science scores plummet. They lose their resiliency and optimism
and become less curious and inclined to take risks. They lose their assertive,
energetic and "tomboyish" personalities and become more deferential,
self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own
bodies.
Psychology documents
but does not explain the crashes. Girls who rushed to drink in experiences in
enormous gulps sit quietly in the corner. Writers such as Sylvia Plath,
Margaret Atwood and Olive Schreiner have described the wreckage. Diderot, in
writing to his young friend Sophie Volland, described his observations harshly:
"You all die at 15."
Fairy tales
capture the essence of this phenomenon. Young women eat poisoned apples or
prick their fingers with poisoned needles and fall asleep for a hundred years.
They wander away from home, encounter great dangers, are rescued by princes and
are transformed into passive and docile creatures.
The story of
Ophelia, from Shakespeare's Hamlet,
shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, Ophelia is
happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love
with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction;
rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is
determined utterly by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to
please. When Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes
mad with grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a
stream filled with flowers.
Girls know they
are losing themselves. One girl said, "Everything good in me died in
junior high." Wholeness is shattered by the chaos of adolescence. Girls
become fragmented, their selves split into mysterious contradictions. They are
sensitive and tenderhearted, mean and competitive, superficial and idealistic.
They are confident in the morning and overwhelmed with anxiety by nightfall.
They rush through their days with wild energy and then collapse into lethargy.
They try on new roles every week-this week the good student, next week the
delinquent and the next, the artist. And they expect their families to keep up
with these changes.
My clients in
early adolescence are elusive and slow to trust adults. They are easily
offended by a glance, a clearing of the throat, a silence, a lack of sufficient
enthusiasm or a sentence that doesn't meet their immediate needs. Their voices
have gone underground-their speech is more tentative and less articulate. Their
moods swing widely. One week they love their world and their families, the next
they are critical of everyone. Much of their behavior is unreadable. Their
problems are complicated and metaphorical-eating disorders, school phobias and
self-inflicted injuries. I need to ask again and again in a dozen different
ways, "What are you trying to tell me?"
Michelle, for
example, was a beautiful, intelligent seventeen-year-old. Her mother brought
her in after she became pregnant for the third time in three years. I tried to
talk about why this was happening. She smiled a Mona Lisa smile to all my
questions. "No, I don't care all that much for sex." "No, I
didn't plan this. It just happened." When Michelle left a session, I felt
like I'd been talking in the wrong language to someone far away.
Holly was another
mystery. She was shy, soft-spoken and slow moving, pretty under all her makeup
and teased red hair. She was a Prince fan and wore only purple. Her father
brought her in after a suicide attempt. She wouldn't study, do chores, join any
school activities or find a job. Holly answered questions in patient, polite
monosyllables. She really talked only when the topic was Prince. For several
weeks we talked about him. She played me his tapes. Prince somehow spoke for
her and to her.
Gail burned and
cut herself when she was unhappy. Dressed in black, thin as a straw, she sat
silently before me, her hair a mess, her ears, lips and nose all pierced with
rings. She spoke about Bosnia and the hole in the ozone layer and asked me if I
liked rave music. When I asked about her life, she fingered her earrings and
sat silently.
My clients are
not different from girls who are not seen in therapy. I teach at a small
liberal arts college and the young women in my classes have essentially the
same experiences as my therapy clients. One student worried about her best
friend who'd been sexually assaulted. Another student missed class after being
beaten by her boyfriend. Another asked what she should do about crank calls
from a man threatening to rape her. When stressed, another student stabbed her
hand with paper clips until she drew blood. Many students have wanted advice on
eating disorders.
After I speak at
high schools, girls approach me to say that they have been raped, or they want
to run away from home, or that they have a friend who is anorexic or alcoholic.
At first all this trauma surprised me. Now I expect it.
Psychology has a
long history of ignoring girls this age. Until recently adolescent girls
haven't been studied by academics, and they have long baffled therapists.
Because they are secretive with adults and full of contradictions, they are
difficult to study. So much is happening internally that's not communicated on
the surface.
Simone de
Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and
that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored
objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from
power envy.
She described the
Bermuda Triangle this way: Girls who were the subjects of their own lives
become the objects of others' lives. "Young girls slowly bury their
childhood, put away their independent and imperious selves and submissively
enter adult existence." Adolescent girls experience a conflict between
their autonomous selves and their need to be feminine, between their status as
human beings and their vocation as females. De Beauvoir says, "Girls stop
being and start seeming."
Girls become
"female impersonators" who fit their whole selves into small, crowded
spaces. Vibrant, confident girls become shy, doubting young women. Girls stop
thinking, "Who am I? What do I want?" and start thinking, "What
must I do to please others?"
This gap between
girls' true selves and cultural prescriptions for what is properly female
creates enormous problems. To paraphrase a Stevie Smith poem about swimming in
the sea, "they are not waving, they are drowning." And just when they
most need help, they are unable to take their parents' hands.
Olive Schreiner
wrote of her experiences as a young girl in The Story of an African Farm.
"The world tells us what we are to be and shapes us by the ends it sets
before us. To men it says, work. To us, it says, seem. The less a woman has in
her head the lighter she is for carrying." She described the finishing
school that she attended in this way: "It was a machine for condensing the
soul into the smallest possible area. I have seen some souls so compressed that
they would have filled a small thimble."
Margaret Mead
believed that the ideal culture is one in which there is a place for every
human gift. By her standards, our Western culture is far from ideal for women.
So many gifts are unused and unappreciated. So many voices are stilled.
Stendhal wrote: "All geniuses born women are lost to the public
good."
Alice Miller
wrote of the pressures on some young children to deny their true selves and
assume false selves to please their parents. Reviving Ophelia suggests that
adolescent girls experience a similar pressure to split into true and false
selves, but this time the pressure comes not from parents but from the culture.
Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their
authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.
Second, American
culture has always smacked girls on the head in early adolescence. This is when
they move into a broader culture that is rife with girl-hurting
"isms," such as sexism, capitalism and lookism, which is the
evaluation of a person solely on the basis of appearance.
Third, American
girls are expected to distance from parents just at the time when they most
need their support. As they struggle with countless new pressures, they must
relinquish the protection and closeness they've felt with their families in
childhood. They turn to their none-too-constant peers for support.
Parents know only
too well that something is happening to their daughters. Calm, considerate
daughters grow moody, demanding and distant. Girls who loved to talk are sullen
and secretive. Girls who liked to hug now bristle when touched. Mothers
complain that they can do nothing right in the eyes of their daughters.
Involved fathers bemoan their sudden banishment from their daughters' lives.
But few parents realize how universal their experiences are. Their daughters
are entering a new land, a dangerous place that parents can scarcely
comprehend. Just when they most need a home base, they cut themselves loose
without radio communications.
Most parents of
adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow
up and explore the world. The parents' job is to protect. The daughters' job is
to explore. Always these different tasks have created tension in
parent-daughter relationships, but now it's even harder. Generally parents are
more protective of their daughters than is corporate America. Parents aren't
trying to make money off their daughters by selling them designer jeans or
cigarettes, they just want them to be well adjusted. They don't see their
daughters as sex objects or consumers but as real people with talents and
interests. But daughters turn away from their parents as they enter the new
land. They befriend their peers, who are their fellow inhabitants of the
strange country and who share a common language and set of customs. They often
embrace the junk values of mass culture.
This turning away
from parents is partly for developmental reasons. Early adolescence is a time
of physical and psychological change, self-absorption, preoccupation with peer
approval and identity formation. It's a time when girls focus inward on their
own fascinating changes.
It's partly for
cultural reasons. In America we define adulthood as a moving away from families
into broader culture. Adolescence is the time for cutting bonds and breaking
free. Adolescents may claim great independence from parents, but they are aware
and ashamed of their parents' smallest deviation from the norm. They don't like
to be seen with them and find their imperfections upsetting. A mother's haircut
or a father's joke can ruin their day. Teenagers are furious at parents who say
the wrong things or do not respond with perfect answers. Adolescents claim not
to hear their parents, but with their friends they discuss endlessly all
parental attitudes. With amazing acuity, they sense nuances, doubt, shades of
ambiguity, discrepancy and hypocrisy.
Adolescents still
have some of the magical thinking of childhood and believe that parents have
the power to keep them safe and happy. They blame their parents for their
misery, yet they make a point of not telling their parents how they think and
feel; they have secrets, so things can get crazy. For example, girls who are
raped may not tell their parents. Instead, they become hostile and rebellious.
Parents bring girls in because of their anger and out-of-control behavior. When
I hear about this unexplainable anger, I ask about rape. Ironically, girls are
often angrier at their parents than at the rapists. They feel their parents
should have known about the danger and been more protective; afterward, they
should have sensed the pain and helped.
Most parents feel
like failures during this time. They feel shut out, impotent and misunderstood.
They often attribute the difficulties of this time to their daughters and their
own failings. They don't understand that these problems go with the
developmental stage, the culture and the times.
Parents
experience an enormous sense of loss when their girls enter this new land. They
miss the daughters who sang in the kitchen, who read them school papers, who
accompanied them on fishing trips and to ball games. They miss the daughters
who liked to bake cookies, play Pictionary and be kissed goodnight. In place of
their lively, affectionate daughters they have changelings-new girls who are
sadder, angrier and more complicated. Everyone is grieving.
Fortunately
adolescence is time-limited. By late high school most girls are stronger and
the winds are dying down. Some of the worst problems-cliques, a total focus on
looks and struggles with parents are on the wane. But the way girls handle the
problems of adolescence can have implications for their adult lives. Without
some help, the loss of wholeness, self-confidence and self-direction can last
well into adulthood. Many adult clients struggle with the same issues that
overwhelmed them as adolescent girls. Thirty-year-old accountants and realtors,
forty-year-old homemakers and doctors, and thirty-five-year-old nurses and
schoolteachers ask the same questions and struggle with the same problems as
their teenage daughters.
Even sadder are
the women who are not struggling, who have forgotten that they have selves
worth defending. They have repressed the pain of their adolescence, the
betrayals of self in order to be pleasing. These women come to therapy with the
goal of becoming even more pleasing to others. They come to lose weight, to
save their marriages or to rescue their children. When I ask them about their
own needs, they are confused by the question.
Most women
struggled alone with the trauma of adolescence and have led decades of adult
life with their adolescent experiences unexamined. The lessons learned in
adolescence are forgotten and their memories of pain are minimized. They come
into therapy because their marriage is in trouble, or they hate their job, or
their own daughter is giving them fits. Maybe their daughter's pain awakens
their own pain. Some are depressed or chemically addicted or have
stress-related illnesses- ulcers, colitis, migraines or psoriasis. Many have
tried to be perfect women and failed. Even though they followed the rules and
did as they were told, the world has not rewarded them. They feel angry and
betrayed. They feel miserable and taken for granted, used rather than loved.
Women often know
how everyone in their family thinks and feels except themselves. They are great
at balancing the needs of their coworkers, husbands, children and friends, but
they forget to put themselves into the equation. They struggle with adolescent
questions still unresolved: How important are looks and popularity? How do I
care for myself and not be selfish? How can I be honest and still be loved? How
can I achieve and not threaten others? How can I be sexual and not a sex
object? How can I be responsive but not responsible for everyone?
As we talk, the
years fall away. We are back in junior high with the cliques, the shame, the
embarrassment about bodies, the desire to be accepted and the doubts about
ability. So many adult women think they are stupid and ugly. Many feel guilty
if they take time for themselves. They do not express anger or ask for help.
We talk about childhood-what
the woman was like at ten and at fifteen. We piece together a picture of
childhood lost. We review her own particular story, her own time in the
hurricane. Memories flood in. Often there are tears, angry outbursts, sadness
for what has been lost. So much time has been wasted pretending to be who
others wanted. But also, there's a new energy that comes from making
connections, from choosing awareness over denial and from the telling of
secrets.
We work now,
twenty years behind schedule. We reestablish each woman as the subject of her
life, not as the object of others' lives. We answer Freud's patronizing
question "What do women want?" Each woman wants something different
and particular and yet each woman wants the same thing-to be who she truly is,
to become who she can become.
Many women regain
their preadolescent authenticity with menopause. Because they are no longer
beautiful objects occupied primarily with caring for others, they are free once
again to become the subjects of their own lives. They become more confident,
self-directed and energetic. Margaret Mead noticed this phenomenon in cultures
all over the world and called it "pmz," postmenopausal zest. She
noted that some cultures revere these older women. Others burn them at the stake.
Before I studied
psychology, I studied cultural anthropology. I have always been interested in
that place where culture and individual psychology intersect, in why cultures
create certain personalities and not others, in how they pull for certain strengths
in their members, in how certain talents are utilized while others atrophy from
lack of attention. I'm interested in the role cultures play in the development
of individual pathology.
For a student of
culture and personality, adolescence is fascinating. It's an extraordinary time
when individual, developmental and cultural factors combine in ways that shape
adulthood. It's a time of marked internal development and massive cultural
indoctrination.
I want to try in
this book to connect each girl's story with larger cultural issues-to examine
the intersection of the personal and the political. It's a murky place; the
personal and political are intertwined in all of our lives. Our minds, which
are shaped by the society in which we live, can oppress us. And yet our minds
can also analyze and work to change the culture.
An analysis of
the culture cannot ignore individual differences in women. Some women blossom
and grow under the most hostile conditions while others wither after the
smallest storms. And yet we are more alike than different in the issues that
face us. The important question is, Under what conditions do most young women
flower and grow?
Adolescent
clients intrigue me as they struggle to sort themselves out. But I wouldn't
have written this book had it not been for these last few years when my office
has been filled with girls-girls with eating disorders, alcohol problems,
posttraumatic stress reactions to sexual or physical assaults, sexually
transmitted diseases (STDs), self-inflicted injuries and strange phobias, and
girls who have tried to kill themselves or run away. A health department survey
showed that 40 percent of all girls in my midwestern city considered suicide
last year. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reports that the suicide
rate among children age ten to fourteen rose 75 percent between 1979 and 1988.
Something dramatic is happening to adolescent girls in America, something
unnoticed by those not on the front lines.
At first I was
surprised that girls were having more trouble now. After all, we have had a
consciousness-raising women's movement since the sixties. Women are working in
traditionally male professions and going out for sports. Some fathers help with
the housework and child care. It seems that these changes would count for
something. And of course they do, but in some ways the progress is confusing.
The Equal Rights Amendment was not ratified, feminism is a pejorative term to
many people and, while some women have high-powered jobs, most women work hard
for low wages and do most of the "second shift" work. The lip service
paid to equality makes the reality of discrimination even more confusing.
Many of the
pressures girls have always faced are intensified in the 1990s. Many things
contribute to this intensification: more divorced families, chemical
addictions, casual sex and violence against women. Because of the media, which
Clarence Page calls "electronic wallpaper," girls all live in one big
town-a sleazy, dangerous tinsel town with lots of liquor stores and few
protected spaces. Increasingly women have been sexualized and objectified,
their bodies marketed to sell tractors and toothpaste. Soft- and hard-core
pornography are everywhere. Sexual and physical assaults on girls are at an
all-time high. Now girls are more vulnerable and fearful, more likely to have
been traumatized and less free to roam about alone. This combination of old
stresses and new is poison for our young women.
Parents have
unprecedented stress as well. For the last half-century, parents worried about
their sixteen-year-old daughters driving, but now, in a time of drive-by
shootings and car-jackings, parents can be panicked. Parents have always
worried about their daughters' sexual behavior, but now, in a time of date
rapes, herpes and AIDS, they can be sex-phobic. Traditionally parents have
wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be
doing things that can get them killed.
This book will
tell stories from the front lines. It's about girls because I know about girls.
I was one, I see them in therapy, I have a teenage daughter and I teach
primarily young women. I am not writing about boys because I have had limited
experience with them. I'm not saying that girls and boys are radically
different, only that they have different experiences.
I am saying that
girls are having more trouble now than they had thirty years ago, when I was a
girl, and more trouble than even ten years ago. Something new is happening.
Adolescence has always been hard, but it's harder now because of cultural
changes in the last decade. The protected place in space and time that we once
called childhood has grown shorter. There is an African saying, "It takes
a village to raise a child." Most girls no longer have a village.
Parents, teachers,
counselors and nurses see that girls are in trouble, but they do not realize
how universal and extreme the suffering is. This book is an attempt to share
what I have seen and heard. It's a hurricane warning, a message to the culture
that something important is happening. This is a National Weather Service
bulletin from the storm center.
Part IV: Reader-response questions:
·
First
and foremost, what are your reactions to this article?
·
How can
you relate the concepts mentioned in your article to your own life? (Do you
experience it personally, do you see it around you, or do you feel the
opposite?)
·
Discuss
Ophelia as portrayed in Hamlet
compared to modern, 21st century girls/women. How are they alike and
different? Use textual evidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment