NBC's Dateline crew was filming a Grade 5 class to illustrate a thesis about classroom sexism. After two days, they gave up. They couldn't see any examples of teacher bias. When they showed their tape to two experts -- professors Myra and David Sadker -- the Sadkers quickly demonstrated that the classroom sexism was so familiar that it was invisible to the TV reporters.
The teacher had arranged girls on one side of a circle, boys on the other, and proceeded to teach actively, vividly and enthusiastically to the boys alone, while the girls sat silent.
This, alas, feels normal.
Despite the enormous advances in consciousness won by decades of the women's movement, our girls are still struggling uphill. They begin school with all the vibrancy and confidence we can instil, and then they run smack into unchanged boy-preference, a consumer culture that is harmful to their emotional health, and a shaming level of sexual harassment.
A recent Toronto study showed that from early primary school on, girls endure sexual taunts, insults about their physical appearance, leering and intimidation -- and many say it shakes their self-esteem.
Take note, because, as Peggy Orenstein shows in her book SchoolGirls, the crash in girls' confidence precedes their slipping achievement in math and science.
Since September, the stack of paperbacks gradually piling up on my desk has charted a rising concern in North America for the well-being of our girls. SchoolGirls by Peggy Orenstein; Reviving Ophelia, by psychologist Mary Pipher; Failing At Fairness, How Our Schools Cheat Girls, by Myra and David Sadker -- all are recent, readable and deeply sobering accounts.
At a time when we blandly assume that "girls can be anything," girls find themselves, in the words of Dr. Pipher, "fiercely pressured to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts." The culture, she writes, is rife with girl-hurting "isms." Not the least of them is "lookism," the rating and valuing of a girl solely according to her appearance. At school, hallway harassers are more lewd, explicit and grossly debasing than anything you or I remember.
The lip service to equality only makes girls' lives more confusing, argues Pipher. Her view is that "daughters are entering a new land -- a dangerous place (of date rape, eating disorders, drugs, depression) that parents can scarcely comprehend." And though girls "cut themselves loose without radio communications" just when they most need a home base, Pipher's book does offer worried parents a wealth of helpful insight.
It used to be that the brightest girls had to fight against parents who wanted to force them into a narrowly defined femininity. Now, writes Pipher, it's good parents who fight to save their daughters' true selves in the face of an abusive, violent, and almost completely sexualized popular culture.
If my daughters were pre-adolescent now, I know one thing I'd do: I'd give them a gift subscription to the award-winning New Moon, The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams. The delightfully fresh New Moon is written and edited by and for girls 8 to 14; reading a stack of back copies is like listening in to the animated, giggly, ardently idealistic, playful and intelligent conversation of a roomful of lively kids.
New Moon has no ads. Hence, no glossy articles about cosmetics, fashions, diets and dating. The readers care about friendships, art, books, crafts, sports, nature, politics. They get furious about biased teachers and sexist commercials. (And they can get just as furious if they think anyone is being unfair to boys.) They write in to ask advice, and are responded to by their peers. It's the most participatory journal I've seen and the least condescending.
New Moon aptly quotes Emily Brontë, who said of her dreams that "They've gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
How paradoxical that in this most liberated age, it's such a tough struggle to preserve a girl child's authenticity and keep her spirit of boldness alive. Hunt down any of those eye-opening books I've mentioned at your local bookstore, where you may also check out a copy of New Moon. Or subscribe ($35 U.S.) to the magazine at P.O. Box 3587, Duluth, Minn. 55803-3587.
Michele Landsberg's column appears Saturday in the Life section and Sunday in the A section.
