Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development - Hardcover

Brown, Lyn Mikel; Gilligan, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674731824 ISBN 13: 9780674731820

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2013

Synopsis

On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours. In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another. This groundbreaking work offers major new insights into girls' development and women's psychology. But perhaps more importantly, it provides women with the means of meeting girls at the critical crossroads of adolescence, of harkening to the voices of girlhood and sustaining their sell-affirming notes.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Should sound a national alert to society that even our most privileged girls still pursue normal femininity at great risk to personal and civic health."
THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
Lyn Mike Brown and Carol Gilligan ask "What, on the way to womanhood, does a girl give up?" One hundred girls gave voice to what is rarely spoken and often ignored: that the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence and disconnection, a troubled crossing when a girl loses a firm sense of self and becomes tentative and unsure. These changes mark the endge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development and the stories the girls tell are by turns heartrending and courageous. Listening to these girls provides us with the means of reaching out to them at this critical time, and of better understanding what we as women and men may have left behind at our own crossroads.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

About the Author:

Brown Lyn Mikel

Lyn Mikel Brown is Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Colby College.Gilligan Carol

Carol Gilligan is University Professor at the New York University School of Law.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0674731824
• ISBN 13: 9780674731820
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 266