Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
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Manufacturer: Anchor
Written By: Peggy Orenstein
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.235
EAN: 9780385425766
ISBN: 0385425767
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 1995-09-01
Studio: Anchor
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Editorial Reviews for Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
The classic account of the hurdles facing adolescent girls in America--now reissued with a new Foreword, to coincide with the award-winning author's new book on women and identity.
Inspired by a study by the American Association of University Women that showed girls' self-esteem plummeting as they reach adolescence, Peggy Orenstein spent months observing, interviewing, and getting know dozens of girls both inside and outside the classroom at two very different schools in northern California. The result was a groundbreaking book in which she brought the disturbing statistics to life with skill and flair of an experienced journalist.
Orenstein plumbs the minds of both boys and girls who have learned to equate masculinity with opportunity and assertiveness, and femininity with reserve and restraint. She demonstrates the cost of this insidious lesson, by taking us into the lives of real young women who are struggling with eating disorders, sexual harassment, and declining academic achievement, especially in math and science. Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls is a classic that belongs on the shelf with the work of Carol Gilligan, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, and Mary Pipher. It continues to be read by all who care about how our schools and our society teach girls to shortchange themselves.
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Consumer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Must read for all teachers, parents, and hopefully adolescents
Comment: I found out about this book because it was required reading for my teaching credential program. It is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. Peggy Orenstein chronicles one academic year in the lives of several eighth grade girls in two Bay Area middle schools, with a focus on the ways in which they are discriminated against by each other, their male peers, and (worst of all) their school systems.
To say the least, this book is an eye-opener. Unless, of course, you are a woman. I've loaned my copy to a select few of my female high school students who I think can handle the advanced academic language, and their reaction has been the same in each case: "This book is very true; you need to teach it to your classes, Mr. S." Recently, my older sister read it and told me that it brought back lots of nasty memories about what it was like for her in school.
This book was written more than a decade ago, but it's no less relevant now. If you are a parent or a teacher especially, you need to know what's going on. The womenfolk will nod knowingly, and the menfolk will be shellshocked to experience one year in the life of these girls. Either way, read it.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A well-written, alarming book marred by a lack of objectivity
Comment: Inspired by the American Association of University Women's report "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America", Peggy Orenstein visited two Californian middle schools and interviewed the female students, revealing the sexism running rampant in the schools. Orenstein also interviewed the students' parents and teachers, reporting her findings in her controversial book SCHOOLGIRLS: YOUNG WOMEN, SELF-ESTEEM, AND THE CONFIDENCE GAP.
The first school Orenstein visited was Weston Middle School, located at the edges of the San Francisco Bay Area. The girls at Weston had a intense desire to fit in - at any cost. The girls were obsessed with looking good, to the point where they would put spoons down their throats to vomit up food or even stop eating altogether. Weston was also plagued by constant sexual harrassment of its female students, most of whom accepted the harrassment as ordinary male behavior.
The second school visited by Orenstein was the Audobon Middle School, a school predominated by African-American, Latino, Asian, and Filipino students. It is Orenstein's accounts of her visit to this school that are most shocking. Every day at Audobon is pure chaos. The teachers swear and make rude comments toward the students, and hardly ever teach a class, opting to let the students run wild instead. Many of the students have little desire to learn; the combination of their lack of desire and their family's poverty has lead many to turn to drugs. Some have turned to gangs for acceptance, despite the fact that the initiation ritual involves sex with every male member of the gang.
SCHOOLGIRLS is an alarming book. Still, I often wondered while reading the book whether I could really trust Orenstein's report. Though I am sure that there is (or was) definitely a disturbing amount of sexual harrassment occuring in these Californian schools, it seemed to me as though Orenstein was twisting this information to further her own feminist agenda. I am neither a feminist nor a sexist; I believe that men and women should exist together as equals. Orenstein, however, seems to believe that all men are pigs, as she makes abundantly clear through her writing. This lack of objectivity strongly affected my opinion of the book.
Despite this, Orenstein is a talented writer who makes SCHOOLGIRL fast reading. She did a superb job observing the students and interviewing the parents and staff. Her findings are truly alarming. My complaint would be her choice of schools. She observed one middle-lower-class school and one lower-class school. Would the class of the schools not affect her observations? I have seen little of the sexism which Orenstein describes in my own school - but then again, I go to school in Vermont, not California.
SCHOOLGIRLS is a well-written, unnerving book, marred by a lack of objectivity on Orenstein's part. Still, those interested in reading some good non-fiction writing may want to give it a try.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The confidence gap
Comment: In 1990, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a report entitled Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America. For this report, "three thousand boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen were polled on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends." (xix) According to Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,
The results [of the AAUW report] confirmed something that many women already knew too well. For a girl, the passage into adolescence is not just marked by menarche or a few new curves. It is marked by a loss of confidence in herself and her abilities, especially in math and science. It is marked by a scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy. (xx)
In this quote lays the essential premise of Orenstein's book. Taking her cues from the AAUW report, Orenstein embedded herself in two California middle schools for a year to observe eighth grade women in their classrooms. These observations eventually blossomed into extraordinarily candid interviews not only with the young women in their school and home environments, but also interviews with families, friends, and teachers of the young women. Combined, these interviews, bolstered by numerous studies and statistics, paint a compelling picture of the social, physical, and psychological obstacles facing young American women.
The first school Orenstein visits is Weston Middle School, in Weston, California, a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area. The school itself is sociologically, though not racially, diverse:
The bumper stickers on the cars dropping off the children reflect the mix: Toyota vans advertising the local NPR affiliate pull up behind rusty pickups that proclaim: "My wife said if I buy another gun she'll divorce me; God, I'll miss her! (4)
Weston is a "California Distinguished School," an honor earned "by the students' estimable standardized test scores as well as the staff's exemplary
performance." (4) Although Orenstein's interviews elicited numerous widely varied responses, one of her most compelling observations of gender inequity within the school was a frightening pattern of preferential treatment towards males. Orenstein referred to this pattern throughout her book as "the hidden curriculum." This "hidden curriculum" is observed frequently and in many distinct situations while Orenstein is at Weston, from the lack of female role models in history and science classes to the approach of the administration towards sexual harassment. One of the most insidious incarnations of "the hidden curriculum" rears its head in the guise of "the perfect girl." Orenstein quotes an interviewee: "`teachers like us because we're nicer, quieter, and better behaved'" (35). This desire to be perfectly behaved to the point of being deferential often works to the disadvantage of the young women in the hyper-competative classroom setting. Boys, bolstered by years of both overt and covert training to be aggressive, are much more likely to both call out answers or accentuate their raised hand by shouting at the teacher when prompted to answer a question. Girls' seeming passivity in these situations often leaves them passed over, neglected, and possibly without a full understanding of the lesson. As Orenstein puts it, "by adolescence, girls have learned to get along, while boys have learned to get ahead." (36)
While the confidence of young women is undermined by this extremely subtle "hidden curriculum" within the educational forum, Orenstein also portrays the complexities of the burgeoning eighth grade social life as extremely detrimental to the women's esteem. Orenstein's subjects constantly discuss their body image, both with their peers and with Orenstein. These young women, the majority of whom are intelligent and from "good American families," talk about food, their weight, and their relative attractiveness to the point of obsession. In fact, four of the five eighth grade women extensively interviewed by Orenstein suffered from (or had experimented with) an eating disorder. All four had at least tried both anorexia and bulimia to counter their pubescent emergence and to keep their weight "low." One, Lisa, the only young lady in the book that Orenstein characterizes as a "fat girl" (102) has an extreme eating disorder, binge eating.
Psychologist Susie Orbach has pointed out that, as with girls who are severely underweight, "big girls' " body size places them outside the bounds of acceptable femininity, and beyond its attendant expectations. In that respect, Lisa's body, like that of the anorexic, becomes a vehicle for protest, a challenge to the customary invisibility of the female self. But instead of embracing denial and wasting away, Lisa expresses her needs by gorging on them. With potato chips, ice cream, and burritos, she creates an armor of flesh that both flaunts her powerlessness and gives her an excuse for it-as well as for her failure at school, and the scorn she's been subjected to among her peers and at home. (102)
This feeling of scorn eventually leads Lisa into the wrong crowd. She not only turns to drugs as a means of escapism, but as she realizes the "armor of flesh" she has built up is a shoddy defense for the criticisms she receives about it, begins to use self-mutilation to express her angst.
"I don't know why I do it," she says, gazing at the anarchy symbol she's carved on her leg. "Sometimes you're bored, I guess. And I know this sounds weird, but it feels kind of good. It feels like . . . it doesn't hurt, it's just . . . feeling the razor cut your skin feels good. And sometimes ... sometimes you like the pain, you like how it hurts." (108)
And it is with this shocking declaration that Orenstein moves past the body image issues, and into her final excerpt in her voyage at Weston.
The last chapter in the Weston portion of Schoolgirls deals with sexual harassment. In 1991, as Schoolgirls was being written, the state of California passed a law giving state schools unprecedented prosecutorial freedom in their quest to deal with the perpetrators of sexual harassment. In Weston, sexual harassment occurred in various forms ranging from frequently uttered obscenities and lewd remarks to occasional unwelcome molestation. Weston's principal decided to tackle the topic head-on, and began a series of suspensions and expulsions of the most frequent or overt perpetrators. After being told by the district superintendent that her methods of discipline might stigmatize the boys in question, the principal feels "burned" and "gun-shy." (130) Ultimately, the entire system of penalization is tossed aside, and even a girls' support group is disbanded. Orenstein concludes that this is yet another example of the "hidden curriculum" within our educational system: rules that are not enforced, or rules that are unenforceable have a tendency to not only demean the young women and essentially cause them to become uncomfortable in their own skin, but simultaneously empower the boys and keep the gender gap intact.
The second school that Orenstein visits is the John J. Audubon Middle School in northern California. "Only about 10 percent of the students, most of whom are unhappily bused in from a nearby military base, are white. The rest are African-American, Latino, Asian, or Filipino." (p. 136) At the outset of this section of the book, Orenstein describes a school that starkly contrasts her experience at Weston. She describes two teachers that are both wildly ineffective and completely dismissive of the students, an administration that struggles just to keep their kids in control, and a guidance counselor that has no time or desire to extend actual guidance to any of his supposed students. Once again, the group of girls who are interviewed extensively in this segment vary widely, yet this time eating disorders are never even mentioned. The environment is completely different in Audubon, a school where the greatest desire of the majority of the girls is to "graduate onstage" from 8th grade. Unfortunately for many of the girls, life simply "gets in the way."
Orenstein chronicles girls from troubled pasts, one who goes through a significant, life-altering decision to improve her performance in school and graduates with honors despite her crack-addicted prostitute mother, and another who all but drops out of school a month before she walks across the stage at graduation because she feels compelled to stay at home and care for her five younger siblings while her 26 year old mother works all day. Orenstein interviews a young Latina who comes from a hard-working blue-collar family whose strict disciplinary patriarch leads to the rebellion in his daughter that eventually leads her to explore the gang scene, a scene in which girls often have to be brutally gang-raped as an initiation. The common thread for these girls is one of desperation: the women at Weston had the ability, through wealth, to worry about comparatively trivial issues such as weight, the girls at Audubon worry about their survival.
Sexual harassment is a similarly heightened issue at Audubon, with frequent occurrences of overt groping, and even a few instances of actual rape. The only thing close to a solution to this problem came in the guise of Jessica Diaz, a "student of health sciences at a nearby branch of the state university." (214) Diaz sets up a group of young Latinas to discuss such topical issues as gangs and sexuality. Unfortunately, Diaz is afforded very little time and no resources; her room is an unused broom closet off of the gym. Yet what she tells the Audubon girls is an absolute necessity; her desire to work with these girls is made even more imperative when Orenstein consistently quotes a statistic placing young Latinas as the as the group with the highest potential to suffer a crippling confidence gap after 7th grade. Of course, it's all too little, too late for Marta, who has already decided which gang she wants to join.
In her final chapter, Orenstein visits Judy Logan's class at "San Francisco's Everett Middle School where she [coordinated] the Gifted and Talented Educational Program (GATE)." (246) Ms. Logan's class in question is the women's history class, and Ms. Logan employs quite a few amazing tactics to battle the gender gap. In her class, both boys and girls present two five minute question and answer sessions in which they pose as an historical figure. One of these sessions is to be presented in the voice of a man, one is to be presented in the voice of a woman. In this, Logan places as much historical significance on the accomplishments of women as men, which certainly does not diminish men while it encourages her students to seek positive female role models. This last chapter, in Ms. Logan's class, is as close as Orenstein comes in her book to providing a model for change in the quest to diminish gender inequity in school.
Orenstein never confronts the subject of an all-girls or all-boys school, nor is she very heavy-handed in of her approach to posing potential changes within the system. However her collection of interviews and data lends a compelling voice for a group who, in their collective quest to become "the perfect girl," has lost its own voice and become neglected. Schoolgirls contains profound insight while maintaining a seemingly impartial voice. Ultimately Orenstein presents merely a lesson, a lesson that society must take to heart if there is to be any change at all in the status quo.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Comment: Schoolgirls presents an extended observation conducted at two very different schools in Northern California, whose student population is very different and yet shares some similarities. The main focus of the observation is to analyze how self-esteem and self-confidence in female students (6 to 8 grades) is affected by their environment, and what in the schools settings and/or personal lives has a greater impact on the future development of these girls. The first school's population is primarily comprised of upper-class white students, while the second is a poor school whose population is mostly divided between Latinos and African Americans and the while population counts for no more than 10% of the whole student body.
Peggy Orenstein loosely organizes the book by engaging into the description of a handful of female students at the two schools, as opposed to offering a general analysis of her overall observation. Yet she is able to offer an understanding of the situation at hands that goes beyond the limitations of the personal case and individual peculiarity that make of each girl a different and unique case study. Different issues are observed in the two schools, therefore it is not possible to make an instant and direct comparisons between how similar `conditions' may affect students in different ways depending on independent variables. Yet, I am not sure the books even has that intention, and a direct and systematic analysis seems to be only a secondary reading of it, and not necessarily a valid approach to the information that Schoolgirls provides. Personally I believe the main concern with the book is to truly find out what affects self-esteem among young girls facing puberty, and the choice of two antithetic school environments is not to draw a comparison between them but to cover a larger spectrum of ethnicities and understand how different issues may affect female students belonging to different cultural backgrounds and coming from different social strata.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book for its simplicity of exposition and the conversational style in which is written: which I happen to find to be quite enticing and alluring. At times I found myself unable to put the book down, driven by the desire to know how a certain episode might end, intrigued and even challenged by the narration of facts that the author was able to convey is a very direct, straightforward and yet inquisitive manner. As I have mentioned earlier, the author chooses to focus on particular students, and places them within the larger environment of the school and personal life settings, with details that are not excessively overwhelming and yet consent the read to formulate a deeper and more homogenous visual idea of who these girls are; and consequently, to identify with them on a more personal and direct level. At times I truthfully felt like reading a well-written novel, yet with the constant consciousness that the people described are true persons, and not fictitious characters fabricated in the imaginative mind of some creative writer who lives in the constructed world of his own visions. I honestly believe the writing style is crucial to the success of this book, along with other choices made by the author that make of Schoolgirls an easy read, and yet provides a tremendous amount of information.
The author is able to provide data from large and systematic studies without falling in the common trap of dryness and impenetrability that many books offering this kind of scientific information seem to be bound to suffer from. Not only is she able to sprinkle throughout the book important and encompassing data - to support, validate or simply introduce an issue - with a lightness and fluidity that is impeccable. Not only is every statement that she makes, pertaining statistical or analytical information other than her direct observation, backed by proper footnoting and bibliographic references. Far more important and just as remarkable, most of her footnotes extend far from simply citing one source, they list several sources used to support a claim, contain extended commentary and further information pertinent to the claim. Frequently a note is half page long, and a few actually are a whole page long. Enough said when I state that a 277 page book has 38 pages of notes and 17 of bibliography, for a total of 51 pages of well documented resources.
The book does not offer a solution to the problematic issues that have such a governing impact on the destruction of self-esteem of these students, or even prevent the very development and edifice of self-esteem. Nor does it have the pretentiousness to offer solutions to these complex problems, frequently defined by realities that extend far beyond the reach of teachers, or the institution of schooling, and are ingrained into cultural and societal realities and collective conditioning that even for mature adults is virtually impossible to escape. Never mind that for many of these students, their parents and the adults around them are the fist ones who never escaped such realities. However, the last chapter does describe the positive results obtained when some of these issue are tackled by some of the teachers, in particular with reference to the issues of sexual education and gender discrimination. I thought it was a nice addition to the book, but I would have liked to see it explored more and in both schools, while it was done only in the poor school. It also felt slightly like a last minute addition to the book, which certainly enriched it but did not seem to be as well integrated into the overall sequential unfolding of the chapters. This is only a minor negative comment, which becomes irrelevant in the larger picture and overall impression I had of this book.
I believe the strongest asset of Schoolgirls is twofold. The easiness of style that makes it extremely intriguing is backed by an impeccable cornucopia of citations that will satisfy even the most demanding of researchers. Peggy Orenstein offers so much material to anyone who is interested in deepening their interest in any of the claims she makes, to be almost overwhelming. Furthermore, the abundance of footnoting is indicative of somebody who has gone a long way to assure herself that her claims were not the results of limited research and as such not completely reliable. On the contrary she proves us that she has done her homework and some more, to her great advantage because nobody should be able to go anywhere without backing their claims...despite the fact that unfortunately it happens, and quite too often too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb, an eye opener
Comment: I'm a middle school teacher, and this book really opened my eyes to the classroom dynamics that hold so many girls back.
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