The War Against Boys (15 page)

C
onfident at 11, Confused at 16” read the title of a 1990
New York Times Magazine
story reporting an alarming discovery about the psychological development of girls.
¹
Research by Professor Carol Gilligan, Harvard University's first professor of gender studies, had demonstrated that as girls move into adolescence they are “silenced” and their native confident spirit is forced “underground.” The piece, by novelist Francine Prose, was laudatory and urgent; it mentioned in passing that Gilligan's research faced intense opposition from academics but provided few details.

Prose's nearly 4,000-word panegyric gave
Times
readers the heady feeling of being at the center of world-changing science. Gilligan and two colleagues had just published
Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School.
²
Prose described the book as “a major phase” in Gilligan's Harvard research project on adolescent girls, extending the findings of her famous 1982 work,
In a Different Voice
. In the preface to
Making Connections
, Gilligan states her latest discovery dramatically: “As the river of a girl's life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.”
³
The stakes are enormous, she says: helping girls negotiate this adolescent maelstrom may be the “key to girls' development and to Western Civilization.”
⁴

Had Prose interviewed experts in adolescent development, she might have alerted her readers to anomalies in Gilligan's methods, and contrasted Gilligan's findings with those of a substantial academic literature that describes adolescent girls far more optimistically. But no such skeptics were consulted.

The
Times Magazine
article generated a panicky concern for girls that would profoundly affect education policy throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Just when—as we now know—an educational gender gap was opening up with girls well in the lead, boys became objects of neglect while the education establishment focused on rescuing the afflicted girls. A brief review of Gilligan's research methods, and of the findings of empirically minded developmental psychologists, will show why the
Times
should have engaged a science writer rather than a novelist to present Gilligan's discovery to the world.

For
Making Connections
, sixteen authors, including Gilligan, interviewed Emma Willard students about how they felt growing into adolescence. The school, located in Troy, New York, takes both boarding and day students and is one of the oldest private girls' academies in the country. These interviews at Emma Willard seemed to confirm their darkest suspicions about the precarious mental state of teenage girls.

Preteen girls, Gilligan writes, are confident, forthright, and clear-sighted. But, as they enter adolescence, they become frightened by their own insights into our male-dominated culture. It is a culture, says Gilligan, that tells them, “Keep quiet and notice the absence of women, and say nothing.” Girls no longer see themselves as what the culture is about. This realization is “seditious” and places girls in psychological danger. So girls learn to hide what they know—not only from others, but even from themselves. In her
Times
article, Prose cited what became oft-quoted words of Gilligan's: “By 15 or 16 . . . [girls] start saying, ‘I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.' They start not knowing what they had known.”
⁵

To protect themselves, girls begin to hide the vast well of knowledge they possess about human relations and injustice. Many bury it so deep
inside themselves that they lose touch with it. Says Gilligan: “Interviewing girls in adolescence . . . I felt at times that I was entering an underground world that I was led in by girls to caverns of knowledge, which then suddenly were covered over, as if nothing was known and nothing was happening.”
⁶
According to Gilligan, girls possess an uncanny understanding of the “human social world . . . compelling in its explanatory power and intricate in its psychological logic.”
⁷
The sophisticated understanding of human relations that girls have but do not show, she says, rivals that of trained professional adults: “Much of what psychologists know about relationships is also known by adolescent girls.”

What sort of experiments did Gilligan and her colleagues carry out at the Emma Willard School that led to the discovery of girls' acute insights into human relations? A chapter called “Unfairness and Not Listening: Converging Themes in Emma Willard Girls' Development” gives a fair idea of Gilligan's methods and style of research. Gilligan and her coinvestigator, Elizabeth Bernstein, asked thirty-four girls to describe an occasion of someone “not being fair” and an occasion when someone “didn't listen.”
⁸
Here are some sample replies of the Emma Willard girls:

Barbara, twelfth grader

Unfairness:
“We had three final assignments . . . knowing the students were feeling very burdened, it was unfair of her [the teacher] to contribute to that.”

Not listening:
“She did not seem terribly moved by how the class was feeling.”

Susan, eleventh grader

Unfairness:
“A friend of mine was kicked out because . . . she had a friend of hers who got 600s on the SATs go in and take them [for her] . . . I understand punishing her, but I don't think her life should be ruined. It makes me angry. I think they should have had her come back here. . . . I don't think they cared.”

Not listening:
“We were going to spend a weekend at a boys' school and [the dean] said I understand you are going to do some drinking. I was just so mad. . . . I said, ‘I will follow the rules.' But she didn't listen. I didn't like her getting involved in my plans, because I didn't think that was fair.”
⁹

To the untrained observer, these teenage girls don't sound exceptionally insightful. Susan seems to be immature and ethically clueless. She seems not to understand the seriousness of the SAT deception; she is indignant that the dean of her boarding school, concerned about underage girls drinking, is so “involved” in her plans. But Gilligan and her colleague Bernstein seem never to notice the moral shortcomings of their subjects. Instead they tell us that girls such as Susan and Barbara are “unsettling” conventional modes of thinking about morality. They credit their callow subjects with exceptional moral insight: “The convergence of concerns with fairness and listening in older girls, for the most part, gives rise to a moral stance of depth and power.”
¹⁰
Normally, say Gilligan and Bernstein, we disassociate the concepts of fairness and listening, but “remarkably, for these girls fairness and listening appear to be intimately related concepts.”
¹¹

But how remarkable is it that the girls, asked by an interviewer to say something about (a) unfairness and (b) not listening, got the idea that they were expected to describe instances in which they had felt that they were unfairly treated and their views were ignored?

Gilligan's sentimental, valorizing descriptions of adolescent girls are frankly absurd. Her study of “unfairness and not listening”—despite its charts, graphs, and tables—is a caricature of research. Most of the girls' comments are entirely ordinary. Gilligan inflates their significance by reading profound meanings into them.

Gilligan would have us believe that preteen girls are cognitively special. But what about boys? Do boys of eleven also make “outrageously wonderful
statements”? Are they also spontaneous and incorruptibly frank? Or does Gilligan believe that, unlike girls, eleven-year-old boys
are
“for sale”? As boys move into adolescence, do they, too, suffer a loss of openness and frankness? Are they also diminished in their teen years? Could it be that girls' specialness consists of their sophistication when compared with relatively clueless boys?

To establish her thesis that our culture silences adolescent girls, Gilligan would need to identify some clear notions of candor and measures of outspokenness, then embark on a carefully designed study of thousands of American boys and girls. Anecdotal methods—especially anecdotal methods applied to one sex—cannot begin to make the case. Moreover, Gilligan does not offer even anecdotal evidence that preteen boys and girls differ in natural wisdom and forthrightness.

It might actually be, then, that preteen boys are just as astute and alive as preteen girls. That would have several possible implications for Gilligan's theory. Perhaps, like girls, adolescent boys are silenced and “forced underground.” But if that is the case, sex is not a decisive factor; instead we are dealing with the familiar problem of adolescent insecurity that afflicts both girls and boys, and Gilligan's sensational claim that girls are at special risk would turn out to be false.

Alternatively, it may be that
only
girls “sell out” and become inarticulate and conformist; that adolescent boys remain independent, honest, and open interpreters of social reality. This, too, doesn't seem right; certainly Gilligan would reject any alternative that valorized boys as more candid and articulate than girls.

Unlike Gilligan, the rest of us enjoy the option of avoiding gender politics and returning to the conventional view that normal girls and boys do not differ significantly in respect to astuteness and candor. Both pass from childhood to adolescence by becoming less narcissistic, more reflective, and less sure about their grasp of the complex world that is opening up to them. Leaving junior high school, both boys and girls emerge from a “know-it-all” stage into a more mature stage in which they begin to appreciate that there is a vast amount they do not know. If so, it is not true that “girls start not knowing what they had known,” but rather that most older children of both
sexes quite sensibly go through a period of realizing that what they thought they knew may not be true at all—and that there is a lot out there to be learned.

When the
Times
article appeared, Gilligan had not yet studied boys. The article gave the impression that boys, beneficiaries of the male-voiced culture, were doing comparatively well. A few years later, Gilligan would announce that boys, too, were victims of the dominant culture, forced in early childhood to adopt masculine stereotypes that cause a host of ills, including their own loss of “voice.” But in the early nineties, her focus was exclusively girls.

Prose did not deem Gilligan's neglect of boys a failing. On the contrary, she treated it as a virtue: “By concentrating on girls, the project's new studies avoid the muddle of gender comparisons and the issue of whether boys experience a similar ‘moment of resistance.' Gilligan and her colleagues are simply telling us how girls sound at two proximate but radically dissimilar stages of growing up.”
¹²
What Prose considered a muddle to be avoided is, however, clearly a crucial part of any research on adolescent development. For how, in the absence of comparative studies, can we possibly know whether what Gilligan described is specific to girls?

Gilligan might at least have warned Prose of the limitations of her findings. Quite apart from Gilligan's scholarly obligation to give us a comprehensive picture of adolescence as a backdrop for her assertions about girls, she should have taken care that the public was not misled. Instead, her inattention to boys invited the conclusion that girls were in distress because the system was biased in favor of boys. And indeed, many of her readers (including some who are in charge of important women's organizations) did take Gilligan's research as surefire proof that our society favors boys and shortchanges girls.

Popular writers, electrified by Gilligan's discovery, began to see evidence of the crisis everywhere. Anna Quindlen, who was then a
New York Times
columnist, recounted in a 1990 column how Gilligan's research had cast an
ominous shadow on the celebration of her daughter's second birthday: “My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that some time after the age of 11 this will change, that even this lively little girl will pull back [and] shrink.”
¹³

The country's adolescent girls were both pitied and exalted. The novelist Carolyn See wrote in the
Washington Post Book World
in 1994, “The most heroic, fearless, graceful, tortured human beings in this land must be girls from the ages of 12 to 15.”
¹⁴
In the same vein, American University professors Myra and David Sadker in
Failing at Fairness
predicted the fate of a lively six-year-old on top of a playground slide: “There she stood on her sturdy legs, with her head thrown back and her arms flung wide. As ruler of the playground, she was at the very zenith of her world.” But all would soon change: “If the camera had photographed the girl . . . at twelve instead of six . . . she would have been looking at the ground instead of the sky; her sense of self-worth would have been an accelerating downward spiral.”
¹⁵
In Mary Pipher's 1994
Reviving Ophelia
, by far the most successful of the girl-crisis books, girls undergo a fiery demise. “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.”
¹⁶