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Michael Gurian is a psychotherapist, educator and author of seven books including the critically acclaimed national bestsellers:
and
Michael has served as a consultant to families, therapists, school districts, community agencies, churches, criminal justice professionals and policy makers.Traveling to approximately twenty-five cities a year, Michael leads seminars, consults and is a key note speaker at conferences. He has lectured at the New York Open Center, the Naropa Institute, and the Harvard Gender Issues Forum. His training videos for parents and volunteers are used by Big Brothers and Big Sisters agencies in the United States and Canada.
Visit: Michael Gurian's Home Page
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Book Excerpt... The Wonder of Girls |
CHAPTER ONE
by
Michael Gurian
BEGINNING OUR SEARCH
A NEW LOGIC OF GIRLS' LIVES
"We have to look beyond patriarchy, that's for sure. But, you know, it's starting to be that we also have to look beyond feminism too. Our daughters' lives are limited by both theories."
-- Gail Reid-Gurian, mother of two girls and family therapist
On a sunny day in June, I took my daughters to Manito Park, our neighborhood play area. Gabrielle was seven and Davita four. Beyond the normal swings and slides, the girls always enjoyed a sculpture there, built from logs and shaped like a Viking ship. On this particular day, we arrived early, and the girls, who had brought some of their stuffed animals, began to play a game involving two mothers caring for children on an ocean voyage. I offered to be part of the game if they wanted me, but then, as they enjoyed their "girl world" without me, I settled into a book on a bench at the periphery.
Their play went comfortably, filled with creative ideas and adjustments, in that way girls have with each other. They could have gone on happily, alone together, until they got hungry for lunch. But a car pulled up, and out stepped a mom and two boys, around five and eight years old. The mom and I waved as strangers do in parks when the sweet energy of children is about. Her two sons dashed onto the ship loudly. I watched, fascinated at first, then disquieted.
The complex game Gabrielle and Davita had created was interrupted by the louder and more aggressive energy of the boys. Within seconds, my girls abandoned their game and took to observing the boys' action and cries. "I'm captain now!"
"Shoot the shark!"
Watching this usurpation of my girls' play-world, I felt a growing irritation. I thought sadly of how often this happened between boys and girls.
There it is, I thought. What we are so often warned about: that when the boys come around, the girls step aside. The girls' self-esteem drops and the boys take over.
My protective instincts for my girls rose even while I harbored no ill will toward the boys, who were, after all, just enjoying the world through their own way of being. I felt almost like a crime was being committed to my daughters. I felt like I should do something.
A professional student of human nature, I spend a lot of time observing children's behavior. When I'm not sure what to do, I fall back on watching. On this morning I did just that. And I learned a valuable lesson.
For about five minutes, my daughters tried to return to their game. This became impossible, given the noise and interruptions. Then Gabrielle said something to the older of the boys, made some suggestions, began a negotiation I couldn't hear from my bench. The boys slowed down a little, listened, talked in the midst of their bouncing and playing. Gabrielle, as the alpha female on the ship, seemed to talk mostly to the older boy, the alpha male. She pointed; he pointed. She told Davita to move one of the dolls over to where he was, and he instructed his little brother to take hold of it and prop it up on the aft rim of the ship.
Within ten minutes from the boys' arrival, the "set" was rearranged. Now the four children were in a group near the helm of the ship, each of them with a different job, and all of them engaged in some new game, even more rich and complex than had been my daughters' or the boys' original intentions for play, this one featuring princesses, giants, pirates, treasures, and, I found out later from Davita, Cinderella's lost shoes.
My disquiet, my irritation, even my hidden anger were replaced now by admiration. As so often happens in the world of children, something small was really something large. The kids were living out their nature wholeheartedly, and it was worth a lot to observe it at work.
A Moment of Awakening
This moment at the park was the first of many incidents that cried out for me to think beyond our culture's present ideas about girls, about girls and boys, and about women and men. If you think about it, how many times have similar things happened on playgrounds, in workplaces, in homes, among children, teenagers, adults? Initially, there is overwhelming energy from males, but soon, gradual assessment, then guidance, from females. As a married man, I am no stranger to this circumstance!
And in the five minutes of negotiation that went on between Gabrielle, Davita, and the two boys, I realized I needed to revise the timeline by which I watched for drops in girls' self-esteem. Among these four children there was no drop in self-esteem, though initial observation seemed to show there was a sad drop for my girls. Instead, there were the natural interpersonal relationships that emerge when we are patient enough to observe them.
This incident occurred many years ago. It was one of the times in my life that I've felt dissatisfied, as a parent, by what our present, conventional conversation about girls has taught me about "gender stereotypes," "girls' self-esteem drops," "girls in crisis." A number of catchphrases dominate our dialogue about girls, but our girls actually live far beyond the words. That morning, I went home and began a list of these phrases, as well as some of the theories that indoctrinate me nearly every day -- in some form in our media and pop culture -- to see girls in a way that allows very little for the subtleties in which girls really live their lives.
I told Gail about my observation. As she does so often, she smiled at me, a little bemused. Quite often she sees things more clearly and much earlier than I do, but just doesn't tell me about it. "Mike, hardly anyone anymore really looks under the surface of girls' lives," she said. "Feminism used to do it twenty, thirty years ago. It was deep. But now it's skidding on the surface." It was during the rest of that day that Gail and I talked about this, talked about my writing this book, and acknowledged something we, brought up in the feminist tradition, had avoided dealing with.
The great ocean of girls' lives actually lies beneath the surface of the simple formulas we are now taught about "girl power" and girls' self-esteem. Feminism is, we realized, no longer the best theory to care for many of our girls.
In this book, my primary objective is to help parents and caregivers raise daughters. I am a teacher and counselor who greatly enjoys working intimately with people and their families. I am not seeking to be a political figure on one "side" of a political debate.
And yet to write about girls in any way different from current convention is to immediately become a person of the fight. My experiences from around the world, my research, and my own parenting lead me to somewhat different conclusions from my peers. Thus, in offering this parenting guide, I feel compelled to speak not only as a helpful professional but as a figure in a social debate. I don't think The Wonder of Girls would be comprehensive if it did not briefly explore some of the ideologies and theories our girls are now being raised in.
This chapter, then, is about the social debate we raise our girls within. If you are uninterested in politics of this kind, you might want to move to Chapter 2. If, however, you want to revise some of the political logic by which girls have been raised for the last few decades, then this chapter will be enjoyable. It is an analysis of feminist theory, specifically of feminist theories about factors predominant in making girls the way they are. It is also a call to move beyond feminism, to a new logic of girls' lives.
The central core of the new logic is this: Feminism as we know it today is "power feminism" -- based in acquiring more and more social and workplace power for females. While this acquisition is important, it is being pursued at the expense of what I will argue that my daughters, and yours, need and want as much or more. Feminism has, in its worthwhile and useful search for power, neglected this other world of girls' needs. In the last chapter of this book, we will define a set of principles by which to provide our girls with an even wider scope of happiness and success than present-day feminism offers.
Looking Beyond Feminism:
Old Myths and New Theories
Almost four decades ago, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and others based their feminist revolution on showing us the Victorian and patriarchal myths that impeded the progress of girls and women. The myths they fought against -- and many of us along with them -- went something like this:
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Since a girl's ultimate social goal should be to catch the right husband, girls don't need equal opportunity for education, especially higher education.
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Girls don't need to become leaders in society and business; their job as women will be to serve men and raise a man's children.
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Women's rights, including reproductive rights, voting rights, right to work outside the home, and right to physical safety, should be controlled by men.
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If women do work outside the home, they don't need equal pay for equal work, and girls should not expect it. |
Because of the inspiration and direction provided by the feminist movement, we have each, over the last decades, seen amazing changes in the home, the workplace, the school classroom, and the media. There are still many battles to fight in pursuit of women's equality, but many have also been won. Because of the inspiration of feminists, we've worked to change our culture, and we've succeeded.
Yet if you are like Gail and myself, while ready to congratulate feminists for the powerful work the movement has done for our girls and women, you have begun to suspect, over the last few years, during moments of your own awakening, that feminist theory is often static and overreactive, sometimes unfair, and generally incomplete in its assessment of human nature. But you may also feel like the villagers in the story "The Emperor's New Clothes," hesitant to cry out, "But look! There's something wrong with this picture!"
Let's feel this hesitancy no longer. Let's explore some of the most predominant feminist theories in our culture, and make decisions about whether they really do apply to our homes, our classrooms, and our culture.
Let's look at the four most prevalent feminist theories, and the imperatives they impose on our thinking as parents, regarding why girls are the way they are. To fully care for girls in this millennium, these four theories will have to be broken through.
THEORY 1
HUMAN NATURE IS NOT VERY IMPORTANT TO GIRLS' LIVES.
Girls are who they are predominantly because of the way they are socialized in our society. Nature plays a smaller part in why girls are the way they are.
What we need to know about girls, we are told, can be learned by studying "socialization." In our society, a girl's socialization is patriarchal and male dominated, and females are second-class citizens. When a girl experiences a self-esteem drop, a problem, an unrequited desire, or a fear of life itself, interpretation of "socialization" provides the reason. To spend time looking at hormones, the female brain, and the natural evolution of the female is to risk limiting girls' potential, so we must avoid it. Human nature (as girls live it) is a subject too risky for contemporary parents and teachers, for spending a lot of time on the nature of a girl will lead, ultimately, to her oppression.
This first feminist theory found its genesis just under forty years ago. It was a logical response to the misuse of biology and nature-based observations by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century neurobiologists and psychologists. When, over a hundred years ago, we discovered that the male brain was ten percent larger than the female, some male scientists cried, "You see, men are smarter than women!" Sigmund Freud, a genius in many ways, based his own theories on just a few people -- his patients -- and found in them penis envy; he claimed this to be natural to females, and overburdened this "nature-based" theory with male chauvinism.
Early feminists reacted strongly and effectively to the limitations and just plain bad theory of many of the men in the early century. In the 1960s and '70s, academic feminists buried neurobiological and sociobiological research. They've continued this trend unflinchingly. In a 1995 television interview on male/female brain differences, Gloria Steinem told 20/20 reporter John Stossel that to talk about biology was to continue the patriarchy.
Hormonal and biochemical research -- so useful in helping adult women understand pregnancy, menopause, and daily life -- has been largely absent from the books and resources on raising girls. In 1998, I asked Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, whether she thought biology played a part in the lives of girls, especially the girls who were suffering so deeply in her book. Biology, she told me, plays a much smaller part in what's going on for girls than socialization does.
Christina Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? told me she saw the feminist hyper-emphasis on "nurture" and nearly complete lack of emphasis on human nature to be a "feminist fear of what is natural, because feminists see what is natural as being defined through a male lens." Early feminism had to disconnect itself from many of the scaffolds of human life in order to develop as a dominant theory. Nature was owned by men. Biology was owned by male theorists who got their guidance not just from science (dominated by men for hundreds of years) but also religion (dominated by male imagery). The imperative behind Gloria Steinem's sense that to talk of biology is to be patriarchal was crucial to early feminism's time and place.
And yet, even given the immense liberation for women that feminism has accomplished, the basic questions of human nature remain. They especially remain for parents who are trying to raise children of nature without understanding the original nature from which the children have come.
The Wonder of Girls hopes no longer to skirt questions involving human nature, for the very soul of the human is lost when human nature is taken out of the human dialogue. At the Gurian Institute, where we train teachers and parents, classrooms and homes become very different places when communities learn the hidden secrets of human nature. We have found that parents, teachers, and community members who are not equipped with the wisdom of nature in understanding their children make painful mistakes both in action and in thought -- they think themselves to blame for things in which they play little part; and they neglect to provide ways of love and nurturance that they did not know they should provide. They become embattled in causes, but discover they do not understand the girl herself, or the boy beside her. And they often try to direct their daughter toward certain social and political goals that may not be right for the personality and nature of that particular girl. They become cut off from the child, especially during adolescence, when their child wants desperately to be understood. A great deal of our society's woes grow from the isolation adolescents feel from their caregivers.
When parents don't fully understand their children, much of the wonder of parenting is lost. In both the minds of parents and children, parenting becomes like a business, always on the verge of failure or bankruptcy.
There is another way, available to us once we push beyond the simplistic idea that girls are who they are "because they are socialized that way," and notice that "girls are who they are as much or more because of their hidden nature" on which socialization plays an important, but, surprisingly, not a life-defining role. New sciences (especially neurobiology and biochemistry) that will not be submerged in politics any longer have made it very possible, as Chapters 2 and 3 will reveal, to know our daughters from the inside out. Distinctions like nature vs. nurture become relatively trivial: What comes to matter is the knowledge of how a girl's brain, hormones, and physiological development, within her everyday enviroment, are affecting her life.
As a mother of two girls put it to me after learning about the biology and biochemistry of girlhood: "This is incredible. Now my girls make sense."
THEORY 2
WOMEN DO BEST WHEN THEY ARE INDEPENDENT OF MEN.
To be safe and successful as human beings, women must become, for the most part, independent of men. Boys and men are not inherently trustworthy; girls and women must compete with them as needed, become more like them as it is strategic to do so, and seek a social position in which they don't need the other sex.
When I was a boy my mother told me what her life was like in the 1950s. "A woman got married and had children, and her husband got a job and supported her and the children. I was alone in my own house, and I relied on your father so much that for years I just didn't know who I was, or what I could be. I felt so second-class, I came to resent him, myself, and the world."
My mother's sense of loneliness, of utter dependency on a man, and of social inequality was shared by many women of that time. When Betty Friedan cried out, "We want equality! Now!" to a huge crowd gathered at the Washington Monument, a nation listened. The dependency of a wife on a husband's social status had become destructive to women's psychological health, and thus to human society.
Our culture took up the cause of women like my mother, and continues to do so to this day, through one of the best outlets available: the workplace. In order to extract themselves from the loneliness of the wife at home, and the low status they were given (and for other economic reasons) women entered the workforce en masse, and discovered a mainly male-dominant environment. Women saw that they needed to compete with men. And the most efficient female strategy appeared to be for women to become more like men. If they became like men, they would compete and succeed in the male world. And many women have.
Because of feminist theory and strategies, the financial worth and social independence of most women in Western economic cultures is now not primarily controlled by a man's money. "Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle" said Gloria Steinem in the 1970s. Her thinking inspired young women seeking to make it on their own. Feminist theory, and our cultural adjustment to it, has helped create an economic culture in which most women can, should they choose to, create a life separate from intimate dependency on men. In a recent poll, however, reported by the Associated Press, the majority of women who were asked if they were happier than their mothers said no. The number-one item on the list of what they felt they missed? Stable relationships. This was especially true for women raising kids.
While the compelling need for a woman to be independent was a dominant necessity of my mother's generation, what was not clear thirty to forty years ago, but is clarifying for many of us now -- especially when the sciences of neurobiology and sociobiology are applied to the lives of girls and women -- is this natural fact: In most cases, human females and males need to form intimate, long-lasting, and symbiotic relationships in order to feel safe and personally fulfilled and in order to raise the next generation safely. Furthermore, the safety of civilization as a whole depends on the social guidance, protection, and valuing of bonds between males and females who are in the nature-based process of raising children. Couples who are not raising children can often experiment with serial mating, divorce, and social independence without structurally harming a society; but couples, families, and extended families that raise children without valuing the bonds among the caregivers have a higher probability of raising troubled children. The weight of this greater probability falls on not only individual families, but the civilization as a whole.
In the old patriarchal logic of raising girls, females were overly dependent on males and got in return a family arrangement that would give most women the relational stability in which to raise children.
In the feminist logic of raising girls, there is a high emphasis on female independence and social status, but the reward of relational stability is downgraded. Females are constantly embattled by having to make it on their own.
All this might not seem like a crucial issue to you or me were we not raising the next generation of daughters. But because we are, we must firmly establish where we stand, as parents, on how female independence from males will be encouraged in our house. Even if we don't spend time thinking about it, we are either pushing our girls toward competition with males or holding them back; we are either teaching them to trust males, or not. As parents in our era, we are in the thick of matters of female independence.
As we search for new logic for girls' lives, every parent and caregiver may find themselves challenged to develop a womanist vision -- one that is neither predominantly patriarchal nor feminist: one that provides for the equal status of girls and women without robbing them of the natural need for dependency on men. Meeting this challenge will be a major, and very practical, subject of this book. For if we succeed in meeting it, our girls will fully achieve personal identity, relational stability, and social success. GO TO PAGE 2
Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian
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