At the junction between childhood memories and faint expectations of adulting, adolescent girls experience a distinct hazing process to fit into a mold designated to support our society’s function, specifically characterized by the suffocation of unsaid words in restrained social context. In Harvard publication Meeting at the Crossroads, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan present the “nice girl” model, an ideal female model who “has no bad thoughts or feelings, the kind of person everyone wants to be with, the girl who, in her perfection, is worthy of praise and attention, worthy of inclusion and love” (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 59). When girls attempt to fulfill this description, they sacrifice speaking about their own concerns for the sake of unity. They, furthermore, internalize the message that addressing negative aspects of life makes them unworthy of love. Conflicting opinions, however, are vital to have needs addressed in all relationships, whether that be with friends, family, or romantic partners.
Adolescent girls often struggle to share their beliefs not only due to the prioritization of harmony over self-advocacy, but also a weak locus of control – the degree to which people feel they have influence over their immediate environment. That is, adolescents reach the age in which they question the environment they were born into, yet have limited control over their surroundings due to age expectations. Limited locus of control aligns with restrictive voice training, in which women teach girls to maintain a “calm, controlled, quiet” demeanor in the face of conflict (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 105). The authors argue, “solutions designed to protect girls’ feelings by ending public conflict simply push strong feelings underground and leave a simmering residue of disagreement, anger, and sadness unspoken and out of relationship” (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 105). When only polite conversations are visible, “[girls] are in danger of losing their ability to know the difference between true and false relationships” as they grow into women (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 215).
Voice training remains a cyclical process throughout generations, fuelled by women who are unable to disagree in public themselves. When Brown and Gilligan introduced their experiment at the Laurel School for Girls in Cleveland Ohio, a teacher spoke of their embarrassment when she was unable to respond to her, “eleven-year-old daughter, who said that she was angry at her mother because when her mother and father disagreed, her mother always gave in” (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 14). Although it seems as though the safest option for women to be role models is to exemplify perfection, a better option “for women to enter relationships with girls [could be]…to break false images of perfection, to invite their most urgent questions into conversation, into reality” (Brown and Gilligan, 2013, p. 231). Melting the barrier between women and girls allows understanding and reflection on both points of the age spectrum, where they meet at the crossroads.
References
Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (2013). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Harvard University Press.