From Girl to Woman:
Gender Roles and Socialization in Adolescence
Reviving Ophelia: A Brief Overview
Adolescence is one of the most difficult times for development. This difficulty
is experienced very differently for boys and girls. This paper will examine how
gender role socialization effects girls more specifically, the emergence of
eating disorders and depression in adolescent girls.
Mary Pipher, Ph.D. in her book “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of
Adolescent Girls”, discusses extensively the varied and difficult road that
adolescent girls travel to adulthood. This book is a collection of Pipher’s
experiences with clients, her daughter, and her own adolescence as well as a
thought provoking social examination. The title refers to William Shakesphere’s
character Ophelia, the young girl who drowned herself in a river after being
shunned by Hamlet. Ophelia is the epitome of lost female youth. The transition
that happens from girl to woman is quite difficult for most.
Pipher examines the loss of self that most girls experience in their
adolescence. She brings up the fact that preadolescent girls have the ability
to be androgynous, as well as an interest in nearly everything. Gender roles
are not limiting at this age, it is their time away from the female gender
role. The onset of puberty changes most girls into very confused and ever
changing creatures. They go from being carefree to careful of what their every
move is. Most adolescent girls are hyper aware of themselves, over analytical
of the reactions they receive from others, are critical of their bodies, and
they “crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle”.
The central question Pipher asks is “why are American adolescent girls falling
prey to depression, eating disorders, and suicide attempts at an alarming
rate?” There is no easy answer to Pipher’s question. Is the problem girls face
a product of our culture? Or, is the problem that adolescent girls face a
natural part of becoming an adult? Piphers answer is that the problem girls
face is both culturally and familial. The American culture is “look obsessed,
sexist, and girl poisoning”
Critical Evaluation
It is with great ease and grace that girls are explained out a bit by Pipher.
Reported often but rarely examined the phenomena of depression, anger, self
hatred, and dysfunction that girls experience in adolescence is really deeply
looked at in this book. The writing is clear and inviting. Each chapter
examines a different problem that adolescent girls face. From families to depression,
sex to drugs and alcohol the hurdles that adolescents encounter are all given
quality time in the book. The experiences of her patients are as varied as
possible. Yet, each girl has the same problem. They are all suffering their way
through adolescence. This book really gives the reader the feeling of that
suffering.
Being an adolescent girl is something that is strange and foreign to most
people. Women barely remember their adolescence, other then the things they
did. Unable to experience life in such an all or nothing way, most mothers of
adolescent daughters cannot find ways to connect to their children. This book
would defiantly help introduce dialogue that parents can use to re-connect to
their daughters. Happy one minute, distraught and angry the next, adolescent
girls are hard to communicate with and even harder to understand.
Tying it All Together
In the textbook “Infants and Children: Prenatal Through Middle Childhood” by
Laura E. Berk there is a little bit of tie in from Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia”
about culture and self esteem. Because of the limits on age in “Infants and
Children” Berk just starts the trip into adolescence. There is a section on
perspective and how it develops in older children. During middle childhood the
abilities to see how others think and feel are first being developed and
explored. As children age they become better at being able to “step in another
person’s shoes”. They are developing empathy during middle childhood. This
development continues until a child can take the perspective of an impartial
third party. Pipher shows that its during this developmental stage when
adolescent girls have an imaginary audience. They feel as though the entire
world is critically watching everything they do. Girls at this age tend to be
embarrassed by the behaviors and activities of their families.
Another phenomena of adolescent girls is the development of eating disorders at
younger ages. Pipher argues that body dissatisfaction is a product of culture.
It is the culture that forms the ideals of attractive and unattractive. As
those ideal body types get smaller and smaller there is more pressure put on
girls to achieve smaller and smaller bodies. In the article “Examination of a
Model of Multiple Sociocultural Influences on Adolescent Girls' Body
Dissatisfaction and Dietary Restraint” by Tracy L. Dunkley she states “Most
theories of dieting, body image, and eating disorders assign a major role to
sociocultural factors, such as the media. There has been a trend in the media,
over several decades, for smaller ideal female body size despite increases in
the actual body size of young women. These findings have led to the idea that
body dissatisfaction results from the discrepancy between a female's actual
body size and an ideal size strongly influenced by images in the media.”
It is not just the culture though. Self-esteem is put on trial as children make
their way through school. Grades, playmates, achievements academically all work
to build or destroy self esteem. Berk states that while “children and
adolescents differ in the aspects of the self they deem the most important,
they way they perceive their physical appearance correlates more strongly with
general self worth then any other self-esteem factor” .
Lina A. Ricciardelli in the study “Self-esteem and Negative Affect as
Moderators of Sociocultural Influences on Body Dissatisfaction, Strategies to
Decrease Weight, and Strategies to Increase Muscles Among Adolescent Boys and
Girls” discusses how self-esteem is influenced by physical appearance.
Ricciardelli comments, “The results from the present study demonstrate that as
well as examining the direct effect of sociocultural variables on body image
and body change strategies, it is also important to explore how these variables
may interact with other variables, such as self-esteem and negative affect.
Overall, the findings from the present study suggest that adolescent girls may
be generally more vulnerable to perceived sociocultural influences
independently of their self-esteem.”
What Can We Do To Help Our Girls?
If the answer to that question were easy there would not be any problems facing
adolescent girls. Adolescence would be a time for girls to easily and safely
journey from childhood to adulthood. However, the answer is not easy. Changing
the cultures ideas of what makes a person valuable would definitely help to
positively influence everybody. The importance of appearance eclipses
everything else. Perhaps a persons true worth is not in what they wear or how
they look, but in who they are. As wonderful as it is to fantasize about a
society where we look inside a person instead of just the outside of a person,
the possibility of “lookism” ending soon is small.
A different, but still effective idea on how to help out adolescent girls is to
understand, anticipate, and ride out adolescence. Informed parents who are
aware of what their daughters are exposed to will be more adept at weathering
the storm of adolescence. Having really open dialogue, keeping the expectations
clear and consistent, and not taking personally the drastic mood swings
daughters go through would really benefit most girls through this time. Many
parents are caught off guard by the change in their children. Being as prepared
for adolescence where children move away emotionally, as parents are now for
the “terrible twos” where children move away from parents physically, will ease
the transition from girl to woman.
Gender roles are enforced through the culture and the family so subtly that it
is hard to identify what parents and magazines do that adolescents their goals
and role models. Are all models role models for womanhood? Is one always
required to behave in the same manner that their parents behave in within all
situations? Girls are highly aware of the behavior of their parents, as well as
the expectations of who they should become. Women are everywhere in
advertisements, selling toothpaste, beer, auto insurance, and coffee. The
concept of a ideal woman is one who is passive and yet strong, a caregiver who
sacrifices all to provide for everybody else. That role is so terrifying to
many that it is either rejected, mixed up, or deeply internalized. Anorexics
may just be the reality of this perfect woman. Thin, in control, passive, and
concerned with what others want of them physically the anorexic seems to embody
all the qualities we attribute to perfection. Is that truly what one should
aspire to become?
The role of a woman is ever changing. Perhaps one day it will adapt to be more
androgynous. Women and men should both strive to become more then just
masculine and feminine counterparts. They should be free to rise above
masculinity and femininity, to a more equal and blended place.
Sources
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. Pipher, Mary P.h. D.
Ballentine Books: Random House 1994.