Raising Their Voices

The Politics of Girls' Anger

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by Lyn Mikel Brown

Harvard University Press

Due/Published October 1999, 271 pages, paper

ISBN 0674747216

New in paper. (F99)

The voices of spirited, angry girls are conspicuously missing from popular accounts of teenage girlhood, that supposed wasteland of depression, low self-esteem and passive victimhood. This book aims to correct the misperceptions that color our picture of female adolescence. Based on her yearlong conversation with white junior high and middle-school girls, from the the working poor and middle class, Brown allows us to hear how girls adopt some expectations about gender but strenuously resist others.

"In this brilliant and unsettling study, Lyn Mikel Brown describes the revolutionary importance of research on girls' development: the discovery of girls' strength and resilience. Her analysis of the experience of white girls reveals the psychological power of race and social class. Encouraging girls to raise their voices, she encourages all of us to listen and take girls seriously."--Carol Gilligan

"It has been seven years since a much-discussed study by the American Association of University Women identified the phenomenon of girls' diminishing sense of self-worth as they approach adolescence. Since then, [several] books have further lamented the evaporation of young girls' feistiness into hesitancy and self-doubt. Lyn Mikel Brown takes a different tack. In Raising Their Voices, she argues that the popular reception of such books has all but ignored an equally significant phenomenon-girls who 'actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity'. . . . This book is an attempt to provide an alternative prophecy, with the hope that it . . . will be fulfilled." -Rebecca Mead, New York Times Book Review