Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships

Public school girls ``at risk''--for early motherhood, dropping out of school, abusive relationships--are the subject of this collaborative study by three Boston-based psychologists. Earlier ``voice-centered'' (listening to) research on girls in a single-sex private school produced solid evidence for believing that at adolescence, girls lose a sense of self and undergo a developmental crisis that inhibits their expressive faculties. This report focuses on 26 girls in grades eight and nine who are culturally and racially different from one another, from poor and working-class urban backgrounds, who reveal their strategies for navigating the psychological distance between home and school. The researchers speak of their own learning to listen to girls who, at the start of high school, were beginning to silence themselves as the result of personal losses, betrayals and isolation. As with the earlier, landmark study, this important, accessible research establishes the need for bringing women and girls together. Taylor teaches at Simmons College; Gilligan is a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where Sullivan is a doctoral candidate. (Feb.)