Gretchen Davidson
Warren Wilson College
CPO# 7381 WWC P.O. Box 9000
Asheville, NC 28815-9000
(828) 771-4000
Gretch_101@hotmail.com
This paper examines what issues a group of young African American girls deal with on a daily basis. Observations, a focus group, and limited questionnaire responses were used to determine three main stress factors. These factors are parents, peers, and boys. These categories were analyzed to discover how the group of girls talk about these stresses, how they interact with parents, peers, and boys, and finally how they empower themselves through female unity to negotiate the boundaries of growing up.
Introduction
I went into this research
looking for pathology. Having read an
army of books and articles about what is wrong with American girls today, I
expected to meet young women who were starving and cutting themselves as a way
to attempt to control a society that is so brutally uncaring of its youth. I have no doubt that these things do occur
frequently; because our society is brutally uncaring, especially to its African
American youth; but this is not what I found.
Instead I found a group of girls who work together as friends and as
females looking for answers to growing up.
The
research took place at a YWCA after school program, where myself and another
researcher made observations and then conducted a focus group. We hung out, we gossiped, we watched from
the sidelines, and we laughed and told jokes sometimes more then we took
notes.
I began my research by
asking myself the simple question: what issues are these young women dealing
with and finding stressful on a daily basis?
I found my simple answers during our focus group: family and parents, peers, and boys. Unfortunately the analysis was not so
simple. I examined how the girls talked
about these identified stressors, how they interacted with family, peers, and
boys, and then I looked at how they deal with this stress. This is where the theory came in. I realized that all of my previous research
was inappropriate. The young women I
worked with did not deal with stress by binging and purging, by cutting and
burning, or by taking drugs or alcohol.
I thought, “maybe they are still too young” or “maybe they are just not
telling us”, but the reality seems to be that they are simply supporting each
other as they test the waters of adulthood.
Growing up female in the United States is hard. Young women have to deal with significant societal pressures to be beautiful or to be white while combating violent racism and sexism at the same time. Young women in the United States have shown a higher prevalence of unhealthy coping mechanisms such as eating disorders, substance abuse, and self-injury than their male counterparts (Pipher, 1994), and researchers such as Carol Gilligan and Naomi Wolfe (1997) have become famous describing the different social and institutional obstacles that women must face as they mature.
I wanted to conduct this research because I have been aware of the problems that young women face, but I was interested in hearing it right from the source. I wanted to know what girls feel and think about and how they deal with life. The research turned out nothing like I suspected it would, and I am so glad that it did. This experience has been eye opening and empowering for me as a woman who desires to work on gender issues in the future.
Theoretical Frameworks
In
the following section, I will outline two different ways that feminist theory
approaches the development of young women.
Feminist theory deals with gender inequities in society. It is an important framework through which to view the status of young women in America. Feminist theorists see the capitalist, patriarchal system that much of the Western world lives under as oppressive towards women, people of color, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, and non-Christians. This oppression manifests itself towards women in many arenas such as rape and sexual assault, sexual harassment, discrimination in economic opportunities, encouragement of unhealthy body types and unrealistic beauty standards, physical and mental abuse, etc.
Often women cannot see the oppression that they are living in. Sexism is so ingrained in our society that young women conform to it in a process of hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci, p.274). Hegemony occurs when oppressed people participate in the establishment because their lives are so deeply fused with it that they cannot see the system for what it is. Women trapped in these institutions are raised to believe in the naturalness and rightness of this system, and consequently forced to support that system.
The internalization of oppressive
ideas is especially detrimental to African-American young women who must
confront internalized racism as well as sexism. As Patricia Hill Collins (1991) writes, "Domination operates
by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African-American women and members of
subordinated groups to replace individual and cultural ways of knowing with the
dominant group's specialized thought".
African-American women’s experience has also been systematically excluded from mainstream socialization, making Black women virtually invisible. This exclusion makes formation of identity difficult for African-American women. Because our society refuses to acknowledge “Black woman” as a valid and real identity, these women must balance between being a woman and being African-American.
Though much is wrong with our society today, it is important to note that not all feminist views focus on what is wrong with girls today, but on what is right. Young women have, through all of history shown an amazing ability to triumph through the worst of conditions. As Alice Walker (1974) describes in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, women have always managed to express themselves and find empowering ways to live in the midst of oppression.
This other view of feminism sees how Pipher’s (1994) analysis of young girls today can often be damaging because it continues to focus on a description of young women as weak and unable to rise above their challenges. Focusing on eating disorders and self-harm also rewards sickness by bringing attention only to girls who are displaying this behavior. This thinking does not attempt to diminish the severity of self-harm, but merely to show how creative and strong young women really are and how these traits deserve as much if not more attention so that young women can grow up believing in themselves instead of believing that they are set up to fail.
The other
important aspect to consider in this feminist analysis is how much race plays
an important role. For example, Pipher
(1994) mainly looks at the experience of white girls, while the young women in
this study are all African American.
Several studies showed that white women have more problems with
disliking their bodies than black girls tend to. For example, Ingrassia and Springen (1995) stated, “there’s
growing evidence that black and white girls view their bodies in dramatically
different ways…while 90 percent of the white junior-high and high school girls
studied voiced dissatisfaction with their weight, 70 percent of
African-American teens were satisfied with their bodies” (66). Given this evidence, it is difficult to say
if the unity and support I witnessed during my research would be present in a
study of white girls.
Methods and
Setting
I designed this research project to attempt to evaluate what issues a group of 11-14 year old African-American girls at the YWCA find themselves dealing with or that cause stress for them. The information from the research will be used in developing an after-school program to provide young women with the empowering tools they can use to cope with the difficult situations in growing up.
Evangeline Simmons, a fellow Warren Wilson College sociology student and I conducted the research for this project. We participated in the after school Support Our Students (S.O.S.) program and observed student interactions. We also conducted a focus group discussion for and hour and a half one afternoon with six girls. The focus group could be considered the meat of my research because it provides the most straightforward answers to my research question, which is, what are the main issues that young girls are finding stressful? The field note observations were useful for examining interactions between students and for analyzing how the girls talk about the different issues in their lives. Following the focus group I handed out questionnaires that recounted basically the same questions as the focus group. I gave this questionnaire to all the focus group participants, but I was only able to get one back. Evangeline followed the focus group with personal interviews on her subject of peer perceptions about dating and violence.
The YWCA of Asheville runs the S.O.S. program. It is a program that is designed to have parents, students, teachers, and program facilitators work together in support of the students. Kathy*, a friendly and outgoing woman is who intimate with each student in the program, is in charge. She is also on close terms with all of their parents, and manages to keep a thorough understanding of how each student is doing most of the time. The other two program facilitators are Mary and Jennifer, whose main job is to keep the students in line and keep them from arguing, and to facilitate learning and healthy interactions, etc. Mary and Jennifer also do a lot of helping with homework.
The program takes place in the
classroom section of a large church downtown.
Every day after school there is one hour of homework time from 4pm to
5pm. At 5pm, the students have
activity. This varies from going to the
park to having a sex education session.
Every month the girls get to go out with Kathy for dinner where they
discuss some topic of interest. The
girls get to choose where to eat and what to talk about for
their “Girls Night Out”.
The
students who participate in the group are not always consistent. Several students that we observed at the
beginning stopped coming altogether, and others began coming later in the
semester. The six girls used in our
focus group have very consistent
attendance, and therefore often appear in the field
note observations.
The
information from the focus group, the field note observations, and the one
*All names have been changed.
questionnaire response were all analyzed using the
Nud*ist program. I categorized my focus
group transcription and observations into eleven main categories and 16
subcategories. I then used these
categories to make a qualitative analysis of what specific elements of their
lives the girls found to be stressful, what caused this stress, how they talked
about it, how they interact with stress-causing individuals, and finally how
they usually deal with these stressors.
The girls specifically
identified three areas that cause them the most stress. These are ‘other people’, which I called
peers, boys, and family. Each of the
identified stressors deals with a relationship to other humans. This paper will discuss each of these areas
and analyze what role each plays in the lives of these girls, how they discuss
and interact about these areas, and what these areas mean to their experiences
as adolescent girls.
It is important to mention
that during the focus group, the girls also identified school as a source of
stress and concern, though it is not one of the main categories. During the focus group Vanessa was asked
what kinds of things she thought about during the day. She answered by saying, “Oh I be thinking
about my grades. My grades are very
important like, I think about tests and how I’m gonna do this…” Other students
identified school as something they must devote a lot of attention and energy
to. Maureen stated, “I think about how
hard my work is”.
Though the girls mentioned
school on several occasions, it was not identified as a significant source of
real stress. I believe that it is important
to recognize the role of school in the lives of these girls, but I would like
to focus on the three main areas of life that these girls claimed to be most
concerned with.
Parents whose children are
in the S.O.S. program have, for the most part, a good relationship with the
program facilitator. There is a Parent
Handbook to the S.O.S. program, and the facilitator stays in contact with every
student’s mother or father. The
relationship that these children’s parents maintain indicates the high level of
commitment and involvement in their children’s lives.
The girls in the S.O.S
program mentioned their parents in several capacities. During the focus group, parents were
identified as often causing stress.
Parents caused stress in two main ways: rules and embarrassment. None of the girls described guardians as
playing a role in their lives, but several did point to other family members as
significant, as we shall see later on.
Going to the mall, the
Community Center, and the movies are common weekend activities for these young
women. When asked what kinds of
activities they participated in, going to the mall was second to home
activities such as watching television or talking on the phone. The third most popular activity was going to
the movies. For example, Jania and Lori
discussed their activities this way:
J: When you gonna go to the movies to see your
little boy?
L: I know, I do wanna go see somebody though. That’s why I like to go at night cause everybody be there.
These activities all require going out, and because the young women are between 11 and 14 years old, they also require permission from their parents. This proves to be problematic when the girls desire more freedom than parents are willing to give. More often than not, parents were reported to be stricter when it came to dating boys. Lori illustrated this during the focus group when she was discussing wanting to go out to the movies with her boyfriend, “I wanted to go to the movies like, so my brother was gonna go, and I said I can go by myself. But then my friend couldn’t go [or brother], then my parents [said] you can’t go by yourself.” Kira and Tamara expressed similar sentiments: “K: My mom won’t let me go to the mall by myself. TM: If you go with a friend they don’t mind, but if you go by yourself then…"
The
girls demonstrated that they are well aware of how their parents feel about
them dating boys. When asked during the
focus group when it was okay to start kissing and ‘doing things’ with boys Kira
commented, “It’s not really okay now, but I still do, but I know what my
parents would say. Yeah, my mom would
kill me.”
The
young women also noted the discrepancy between their parents’ attitudes towards
boys when they were very young and now that they are beginning to become
adults:
K: Your parents be like oh how cute when you like
little, but when you get older they be like
L: When you get older they be like
K&L: uh uh.
TM: it’s like when you’re small they
don’t care,
The way that the girls
discuss boys with their parents also caused some frustration and embarrassment,
though it was mostly expressed in a light-hearted way. Kira and Lori talked about being teased by
their parents when discussing boys. “K:
So when you say somebody asked you out, they be like where you going? L: It’s like no; they didn’t ask me out to
go nowhere. Then she keep saying where
you going, where you going.”
Parents
also cause stress for the girls through embarrassment. This sentiment was not expressed by all of
the girls, but was brought up by several of them. The main place that parents were able to cause embarrassment was
at the mall. Kira commented, “they be
calling you out, and they be embarrassing you in the mall, that’s the worst
place to be embarrassed cause everybody’s there.”
The
stress that girls recognized being caused by their parents was mainly caused by
being embarrassed in public places or in discussion about boys and in the rules
that they set. These issues seem like
fairly normal parental issues during adolescents when teens are attempting to
assert independence from their families.
In the literature the main problems I found that dealt with
daughter/parent relationships explored separation anxiety and learning to form
an identity as a woman at the exact time that young girls are supposed to be
pulling away from their main role model for this development, their
mother. Stress about separating from
parents and developing a sense of womanhood at the same time has been discussed
in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994) by
Mary Pipher. Pipher states, “daughters
are as confused as mothers by our culture’s expectations. Girls are encouraged to separate from their
mothers and devalue their relationships to them…growing up requires adolescent
girls to reject the person whom they are most closely identified” (103).
The
young women in the S.O.S program did not explicitly express such concerns;
however, the only time that we discussed parents was during the focus group,
which could paint an inaccurate picture of all of the different elements of a
parent/daughter relationship.
Other
members of the family played an important role in the lives of the young women
I studied. Brothers were discussed in
several different capacities, once as a figure to take out aggression on, once
as an annoyance, and once as someone to confide in. Vanessa mentioned that she talked about sex and other issues with
her older brother. She denied
discussing the same things very much with her friends.
When
Kira was asked how she dealt with stress, she said, “I hit my brother. I just start a fight with him. Annoy him or something, it makes him feel
bad, but it makes me feel better.”
Tamara also expressed a tendency to “get on [her] brother” when she was
stressed out.
I believe that these two
brother scenarios deal with younger brothers, while Vanessa’s brother is
older. Vanessa interacts with her
brother in a different way, using him for advice and not for stress
relief. She also mentioned
participating in activities with her brother.
When she was taking care of an electronic baby as part of the “Baby
Think it Over” project, Vanessa and her brother took the electronic baby to the
mall. Kira and Tamara did not express
that they participated in constructive activities with their brothers.
There
are several instances of interacting with extended family that I believe it is
important to highlight. Extended family
can often be a significant part of young people’s lives. Both Kira and Tamara discussed members of
their extended families during the focus group. Kira talked about how her grandmother nags her to clean her room
and does and even better job of embarrassing her at the mall than her parents
do. “She be checking out old people
shoes when I be going to buy me some shoes.
She be getting all in, oh Lord…” She also mentioned having an uncle in
her life who takes her out places and out to eat.
Tamara
revealed that she felt close to an aunt that she could confide in easier than
anyone else in her family.
Like sometimes I call my aunt. My momma call my aunt up and then our aunt is like, let me talk to them childrens. So I talk to her and I tell her about things that going on in school and stuff, what I’m dealing with at home and stuff.
Family interactions are a very important aspect of
these young women’s lives. They depend
on family for guidance and growth, yet still desire to resist parental and
grandparental rules and conditions.
This contradiction can cause stress for young women who are torn between
a desire to grow up and the wishes and recommendations of parents who care
about them.
Other Girls
(Peers)
Much
of the literature that I have read concerning interactions between girls
focuses on girls’ ways of interacting in relation to boys’ ways of
interacting. Joyce Canaan (1999) and
Barrie Thorne (1993) have closely studied these different interactions. Canaan’s article mostly examined modes of
communication such as passing notes.
She discussed how status within groups of girls is determined by who has
the inside information about what is happening in the lives of the most popular
students. For example, the most popular
girl is upset or stressed out, and the person that she talks to about it receives
improves status. Thorne (1993), on the
other hand questions the widely accepted theories that girls and boys interact
in totally different ways. She
challenges what she calls the different-cultures approach by showing how girls
and boys may have more similarities than researchers choose to recognize. Different-cultures theory often describes
girls as more likely to work in small groups and pairs. These pairs, or alliances, shift so that
girls are always hanging out with someone.
This kind of behavior was common with Kira and Maureen, Jania and Lori,
and Vanessa and Angela, except that these pairs remained constant and were not
subject to the underground conflict and elitism that different-culture theory
describes. Throughout most of the
study, these girls worked within the abovementioned pairs. They sat together during homework time, ran
around together at Stephens-Lee Park, sat together during the focus group, and
generally hung out at other times.
For example, all of the
S.O.S students had to sand and paint chairs for a community auction that the
YWCA held. Jania and Lori worked
together on the same chair, and Kira and Maureen also worked together on a
different chair.
Tamara and Ramona, on the
other hand, spent most of their time sitting and working alone. To go back to the chair example, Ramona
sanded her chair with Evangeline, Nikki (a girl who did not come very often and
kept more to herself), and me, while the other girls worked in their usual pairs. Tamara sat by herself during the focus group
and through most of the homework time at the church. Tamara mentioned this loneliness during the focus group. She said that she faced ridicule at school
and that the other girls in the focus group probably had lots of friends, but
that nobody at her school wanted to be her friend. Tamara's exclusion was exacerbated by the fact that she does not
attend the same school as everyone else.
Tamara acknowledged her
exclusion by whispering into the microphone of the tape recorder so that others
in the group could not hear her. She
stated that she had trouble with being called names and being excluded
especially at school. This teasing
carried on during the S.O.S after school times, but boys were often the
perpetrators of teasing of Tamara. This
exclusion and teasing is very common in Thorne (2000), Pipher (1994), and
Canaan’s (1999) work about the way young men and women interact. As Pipher (1994) and Wolfe show, this can be
a significant source of stress for the young people being teased or excluded.
Tamara exhibited proof of this stress because she did not feel comfortable
addressing her feelings to the whole focus group.
In
her discussion of the way girls act Thorne also mentioned conflict. She related
that different-culture theory portrays conflict between females as under the
surface. This includes talking about
each other behind the other’s backs and switching alliances in order to cause
conflicts. Thorne describes it this
way; “Girls often carry out the activity of constructing and breaking dyads and
maneuvering alliances through talk with third parties” (94). The girls in the S.O.S. program did not talk
extensively about each other behind each other’s backs, except in a playful
manner. Conflict among these girls was
much more open and freely expressed.
Conflict
was expressed within small friendship groups with other females, as I’ll
discuss later, bit it also came up within the larger group. Canaan (1999) demonstrated that girls were
less likely than boys to raise conflict out loud in group situations, and more
likely to express animosity through silent or manipulative maneuvers. I did not find this to be true. The girls I studied did not hold back any
more than boys in overtly expressing conflict.
The same was true for out loud teasing in the group sessions, which was
a common activity of both sexes.
Many
times conflict came up within the tight-knit pairs, but was fleeting or was
quickly solved. For example, Maureen
and Kira argued over an incident at the mall when they got in trouble with
their parents. Kira started by saying,
“…me and some friends go out to the mall; one of my friends got me in
trouble.” Maureen responded, “No, it
wasn’t my fault.” Kira: “Yes it was okay.”
Maureen: “No because no.” This
conflict quickly ended when the subject was changed, but it was obviously
something they had argued about before.
Jania
and Lori demonstrated similar behavior when we were discussing peer pressure
during the focus group:
L: I’m not a boring person, but I don’t really,
sometimes I do things, but I don’t really on the weekends, wash my clothes…
J: Lori, we’re talking about peer pressure, doing
things that your friends wanna do.
L: I know, I’m just saying that I don’t really go through that.”
Jania and Lori often argued in an authoritative manner. For example, in this last quote, Jania was pointing out to Lori what she was doing wrong. On another occasion, Jania made Lori sit down and have her finger nails sanded by an electric wood sander. Several times she jumped and said “Ow”, but Jania told her to continue.
Vanessa
and Angela displayed a different kind of conflict than any of the other
girls. It is difficult to know what to
make of these interactions, and I am not sure if it is even possible to
describe it as conflict. At
Stephens-Lee Park Vanessa and Angela and I went to sit out in the van because
they were tired of being inside the gym.
One of the S.O.S boys named Marcus soon followed us. This is an excerpt from my field notes,
which illustrates the dynamic between Vanessa and Angela and Marcus.
Angela and
Vanessa sat in the back seat, and Marcus sat in the next one up. He asked Angela to sit with him, and he
rubbed her back for her. [In the field note I mentioned that Vanessa had said
earlier that Angela and Marcus might be dating.] During this, Vanessa kept whispering in Marcus's ear. When they whispered to each other they bent
their heads together in a very personal and close way. After the whispering Angela
did not seem to be bothered or jealous, though from what Vanessa was saying
Marcus and Angela were going together.
After the whispering, Vanessa was teasing Marcus out loud. Vanessa kept teasing them, and eventually
they were wrestling over the seat. She
kept grabbing him and eventually she stole his hairbrush. Angela, who is
quieter, left the van, and I tried to get Vanessa and Marcus to stop, as they
appeared to be causing some real pain to each other. They did not stop. Marcus
pulled on Vanessa's ponytail, which is a weave, so it didn't hurt her, but it
physically prevented her from moving.
Vanessa screamed and laughed a lot, and this went on for a while. Eventually, Vanessa escaped from the back
door of the van, but Marcus had her jacket. They ran around outside the van and
eventually decided to make a truce and they traded items. This happened with a bit more hair pulling
and yelling. Marcus went over to Angela on the playground and asked her to sit
with him in a little playground dome.
Vanessa was yelling to Angela not to sit anywhere with him. She did, though, and Vanessa and some of the
other kids went over there and proceeded to chat and tease.
The way that Angela and
Vanessa dealt with this situation was very interesting to me. Angela seemed to want to avoid
confrontation, and she left the van.
She did not indicate that she was annoyed that Vanessa and Marcus had
begun to fight in what appeared to be a fairly flirtatious manner. When Marcus eventually went over to the
playground to sit with Angela, Vanessa yelled to Angela that she should not be
hanging out with a boy like that. Her
warnings show friendship and concern; that she worries about Angela hanging
around with Marcus. But Vanessa yelled
this warning across the whole playground, so it is also possible that she was
just trying to further irritate Marcus.
Perhaps Vanessa and Angela
use play to negotiate their friendship.
Because they often interact on this level of play and teasing, it is
possible that this is just how their friendship operates.
It is difficult in this
situation to determine how Vanessa and Angela's friendship is affected by the
presence of a boy like Marcus, but I think it is safe to say that there is a
definite effect. It is also difficult
to tell if this was a situation of conflict or merely one of play. My suggestion would be that Angela was
feeling some sort of resentment at the refocusing of attention but could not
express it either because of fear or shyness or because of the intricacies of
her friendship with Vanessa. The fact
that Angela left the van leads me to believe that she felt some kind of
dissatisfaction with the situation.
Later on, I will revisit this field note for an analysis of interactions
between girls and boys.
During
the focus group Evangeline and I brought up the subject of being concerned
about situations or actions that their friends could be involved in that might
cause them to worry. The main concern
that the girls identified was fear of pregnancy. Jania indicated this by saying, “I don’t care what they be doing
as long as they don’t get pregnant.
They get pregnant, then it’s my business cause that’s my friend.”
Our
discussion of pregnancy was very interesting to analyze. The girls in the group are not sexually
active, yet they have a fairly advanced knowledge of sex and pregnancy. They have also experienced through real life
how pregnancy can seriously affect a young girl’s life. Pregnancy was portrayed during the focus
group and during several sex education discussions as something most definitely
negative. Vanessa talked about
pregnancy this way:
Sometimes I think about teen pregnancy and how it would feel if I was actually pregnant like…A lot of little girls, they ain’t even fully, how they gonna take care of a baby? L: When they can’t take care of themselves. VA: Amen…I know a person, really personally… and they pregnant, and I don’t think she ready to have it cause she real little and you know the baby gonna have low birth weight uh and a lot of things premature, just a lot of things wrong with it. It ain’t gonna be a healthy baby cause she’s not fully developed, and I don’t think she ready to carry all that weight.
Vanessa’s knowledge of the nature of pregnancy is
fairly developed. She participated in
Baby Think it Over, and all of the girls have attended a sex education class
session once every week for the whole semester. The girls seem to have a concept of what pregnancy can mean for
young girls and of how they ought to look out for each other in that respect.
Gossip
is a major factor in young people’s lives.
During the focus group we asked what the girls talk about among their
friends. The resounding answer was
“other people!” Lori stated, “All
people do is talk about other people” and Kira backed her up by stating, “We
always talk about other people.” Jania
admitted to gossiping in this manner too, though she maintained that she talks
on the phone to her friends about “reality and real things, not people… like
what’s going on in my life, how I feel about something.”
During
the focus group the girls often talked about other people’s sexual
activities. Kira mentioned a boy that
she knew that was short, twelve years old, and not a virgin anymore “because of
certain happenings with [her] friend’s cousin.” This fact was pretty interesting to Kira and other members of the
group who knew the person. This
phenomenon was repeated in the discussion of the girl they all know who is
having a baby and appears to be too small and underdeveloped to healthfully
give birth to it. Vanessa, Lori, and
Jania discussed the pregnant girl, stating that she acted slow, walked slow,
and was “forever smelling.” Though they showed genuine concern for her
situation when they discussed her pregnancy, the girls also scrutinized and
gossiped about her actions and appearance.
Several
times I heard the girls talking about other young women in the S.O.S program
behind their backs. During one homework
session Jumpy and Vanessa and Winston were talking about a time at the movies
when Vanessa had put her tongue on the back of Jumpy’s neck and he had jumped
away, earning the nickname “Jumpy”.
Somehow during this conversation somebody mentioned that it might have
been Lori’s tongue. The girls’ response
to that was, “if it was Lori, check if you got rabies”.
Another
instance where talking behind each other’s backs occurred was while we were
sanding chairs at the YWCA. Nikki,
Ramona, Evangeline, and I were working at one chair, and yellow dust was flying
all over everywhere getting in our eyes and hair. Kira’s mom pulled up while we were working, and Kira got ready to
go home. As she was leaving Ramona
yelled, “Bye Kira!” Nikki, a fairly
quiet girl, looked at us and said, “now she know Kira don’t like her.”
This
type of talking behind each other’s backs was documented in Thorne’s
description of how different culture theory sees interactions between girls,
but it was not a common occurrence in my experience at the S.O.S. program. Face to face confrontation and conflict was
much more common, but still rarely bad natured.
Over
all the girls in the S.O.S. program displayed a certain level of devotion to
each other, especially in the face of their male counterparts, as we shall see
in the next section. Their conflicts
were almost always between friends and lacked real viciousness or anger. The few occasions where girls talked about
other girls behind their backs were isolated and uncommon.
One incident, which is
described later, occurred where two boys were telling a rumor about
Angela. Angela wanted to know what they
were saying about her, so Kristy came over and told Angela the rumor. This kind of camaraderie leads me to believe
that these girls work together and support each other instead of having a
complex, but superficially determined hierarchy of popularity as Canaan (1999)
described. Devotion to each other
allows the girls to maintain confidence and resist the pressures society puts
on women. One must wonder then if girls
without a tight social network or partnership are a greater risk without having
someone to depend on and confide in.
This is the topic I have avoided
writing about until the end. The big
b-o-y-s. The topic of boys was the most
commonly identified source of interest and stress by the sheer fact of how
often the girls talked about boys.
Because the S.O.S. program is coed I was able to observe many
occurrences of girls interacting with boys, and I also got to hear during the
focus group how girls talk about boys in an all female setting. These contrasting settings allow for several
different angles from which to view the boy question.
One might wonder at the
exclusion of homosexual possibilities from this text, but the attitude that I
observed of the students in S.O.S towards homosexuality is one of humor. They do not generally treat the subject with
seriousness and respect. Often times
the boys in the group made derogatory remarks about homosexuality, especially
during the sex education sessions.
These comments always invoked laughter from the larger group of both
girls and boys.
Several times the girls made
references to homosexuality with in their group of friends. For example, one afternoon after we were
sanding chairs at the YWCA, Kira accidentally bumped into Danielle’s arm while
we (Evangeline, Kathy, and I) were all walking on the sidewalk. Danielle said to Kira, “I didn’t know that
you swung that way Kira!” Kira
protested while Kathy interrupted and asked, “Swing what way?” The girls giggled and told Kathy that she
wouldn’t understand.
Lydia, the only white girl
in the group gave the impression of having an androgynous attitude towards her
appearance. This does not indicate
anything about her sexuality, but at the same time she was not a fully
integrated member of the group. I am
uncertain if this has more to do with dissimilarities because of race, or
gender presentation, or something else.
Lydia was not shown any disrespect, but she was not usually included
either.
Because the group did not
generally accept homosexual relationships as a reality, the focus on romantic
relationships was about men. This
subject is broad, so I would like to first talk about the way the girls discuss
men, and then cover how they actually interact with boys.
The girls talked about boys
in several important and distinct ways.
They identified boys as an annoyance, then as inferior in some way. Labeling boys as inferior is affirming for
girls and helps them build unity and support with each other. The girls also discussed each other’s
experiences with boys in a way that seems to give higher status to the more
knowledgeable. The following section
expands upon the ways that girls talk about boys in their lives.
Through the focus group,
boys were labeled as one of the main causes of stress. This stress comes both from male peers
bothering and harassing the girls and from romantic relationships with
boys. Kira noted several times that she
had trouble with male peers at school:
I be cussing somebody out at school cause people
they be, they be annoying you, some boys be annoying you and stuff, and you be
ready to cuss somebody out…
Some boys, they think they like smarter than girls, but you know girls actually smarter than boys cause we’re born with a nub in our brain that they don’t have till they’re 11.
Jania who stated, “Women can take more pressure,
peer pressure and stuff”, mirrored the last assertion about female intellectual
superiority. Kira backed her up, “we’re
wiser in the end; we know what common sense is… some men are okay, but just
some men, just some men…”
Kira’s
final comments about men sound relatively sophisticated for an 11 year
old. She expresses exasperation with
men in a way that might indicate that she has some knowledge about them. Jania, who actually has a boyfriend, also
spoke of female superiority, but she did not display the same frustration with
boys that Kira did.
The
way the girls talked about female superiority seems to be an empowering point
for them. It is possible that their
belief about their own strength helps them to handle the stress that boys
cause. For example, Kira talked about
wanting to cuss out and beat up boys at school who bother her. This indicates that she does not feel
inferior to them or that she has to take their harassment simply because she is
a girl.
This
empowerment also helps build a unity between the girls, as I mentioned in the
last section. Often during the focus
group, the girls would back each other’s statements up with words of approval
or by expanding upon the opinion. The
next quotation shows how the girls expand upon each other’s ideas and create a
communal opinion.
The
empowerment of believing in their own strength was visible again during the
focus group, when we discussed what an ideal relationship is. The girls could clearly see what they
deserved from a relationship with a man:
EV: Well, what do you think a good relationship is
like if you have a boyfriend, what’s a good relationship?
K: You should, you could talk to ‘em.
J: Communicate.
K: Yeah.
J: and, and
VA: Trust.
J: and you, y’all have stuff in common, and you know
that that person won’t get jealous if you talking to somebody else like it was
another boy and you just talking to him as a friend, they don’t get jealous.”
Vanessa followed these statements by explaining several bad relationships that she and women she knew had been in. She discussed one relationship that she had had where the boy was very jealous of her talking to other boys, but then turned around and flirted with other girls. Vanessa described how she would not put up with that kind of behavior.
“I talked to another boy, like say I was talking to another boy and we could’ve, I could just give him a friendly hug, and it’s like “what you doing with him?” “Nothing”, and you know how that go, and anyway, when he be like talking to other people, I be on his case like oh, “you better stop touching her, what you think you doing” smacking him and stuff like that, but he ain’t never put his hands on me, cause if he put his hands on me, he be in jail somewhere…”
The belief in the strength
of women could possibly come from the girl’s home situations. Many of the girls mentioned their mothers,
aunts, and grandmothers when we discussed stress that families cause. The only male family members mentioned were
brother and uncles, generally relationships that do not have the same role
modeling set up that the mother and grandmother relationship have.
The
girls talk fairly often about boyfriends and who is dating whom, and what kind
of physical affection people they know are participating in. Jania was the only girl in the focus group
with a verified, real boyfriend. She
discussed their relationship a little bit during the focus group.
J: Well me personally, since I have a boyfriend, we
talk about a lot of stuff, we don’t really tease, but like if we tease it’s not
like about big stuff, it’s about little bitty stuff and then we stop before
someone gets mad.
L: How old is he anyway?
J: I can’t tell you.
L: 15
J: He got left back, he’s stupid.
We discussed kissing and who had kissed people and
who hadn’t. Kira claimed to have kissed
a boy in third grade, the same boy who stole a bottle of his mother’s perfume
and gave it to Kira. Jania claimed to
have never kissed anybody, but later admitted, “I will if I like the person.”
The way that the girls discuss kissing and dating appears to give status to the more experienced. Kira, who is 11, talked a lot about having had boyfriends and knowledge of men. For example, Evangeline asked whether girls had to do things like kiss in order to have a boyfriend. Kira responded by saying, “no, but it’s more fun… cause he spend money on you.” Williams’ (1999) article on teenage girls’ representation of themselves as invulnerable and manipulating in sexual relationships seems applicable here. Williams (1999) talked about how girls present a front of maturity to protect them in relationships. Though they are still kids, the girls she studied attempt to display nasty or shocking knowledge about sex. These mechanisms help protect the girls from being hurt in romantic relationships or protect them from having to be vulnerable. Kira is not interested in a love relationship or in receiving care and comfort from a significant other, she is merely interested in the benefits that such a relationship might have for her social status and for the pure fun of it. Using Williams’ analysis, Kira may be demonstrating this attitude towards relationships to make herself appear sophisticated.
When it comes to the actual act of
sex the girls do not try to claim the same level of experience. For example, Kira tried to get Maureen to
admit that she had done something with a boyfriend back in Washington. Jania addressed her about it:
J: Y’all had relations?
M: What, who me?
J: Y’all had intercourse, y’all had
relations?
M: I’m too young to do that.
Maureen’s attitude represents well the feeling that
most of the girls have: sex this young can be pretty dangerous. This is best exemplified when the girls
asked us about our own sexual experiences.
At the end of the focus group Kira asked Evangeline and I if we were
virgins. They responded to our answers
with giggles and shock when I told them that I lost my virginity at 14. Their display of shock demonstrates how far
removed sex still is from experience for them.
This could be credit to the sex education classes that they receive as
part of the S.O.S program.
Through
their discussion of boys, one can see how the girls regard them as an important
issue in life, something that takes up a lot of time, thought, and energy, but
not as superior beings that they should look to for validation and
support. The way the girls discuss the
superiority of women and how flippant Kira and others are about relationships
leads me to believe that these girls do not feel dependency on boys or on
attention from them.
The
attitude that this group of girls has shown towards men may be very much in
line with the feminist framework. The
girls have a strong understanding of their experience as women in this world,
which is evidenced by the way that they discussed sexuality in the Sex Ed
classes. They answered questions
accurately, did not participate as much in giggling about sex (though it
definitely happened), or in looking at it as an accomplishment the way that the
male students tended to. Many male
students also displayed sensitivity and maturity too.
These girls also have not,
for the most part, bought into the societal ideal that it is important for
women to be meek in comparison to men; for example, they feel it is appropriate
to beat up boys who offend them. Because they believe in superior female characteristics, these
young women often support and back up each other. Female unity, especially at younger ages is an important principle
of many feminist dialogues.
Throughout the course of the
program I had many opportunities to witness interactions between girls and
boys. There stood out to me three ways
that girls and boys interact at the S.O.S program. These are by separating themselves, through flirtation, and
through physical and verbal teasing.
Flirtation only took place among the older students in the program. It was rare that actual relationships were
formed, and often the line between flirting and teasing was unclear and hard to
discern. Teasing is probably the most
common interaction, taking place within and among all of the students in the
program at various times. Normal
conversations often turn into teasing, and this practice, when harmless, was
also more or less accepted to a certain extent by the facilitators of the
program. First I will discuss how the
students separate themselves by gender, and then I will examine how they use
flirting as a means of interaction. I
will then finish by examining teasing interactions.
The first thing that stood
out to me was the way that girls and boys voluntarily separated themselves in
seating arrangements for homework time and other activities. This was most common among the students who
tended to group anyway. Students who
did not hang out in pairs or groups often sat next to someone of the opposite
sex. Most of my field notes that
include a seating arrangement diagram show small clusters of girls sitting at
one end of the table and a small cluster of boys at the other end. When they are in the larger group this way,
the students spend a lot of time yelling jokes and insults around the
classroom.
This
seating segregation reinforces the fact that girls most often look to other
girls for their friendship and support, as I discussed in the closing paragraph
of the last section examining how the girls verbally express feelings about
boys. They often mix to tease each
other, to gossip about something, or in several cases to flirt.
Flirtation
attempts were fairly common from boys, but Vanessa is the only girl who
regularly went out of her way to flirt with boys. Angela also occasionally flirted, but in a much more reserved
manner. Jania rarely flirted with the
S.O.S. boys, but when she did it was in an authoritative manner.
Vanessa’s
method of flirting is the most blatant and pronounced. She often spent her homework time trying to
get attention from boys or being in arguments with them. For example, during one homework session
“Vanessa kept referring to Winston as her boyfriend. At one point he was showing me a video game on his calculator,
and Vanessa was across the room saying his name over and over … He was saying,
“Hold on!” When Winston had trouble
sitting still at the end of the day, Vanessa was saying, “look at my boyfriend,
he’s all drugged up!”“
Jania
coyly flirted with one boy who was only in the program for a day. This is an excerpt from my field notes:
Jania was whispering questions to the new boy, who was white and had apparently attended the summer YWCA program before. Mary asked him where he goes to school, and he said at Enka. I asked where that is, and Jania and Lori giggled. Jania said, “It’s out in the boondocks.” Then she said sorry to him, but we were all giggling a bit. Then Andy [the new boy] and Jania talked about the summer camp. Andy said, “She never talked this much last summer. She just sat in the back like this.” And he bit the top of his water bottle and put his head down. He also mentioned some boy that had been interested in Jania. Andy said, “you liked him.” Jania: “He liked me!” Andy: “You liked him.” Jania: “He liked me.”
The
girls’ flirtation with boys is very much on surface level. The girls do not really invest themselves in
these interactions, and can switch whom they are flirting with at any moment. The fact that the girls are not emotionally invested
with the people they are flirting with reinforces the earlier assertion that
the girls function independently of their male counterparts and only flirt in
this way as a means of testing their womanhood and appeal and as a way of
asserting their independence and maturity.
The line between flirting
and teasing is very fine, and often difficult to see at all. Much of the interactions between girls and
boys were of a teasing nature. From my
field notes I recognized two different ways of teasing. Those are physical and verbal. Verbal teasing often took place in the
classroom setting, in passing, or when there were a lot of people around. Verbal teasing could even arise in the
middle of a sex education session, but this always resulted in disciplinary
consequences.
One example of verbal
teasing took place one afternoon just as the program session was winding
up. A group of the students were
sitting around the tables waiting for 6 pm to come. The teasing began with rumors.
First was a rumor that Jumpy ate clit. He responded by saying, “Aw, why you always gotta be spreading things about me?” There was a lot of laughing and other comments were thrown around until Kathy told them to stop harassing Jumpy. Eventually Jumpy said that he knew a rumor about Angela. He whispered it to Vanessa, then walked around the room and whispered it to Winston. Kristy (who only attended one session that I was there for) figured out what the rumor was and told Angela who had moved to sit next to Kristy. Angela had food and had just told Winston that she would feed him if he told her the rumor. She gave Kristy some food for telling her.
Often the verbal teasing was of a sexual manner such
as Jumpy eating clit. Sexual comments
arise as a way for the students to begin discussing and dealing with adult
ideas, without having to commit to a mature conversation. This is similar to the way that young girls
flirt playfully to being testing their sexuality and independence. Although, as I mentioned before, students
can deal with sex in a sophisticated manner, it seems that joking is safer.
Physical
teasing is another common way that girls interact with boys. Physical teasing was less common in the
classroom, though I did observe it several times. On one occasion Vanessa and Jumpy were physically interacting in
the classroom:
Jumpy said to me, “excuse me while I beat this young woman.” He had taken off his belt and both him and Vanessa were laughing. Vanessa and Jumpy then began throwing pencils around the room at each other. Jumpy fell on the floor, and Vanessa hit him with a marker. Winston jumped in and hit Vanessa’s leg with his belt.
The physical teasing that the students were involved
in often seemed severe. For example,
when Vanessa and Marcus were fooling around in the van at Stephens-Lee park
they showed no mercy for each other.
The most interesting thing about this is that, although it was fierce
playing, the students were always laughing; things did not get taken so far
that people got seriously hurt.
Another interesting aspect
is who participates in this kind of physical teasing. I witnessed Vanessa’s physical teasing with boys the most, and
she is also one of the most common flirters.
This indicates that teasing and flirting interactions may be more
closely related than I originally thought.
It seems to me that the
students in this group use verbal and physical interactions to begin playing
with adult ideas such as sexual relationships.
They use sexual talk as means of insulting, and they often touch each
other as a way of teasing. Through
these interactions girls still maintain unity with girls and boys continue
their alliance with other boys, but they mix up the gender barriers as a way of
testing adult waters. This is similar
to the way that the S.O.S. girls dealt with trying to negotiate expanded
autonomy and independence from their parents by slowly pushing limits and
becoming frustrated with old rules and standards.
The
theoretical conclusions that I came up with converge around the idea of
empowerment feminism. My observations
from this study point me to displaying how these girls support each other and
maintain a female solidarity that helps them maneuver through this stage of
adolescence.
Black women have
historically managed to survive through the horrors of United States history
using creative strategies to survive.
Walker (1974) wrote, “How was the creativity of the black woman kept
alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years
black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a black person
to read or write”(2385). She answers this question by showing that black women
used whatever was available to them to express creativity and manage to
survive. For example, women could sing,
create gardens, or sew as a way to express creativity in the face of total
oppression. “And so our mothers and
grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark,
the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed
letter they could not plainly read” (2385).
Walker’s
writing relates to the young women at the S.O.S. program because these girls
are also innovatively coming up with solutions and alternative ways to deal
with society. These creative ways of
coping include supporting each other, believing in female superiority, and
separating themselves from boys enough to maintain female cohesion. Backing each other up is evident in
situations such as this one during the focus group when we were discussing
different kinds of abuse:
V: …Like if you talk about a woman’s weight, and you
keep on, she’ll really feel that way and have low self-esteem—that’s abuse to
me.
J:
Yep, right on sister.
J: Playing mind games with you.
K: Mmmmhmmm.
In this situation Jania validates Vanessa’s statements by verbally supporting her. This is especially important because the girls are discussing types of violent relationships. Showing support for each other around such a significant subject for women helps them to feel solidarity about problems such as violence in relationships.
In
several areas of the focus group I described how the girls discussed female
superiority, and through the section on interactions with boys we discovered
that the girls flirt and tease boys, but maintain a distance that keeps the
genders separate and autonomous.
This
study effectively answered the original research question that I was
exploring. I found out that this
particular group of girls feel that peers, parents, and boys are
stressful. I also managed to have some
insight into the way girls talk about and interact about these stressors. I
believe there is a lot more to look at concerning how adolescent girls deal
with stress, but from this limited research, it is my conclusion that many
girls are finding ways to manage the pressures of growing up in our society by
working together. These girls are on a
path to succeed in growing up without falling into the trap of self-hate that
our society so desperately wants them to.
This conclusion is very
optimistic because this study cannot provide a complete picture of how things
will turn out for the girls involved due to limitations on its duration. It is important to note that this study
could possibly be much more effective if it followed the girls throughout their
entire adolescent experience.
Another important thing to
note is that there are many ways to view the experience of these girls, though
I tried to use grounded theory as I developed an analysis, one can never say
that findings are completely unbiased or affected. I tried to avoid concentrating on only the popular students, but
by virtue of classifying flirtation as a method of interaction, I ignored the
students who do not participate in such rituals. In studying a group it is always easier to focus on the
participants who normally get the most attention, but their experience cannot
speak for the whole in any way.
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