Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development

Lyn Mikel Brown; Carol Gilligan

Published by Harvard University Press 1992

Meeting at the Crossroads

Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development

Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674731837

Overview
Contents

About this book

On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.

In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another.

This groundbreaking work offers major new insights into girls' development and women's psychology. But perhaps more importantly, it provides women with the means of meeting girls at the critical crossroads of adolescence, of harkening to the voices of girlhood and sustaining their sell-affirming notes.

Author / Editor information

Brown Lyn Mikel :

Lyn Mikel Brown is Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Colby College.Gilligan Carol :

Carol Gilligan is University Professor at the New York University School of Law.

Reviews

Should sound a national alert to society that even our most privileged girls still pursue normal femininity at great risk to personal and civic health.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	v
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 A Journey of Discovery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 The Harmonics of Relationship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
3 Whistle-Blowers in the Relational World:Three Guides through Childhood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	42
4 Approaching the Wall: Three Guides into Adolescence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
5 Rivers into the Sea: Three Guides through Adolescence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
6 Dancing at the Crossroads Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2013
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Front matter: 8
- Main content: 258
Keywords: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies; Adolescent psychology.; Teenage girls -- Psychology.; Women -- Psychology.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674731837

Hardcover

Published: December 11, 2013
ISBN: 9780674731820