Between Voice and Silence

Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship. Jill M. Taylor, Carol Gilligan, & Amy M. Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1995. 253 pp. ISBN 0-674-06880-7. $14.95 paper. What thoughts and feelings do girls from poor and working-class families have about relationships, about school, about their futures, about their sexuality? By listening to the voices of 26 adolescent girls and examining the experience of the listeners, Jill Taylor, Carol Gilligan, and Amy Sullivan have produced a text that answers this question and contributes to our knowledge of the intricate relationship between voice and silence in the lives of girls growing up in marginalized cultures. The 26 girls selected to participate in the Understanding Adolescence Study all attended Boston public schools and were designated as at-risk for dropping out of school or for early motherhood. They were from poor and working-class Hispanic, Italian, Caribbean, or African American families and were interviewed annually for 3 years beginning in their eighth-grade school year. Their own words flow through the text and provide evidence of the tension between speaking up or staying silent. In eighth grade many of the girls voiced their thoughts, feelings, and experiences and also reported have close relationships with mothers and other adult women; 85% of them mentioned having an adult woman mentor, an othermother (p. 117) who encouraged them and validated their experiences by listening to them, understanding them, and taking them seriously. By tenth grade many of the same girls have found that speaking up can lead to reprisals at home and at school. Except for the African American girls, many by tenth grade have stopped telling their mothers about their lives, and all have moved on to high school where they feel nobody listens, nobody cares, and nobody asks. By tenth grade many of the girls identified the pressure for heterosexual relationships and the threat of pregnancy, the lack of support for going outside cultural and familial norms, the socialization to motherhood, and their own fatalistic outlook that something is going to get in the way (p. 180) as forces that compromise their chances to achieve their goals. Themes that emerged from the interviews with the girls were also explored by the women interviewers and by many of the girls' teachers who participated in retreats held during the Understanding Adolescence Study. These retreats provided the participants with the opportunity to listen to the girls as authorities of their own experience, to explore their own thoughts and feelings about race and relationships, and to examine how women might better support girls who are marginalized by class or culture

Active listening · Developmental psychology · Feeling · Human sexuality · Race (biology · Silence · Sociology · Early Childhood Education and Development · Gender Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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