Growing Up Female

Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002, 301 pp., $14.00 paper.

Girl in the Mirror: Mothers and Daughters in the Years of Adolescence by Nancy Snyderman and Peg Streep. New York: Hyperion, 2002, 373 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters by JoAnn Deak with Teresa Barker. New York: Hyperion, 2002, 287 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

Queen Bees & Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, & Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002, 336 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

When Mary Pipher published Reviving Ophelia in 1994, she made public and immensely popular the image of the early adolescent girl as a girl in crisis. Besieged by accounts of girls as victims of a girl-poisoning culture, of depression, suicide, eating disorders, teacher neglect, poor parenting, and sexual violence, parents sat helplessly on the sidelines wondering what they could do to prevent the loss of their early adolescent daughters as "they crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle" (19). Yet hope reared its head for a brief time in the mid- to late 1990s when a new era of Girl Power tantalized parents into thinking that the Girl in Crisis era was over. Strong, athletic, independent, confident, smart girls were touted as the new feminine ideal. However, in 2002, a series of books published in the popular press, including the four reviewed here, cautioned parents, particularly mothers, that the threat of the Bermuda Triangle still lurks, and Girl Power sports a darker side.

Queen Bees & Wannabees and Odd Girl Out are the most widely known of the four books reviewed. During the summer of 2002, the authors of these books were mainstays on morning talk shows, Oprah, and the New York Times Magazine. Both books present an all too familiar story: underneath their nice façade, girls are backbiting, catty, jealous, and duplicitous; they will stop at nothing to get what they want. According to these authors, contemporary girlhood is a world where girls inflict harm on others, typically girls within their own social network, through words, silences, nonverbal gesturing, and subtle exclusionary practices. The girl power culture with its contradictory messages and the media are partially to blame for the meanness of girls as are parents and teachers, but both authors also indict girls themselves.

Rosalind Wiseman, author of QueenBees, is the co-founder of the Empower program, a school-based violence prevention program, and her book centers around short anecdotes and quotes that she has presumably collected from her participants. She purports to take you (the mother) into your daughter's world—Girl World. The rest of the book lays out how scary that world is—both for you and your daughter. She contends that every female has been hurt by her girlfriend at some point in her life; every school has mean girls, and mean girls' parents are in denial that their daughters are mean. Her chapter titles—"Nasty Girls: Teasing, Gossiping, and Reputations," "Power Plays: Group Dynamics and the Rites of Passage," " Pleasing Boys, Betraying Girls"—all point to a bleak world in which even the positive aspect of girls' friendships has a negative side.

In Chapter Three, "The Beauty Pageant," Wiseman echoes what feminist scholars have argued for years: all girls, despite their race, social class, or sexual orientation, are regulated by the dominant code of femininity. They may choose to resist it, to reject it, or to embrace it wholeheartedly, but regardless of their individual choice, their lives are policed and regulated by the Victoria's Secret definition of femininity: "Adolescence is a beauty pageant. Even if your daughter doesn't want to be a contestant, others will look at her as if she is. In Girl World, every one is automatically entered" (77). She also provides an easily accessible explanation of the hegemony of whiteness in the social construction of beauty, arguing that if beauty is defined by "the tall, skinny, blonde with the perky...