Urban Girls Revisited: Building Strengths

Preface

Preface Niobe Way In response to an absence of girls and women in psychological research, researchers began in the early 1980s, with Carol Gilligan and her students from the School of Education at Harvard University leading the way, to investigate the development of girls and women. This research highlighted girls’ and young women’s strengths and strategies of resistance to conventions of femininity and the ways in which cultural constructions of gender shape girls’ and women’s development (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Jack, 1991; Gilligan, 1982; Taylor et al., 1995). The focus on the development and strengths of girls and women was radical in a field that had long been dominated by the study of boys and men and by a perspective that pathologized girls’ and women’s development. In the midst of this dramatic shift, psychological researchers also began to note other critical absences in the research on human development. Primary among these was a lack of developmental research on girls and women who were part of ethnic minority and/or poor and working-class communities. Although social science research was being conducted with Black and Latino girls and women from poor and working-class communities, the vast majority of these studies were problem oriented, focusing on issues such as teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school, and drug use. By the mid-1990s, however, the situation began to change. A small but significant series of studies began to emerge that focused on the development and strengths of girls and women from ethnic minority and/or poor and working-class communities. In response to this work, Bonnie Leadbeater and I decided to edit a book together that showcased the best of these studies. We were interested in including work in this volume that revealed the ways in which urban girls and young women, in particular, xiii challenged widespread stereotypes of them, created their own identities, and maintained healthy relationships in the midst of discrimination, poverty, and violence. We focused on urban girls and young women because urban contexts provide the setting for much racial and ethnic diversity and because urban girls and young women were particularly likely to be ignored or misrepresented by the media and by the research community. This was the decade when conservative pundits created the notion of the “welfare queen,” and when urban youth, a phrase often confounded by the media and the scholarly community with Black youth, were routinely characterized as neglecting their education in favor of high-risk behavior. Our edited book Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities constituted a sustained effort to bring together diverse scholars who were writing about and with urban girls and young women in ways that recognized their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths. It examined the development not only of Black urban girls but also of Latino and White urban girls. Urban Girls became a staple on the reading lists of many social science courses and was read widely in professional circles. It has informed, along with other books in this genre, programs and policies that seek to help foster girls’ sense of agency and nurture their resilience. Then, an odd thing happened. Just as we were gaining a more complex understanding of girls’and women’s development and improving their lives in concrete ways, there occurred—in academia but swiftly thereafter in the culture at large—a dramatic shift back to a focus on the development of boys and young men. Books on this topic muscled their way into bookstore windows and talk shows (e.g., Gurian, 1998; Kindlon & Thomson, 1999; Pollack , 1998; Way & Chu, 2004). Popular magazines ran title stories on the damage wreaked on boys by current pedagogical and psychological experts. Social scientists and journalists began to refer to a “boy crisis” that had presumably been undiagnosed and left unchecked, largely because academics and psychologists had been overly concerned with helping girls. It was boys, many claimed, who were neglected by researchers and by policy makers. If the 1990s was considered “the decade of the girl” (see Ward, this volume), then the first decade of the twenty-first century became the decade back to the boy. Evidence of this shift included a daylong conference focused on the healthy development of boys and men in 2004 sponsored by the Ms Foundation for Girls and Women. The reasons for this shift are complex and include, most likely, the fact that girls and young women started to do better than boys and men by xiv Preface [3.133.108.241...