Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships »

Jill McLean Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Education and Human Services, Simmons College.

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

Amy M. Sullivan is a research consultant and a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

More than any other psychologist, Carol Gilligan has helped us to hear girls' voices just when they seem to be blurring and fading or becoming disruptive during the passage into womanhood. When adolescent girls—once assured and resilient—silence or censor themselves to maintain relationships, they often become depressed, and develop eating disorders or other psychological problems. But when adolescent girls remain outspoken it is often difficult for others to stay in relationship with them, leading girls to be excluded or labeled as troublemakers. If this is true in an affluent suburban setting, where much of the groundbreaking research took place, what of girls from poor and working-class families, what of fading womanhood amid issues of class and race? And how might these issues affect the researchers themselves? In Between Voice and Silence Taylor, Gilligan, and Sullivan grapple with these questions. The result is a deeper and richer appreciation of girls' development and women's psychological health.

In an urban public school, among girls from diverse cultural backgrounds—African American, Hispanic, Portuguese, and white—and poor and working-class families, the authors sought a key to the relationship between risk, resistance, and girls' psychological development and health. Specifically, they found cultural differences that affect girls' coming of age in this country. In Between Voice and Silence, the story of the study parallels another, that of African American, Hispanic, and white women who gathered to examine their own differences and to learn how to avoid perpetuating past divisions among women. Together, these two stories reveal an intergenerational struggle to develop relationships between and among women and to hold and respect difference.

Publishers Weekly

Public school girls ``at risk''-for early motherhood, dropping out of school, abusive relationships-are the subject of this collaborative study by three Boston-based psychologists. Earlier ``voice-centered'' (listening to) research on girls in a single-sex private school produced solid evidence for believing that at adolescence, girls lose a sense of self and undergo a developmental crisis that inhibits their expressive faculties. This report focuses on 26 girls in grades eight and nine who are culturally and racially different from one another, from poor and working-class urban backgrounds, who reveal their strategies for navigating the psychological distance between home and school. The researchers speak of their own learning to listen to girls who, at the start of high school, were beginning to silence themselves as the result of personal losses, betrayals and isolation. As with the earlier, landmark study, this important, accessible research establishes the need for bringing women and girls together. Taylor teaches at Simmons College; Gilligan is a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where Sullivan is a doctoral candidate. (Feb.)