Description: Filled with the voices of teenage girls, this book allows us to hear how girls adopt some expectations about gender but strenuously resist others, how they use traditionally feminine means to maintain their independence, and how they recognize and resist pressures to ignore their own needs and wishes.
Brief description: Lyn Mikel Brown is Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Colby College.
Review Quotes: It has been seven years since a much-discussed study by the American Association of University Women identified the phenomenon of girls' diminishing sense of self-worth as they approach adolescence. Since then, [several] books have further lamented the evaporation of young girls' feistiness into hesitancy and self-doubt. Lyn Mikel Brown takes a different tack. In Raising Their Voices, she argues that the popular reception of such books has all but ignored an equally significant phenomenon--girls who 'actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity'...This book is an attempt to provide an alternative prophecy, with the hope that it...will be fulfilled...Brown's thesis that working-class girls are better equipped to avoid the epidemics of American adolescence is provocative.--Rebecca Mead "New York Times Book Review"