Clinical psychologist Dan Kindlon has been researching children and adolescents for over 20 years and argues that the psychology of American girls has radically changed in recent years owing to the effect of feminism and increased equality.
Harvard Magazine has an article on what he calls ‘alpha girls’ in his new book – confident girls and young women with high expectations and high self-esteem.
“The psychological demons that used to affect girls and women in this country just don‚Äôt affect today‚Äôs girls in the same way,” Kindlon asserts. In the 1980s and early ‚Äô90s, Carol Gilligan (formerly Graham professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now a professor at New York University) and other feminist psychologists wrote that girls in their teens compromise their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby “losing their voice.” In 1992, influential American Association of University Women (AAUW) research on late-1980s data on girls born in the 1970s found that girls’ self-esteem plunged in middle school, compared to boys’, and that classroom sexism (such as teachers’ calling on boys more than girls, or more competitive than cooperative learning) was a cause. The AAUW report recognized positive trends, such as young women‚Äôs ascent in college enrollment, while recommending correctives for the continuing shortfalls.
Alpha girls are created in large numbers when the society that they are born into has sufficient equal opportunity, Kindlon says: “It wasn‚Äôt until the early to mid ’80s‚Äîwhen schools really started to get serious about Title IX, when women first began to outnumber men in college, when women began moving into leadership roles, such as Congress, in significant numbers‚Äîthat societal conditions had changed enough to permit the alpha girl explosion.” He set out to discover how Beauvoir’s “inner metamorphosis” has changed girls’ psychology in the years since the AAUW report.
Link to Harvard Magazine article ‘Girl Power’.
Mind Hacks 