The National Coalition of Girls Schools supports an all-girl single sex education. Some public schools, such as the Young Women's Leadership Academy in New York City and, of course, private boarding and day schools across the country attest to the "superiority" of an all-girl school. Perhaps the decision must always rest upon the individual characteristics of the girl or young woman involved, and an all-girl environment will be the best for some and the worst for others.

Christina Hoff Sommers wrote at length about this issue in the May 2000 Atlantic Monthly:


This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex

It's a bad time to be a boy in America. The triumphant victory of the U.S. women's soccer team at the World Cup last summer has come to symbolize the spirit of American girls. The shooting at Columbine High last spring might be said to symbolize the spirit of American boys.

Part Two.

Part Three

Part Four

Additional Material Can Be Found Here:
Beyond Title IX: Gender Equity Issues in Schools
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The Girls of Gen X
By Christina Hoff Sommers, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

All is not well with the women of Generation X.
Consider the evidence: Close to 40 percent of college women are frequent binge drinkers, a behavior related to date rapes and venereal disease. Young women suffer higher levels of depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts than young men from early adolescence on. Between 1980 and '92, the rate of completed suicides more than tripled among white girls and doubled among black girls. For white women between 15 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death X And there is evidence that young women are less happy today than 20 years ago. Using data from a survey of high school seniors, sociologist Norval D. Glenn has tracked the trends of reported happiness for young men and women. Since 1977, the "happiness index" has been trending downward for young women. (See chart next page.) Moreover, this decline is specific to girls. Young men's reported happiness has risen slightly over the same time. X Gen X women seem to experience the greatest discontent in two areas: Men, and their own bodies. Young women can find sex easily, but they have a hard time finding a caring and sexually faithful partner who will share their lives. Marline Pearson, who teaches at a large community college in Madison, Wisconsin, recently asked her women students to identify the greatest obstacle facing women today. The difficulty of "finding and keeping a loving partner" topped the list, outranking obstacles such as job discrimination, sexual harassment in the workplace, and domestic violence. X In addition to being disappointed in their intimate relationships with men, women are discontented with their own bodies. Healthy young women of normal weight describe themselves as fat or "gross." At puberty or even earlier, girls begin restricting what they eat. Two-thirds of ninth-grade girls report attempts to lose weight in the previous month. Of course, dieting is not new, but Gen X women do more than watch calories. Some starve themselves. Others eat but are afraid to keep food in their body. Instead, they chew their food and spit it out, vomit it up, or purge it with laxatives. Even more widespread than eating disorders is disordered eating, the restrictive and obsessive monitoring of food consumption. According to some experts, most college women today suffer from disordered eating. Indeed, it is the rare college or university today that does not have at least one specialist in eating disturbances on its counseling staff. According to one survey, the number-one wish among young women, outranking the desire to end homelessness, poverty, or racism, is to get and stay thin.

These conditions afflict some of the most privileged young women of the generation. This comes as a shock to older, baby-boom women. After all, college-educated Gen X women-the first full beneficiaries of the achievements of the women's movement-have grown up with more freedom, opportunity, and choice than their mothers or grandmothers. More to the point, they have been the beneficiaries of what might be called the girlhood project: the systematic and self-conscious effort to change the culture and prepare girls for lives as liberated, self-determined individuals with successful careers, sexual freedoms, and nearly limitless personal choice.

As a mother raising daughters in the 1970s and '80s, I remember the heady sense of possibility that accompanied the girlhood project. Sons were sons, but daughters were a social experiment. We gave them books like Marlo Thomas's Free To Be You and Me and read them stories in Ms. like "The Princess Who Could Stand on Her Own Two Feet." We dressed them in jeans and sneakers. We fought for their right to play Little League baseball. We pushed for more sex education in the schools. We urged them to please themselves rather than to please men.

Given our optimistic expectations, it is bitterly disappointing to reach the '90s only to discover that young women's happiness index is falling, not rising. What is happening to our bright and talented daughters?

Several feminist writers have grappled with this question. Therapist Mary Pipher was the first to describe the dark side of American girlhood in her best-selling book Reviving Ophelia. Pipher's case histories present a disturbing portrait of depressed and angry adolescent girls, self-mutilating, self-starving, self-loathing. Two more recent books offer a thoughtful analysis and criticism of the changing nature of American girlhood. In Promiscuities, her memoir of growing up fast and sexy in the '70s, Naomi Wolf describes the confused sexual awakening of privileged girls raised by self-absorbed parents too busy sampling the pleasures of the sexual revolution themselves to guide or protect their daughters. Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of Girlhood meticulously documents the downward slide of girls' aspirations and ambitions over the past century, from improving one's character through good works to improving one's body through grueling workouts.

All three accounts point to one source of trouble: the passage between girlhood and womanhood. Growing up has never been easy for girls, of course, but it is more prolonged and perilous than ever before. Puberty can begin as early as eight; first sexual intercourse commonly occurs between 15 and 17; and women remain single and sexually active into their middle or late twenties. Forty-five percent of women who came of age in the 1950s and '60s were still virgins at age 19, and for many of those 19-year-old women, their first sexual intercourse occurred on their wedding night. But only 17 percent of women who came of age in the 1970s and '80s were virgins at 19. Since many Gen X women postpone marriage until their late twenties, few are likely to be virgins on their wedding night. As a consequence, girls are exposed to the problems associated with unmarried sex at an earlier age and for a longer period of time than a generation ago.

A rough consensus exists on some key factors that make coming of age more difficult for girls today: a cultural emphasis on thinness which makes the normal weight gains of puberty a source of anxiety and self-loathing; a media saturated with sexually explicit images and misogynistic messages; the sexual revolution and the availability of the Pill, which relieved men of any significant burden of responsibility for the negative consequences of unmarried sex; the high rate of family breakup and dysfunction; and the erosion of adult supervision. Puberty is now fraught with danger and anxiety.

Young girls are now at greater risk for early and traumatic sexualization, often by adult men. According to Brumberg, there have also been dramatic shifts in the social controls governing the sexuality of adolescent girls. Professional providers of contraceptive and abortion services have replaced mothers as the main source of authority on sexual matters. This shift has contributed to the demoralization of female sexuality and the decline in chastity.

At age 15, Naomi Wolf tells us, she followed the responsible, "healthy," medically approved approach to getting rid of her virginity. With her boyfriend, she went to a clinic to be fitted for a diaphragm, a business "easier than getting a learner's permit to drive a car." Yet as she prepared for the procedure, she missed a sense of occasion. "It was weird to have these adults just hand you the keys to the kingdom, ask 'Any questions?', wave and return to their paperwork.... The end of our virginity passed unmarked," she writes, "neither mourned or celebrated."

Both Brumberg and Wolf are critical of the medicalization of girls' sexuality, with its emphasis on sexual health and self-management. (In the words of one sex education book, the goal for girls is to stay "healthy, safe, and in charge.") This places an unsupportable burden on young girls to protect themselves from predatory males. It also neglects girls' emotional needs for affiliation and affection, as well as their desire to have their sexuality invested with some larger meaning.

These revisionist-feminist writers seek to remoralize girlhood, but not with the morals of yesteryear. Instead, they call upon older women to take responsibility for (and pride in) younger womens' sexuality, and they look to senior women and especially mothers to instruct girls more actively. This advice overlooks at least one crucial point. Older women are already involved in shaping the passage to womanhood and have been for more than 20 years. It is feminist women who write and edit books and magazines for teen girls. It is feminist women who have fought for abortion rights and the end to parental consent laws for girls. It is feminist women who have championed the right of girls to be as sexually free as boys. In short, these older women are the authors of the girlhood project. Are they now the right parties to repair the damage done?

The girlhood project was rooted in rebellion against traditional conceptions of girlhood. According to feminist critics, earlier generations of girls were raised primarily to be wives and mothers. From puberty on, parents taught daughters to be modest, nice, nurturing, accomplished in the domestic arts, and virginal. Since a young woman's virginity was a moral as well as a physical condition, family and church conspired to keep women pure.

Whether this is actually a fair summary of prevailing American sex roles prior to the 1960s is dubious. Even in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville commented that Americans "have calculated that there was little chance of repressing in woman the most tyrannical passions of the human heart and that it was a safer policy to teach her to control them herself. Unable to prevent her chastity from being often in danger, they want her to know how to defend herself, and they count on the strength of her free determination more than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown.... Unable or unwilling to keep a girl in perpetual ignorance, they are in a hurry to give her precocious knowledge of everything."

In any case, the activists who undertook the girlhood project declared war on what they viewed as Victorian double standards for boys and girls, which they blamed for unhappy marriages and unfulfilled female desires. Feminists called instead for a new single sexual standard-based on traditional boyhood. In their play and pursuits, little girls were to be made more like boys. Among liberal elites, a traditionally feminine daughter became a mild social embarrassment, while a feisty tomboy daughter was a source of pride.

In everything from sports to sex, girls gained experiences that were once off-limits. Twenty-five years ago, only one in 27 high school girls participated in team sports. By 1994, one in three did. A copy-the-boys approach was also applied to sexuality. Increasingly, the timing of girls' sexual awakening resembled boys. Today, the most frequent age of first intercourse is 17 for girls, 16 for boys. In frequency of intercourse and number of sexual partners, the traditional gender gap is closing as well. Modesty has also disappeared. Girls can be as profane, sexually frank, and "horny" as the guys. "Girls talk in the casual, expletive-laced manner stereotypically attributed to men," one 18-year-old college male writes. "Sex is discussed in all its variations, and bizarre or deviant sexual practices are often explored. This sort of talk is considered 'flirting.'"

Amidst its success at ending different standards for the sexes, the girlhood project has created new discontents. For one thing, it contributes to girls' unhappiness with their bodies. The tomboy ideal is demanding. It favors the few girls who are naturally wiry and athletic, and leaves the majority of girls displeased with their own shapes. The rapturous acclaim for tiny Olympic gymnasts and lithe skaters gives nonathletic girls still another reason to feel disappointed in their normal forms.

The more masculine body ideal shifts the locus of body shame from sexual organs to more visible body parts. Today's college women know how to find their clitoris in a mirror, but they can't bear to look at their "thunder thighs." Fashion magazines, which girls begin to read at age nine or ten and continue to consult well into their 20s, provoke body shame. Virtually all these magazines send one clear message: Your body is a mess. For example, the cover of the December 1997 Jump, a magazine for young teens, features stories entitled, "Body Bummers: How to go from feeling flawed to fab" and "Sizing up boobs." Such magazines tell girls to like themselves, whatever their size or shape, but they only feature flat-chested models who are six feet tall and 105 pounds. Indeed, a recurrent rumor among teenage girls is that these models are really boys.

Girls respond to body shame with rigid technocratic monitoring of their bodies. Again, the strenuous pursuit of feminine virtue has not disappeared but shifted location. The virtue of staying sexually pure has been replaced by the virtue of staying physically fit. In my corner of western Massachusetts, swarms of college women descend on the local health club each fall. They work out in the weight room or on the treadmills, their pony tails bobbing, their arms pumping, their faces sweaty and serious. Some read fashion magazines as they work out.

It does not take a degree in cultural anthropology to figure out that more is going on here than mere exercise. In girl culture today, "working out" is the new self-purification ritual, deeply invested with positive moral meaning. Good girls work out. Bad girls let themselves go. In the same way, eating has become a means of self-purification, and food itself has been moralized. There are good foods that one takes into the body and bad foods that one avoids or throws up. This helps explain why so many college women see "bad" foods as far more dangerous than drugs or alcohol, and why young women who drink and take recreational drugs will simultaneously refuse to eat anything but "pure" pesticide-free, fat-free organic food. Food is entirely divorced from pleasure and sociability while the other ingested substances are not.

If the girlhood project leads young women on a quest for a masculinized body, it also sets them on the path toward a more masculinized emotional life. There is now a single sex standard for men and women, but it favors Hugh Hefner, not Betty Friedan.

As much as young women's sexual lives resemble men's in the timing of first sex and the number of sex partners, their reasons for having sex remain very different. The nation's most comprehensive and up-to-date sex survey reports that 48 percent of women have intercourse for the first time out of "affection for their partner," compared to only 25 percent of men. The researchers add, "Young women often go along with intercourse the first time, finding little physical pleasure in it, and a substantial number report being forced to have intercourse. These facts reflect the dramatic costs for young women, and they seem to be increasing as young women have intercourse earlier in the life course."

Even when young women deliberately set out to lose their virginity, they often experience feelings of sadness, emptiness, and disappointment afterward. Women may want affection, tenderness, and commitment in their relationships, but what they actually get is "more naked, loss-filled sex," says Warren Schumacher, who teaches courses in marriage and the family at the University of Massachusetts. Thus, though the girlhood project prepares girls for sex, it says nothing to them about love.

With the decoupling of sex and love, intense passion and romance are vanishing. Loveless sex has become a routine pleasure of the single life, on a par with a good movie. Sexless love is also part of singlehood. According to psychologist Joanna Gutmann, a counselor at the University of Chicago, asexual couplings are increasingly common. Gen X men and women may share beds without ever having sex, or they may start out in a sexual relationship and then eventually shift to a comfy, asexual living-together relationship for the sake of companionship and convenience. Passionate, romantic love between young men and women is increasingly rare, says Gutmann.

By the time they reach their late twenties, many educated women in urban areas complain that all the good men are "taken" (or not available because they are gay). Some single women find it easier to hook up with different people for different purposes. "It doesn't make sense to rely on one person to meet all your needs," one 28-year-old woman told me. "Our generation diversifies. We might have one person for sex, one to go out club-hopping, another to share thoughts and feelings." Comradeship has replaced courtship and marriage as the preferred path to intimacy. To use a political metaphor, the aspiration to union has been abandoned for the more modest goal of confederacy.

Two decades after the girlhood project began, it may be judged not only by its aspirations but also by its decidedly mixed results. In important respects, it has improved the lot of girls. Adolescent girls now receive more serious mentoring attention from important men in their lives, including fathers, teachers, and coaches. Their participation in sports prepares them for a work world still largely shaped by male codes of conduct rooted in competition, combat, and conquest. More importantly, they are no longer bound by the marriage-and-motherhood script. They are free to follow their own desires as they make choices about their work and private lives.

At the same time, the girlhood project has shortchanged young women. The passage from girlhood to womanhood now entails a remarkably strenuous effort to transcend biology. Most girls are not cut out to be tomboys forever. Too often now, normal female physical and psychological maturation is taken as a problem, a worrisome sign that girls are "falling behind boys."

Today, all that is naturally womanly-especially anything related to childbearing -is treated by elites as something to be managed, minimized, and somehow overcome. Nearly all women still want motherhood, but they have grown up with the idea that it is a trauma that must be "worked into" a career. The only trouble-free times in the female life course are now defined as the periods when women are least connected to their womanliness: in childhood and again in old age. A woman's life between ages 10 and 60 has been medicalized and problematized, with a host of products and technologies like birth control and abortion, hormone replacement therapy, and cosmetic surgery being offered to ward off or manage what is natural. Is it any wonder that Gen X women look at adult life with a measure of fear and trembling?

The attempt to remake American girlhood is deeply connected to feminist aspirations. So how are feminists responding to signs of trouble popping up among Generation Xers? Many are ringing alarm bells-and blaming society or men. Others are urging their fellow feminists to offer more personal guidance to the young. Liberal women, say Brumberg and others, must make a new commitment to girl advocacy.

More mentoring is a worthwhile goal, but the state of American girlhood won't improve unless older feminists acknowledge their own responsibility for creating some of the difficulties today's young women face. To begin, women may have to confront their own anxieties about body image. Many American girls now grow up with mothers who are dieting, working out, and always complaining about their bodies. Indeed, it is often mothers who feel shame over their daughters' weight gains in puberty and rush their 11-year-olds to a fat camp or a pediatrician for a medically supervised diet.

Older feminist women, not the patriarchy, also edit the fashion magazines girls so eagerly consult. Nowhere else on a newsstand will you find as much body worship and emphasis on dress and dieting, or as many models made up like drug-addled prostitutes, or as many articles romanticizing casual sex. The same magazines are obsessed with money, things, and the trappings of celebrity. They assume every girl is focused on her self and her sex life, rather than her family and community, and they ignore any topic of civic, religious, or intellectual seriousness.

In addition, the firsthand models that today's girls grow up with are too often no more responsible or inspiring than this magazine fare. Revisionist feminists themselves acknowledge that it is the nice progressive parents of Gen Xers who turned self-actualization, divorce, live-in lovers, the drug habit (stretching from pot to Prozac), latch-key childhood, New Age therapies, and feel-good morals into mass phenomena.

Older women who aspire to be advocates to today's girls ought to consult the desires of the girls themselves. They will find that, more than sex, girls are interested in love and the business of finding a male worthy of love. Contemporary liberal institutions give these girls hundreds of books and articles devoted to the mechanics of sex, and many warnings about the dangers of penises not wearing condoms, but almost no information about how to make a life with the boys attached to them.

Older women must recognize that their feminist critique of 1950s girlhood, which inspired the effort to remake female upbringing, may not fit the realities of girls' lives now. Maybe the problem then was the tyranny of the feminine mystique. But the solution today is not a more unnatural and therefore even more tyrannical masculine mystique.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of The Divorce Culture.

on the other HAND

Today's American girls are better educated and have more opportunities than any women in history. It is now girls who are opening a gender gap that threatens to leave boys behind as "the second sex." The country's current college freshman class is 55 percent female, 45 percent male. Women earn most of the nation's bachelor's and master's degrees, and Department of Education projections show women continuing to improve these advantages.

Feminist scholars present a different picture. Harvard University's Carol Gilligan tells us that girls lose their "voice" in adolescence; they become shy, "psychologically footbound," diffident, and "go underground." Gilligan relies on focus groups, anecdotes, and feminist "self-esteem" surveys, but her influential views do not fit the facts.

Data show that, far from being shy and demoralized, today's girls outdo boys in many critical areas. Girls get better grades. They are more engaged and serious intellectually. They read more. These allegedly timorous creatures now outnumber boys in student government and in debating clubs. More girls work on school newspapers and yearbook staffs. More girls are elected president of student organizations, and more are members of honor societies.

In 1995, 56 percent of all high school students in advanced placement classes were female. In academic year 1994-95, reports the Institute of International Education, 62 percent of American college students studying abroad were female. Physically, too, girls are doing better than ever. Today's girls have a life expectancy a full ten percent longer than boys.

That's the good news about girls. The bad news is that American girls are coming of age in a society in which crucial institutions have been badly weakened, rendering girls vulnerable in ways their grandmothers were not. Marriage, the family, and religious organizations do not offer them the safety and stability previous generations of girls and women took for granted. The social arrangements that once assigned to them a protected role as daughter, wife, or mother, have lost much of their clarity and force. To take one example, girls are at greater risk of being exploited or abused by young men who have no sense of gallantry or protectiveness toward women. Young women are freer, but it's not clear they are happier or more secure than previous generations.

The liberation movements, which did so much to help women gain their newfound freedoms, are proving unable to help repair the social institutions that women badly want and need to be more secure. Instead, women's groups remain implacably opposed to any social arrangements that smack of "patriarchy." Theorists like Carol Gilligan and activists like Gloria Steinem are not about to promote policies that sustain marriage, help keep families intact, or restore fathers to the home.

The ideas and programs of feminist leaders for advancing the interests of girls are unrealistic and increasingly eccentric. According to Gilligan, "Women's psychological development within patriarchal male-voiced cultures is inherently traumatic." She claims that at the onset of adolescence, American girls hit the "wall of Western culture" and get the message that "people...do not want to hear what girls know." For Steinem, a major source of girls' troubles is their alienation from ancient goddess-centered religions. She recently initiated "Girls Speak Out," a program that brings girls and women together for two-day workshops where they are introduced to ancient ("pre-patriarchal") goddess-worshipping cultures. As Steinem explains, "Instead of just reading about ancient goddesses from all different cultures, we find replicas that girls can touch, pass around, make up stories about, and see how images of female power make them feel-just as girls in ancient times did."

Gilligan, Steinem, and the many other feminists who continue to promote a girls-are-silenced-and-shortchanged-victims philosophy are simply not up to the task of guiding contemporary girls. If I may borrow an image from Camille Paglia, putting your girl in the hands of contemporary feminist leaders is like sending your dog to vacation at the taxidermist. Most girls now reject the feminist label because today's feminism is proving so irrelevant and useless to average women.

Overall, there is reason for optimism about the condition of American girls. Our daughters are free and unprecedentedly wealthy and healthy. They are working hard at school, they play field hockey and basketball, and they have excellent economic prospects. Very few think of themselves as silenced or traumatized by a patriarchal system. Despite a chaotic and confusing social environment, most of the country's girls have native good sense and will find their way into a successful adulthood.

When I think of American girls, I think of my lovely 16-year-old niece and what she will be like ten years from now. I won't say I have no qualms, but on the whole I find that contemplating her future makes me smile.

-Christina Hoff Sommers is W.F. Brady Fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism?






Published in Rosy or Rocky? Generation X and the future of America January/February 1998 Issue