To be a Girl

"This psychological seclusion of girls from the public world. The dissociation of girls 'voices from girls' experiences in adolescence, so that girls are not saying what they know and eventually not knowing it as well, is a prefiguring of many women's sense of having the rug of experience pulled out from under them, or of coming to experience their feelings and thoughts not as real but as fabrication. [...] [Jean Baker] Miller and I have been struck by the fact that although we have approached the study of women and girls from different ways, we have arrived at much the same insight into the relationship between women's psychology and the prevailing social order. A new psychological theory in which girls and women are seen and heard is an inevitable challenge to a patriarchal order that can remain in place only through the continuing eclipse of women's experience. Bringing the experiences of women and girls to full light, although in one sense perfectly straightforward, becomes a radical endeavor. Staying in connection, then, with women and girls — in teaching, in research, in therapy, in friendship, in motherhood, in the course of daily living — is potentially revolutionary."
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice