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Women's Voices and Women's Silences

On a Sunday in late November of 2021, The New York Times published a review of a book called The Trouble with White Women. Joan Morgan, the reviewer, began:

To fully grasp the significance of Kyla Schuller's The Trouble with White Women, it helps to understand the feminist climate in which it arrives. There was Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 presidential election, significantly abetted by the approximately 50 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump; and then the US Supreme Court's refusal to block the law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. (A majority of white women in Texas voted for Gov. Greg Abbot and Senator Ted Cruz, both vocal supporters of that law.)1

There is no way of talking about women's voices in today's political climate without also talking about race. This means talking about the voices of the white women who abetted the defeat of Hillary Clinton and voted for the Texas politicians who supported the law to ban abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy, as well as the voices of the white women who voted for Clinton and against the politicians who would ban abortion. It means talking about the voices of the 91 percent of Black women who voted for Clinton in 2016, and the 95 percent of Black women who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and also those of the 53 percent of white women who, in 2020, voted to re-elect Donald Trump (Pew Research Foundation).2 In short, it means talking about race and gender, asking why those Black women who voted voted overwhelmingly Democratic, more than any other group including Black men, and why a majority of white women who voted, as far as one can see, chose white supremacy over gender solidarity by voting for Trump in both the 2016 and the 2020 elections.

All of which is to say that my story about women's voices cannot be simply a story about gender. What's more, it is not about women versus men, as the gender binary would have it; or about women's oppression or submission within a gender hierarchy that privileges men. Instead, it is a story about resistance - one that includes Black people and white people, Black women and white women. Above all, it is a story about girls.

I wonder if you, dear reader, are struck by what I find so striking: girls in our midst who are giving voice to resistance. In some ways, we've always known this about girls. One has only to read Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis to hear the voice of a daughter, Iphigenia, who, upon being summoned by her father Agamemnon and learning that he is preparing to sacrifice her in order to gain the winds that will carry the Greek army to Troy, tells him he is mad. Life without honor, she says, is preferable to death. Needless to say, he doesn't listen. She is countering the culture that he is defending, a culture that values honor over life.

In her second speech, after realizing that her voice has had no effect, Iphigenia dissuades her mother from protesting, explaining that she wants to be her father's sacrifice and to go down in history as the person responsible for restoring Greek honor.3 It's a snapshot of initiation: the psyche aligning itself with the values of the culture in which it exists. To Aristotle, however, it is a flaw in playwriting because to him the change in voice is unexplained.4

Having spent ten years listening to girls at the very time of their initiation into a culture that values honor over life and privileges the voices of fathers, I can explain it. What's more, I heard this shift in voice over and over again among the girls I was studying, and witnessed the rewards that come to girls who align their voices with patriarchal norms and values. But I also witnessed girls' resistance to making this alliance and the effects of their resistance on women, and herein lies the story I want to tell: how women's voices and women's silences give us insights into understanding what otherwise is a puzzle in human development: why we accommodate to a culture that compromises our humanity. Because, as we have seen in our own time, girls' voices can be radically disruptive, especially when they are listened to.

I'm thinking of Greta Thunberg - "Don't thank me, do something," Greta told the members of Congress who rushed forward to thank her when she visited the US Capitol. Greta, whose one-person school strike when she was 15 - just Greta and her handwritten sign in front of the Swedish parliament - had, within sixteen months, inspired the largest climate demonstration in history: more than 4 million people from 161 countries joined the global climate strike on September 20, 2019. Greta, who became Time magazine's person of the year in 2019 and was nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

She's one. But here's another: Darnella Frazier. Of all the people who witnessed the murder of George Floyd by the policeman Derek Chauvin, Darnella, age 17, was the only one who took out her cell phone and clicked on the camera and recorded it. Filmed the entire incident, the close to ten minutes that Derek Chauvin kept his knee pressed on George Floyd's neck until he was dead. To the reporter who asked why she had filmed it, Darnella explained: "It wasn't right. He was suffering. He was in pain . The world needed to see what I was seeing." And because she filmed it, a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of murdering a Black man, George Floyd. Her film was the evidence that proved crucial at the trial. As Darnella explained, "I opened my phone and started recording because I knew if I didn't no one would believe me."5

Why teenage girls? From a psychologist's vantage point, the more pressing question may be "What happened to everyone else?" How come the rest of the people who saw what was happening to George Floyd right in front of their eyes and heard his cries didn't take out their phones and record what clearly was not right? What about all the people for whom thanks from members of Congress would have sufficed, and who, unlike Greta, would not have pushed back with, "This is all wrong," or "How dare you?" - by which she meant, how dare you not act when my future is at stake?6

In 1981, after completing In a Different Voice, I learned, in the words of Joseph Adelson, editor of the 1980 Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, that adolescent girls had "simply not been much studied." The psychology of adolescence was "the study of the male youngster writ large."7

So be it, I thought, because this was true at the time of much of psychology, not to mention medical research where the signs of women's heart attacks are still described as "atypical," meaning not like men's. But . in a book filled with women's voices - I'm speaking about In a Different Voice, where the two central chapters are about women who, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, were pregnant and thinking about whether to continue or to abort the pregnancy - the single voice that many women readers found most unsettling was that of an 11-year-old girl, Amy, one of the two girls quoted in the book and the only girl quoted at any length. Maybe it was Amy's voice lingering in my mind along with the awareness that, even though I had been taught to hear her moral reasoning as "naive" and "wishy-washy," what she said made sense. Or maybe it was simply that I had just finished a book and, when the newly appointed principal of an all-girls' school approached me with a request to study girls because he could not find any research on girls' development, and he had raised the funds that would support my graduate students, I thought "why not?" What I remember from that time was going to the school to talk to the students about the study and one of the girls raising her hand and asking me: "What could you possibly learn by studying us?"

As it turned out, the studies with girls that began at Emma Willard in the early 1980s, and continued over a period of ten years in a range of public and private schools, girls' schools and coed schools, and after-school settings, turned out to be the most deeply illuminating work I have done.8 And to me as well, that came as a surprise. Listening to girls in the years just before adolescence, I heard a voice that I knew and had forgotten, a voice that sounded at once familiar and surprising, and this in turn led me to realize that at a certain point in development, we are pressed to rewrite our history - to tell a story that is not quite our story, to replace one voice with another that then serves as a cover.

Studying girls, I became a witness to dissociation - a not knowing that was culturally inscribed and socially enforced. What I had learned to think of as steps in a developmental progression - the separation of reason from emotion, of the mind from the body, and the self from relationships - milestones on the march toward rationality, autonomy, and maturity, held this not knowing in place. Because if we cannot think about what we are feeling, if our mind doesn't register what is going on in our body, and if our self becomes like a mighty fortress, defended and boundaried...