When I worked in the live-in component of a summer academic program for pre-teens one summer, I was reminded of how much taller twelve-year-old girls are than their male counterparts. It made me think of how different the reactions you evoke from people are as your height changes. Though my sister is three years younger than I, most people treated us as if we were twins because she spent much of her childhood near my height. I never received the deferential treatment I imagine most elder siblings do.
In response to a question in my math textbook, my second-grade teacher once determined that I was the shortest person in my class. As a consolation, she predicted that one day I would be even taller than her. She was correct, as I became one of the tallest students in my eighth-grade class. At the time, the other girls and I would make ourselves even taller with multi-inched platform shoes. For commencement and our formal graduation boat trip across Lake Michigan, we competed over the lengths of our heels.
As some eighth graders competed over height, others implicitly idealized their prepubescent petiteness. People often say that a girl can be tall, as long as she’s not too tall. In response to the Common App diversity question years later, one friend recalled being made to feel ‘oversized’ (she was not) in contrast with the daintiest, porcelain-doll-like little girls. I had not expected my friend to feel this way, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized people do associate physical smallness and consequent, so-called cuteness with femininity. I suppose such ideas should not surprise me, given the social pressure for women to be look younger, and the preference for neoteny in women.
Expectations of smallness are not that far removed from expectations that girls be skinny. When we first discovered e-mail addresses in middle school, the kids forwarded so many chain-letter surveys to each other. They would regularly fill out class superlatives—‘smartest,’ ‘most talkative,’ ‘skinniest.’ I remember never being considered the skinniest compared to those kids, which has made me feel taken aback every time someone in college has called me skinny. But I suppose body image is relative. It seems we’re always negotiating the relationship between our sizes and our reactions from others.
Perhaps I had especially short high school classmates, male and female, but I continued to tower over many a 5′ peer in my adolescence. I felt like a giant standing among them. By the time I reached college, however, I lost the height advantage. While I am still above the average height of a woman in the US (5′ 3.8″, according to About.com; I am 5′ 4.5″), even my little sister now considers me ‘little’ (today, she is 3.5″ taller than me).
The height difference between the average matriculating Penn freshman and the average graduating senior from my high school was enough that I hadn’t anticipated that other Penn students would call me small. I was unused to it because it was not how I positioned myself relative to others in high school. Being treated as a petite person made me feel as if others inferred some corresponding docility based on my size. It’s disconcerting when people in a new environment interpret your size differently from the self-construction you’ve developed in your original environment. Being thought of as diminutive as an adult is also socially belittling, as if you’re a child or cartoon character, instead of a respected, full-grown human being to be treated seriously as an equal (indeed, there are other, more serious cultural precedents for women being treated as permanent children). Hopefully, I don’t shrink too much when I get old.
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I wrote a blog entry for Penn Asian Review about a talk given by Dr. Nancy Abelmann at Penn last month. The talk was entitled “Impossible Labor: The ‘Domestication’ of Early Study Abroad.” Dr. Abelmann is a professor of anthropology and women’s studies at University of Illinois. She has studied the role of Korean mothers in “early study abroad” (ESA)- that is, studying abroad before the college level, as has become pervasive among primary and secondary students in Korea.
Dr. Abelmann spoke about the pressure on Korean mothers to take their children abroad to study English, while the fathers stay in Korea to fund the family in America. Dr. Abelmann noted that Korea has historically had a higher rate of early study abroad than other countries. She attributed this phenomenon to Korea’s economic policies, which have embraced globalization to a greater degree than those of other countries. Furthermore, as the 1997 Asian Financial Crash created middle class anxiety about social reproduction, the greater demand for consumer education manifested in ESA’s appeal.
Dr. Abelmann has researched several published memoirs that give mothers instructions on how best to manage their children’s educations in America – the “impossible labor” in the title of her presentation refers to the unattainable standards these instructions set for mothers. As means of socially reproducing the role of the mother, these memoirs made explicit prescriptions for “normative demands of femininity.” While the mother inherits a familiar, straightforward role in managing the child’s education if she stays in Korea, she faces the challenge of navigating an unfamiliar education system once she goes to America. In these memoirs, mothers express anxiety about their children’s loss of Korean culture. Dr. Abelmann also noted the particular strain on transnational subjects who were in America temporarily and had no intent of immigrating here permanently.
While Dr. Abelmann focused on how this changed social expectations of mothers, she also noted that sometimes fathers ended up communicating with their children more often when their children were abroad. Because the fathers worked late hours, they did not see their children much to begin with when the children were still in the country. However, when the children studied abroad, the fathers had to take extra initiative to keep in contact with their children through Skype and other means.
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I first heard of Rachel Simmons through a profile in Time magazine.
We’ve all heard the stereotype that girls treat each other with greater underhanded cruelty than boys treat each other, à la Mean Girls. Instead of attributing such behavior to biological differences, Rachel Simmons makes the interesting argument that this actually results from girls facing greater social pressure to be nice than boys face. She seems to suggest that because the repressed hostilities need to have expression somewhere, they come out in the manipulative and catty behavior that we recognize.
She writes:
“the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone’s back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that’s not about girls themselves but about the culture that they’re growing up in.”
While we’ve all noticed that girls can partake in those rituals, I am not sure myself whether I would agree that it is culturally conditioned—or maybe I just never noticed it myself. In my elementary school (and for me, elementary school in Chicago is 1st-8th grade) girls did place indirect social pressure on each other to be nice. I heard my peers say, “Laura is the nicest girl in the class… Michelle is the second-nicest,” as if it were some competition. It did make it seem like niceness was something to aspire to.
On the other hand, I didn’t interpret it as something girls had to aspire to more than boys, but I guess the boys weren’t standing around trying to compare who was nicest (maybe because women are expected to be more nurturing?). I suppose teachers may have been complicit in the stereotype that girls are the nice, well-behaved ones, and there’s a greater expectation that boys will misbehave, but those descriptions never seemed prescriptive to me. I am personally wary of the suggestion that the social pressure pre-exists the stereotype, because I never felt that I had to try to be nice BECAUSE I was a girl. It just seemed like the basic human-being way to behave. Even if boys were thought of as the troublemakers in class, I didn’t feel as if teachers were more lenient towards them when they misbehaved; I didn’t sense a different standard for behavior between boys and girls. Then again, there are limitations in drawing conclusions from personal anecdotes.
Simmons’ generalization about Asian girls and families in the last paragraph also makes me uncomfortable, especially since I find it untrue of my extended family. Furthermore, Asia is such a large continent that such a sweeping generalization cannot accommodate either the subtle or pronounced cultural variations that occur (besides, when I think of Asia, I think of Uzbekistan). It is not clear to me why she thinks she has the authority to make the statement in the last paragraph either, since on her web site she doesn’t seem to have any specialization in Asia-related matters. Even if she had restricted her writing to a particular region of Asia, such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Asia Minor specifically, I think there is still considerable variation within those subregions. I have found that other journalism about psychological or social attributes about Asians also neglects to take into account noteworthy variations in Asian cultures.
However, I was still curious about her other writings, so I decided to look up her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. She writes about girls’ underhanded forms of aggression towards each other, the result of societal pressure to be “nice.” I don’t find the prose or the content especially engaging, but I thought these lines were interesting:
“Annie was so afraid of isolation that tolerating abuse seemed like her only option” (61).
“Annie tried to please her friend at any cost, wanting only to save the relationship. Her unremitting focus on staying friends with Samantha allowed abuse to take over the relationship” (61).
“With meanness so intermixed with the relationship, Annie lost the capacity to tell the difference” (61).
Simmons suggests that girls are under a lot of pressure to be nice, regardless of how they are treated. Is the relationship she describes above true of girls? If so, are girls afraid of isolation because it is intrinsically unpleasant, or because they feel social pressure not to be isolated? Is the stigma of isolation worse than the intrinsic negative effects? Which is the greater motivating factor that keeps girls in abusive friendships with each other?
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Maybe you’ve heard this Yemeni proverb: “Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee” for a good marriage. Or maybe you haven’t. Either way, there’s an eight-year-old girl in Yemen getting married right now. And because she’s so young, her father and husband are super excited about shaping her into the perfect dutiful wife.
This is rather inconceivable to me, as someone considering marriage in oh, say, never? But Yemen is only one of many countries the world over where girls as young as 6 are sent off with 50-year-old men to make babies. You can call it crazy, you can call it cruel, but to the families of these girls, it’s just life – and even a safer alternative. Najood, one Yemeni girl who had been married at age 10, has parents who beg in the streets of Yemen to feed their 16 children. If marrying their daughter off as a schoolgirl means she is protected from being kidnapped and sold into servitude, why wouldn’t they? If trading one of their 16 means three goats and a sack of grain to feed the other 15, why shouldn’t they?
Legislation was passed in the Yemen Parliament in February limiting the minimum age of a girl’s marriage to 17 – but conservative politicians from North Yemen made sure the law didn’t reach the President. This in a country where the average age of a bride is 12 and a half. Their defense consisted of touting the fact that Islamic law, Sharia, didn’t stipulate any minimum marriage age, citing the example of the Prophet Muhammad who had married his third wife Aisha when she was only 6 years old. Fifteen hundred years of subsequent history and knowledge of the ill effects of child marriages don’t seem to matter to these hard-line extremists.
Najood is lucky – she managed to escape her 30-year-old husband’s home after a few months and was granted a divorce on accounts of physical abuse and rape. But if a recent Sana University study is to be trusted, there are 5 million Yemeni girls sleeping with men old enough to be their fathers. And thousands of them will die giving birth to children they aren’t physically ready for. They will suffer from painful STDs and live socially isolated. Most will remain illiterate and uneducated and perpetuate the frustrating cycle of poverty every government in the world is struggling with.
Luckily, the Yemeni government, as well as numerous social activist groups across the globe, are doing something about it – creating support groups, providing schooling and employment for young girls and educating their families about the health risks of child marriage. It will take time but maybe there’s a chance that things might improve for our younger budding feminists.
Najood, understandably, swears that she will never marry again.
Posted in Feminism in the wider world | 1 Comment »
