Gender Roles and Socialization in Adolescence Essay -- Reviving Opheli

A Review of Mary Piphers Reviving Ophelia Saving the Selves of boyish Girls, Laura E. Berks Infants and Children Prenatal Through Middle Childhood, and Lina A. Ricciardellis Self-esteem and Negative ask as Moderators of Sociocultural Influences on Body Dissatis positionion, Strategies to Decrease Weight, and Strategies to Increase Muscles Among insipid Boys and Girls Adolescence is one of the most herculean times for development. This difficulty is experienced in truth differently for boys and girls. This paper will examine how gender role enculturation effects girls more specifically, the emergence of eating disorders and depression in immature girls. Mary Pipher, Ph.D. in her book Reviving Ophelia Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, discusses extensively the varied and difficult road that adolescent girls travel to adulthood. This book is a collection of Piphers experiences with clients, her daughter, and her own adolescence as sanitary as a thought provokin g social examination. The title refers to William Shakespheres character Ophelia, the modern girl who drowned herself in a river after universe shunned by Hamlet. Ophelia is the abstract of lost female youth. The transition that happens from girl to woman is quite difficult for most. Pipher examines the loss of self that most girls experience in their adolescence. She brings up the fact that preadolescent girls have the ability to be androgynous, as well as an interest in nearly everything. Gender roles be not curb at this age, it is their time away from the female gender role. The onset of pubescence changes most girls into very confused and ever changing creatures. They go from being carefree to careful of what their every move is. Most adolescent girls are hyper aware of themselves, over analytical of the reactions they receive from others, are critical of their bodies, and they frighten off and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle. The fundamenta l question Pipher asks is why are American adolescent girls falling give to depression, eating disorders, and suicide attempts at an alarming rate? There is no easy answer to Piphers question. Is the problem girls face a harvest-home of our culture? Or, is the problem that adolescent girls face a natural take apart of becoming an adult? Piphers answer is that the problem girls face is both culturally ... ... to behave in the same manner that their parents behave in indoors all situations? Girls are highly aware of the behavior of their parents, as well as the expectations of who they should work. Women are everywhere in advertisements, selling toothpaste, beer, auto insurance, and coffee. The impression of a ideal woman is one who is passive and yet strong, a caregiver who sacrifices all to provide for everybody else. That role is so terrifying to more that it is either rejected, mixed up, or deeply internalized. Anorexics may just be the reality of this perfect woman. Thin, in control, passive, and concerned with what others want of them physically the anorectic seems to embody all the qualities we attribute to perfection. Is that truly what one should aspire to become? The role of a woman is ever changing. Perhaps one daytime it will adapt to be more androgynous. Women and men should both give to become more then just masculine and feminine counterparts. They should be free to rise above masculinity and femininity, to a more jibe and blended place. SourcesReviving Ophelia Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. Pipher, Mary P.h. D. Ballentine Books Random plate 1994.