The Women's Resource Center in the Division of Lifelong Learning, will host Lyn Mikel Brown, as a visiting scholar at the University of Maine in a project funded by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. The project is designed to gain a better understanding and knowledge of the friendships that girls have with one another, how they are supoportive but can also be destructeve. By understanding the nature of girls' friendships and incorporating this knowledge into our ongoing work, we can help the girls in Maine to resist the pressures to conform or be ostracized by those they most want to impress. Girls depend on close, intimate friendships to get them through life. With their friends at their back they will stand on principle, rebuke a school bully, report sexual harassment or abuse, develop a radically new idea to fight stereotypes.
Girls are also extremely tough on other girls.
They talk behind each others' backs, they tease one another, they police eachothers' clothing and body size and fight over real or imagined relationships with boys. They promote a strict conformity to group norms and rules, reinforce gender and racial stereotypes, and in this way hold each other back through threats of exclusion and rejection. This project is not so much an attempt to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable differences between these two stories, but to understand how both arise from a common source. That is, both reflect girls' struggle for voice, love, safety, and legitimacy within a patriarchal culture. Girls desperately need the support of their friends to remain emotionally and psychologically whole in a world that takes them less seriously and subordinates thier needs and wants to those of boys.