Schoolgirls

Author Essay

A Note from the Author

When I first met the young women I wrote about in SchoolGirls, I had no idea of how their lives would unfold during our year together, no notion of the stories they would tell me. I only know that, after reading the American Association of University Women (AAUW) report Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America and other research on adolescent girls, I was left wondering: What is it like — what does it look like, sound like, feel like — to be a girl in America today? I wanted to offer that missing piece: the voices and actions of real girls who were struggling to define themselves at a crucial juncture in their lives. To that end, the process of reporting this book quickly became a series of running conversations. There were the conversations with parents who wanted the best for their children, with teachers who were (or were not) struggling with issues of equity in the classroom, and, most important, with the girls themselves, who discussed their lives so candidly and with such startling insight.

My hope is that SchoolGirls will inspire that same urge to talk among its readers. I hope that it will encourage discussion about how we are raising and educating our daughters, as well as about how we were raised and educated ourselves. And I hope that, through those conversations, through those extensions of the "gender journey" the reader takes in the book, we can begin to find ways to raise stronger, more confident girls.

–Peggy Orenstein