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Key points
- Research interviews with 123 adolescent girls revealed 72% of them feel restricted in their self-expression.
- Adolescent girls have reported that they face pressures to disconnect from themselves to maintain superficial relationships.
- For adolescent girls, the act of disconnecting from themselves is linked to depression and anxiety.
This is a guest blog post written by Imani Minor under the advisement of Dr. Onnie Rogers. Imani is a graduate of Northwestern University and alumni of the Development of Identities in Cultural Environments (DICE) Lab where she completed her Senior Honors Thesis in psychology. This fall, Imani will begin a Master of Social Work and Master of Divinity program at Howard University.
Q: Are there certain things people expect you to do just because you’re a girl?
A: Yeah, that they have to be perfect and always look their best and act their best, but the same is not required for a man.
— Stephanie, 10th grade, Black girl.
In the last 48 hours, all eyes have been on Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time...but not for the anticipated Olympic gold medal-earning, record-breaking, gravity-defying reasons promised in Tokyo 2020. Instead, the world watched as Biles completed an uncharacteristic error on her vault and then walked off the competition floor, ultimately withdrawing completely from the Olympic Games. Why? For her mental health. It is unprecedented.
Just a few weeks ago, Naomi Osaka, the world-class tennis player, faced sanctions after refusing to attend press conferences at the French Open due to mental health concerns, which sparked a social media uproar. She too decided to take a break from tennis in order to focus on her mental health. By prioritizing herself, Osaka has brought to the fore the pressures that many girls and women, like the young girl, Stephanie, quoted above, face to sacrifice their mental health in favor of societal expectations.
As a Black woman, I constantly navigate expectations to limit the space I take up in the world, specifically as it relates to emotionality and mental health. Take, for example, the Strong Black Woman stereotype whereby Black women are praised for their silence amidst tremendous emotional labor and demonized when they have an outburst or simply breakdown. When Sha’Carri Richardson, America’s fastest woman, tested positive for marijuana—marijuana she used to numb her pain and present her “best self” to the world during the Olympic Trials—the backlash was relentless.
Given my lived experiences and the previous psychological research revealing the mental health challenges uniquely faced by Black women, I embarked on a senior thesis to examine how adolescent girls, during their formative years of building a sense of self, engage with emotionality and expressing themselves in this world. How do they perceive these emotional straitjackets? What do they do to negotiate them? I was also curious to see how Black girls, in comparison to Latina and White girls, describe emotional labor assigned to girlhood.
Listening to Adolescent Girls Describe the Constraints of Patriarchy
I systematically analyzed research interviews that were conducted with 123 adolescent girls, 10th graders, who identified themselves as Black, Latina, and White. Each girl answered questions about what it means to be a girl. I began by simply reading the girl’s responses. After listening to just 15 girls’ interviews, two things became clear:
First, when girls were asked to reflect on what other people think about girls, they spoke consistently about the constraints (rather than opportunities) that girlhood poses in this society:
Q: What do you think others think about girls?
A: I think a lot of people tend to like put females down, it’s like horrible how kids are growing up and their parents are like, “oh, stop crying like a little girl” and things like that, that like, from a young age, brings um like pictures of females in such a negative way.” (Alyssa, Latina girl)
Second, others’ expectations for what it means to be a girl actually restrict girls from feeling, expressing, and presenting themselves fully in the world.
Q: Can you tell me about a time when you felt you were expected to act more proper?
A: I feel like if we go to a restaurant and it’s like men are like allowed to like laugh and like, be like boisterous but like ladies just have to sit there and like smile and look pretty. (Hannah, White girl)
In fact, I found that 72% of the girls spoke about restrictions on self-expression, suggesting to us that being a girl means that you cannot just be. Just as the backlash to Osaka showed us, to be a girl means you cannot assert what you want and need, particularly if it inconveniences others.
I also identified the varied and specific constraints that girls negotiated. While about one-third of the responses (32%) referenced general or broad constraints, such as being “more polite and more put together," others were targeted to constraints concerning how girls express through their Body (56%), Voice (39%), and Emotion (17%).
See Figure 1:
Fifty-six percent of the girls referenced Body expectations related to how they should present and carry their bodies as they move throughout space. For example, Andrea (Latina girl) says, “I just be relaxing or chilling and then my mom just be like, 'hey, cross your legs.' Her mom’s instruction to cross her legs comes in direct contrast to Andrea’s relaxed and chill state, suggesting a limitation on how girls should/can simply exist.
Similarly, 39% of girls spoke about constraints on how they were allowed to use their Voice and speak their mind, if at all. When Hailey (White girl) was asked to describe expectations of girls, she replied:
“Being well-spoken and not like speaking out and voicing your concerns or complaining about anything, standing up for yourself.”
Here, Hailey speaks about norms for girls to silence themselves, distancing themselves from their own needs.
Even with the gender stereotype that girls are “emotional," 17% of the girls expressed constraints on how girls should (or shouldn’t) express themselves emotionally. While this was the least prevalent code, our data suggest that these emotional straitjackets are not simply about emotions. Instead, these straitjackets function to limit the overall space that girls are allowed to take up in the world:
“They expect all girls to be like nice all the time to everybody, but then like boys I feel like aren’t expected to do that as much. […] Um sometimes if I’m like in a bad mood and talking to a classmate, they’ll be like 'oh like why are you so angry and stuff,' when like I’m just not in the mood to talk.” (Lydia, White girl).
Furthermore, we find that Latina and Black girls were more likely to talk about Body constraints, specifically, compared to White girls. That is, in the most basic and pervasive way, girls of color are restricted from moving freely through spaces. This finding also underscores that there are unique pressures that girls of color must navigate, which can differentially influence their mental health.
The Crisis of Connection and Mental Health
Our research builds on prior research on girls’ mental health and the crisis of connection (Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan, 1990; Way et al., 2018). As girls reach adolescence within a patriarchal society, they face pressures to disconnect from themselves in order to maintain superficial relationships with others. This disconnection is linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes for girls and women, such as depression and anxiety. Simply put, girls' ability to show up in the fullness and realness of who they are is linked to their mental health. My broad examination of how girls speak about interpersonal expectations demonstrates the varying, extensive, and related areas whereby girls are pressured to disconnect from themselves.
The recent stories of Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, and Sha’Carri Richardson reveal two sides of a coin tarnished by patriarchal and racist expectations. Their stories provide examples of dehumanizing standards that deprioritize and devalue girls’ and women’s mental health.
Standards that only end up costing us in the long run. As such, we must question and critique established norms and expectations on girlhood.
Simone Biles has arguably done "the most GOAT thing" she has ever done by listening to what she needs and taking care of her full self amid intense pressure and social expectations. Naomi Osaka also provided us with a beautiful and revolutionary example of the resistance work we should all be doing to choose our full selves over who society commands us to be. Our mental health matters. We matter.
References
Brown, L. M., & Gilligan, C. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women's psychology and girls' development. Harvard University Press.
Gilligan, C. (1990). Joining the resistance: Psychology, politics, girls and women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Way, N., Ali, A., Gilligan, C., & Noguera, P. (Eds.). (2018). The crisis of connection: Roots, consequences, and solutions. NYU Press.
