Book Review


Pipher, M. (1994). Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls.


New York, NY: Riverbend Books.


Reviewed by Sheila Southon, Guidance Counsellor


This book was published 10 years ago and I wish I had read it then. Dr. Pipher is the for- mer head of APA’s Division of the Psychology of Women, and a therapist in private practice. Her insights into the difficulties of being a teenage girl and maintaining some sense of self fits so well with whatwe see in our daily lives. Pipher draws conclusions about the toxic nature of today’s society on young girls, then illustrates her point with examples from her practice.


“Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from con- senting to become submissive adored ob- jects.”


Throughout the book, Dr. Pipher makes the case that in early adolescence girls stop asking “who am I and what do I want?” and start asking “What can I do to please others?” especially males. Yet like Mme. de Beau- voir, she makes the case that it is more about an imbalance of social power than Freud’s “penis envy”.


This drastic shift is supported by a whole range of cultural institutions – most notably sexism and look-ism -- that further serve to alienate girls from their inner selves. “To the man men the world] criess work! To woman it says: Seem” says Olive Schreiner author of The Story of an African Farm (part 2, ch. 4). Girls are judged more by how they look than by how they think, how they feel, their cre- ativity, strength, generosity, kindness or any other skill or quality.


From an increasingly early age (think “tod- dlers in tiaras”), girls are driven to an external locus of control and away from the authen- tic selves. At younger ages their authentic selves allows them to explore, to try, to risk ,and to experience for themselves.


Pipher discusses how teens are encouraged to break away from the family and be their own person, just when they need the fam- ily’s ability to cope with societal influences. She discusses the adolescent’s relationships with mothers, fathers and peers. She states that many of her clients have only discussed their junior high years when they were in high school; being unable and unwilling to articu- late their problems during their early teen- age years. The breaking away from parents has always happened to some extent, but socio-cultural changes like the breakup of the extended family and core family mobility have drastically accelerated this process.


Yet, generally, parents are more protective of their daughters than either corporate America or their peers are. Corporate America ex- ploits the dissolution of girls’ inner resolve by holding up progressively more unreachable standards of artificial perfection, convincing girls that THIS product will be the key to feel- ing at least “good enough”.


And peers are woefully inadequate to guide inner self exploration when they themselves are adrift. In fact, girlfriends can turn on each other in a heartbeat even through simple in- ability to know what else to do, if not for some more sinister social reason. Boyfriends are going through their own changes too, and are


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