by their peers and by hesitant parents and teachers, our girls are told to be beautiful but that beauty is “only skin deep”; to be sexy but not sexual; be honest but do not hurt others’ feelings; be independent but be nice; be smart, but not so smart that you threaten boys. Is it any wonder they are confused?


To perhaps a greater degree than ever, our girls feel “...obligated and resentful, lov- ing and angry, close and distant, all at the same time with the same people. Sexuality, romance and intimacy [are] all jumbled to- gether….”


In my own practice, I am baffled and speech- less at the nonchalance of girls towards their own self-respect: “…well yea I left class to give him head. It sucks that I got caught, but – it’s not sex anyway.” Or the girl who was driven to public humiliation because after 45 minutes in the bathroom with a boy at a party, he loudly proclaimed that she “wasn’t any good”. She was desperate to apologize, and set out to prove him wrong!


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STILL – despite the veneer of social progress – held to a code of behavior to deny their emotional selves and to sexually conquer girls whenever the get the chance.


These dramas play out in schools and malls as they always have, but increasingly also over a plethora of social media foreign to most parents. A “look” in the hallway be- comes vitriol in 140 characters for the world to see. Sensitive, gentle girls crumple faster than a wounded gazelle under a lion pride.


Our “modern” culture has a pervasive effect worse than the South African finishing school that Olive Schreiner said “was a machine for condensing the soul into the smallest pos- sible area. I have seen some souls so com- pressed that they would have filled a small thimble.” …. “The less a woman has in her head, the lighter she is for carrying.”


Through a constant barrage of mass media, VOL. 46 NO. 2 | SPRING 2014


Those of us who witnessed the women’s movement of the 1970s are more than cha- grined to hear young women now treat the word “feminist” as slightly distasteful. Little do they know how different their lives would be without those hard-won social and political rights. Witnessing girls leaping into the same old role as moral guardians of male behav- iour – which society still seems to see as beyond reproach – borders on disheartening.


Case by case, Dr. Pipher walks us through techniques she used to guide these girls back to their internal locus of control. The cases in Reviving Ophelia touch on parent-daughter relationships, blended families, the cult of thinness, drugs and alcohol, sex and vio- lence, and of course depression. The most common issues we who counsel girls these days face.


Dr. Pipher looks at parenting dimensions, girls’ spiritual selves, signs of innate resilien- cy, and the importance of supportive relation- ships as ways to help girls cope. But Reviv- ing Ophelia is less a step-by-step manual as a collection of situational suggestions. It reminds me of Dr. Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Ex- ecutioner for that richness of perspective. It certainly worth having as a clinician’s tool.


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