Telling Girls the Economic Facts of Life

One reason fiction exists is that fact is sometimes more than any sane person wants to face.

For example, this still-prevailing little girls’ fiction: When I grow up, a rich man will fall in love with me and marry me and take care of me.

And these less gentle facts: Seventy-five percent of women who are now 16 will be in the work force by 1990, often while simultaneously raising the next generation of children. Of the 22 million girls in America today, 50% to 66%, as opposed to only 10% of the boys, are headed for the low-paying jobs traditionally held by females. As for the being-taken-care-of part, a girl is nine times as likely as a boy to end up a single parent and sole support of her children. In the last 20 years, a 1985 Ford Foundation study reports, the number of female-headed households doubled and will increase by 26% in the 1980s alone. Rich? One-third of America’s female-headed families, including more than 7 million children, live in poverty.

One more painful fact for that vast majority of women who do and will work, this courtesy of the Rand Corp.’s 1984 report, “Women, Wages and Work in the 20th Century”: For every $1 a man earns, a woman earns 63 cents.

Hence the theme, “The 37-Cent Solution: Equalizing Girls’ Options for Economic Autonomy,” of last weekend’s 40th anniversary conference of the Girls Clubs of America.

As GCA national executive director Margaret Gates told the meeting of nearly 1,000 girls’ advocates here, “While self-esteem is the essential ingredient for a meaningful life, countless hours of experience in working with girls have convinced us that lasting self-esteem is based on the capability to provide for oneself. Girls have been systematically deprived of preparation, information, training and education in this critical life skill. We believe it’s time to focus national attention on strategies for preventing the increasing feminization of poverty instead of just regretting it.”

No Simple Recipe

Clearly, however, the picture is clouded, and the recipe for economic autonomy is not quite so simple as whipping up a batch of grandma’s oatmeal cookies. If grown-up women have had to claw their way up an economic ladder that seems ever steepening, ever lengthening, girls are no less immune to the personal and cultural barriers that obstruct a path to success and independence. A generation of women who still remember job interviews that asked embarrassing personal questions and employers who forbade the wearing of pants by women on the job are now mothers to girls who face their own educational and workplace obstacles. In a world where, in 1984, according to Gates, United Ways gave $2.38 to boys’ programs for every $1 to girls, girls’ economic options are obviously far from equalized.

As conference moderator/actress/feminist Barbara Feldon pointed out, the working women of the 21st Century will redefine today’s notion of the superwoman. And, as she observed, “they are not going to come from families who reward their sons for being smart and their daughters for being pretty. Or from schools that consistently encourage boys to take science and math and girls to take English and art.

“And definitely not from a culture hypnotized by the destructive myths about women created and perpetuated by mass communications.

“Independent, capable women,” Feldon went on, “are not going to suddenly appear in a country with no serious commitment to reducing the number of teen-age pregnancies or to increasing education and job training for girls.”

Different Expectations

Parents, said Pamela Trotman Reid, associate professor of psychology, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, may react more positively toward expanded roles for women, but still retain higher expectations for boys. Studies show that parents continue to reward boys for risk-taking and assertiveness, while remaining comparatively overprotective with their daughters.

On the other hand, those studies may themselves be skewed, for as Nona Lyons of the Center for the Study of Gender Education and Human Development at Harvard University reported, “the lives of boys have been far more frequently, far more thoroughly studied” than the lives of girls. As a consequence, “there has been undue attention on qualities such as aggression and competitiveness” at the expense of qualities such as nurturing and caring.

“Not only are girls not studied,” Lyons said, “but the ideas we look at are taken from the lives of boys.”

To rectify this imbalance, Lyons and her associates are conducting their own assessment of girls, the first such continuing study to focus on girls. Already, one startling fact has emerged: “Frequently, in the literature,” Lyons said, adolescence has been regarded as the peak point of autonomy and independence. But for adolescent girls, Lyons said, “we find that they value independence and dependence--meaning that they value their relationships with others as much as their own independence.”

What this points up, she suggested, is that “this business of not understanding girls on their own terms frequently applies to other areas as well.”

And Lyons gravely predicted, “The central dilemma for girls and women in the next 15 years may be how to value themselves and their strengths on their own terms.”

The Role of Media

But much of that self-valuation is bound to come from external sources, and particularly from the media. Addressing the question of “what little girls are made of,” UCLA communications professor Diana Meehan said, “those of you who work with them know they run the full range of human behavior. But the media still tells us it’s ‘sugar and spice and everything nice.’ ”

Television roles for women may be expanding, Pamela Trotman Reid agreed, but still they remain “stereotypical and strongly reminiscent of the past.” For the minority child, Meehan concurred, “the potential models are hard to find,” and among those images of women portrayed on television at all, the recurring “victim,” said Meehan, “is perhaps the most pernicious that is primarily associated with women.”

Asked Meehan, author of a book on women and prime-time television: “Do these images on television mold a life?” And the answer: “There is a weighty body of evidence in social science to suggest that they do.

“Viewers perceive television as representative of reality,” Meehan went on. “And children are the most susceptible viewers because of their limited experience in life.”

These same children, girls in particular, are busy thrashing out a body image conflict that seems to afflict women of all ages in this society. As Reid noted, “nearly half the females interviewed in a recent study, compared to 26% of the males, agreed with the statement ‘I frequently feel ugly and unattractive.’ ” Aside from underscoring what Reid called “the immense cultural burden placed on girls to be attractive,” this dichotomy “creates a special problem for girls in adolescence and accounts for the major difference in self-esteem between boys and girls.”

“Breasts, breasts, breasts!” said Elizabeth Winship, author of a nationally syndicated teen column, Ask Beth. Even in a sports bra era, teen-age girls are driven by the fact that they are too flat, or not flat enough. They obsess about their bodies: “A Radcliffe study last year,” Winship said, “revealed that at some time, more than 80% of the respondents felt they were fat. In actuality, only 20% were overweight.”

In the thousands of letters she receives, Winship said, “girls seldom write to me about preparing for work.” Of 200 recent letters, “25% were about beauty, 36% were about boys, 9% were about ‘My Mom treats me like a baby.’ ” Three letters were from girls looking for summer jobs.

Because, Winship said, “a girl’s image of herself is defined almost entirely by how boys look at them,” these same teen-age girls are “sitting ducks for teen pregnancy and the kind of lines boys hand out.”

Indeed, said Edith B. Phelps of Harvard’s Center for the Study of Gender Education and Human Development, “teen-age motherhood is the most devastating blow to a girl’s chance for economic autonomy.” Today, “the United States leads nearly all developed nations in rates of teen-age pregnancy, abortion and child bearing. The United States is the only developed nation where the teen-age pregnancy (rate) is going up.” For that matter, “in 1981, the United States had 527,000 live births to women 19 and under.”

Contrary to popular mythology, Phelps added, “Teen-age pregnancy is not a primarily a black phenomenon.” Figures from the Alan Guttmacher Institute show that 63% of the births to women under 18 are to white women.

Translated into work and educational options, Phelps said, “young women who give birth in high school are half as likely to graduate, and a tenth as likely to finish college.”

“The great problem,” said Alexis Herman, former director of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, “is that the teen-age mother of today will be the female head of household of tomorrow.”

‘Pink-Collar Ghetto’

Further, Herman said, “Unlike the teen mothers of 20 years ago, these young mothers do not give up their babies. Ninety percent of them keep their babies.” With limited educational futures, “these teen mothers are the most likely,” Herman said, “to become the peripheral workers”--that segment of the workplace that Ms. magazine editor Gloria Steinem called “the pink-collar ghetto, where most females are concentrated.”

Agreed Phelps: “Occupational segregation is one of the most pervasive aspects of the American labor market.” In fact, “in 1980 it was more widespread than it was at the turn of the century,” for “in 1900, 60% of all women were in occupations with a female majority.” In 1978, “68.5% held traditionally female jobs.”

Certainly, with girls as young as 9 years old crowding the ranks of Girls Clubs of America and similar organizations, these facts and figures seem staggeringly adult, if not downright bleak. But, said GCA executive director Margaret Gates, “I think every kid has to play, certainly, but the subtle message of what’s ahead has to come, too.”

In any case, Gates continued, “The reality can be more challenging than bleak. I mean, boys don’t necessarily find it bleak when they realize they’re going to have to support themselves for the rest of their lives. I don’t think the message is a negative one at all.”

On the contrary, said Ruth Holland, a GCA program director from Oxnard, Calif., “I think preteen is the ideal age to give these girls this economic information. It’s something you have to keep telling them over and over.”

Knowledge and experience provide confidence, said GCA 40th anniversary chair Keven Bellows, and “the importance of self-confidence, the feeling of being capable, really ‘up to the job’ at hand cannot be overestimated.” Said Bellows: “It is the crucial element in successful performance, and the crucial element in trying again, if you fail. It is also a feeling foreign to too many millions of girls facing the economic realities of adult life.”

And as for the dreams, as for the familiar fantasies and fictions, “We are teaching girls the difference between fantasies and dreams,” Bellows said. “Dreams can come true, but to make those dreams come true, they have to do the work.”