NONFICTION - Nov. 29, 1992

MEETING AT THE CROSSROADS by Lynn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan (Harvard University Press: $19.95; 258 pp.) This book is a harrowing journey, whether you have children or not. Brown and Gilligan ask the painful question, What does a girl give up as she becomes an adult? The answer, still, in this society, is that she too often gives up her independence, her outspokenness, her sense of self, and assumes a more compliant personality. If children are to be seen and not heard, girl children are to be even more inconspicuous. The young women they have interviewed for their study bear painful witness to this hypothesis, and are a more convincing argument for changing the way we listen than any broader collection of statistics would have been. An 8-year-old, one of only two African-American students in her class, is bent on being nice, on being the kind of girl who gets along with everyone. In third grade, she is already convinced of the benefits of fitting in; fearful of “rumors and whispers,” but believing, hoping, that pleasantry will prevail. These stories are enough to make you cry for lost souls, all locked up inside constraining notions of what a young woman ought to be. A better reaction would be to study the authors’ listening techniques and try to apply them with all those oh-so-polite little girls you know.