Girls in America Carol Cassidy, Katha Pollitt (Foreword)
Publisher: TV Books
ISBN: 1575000849
DDC: 305.235
Edition: Hardcover; 2000-02-01
Summary:
Girls in America could be renamed "Girls, Uninterrupted." In over 200
pages of text, editor Carol Cassidy almost never intrudes her voice
into these interviews of 29 girls--teenage mothers, athletes, and
beauty pageant queens--talking about what it's like to grow up female
in modern America. Listening to girls is almost a crusade for
Cassidy, a filmmaker who first turned some of these stories into a TV
documentary. In her introduction she notes that most of those she
interviewed said no one had ever asked them for their opinions
before. "What about listening to our daughters," she asks, "to their
flowered stories, their barbed insults, their prickly questions,
their swollen sobs?" We hear a little of each in this book's pages.
Andrea, in South Carolina, a pageant contestant who just won "Miss
Southern Belle," recalls joyous days "wallerin' in the dirt" as a
young, pudgy tomboy. Ivon, whose father was abusive to her mother,
cries talking about the harmful relationship she finally left, only
to have a baby at age sixteen. Taneshia, who lost her mother to
cancer and is estranged from her father, finds comfort in double
dutch jump roping. "You do it on your own," she says of her favorite
sport. "You just do what you feel, what your body wants to do, what
your heart wants to do." These girls both fulfill and explode the
stereotypes of their age and roles, and teen readers are sure to find
comfort--and maybe even inspiration--in their honest stories. --Maria
Dolan
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