LePage-Lees, Pamela. (1997).
From Disadvantaged Girls to Successful
Women: Education and Women's Resiliency. Westport, CN: Praeger
Publishers
184 pp.
$49.95 ISBN 0-275-95752-7
Reviewed by Laurel Parrott
April 19, 1998
The subject matter of Pamela LePage-Lees's new book is clearly close to her heart, and she brings
an insider perspective to her study of women who have overcome barriers to achieve academic
success. From the very first page, where she remembers the feelings associated with
accompanying her mother to receive government surplus cheese, it's clear that the author
identifies with the subjects of her study. She acknowledges that the decision to explore such a
personal subject is a departure for her. Fearing that her colleagues in academia would question
her "objectivity," she had avoided such personal subjects in her research until she realized that
"my experience was absent" in the literature. Not only did most accounts of the disadvantaged
ignore those persons who went on to succeed, most were written by academics who either had
privileged backgrounds or hid their own disadvantaged roots. "I now believe," she says, "that
certain groups have been shut out of the academic process because people from the traditional
majority subtly communicate that it is inappropriate for people from marginalized groups to
reflect on their own experiences. In many ways they suggest that only the 'objective outsider' can
truly conduct a scientific study" (p.3). With this book LePage-Lees quite successfully challenges
such notions.
Because of my own involvement in a current study of "disadvantaged" adolescent girls, I jumped
at the chance to read and review this book. I turned to the book looking for answers to such
questions as "What elements of school and family life make some disadvantaged girls succeed?"
"What can society—particularly schools—do to foster their resilience?" A book based on a
two-year qualitative study of twenty-one women who overcame multiple barriers to achieve
academic success seemed likely to answer these questions. Each of the women studied met
three criteria for disadvantage: they had lived as children in either a poor working-class or
lower-class family, they were first-generation college students, and their childhoods had been
marked by the stress of familial dysfunction or childhood trauma. Also, each woman either had
gone on to attain a post-graduate degree or had been involved in graduate study for at least two
years.
The author situates her study in the literature on "disadvantage" and describes her participants,
giving us an understanding of their demographics, the types of stressors each faced as a child,
and the academic success she ultimately achieved. She also presents compelling stories of five
women selected, she says, to "demonstrate the diverse range of ages, occupations, achievement
levels, ethnic backgrounds and geographic origins among the women I interviewed" (p. 12). The
sheer length of the list of "stressors" for some of her participants is startling in and of itself, but
the gripping details of the often monumental barriers these five women faced while growing up
are what hook the reader. LePage-Lees weaves a rich tapestry of disadvantage by presenting in
some detail both the early lives and the later success of five of the women, allowing us to meet
them as real women with remarkable stories. I was disappointed in later chapters that the stories
of Helen, Joy, Maria, Toni and Janus lost their prominence, as their voices became
indistinguishable from those of the other women.
The author finds fault with some traditional notions of resilience, particularly those asserting that
resilient individuals are in some way invulnerable to their disadvantage. LePage-Lees asserts
that the women in her study were indeed "deeply affected by their misfortunes" (p. 18). Noting
that in studies of resilience "often individual personality is ignored or underplayed because
people like to place blame on family functioning," (p. 18) she explores the personality traits of
these women who overcame disadvantage. She shows how the women in her study shared
attributes—independence and maturity, benevolence, perfectionism, and perseverance—which
often worked both for and against them in their struggles. For example, the fact that these
women, perhaps in part as a result of the troubles they faced as youngsters, had always been
independent and mature was an important factor in their ultimate success. At the same time,
these traits worked against the women when counselors and potential mentors ignored them
because they appeared not to need help. Certainly their perfectionism helped them succeed; but
it made them uncomfortable with teaching strategies that favored trial and error over direct
instruction, led them to please the teacher rather than learning for the sake of learning and led
some to turn away from classes and majors (often science and math) when they found themselves
earning less than top grades. As a group, the women struggled with self-confidence. "Most of
the women seemed ... to have a high opinion of their abilities in some instances and serious
doubts about their abilities in others" (p.22), and they "had difficulty understanding the difference
between confidence and arrogance" (p. 24).
LePage-Lees finds it perfectly understandable that many of the women questioned their status as
"disadvantaged" and that most were reticent to talk about their disadvantage. After all, she says,
there's always someone more disadvantaged, the term "disadvantaged" has been linked so often
to low achievement, and the term has taken on racist connotations. Interestingly, these women
were accustomed to hiding their disadvantage, particularly in the academic environment, and
they believed that this subterfuge had been important to their ultimate success. At the same time,
they believed their disadvantage ultimately helped them in their careers by strengthening them
and giving them insights and motivations others lacked. The author points to the consequences
for the women of their decision to hide their backgrounds. In college, they perceived themselves
to be different from those around them; they felt out of place, viewed themselves as imposters,
and thought they were less well prepared than the other students whom they perceived to be more
advantaged than themselves.
What role did school-based adults play? LePage-Lees found that although the women were able
to adapt to a variety of teaching styles, they tended to value caring and attentive—as well as
challenging—teachers who recognized their special talents. Surprisingly, the women also
tended to be disappointed in their female professors in college and graduate school. These
professors were less supportive than the women had hoped they would be, and the professors
often weren't "like them" in terms of SES, ethnicity, or disadvantage. Most of the women
reported having never had a mentor and they put forth little effort to obtain this type of
assistance. In the words of Shirley, one of the participants, "I think there might be problems with
people who have experienced trauma to the extent that they can't reach out to other people.
They're really handicapped in the mentorship area. People reach out, but you reject them. You
don't see as opportunities, things that are opportunities" (p. 47-48). The women wanted similar
things from a potential mentor as they wanted from a teacher—someone who genuinely cared
about them and believed they were smart and special, someone who viewed the relationship as
reciprocal and collegial, someone who was like them in terms of ethnicity and social class.
School life was very important to these high-achieving women, providing them with a "way to
build self-confidence, a secure place away from negative home situations, and an extended
family" (p. 65). School offered the opportunities, and the women had the personalities to take
advantage of them. The positive attention and high grades they received in elementary school
empowered them. Particularly in college, the women felt "satisfied with their schools when they
were given the opportunity to have voice, made to feel welcome in the schools [particularly as
non-traditional students], and provided with curriculum that touched on personal experience" (p.
64). But schools worked against these women, too, and they believed their progress was
unnecessarily difficult, particularly in higher education. They often found institutions hostile to
non-traditional students. They encountered sexism. Most alarming to the author, the women
suffered from the arrogance and elitism of higher education, perhaps experiencing more difficulty
with such factors than more traditional students do. LePage-Lees explains that since many of the
women "did not experience a normal and positive chain of command in their families, they [did]
not recognize or accept a hierarchical chain of command [in school]" (p. 73). Failing to attend to
the complex power relations in higher education, the women suffered the consequences of being
seen as unappreciative and non-compliant.
Combining the work of scholars who have explored women's development (Gilligan, Chodorow
and others) with those who have explored differing types of intelligences (Gardner, Goleman),
LePage-Lees suggests that "resilient girls develop what has been described as 'emotional
intelligence, or inter-and intrapersonal intelligence" which is grounded in attachment and
affiliation" (p. 81). She argues, however, that the women's higher-level thinking skills often went
unnoticed by teachers whose practice was to have students jump through the hoops of basic
skills training. Focusing on trivial details rather than on concepts and ideas, these teachers failed
to appreciate the talents of these disadvantaged students. Furthermore, the women believed they
had been shortchanged by the instruction they received, both in content and in the cultivation of
critical thinking. Many of them considered their precollegiate education deficient, especially in
comparison to that of their peers in college and graduate schools. The author contends that the
schools—driven by the need to teach basic skills and to make a good showing on standardized
tests—undervalued the special knowledge that these women gained from their personal
experiences. The women tended to do better in the experiential environments of social science
and humanities than in the "carefully constructed environments" of math and science where
success comes from trial and error (p. 87). In reflecting on her informants' experiences, the
author questions whether theories of women's development have "considered carefully enough ...
the complexities associated with class and race" (p. 93) and she characterizes as sexist and
classist the notion that learning patterns based on personal experience and feelings are evidence
of a lower level of cognitive development. LePage-Lees seems to view these non-traditional
women as round pegs being forced into square holes and suggests that non-traditional women
need to be "taught how to communicate their novel ideas in ways that traditional people can
understand and accept as opposed to being forced to make their ideas conform to traditional
models" (p.94). Even more important, schools must recognize "critical thinking" skills or
"emotional intelligence," which can be easily overlooked when students lack basic skills.
LePage-Lees explores the varying degrees to which the women were supported by those with
whom they had personal relationships, particularly their families. Not surprisingly, in light of the
varying nature of the stresses faced by the women, LePage-Lees found considerable variation in
the ways family members reacted to—and whether they supported or hindered -- the women's
ambitions and ultimate success. Families were often skeptical when these first generation
college students chose not only to attend four-year colleges but also to attend graduate school and
pursue academic careers. In some cases mothers provided significant help and support -- even
more than educators provided—but fathers were mostly absent from the conversation. In most
cases the women in the study became more successful and were more resilient than their siblings.
They felt their siblings resented them. The chapter makes clear that the women who had male
partners were much more often hampered by, rather than supported by, these partners. Those
who had children were motivated by them to succeed, but they were often burdened by the dual
role of mother-student. Finally, members of a wider community of friends, extended family, and
others outside the immediate family were often enormously important in supporting these women
on their road to success.
The final two chapters summarize and extend the lessons learned from the resilient women, and
it is here where this reader was left wanting more. Simply restating the findings of her study, the
author concludes that these disadvantaged women succeeded because they "adapted and
assimilated to the majority culture," hiding as much as they could the truth of their backgrounds
along the way. They turned to school as a rewarding refuge and excelled, particularly because of
the higher level thinking skills they may have gained as a result of childhood stresses. The
rewards of elementary school success gave them the confidence to carry them through the more
difficult high school and college years, where they worked harder to meet the higher standards.
Graduate school was a place to use their critical thinking skills, to once again receive more
individual attention, and to be more independent, and it was where the women blossomed.
Motivated by attention and rewards and the chance to use their intellectual abilities, they
achieved highly, but the process was enormously difficult, alienating, and often unpleasant.
The author makes three recommendations for transforming education to better serve
disadvantaged girls and women while at the same time acknowledging the difficulties involved in
achieving any of the recommendations on a broad scale: that teachers take the time to know and
understand their students as individuals; that teachers strive to understand, accept and reward
differences, including different kinds of intelligence; and that academia eliminate hierarchy. She
acknowledges that teachers are hampered by a number of factors, not the least of which is the
tendency of students like those studied here to actively hide their backgrounds. Also, caring
relationships take time and skill to establish and nurture, and teachers are provided neither the
time, the training, nor the rewards to encourage such involvement. Neither are structures in place
to help teachers strive to understand, accept and reward the different strengths brought by
individual students. LePage-Lees seems nearly to give up on her final
recommendation--eliminating patriarchal hierarchy--even as she states it, acknowledging the
entrenchment of
hierarchy in our society and the vested interests to those in power of maintaining it.
I think it's fair to say the stories of twenty-two women actually are represented in this book. Just
as the personality traits of the women she studied had both positive and negative consequences
for them, LePage-Lees' status as an insider both strengthened the study and served as an
occasional distraction, causing me to wonder if certain ideas she was expressing were more hers
or her participants'. A challenge of qualitative inquiry is to satisfy the reader that the author is
accurately portraying the perspectives of the persons studied while acknowledging her own
biases. From the beginning, the author acknowledges her sisterhood with the subjects of her
study and admits "I have included my own feelings and experiences alongside those of women
represented" (p.4). For those used to reading the works of self-styled "objective outsiders," this
can be a bit disconcerting and at the same time liberating. The author describes the pains she
took to share her writing with the participants and elicit feedback from them, and the results of a
feedback questionnaire indicate that the eleven women who responded were generally satisfied
that she had told their stories. The decision to include an entire letter from Helen (one of the five
women profiled early in the book) in response to the feedback questionnaire was a good one
because it serves to strengthen our understanding of the give-and-take between author and
participant and supports the way LePage-Lees told the women's stories. Just as the early look at
Helen's story was crucial in illustrating the extreme disadvantage faced by some of the
participants, her letter strengthens our understanding of the stressors she faced and the challenges
she encountered in overcoming them.
LePage-Lees sets herself an ambitious goal—to examine the lives of her participants in a way that
would to add to our understanding of resiliency. Readers accustomed to educational literature
dealing with only one "level" of education (whether elementary, secondary or higher education)
might be distracted by such an all-inclusive examination. For example, my feeling that she
emphasizes too much the college and university experiences of these women and not enough the
early years may relate to my own bias and interest in adolescent girls; after all, it is hard to care
much about what girls will encounter in graduate school when one is concerned with the forces
that may be driving them out of junior high! On the other hand, the emphasis on higher
education may relate to the fact that this ultimate stage of education was most important to the
daily lives of the author and her participants at the time of the study.
I return at last to the questions I hoped this book might answer about resilience of disadvantaged
girls and women, and how schools can help them. As for resilience, I was left with the
impression that some disadvantaged girls are lucky enough to be born with the personality traits
to allow them to succeed despite the barriers erected by family, school, and society, and that the
recommendations the author makes would simply make their journey more pleasant. In the end, I
thought the book was most successful in meeting a perhaps secondary goal identified by the
author—providing "successful women who have faced stress...some hope, some advice and
some validation" (p.1). It was important to the author to show that some women do overcome
disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve success and that they do so in many cases despite the very
institutions that ought to be helping them.
About the Reviewer
Laurel Parrott is an independent research consultant.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment