I’m going to write a short series of posts about ideas that have had a big impact on me. These ideas have often been comparable to the Magic Eye posters that everyone seemed to have on their walls in the 1990s, which, if you found the right way of looking at them, revealed an image that it was then impossible to un-see. In fact, Magic Eye produced a book called ‘A New Way of Looking at the World’. The ideas I’m going to write about are those that not only changed the way I looked at the world, but they also made it almost impossible to un-see the new reality they revealed. And so I’d love to share them with you.
The first idea I’m going to look at is one that I came across in October 2020, when I was reading two books, one after the other, while writing my third book In Her Nature: Dana Crowley Jack’s Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (1991), and Lyn Mikel Brown & Carol Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (1992). The idea is deceptively simple, as are many game-changing ideas. In fact, it wasn’t until I was well into the second chapter of Meeting at the Crossroads, that I suddenly stopped and thought ‘hang on a minute; that was REALLY important’ and turned back to this passage, in the introduction:
Broadly, then, the idea is this: a mainstream account of child development is heavily influenced by the notion (put forward by Freud, among others) that infancy is a period in which the child separates from the mother, and rejects childish dependency in favour of more mature characteristics, such as individualism and self-sufficiency. But Brown and Gilligan suggest that this particular type of socialisation doesn’t apply to all children - just to boys. Girls, they point out, are socialised to prioritise relationships over and above the stereotypically masculine virtue of self-sufficiency. In childhood, girls’ relationships with friends and parents can be fulfilling. But in teenagehood, girls often discover for the first time that, in order to maintain their friendships and relationships, they are being asked to sacrifice their own voices, their priorities, and their self-belief - including their belief in the truthfulness of their own experiences of the world. This sets a pattern for adulthood, in which women are frequently expected to give way to others, to be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’, to put our own priorities last, and in which we often come to doubt the truth of our own reality (and are gaslit by others).
In summary: boys’ chief developmental crisis is the separation they undergo from their mothers in infancy - but girls’ chief crisis is the separation they undergo in adolescence, and it is a separation, not from the mother, but from their own selves.
I found this idea mind-blowing for a number of reasons.
In the mid-2010s, when I was writing my second book, A Revolution of Feeling, I had spent quite a while reading various psychoanalytic accounts of ‘separation anxiety’ in infancy. These all expressed versions of the mainstream theory outlined above: that, at some point in the first year of life, all infants undergo a crisis in which they realise that they are separate from the mother (and/or from the wider world).
In that book, I was interested in how different people experience disappointment and disillusionment. I found it fascinating that psychologists including Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut and Melanie Klein thought that undergoing disillusionment was a key moment in children’s development. In various different ways, those writers all represented the earliest stages of infancy as a period of illusion in which babies experience a fantastical and sometimes terrifying ‘oceanic’ world in which there are no clear distinctions between themselves and other objects, and in which they are omnipotent. The baby’s realisation that they are, in fact, distinct from other objects and people, and not omnipotent after all, was represented as a painful process of loss, grief and disillusionment, which often coincided with - was even caused by - the mother weaning them from the breast. It might be painful, but this disillusionment was portrayed as an essential, unavoidable fall into reality and maturity, which ultimately helped the child to create (in Freud’s words) ‘the feeling of our own self, of our own ego … as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else’.
I was interested in these mainstream theories, because I felt that my own personal disillusionments and disappointments in the past had been important, if painful, learning experiences. Realising that a person, scenario, plan or notion in which I’d had faith was actually illusory - realising that that person or plan was actually very different from the idea I had entertained of them - could be hard, upsetting and embarrassing, but ultimately it also gave me a much better understanding of reality. So I was fascinated by the psychoanalytical idea that disillusionment might be a key developmental stage for us all.
BUT, I was reading these psychoanalytic theories while my three daughters were still very young and, although I found the ideas intellectually interesting, they didn’t seem to accurately represent the behaviour of my babies. Obviously I couldn’t see inside their minds, but none of my daughters - one of whom was breastfed with some bottle-feeding, and the other two of whom were exclusively formula-fed, incidentally - had seemed to undergo a major depressive crisis in their first year of life. And when I thought back to my own childhood, what I remembered most strongly was not a burgeoning solitariness and self-sufficiency from my earliest years - but, instead, the complexity of forming and maintaining friendships with other children and my relationships with my own family members.
If I had to put a pin in the timeline of my life to indicate when a developmental ‘crisis’ had occurred, it wouldn’t have been in early childhood, but in teenagehood, when I became aware that there was an enormous conflict between what was genuinely nourishing for me as a human, and the sacrifices I was expected to make in the name of being an acceptable teenage girl. However, it wasn’t until coming across Dana Crowley Jack’s book Silencing the Self - and, through Jack’s recommendation, finding Brown and Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads - that I had ever read an outright rejection of these staple psychoanalytic theories about the formative moment of the infant’s separation from the mother, and a suggestion that a different scheme might apply to girls. Before then, I had just assumed that Freud et al must have been right, and that I and everyone else must have gone through this key infantile crisis of separation, and that I just couldn’t remember it.
Jack, Brown and Gilligan’s ideas gave me a way of understanding my teenagehood - and the adult life that followed - which I hadn’t been able to fully articulate before. Around the age of 16, I had become quieter, and found it harder to speak in class or present my work. I had become more self-conscious and perfectionist: I felt that I couldn’t risk failure at anything. I had developed anorexia and I was painfully obsessed with the idea that other people might not think that I was ‘nice’. I had lost touch with what was good and nourishing for me; I stopped doing the activities that had brought me joy earlier in childhood; I lost the feeling of health. I judged myself entirely according to external standards: grades in my schoolwork, my weight on scales, my dress size and, later into my twenties, whether men fancied me. It didn’t occur to me whether I fancied them or not, or whether they were good people, or whether I should take their opinions seriously: I bent over backwards to conform to what I thought they wanted from me. If necessary, I readily agreed that my own experiences and ideas were wrong, and took on their views of the world instead. It seemed like the most important thing in the world was that other people liked me.
In my teens, I had read books such as The Beauty Myth, hoping to make sense of what was happening to me. But I didn’t encounter anything that tackled the sheer range of ways in which girls lose themselves and their sense of reality during teenagehood, in the name of being liked.
In Meeting at the Crossroads, Brown and Gilligan’s conclusion that girls undergo a developmental crisis in adolescence, which involves such a comprehensive loss of self, was formed during years of interviews with girls at a private day school in Cleveland, Ohio. In page after page after page, the girls articulate experiences that I’m sure are familiar to very many women reading this. I summarised some of them in my third book In Her Nature:
Reading these teenage girls’ words was a jaw-dropping moment of recognition - not just of my own adolescent experiences in the 1990s, but of something I was noticing in broader culture in 2020, at the time I was reading Meeting at the Crossroads. Brown and Gilligan talk about the damage that is done to girls and women by injunctions to ‘be nice’ and ‘be kind’. Like adolescents, younger children also experience conflicts between their and others’ perceptions of reality - eg. who was at fault in a playground game - but younger children are more able to use a range of emotions, including anger, to fight their corners; and they are able to easily recover from heated arguments and restore their friendships afterwards. But Brown and Gilligan describe how, in teenagehood, commands for girls to be nice and kind intensify, coming from teachers, parents, other children, as well as from media images of teenage girls. And being nice and kind is generally defined as being antithetical to fighting your own corner. It involves stepping aside, backing down, giving way, stifling your own lived experience and the conclusions you’ve drawn from it. Girls who are not considered to be nice and kind can be judged extremely harshly for it.
When I was reading Meeting at the Crossroads in 2020, everywhere I looked, I saw girls and women being told that niceness and kindness were the standards by which they were being measured. T-shirts aimed at my daughters’ age group were emblazoned with slogans enjoining them to ‘be kind always’ or celebrating that the wearer was ‘officially on the nice list’ - while t-shirts in the boys’ category were encouraging them to ‘be heroes’, to ‘adventure’, and celebrated that they were ‘always awesome’. It was a glaring visualisation of Dana Crowley Jack’s description of how boys are socialised to be individualistic and self-sufficient, whilst girls are socialised to think of themselves in relation to others, and to sacrifice their sense of self in the name of placating other people.
And when I turned to social media, and saw women who were standing up for something they passionately believed to be right - how men exploit the physiological differences between males and females to control women through violence and sexual assault, for example - I saw those women repeatedly being instructed to deny their own lived experiences through which they’d formed those beliefs; to deny that women’s bodies are battlegrounds; to deny even that ‘woman’ or ‘female’ are coherent categories - all in the name of being ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ to men who want to be women. The threat of being considered ‘unkind’ and ‘not nice’ is a serious one for girls and women, and in this context what was being threatened was social ostracisation - ‘being cancelled’ - for those who continued asserting their own experiences of reality.
This has enormous and devastating repercussions for women’s lives. In my last Substack post, I wrote about how far more men than we realise are living secret lives in which they’re carrying out behaviour that hurts and sabotages women who are close to them. A number of commenters have suggested that women are just as likely to harbour secret lives as men - but this idea about the ways in which girls are pressured to stifle their own selves from teenagehood onwards provides an explanation of why that’s extremely unlikely to be the case. Husbands’ secret lives are maintained by pulling the wool over their wives’ eyes, quashing their suspicions by claiming that women’s perceptions are untrustworthy; that the woman is mad, or stupid, and that any grounds for suspicion simply didn’t happen. Dominique Pélicot encouraged Gisèle’s worries that she had dementia when she semi-jokingly asked if he had been drugging her. Women are more vulnerable than men to this type of abuse in which we are asked to deny the evidence of our senses, and to reject our gut feelings, because we are taught from early on that it is more important to maintain relationships with other people (especially our marriages) than to assert what we believe to be true. Many of us spend a lifetime doubting our own perceptions and beliefs; wondering if we’re right or just mad. And men take advantage of our socialisation to abuse us.
Encountering the idea that girls’ psychological development follows a different pattern for boys - involving a crisis in teenagehood rather than in early infancy; and involving the loss of one’s own self rather than separation from the mother - was therefore not just intellectually eye-opening for me. It provided a language to understand my own life and vulnerabilities, from early adulthood onwards; and to see the commonalities in women’s experiences. Perhaps most importantly, by being aware of these susceptibilities - especially the difficulty that many women find in being absolutely sure of the evidence of our own senses - we can consciously take them in hand. We can try to nurture voices within ourselves to stand up for our perceptions of the world, for what we believe to be right and true, and for the ways in which we are valuable as individuals, not just in relation to other people.
I stumbled and believed in this idea of th e differences in socialisation between the sexes at various points in my life.I had the benefit of being 'politicised' by my dad and been encouraged to be independent during my teens and did a lot of hitch hiking with other girls.Chose my own path and went to uni in the sixties.
I married another student who used domestic abuse and control to get me to be the woman he had been socialised into thinking I should be.
Fortunately I was strong enough to retain my identity, strength and beliefs and used them to escape.
Essentially we need to teach all girls to be strong feminists and we need to teach boys too of the benefits and the absolute need to recognise sexism is limiting for them too.
Wow. This also goes a long way in explaining the ROGD crisis happening to young girls