The Right kind of girl> At the crossroads of adolescence, young women diverge on paths of passive silence, inquisitive resistance

Who exactly is Ophelia?

That is what some adolescent girls want to know. They are not talking about the one who drowned herself because she was rejected by William Shakespeare’s angst-filled Hamlet. They mean the one in Mary Pipher’s best seller, “Reviving Ophelia.” The one whose confident feistiness is replaced by self-doubt when she crosses that invisible line between girlhood and adolescence.

Girls teetering on the edge of womanhood “take in the cultural message and [learn] what it means to be the right kind of girl … passive and nice and kind,” according to Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College in Waterville.

“At this crossroads … girls can go either way. They can narrow their voices, or they can become what I call resisters. Resisters are curious, perceptive and smart in a worldly way.”

These “resisters” are the focus of Brown’s latest book, “Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger.” From 1993 to 1995, she videotaped two focus groups of girls at their public schools in Maine. One group came from middle-class families living in a midsized city Brown calls “Acadia.”

The other group was made up of working-class girls in a small rural town she names “Mansfield.” The 19 girls who participated ranged in age from 11 to 14. All are white.

This territory is not new to Brown. She co-wrote the 1992 book “Meeting at the Crossroads.” She and psychologist Carol Gilligan followed and studied the development of 100 girls in the Midwest into women over a five-year period. Those young girls “gave voice to what is rarely spoken and often ignored,” Brown said in 1994 interview, “that the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence and disconnection, a troubled crossing when a girl loses a firm sense of self and becomes tentative and unsure.”

Although in 1994, Brown identified the real towns used in her most recent work, she now refuses to have them identified. She is fiercely protective of the privacy of the girls portrayed in her new book, who are identified only by pseudonyms. She also refuses to discuss how and what the girls are doing today, five years after the completion of her initial research.

She cites her “loyalty to the girls” as her reason for not discussing their recent history.

Of the girls who figured in “Raising Their Voices,” she said that “these girls were chosen for their outspokenness and strong opinions, and in some cases, their critical perspective on and their behavioral resistance to societal expectations of femininity.”

“My plan was to outline a clearer picture of these girls as resisters, to explore how social class and culture affect their resistance strategies, and to learn about the teachers and school experiences that support or discourage them in their expression and actions.”

She discovered that the way adolescent girls express their anger, as well as how they choose to harness it to effect political change, depends more on social class than other factors. Participants in both groups experienced equal levels of anger, but the “Acadia” girls were much more likely to be “measured and polite about it, at least in public.”

Although both groups of girls agreed it is important for them to express their feelings and opinions, they also were well aware that girls who do so are not well-liked. One “Acadia” girl reported, “I don’t think I get angry. … I just get very, very, very annoyed … I’m never angry at anybody. I’m just annoyed and I dislike them.”

By contrast, the “Mansfield” girls were more comfortable expressing their anger — at teachers, parents, one another and themselves. Yet in the school setting, expressing their anger often got them in trouble with teachers and administrators.

“[These girls] are, at times, angry at those who do not listen, do not understand, do not pay attention to what they know and want for their lives, … ” said Brown. “Unlike the `Acadia’ girls, the `Mansfield’ girls seem not to know what their teachers want from them. They feel ignored and dismissed, even when they think they are playing by the teachers’ rules.

“The girls from middle-class backgrounds have been educated in the forms of expression and ways of behaving that are acceptable and deemed appropriately feminine by the white middle-class culture of their school. So they understandably prosper in that environment — they know how to read the culture of their school and know how to speak and act in ways that assure their continued success.

“The working-class girls are, justifiably, more suspicious that school is going to be supportive and beneficial to them; they have ways of speaking, being and knowing that are wonderful, but are not always understood or supported in school. They are more comfortable with anger and conflict, more likely to say what they think, but often feel misunderstood and mistreated because of this.”

Yet, in at least one instance during Brown’s study, the “Mansfield” girls successfully turned their anger into action. Under the guidance of a trusted teacher, they organized classmates and lobbied the administration to get equal practice time for the girls basketball team. While the bond among the “Mansfield” girls strengthened during the study, the “Acadia” girls fractured into smaller splinter groups.

Brown, the daughter of working-class parents who was raised in Calais, admitted that her own feelings around working with the two groups were mixed. While she felt emotionally connected to the “Mansfield” girls, they viewed her as a middle-class academic who had come to see how the other half lived. The “Acadia” girls saw her as a mentor. Some even sought a more personal relationship with her, while Brown “was more guarded with them” because of their parents’ place in the community.

“These girls, in their passion and struggle, hold the potential for deepening our understanding of idealized femininity by clarifying the damage it causes and alluding to the social and psychological forces holding it in place,” she said, urging women “to shift their attitudes from a desire to help girls, to a desire to join them in the struggle.”